Nigeria At 65: It’s Time To Break The Vicious Circle

 By Olu Fasan

President Bola Tinubu cancelled yesterday’s Independence Anniversary parade at the last minute. No reason was given for the cancellation beyond the government’s “deep regret” for the “inconvenience caused”. Given that it was about Nigeria’s 65th anniversary as an independent state, a milestone, the cancellation was significant. Yet, in truth, it was just as well the parade was axed.

For it would be an extraordinary act of self-deception to roll out the drums for Nigeria’s 65th independence anniversary. The sad truth is that, beyond the fact of its existence as a political entity, there’s little worthy of jubilation about Nigeria at 65. If that statement sounds outlandish, then consider the following three critical measures of a nation’s success: unity, security and prosperity. Add a fourth: state capacity. How well has Nigeria fared, at 65, on these indices of development? Abysmally, one must say! 

Take unity, without which no country can succeed. Is there unity in Nigeria? Is there a shared sense of purpose? Nigeria is a deeply divided country, ethnically, politically, socially and religiously. As a result of these domestic fissures, virtually every issue in Nigeria is viewed through sectional or sectarian lenses. What about security? Can Nigerians go about their daily activities without fear for life or safety?

The answer is no. The spread and impunity of non-state violence routinely blight human lives in Nigeria. Earlier this week, a young Arise TV News anchor, Somtochukwu Maduagwu, was murdered by armed robbers in Abuja. (May her soul rest in peace!) Insecurity has turned Nigeria into a Hobbesian state of nature, where life is “nasty, brutish, and short”, as Thomas Hobbes put it in Leviathan.

Then, what about prosperity? Nigeria has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world and was once listed as the “poverty capital of the world”, with most of its citizens living below the poverty line. Yet, generating prosperity and engendering better living standards are parts of what define a successful nation. But Nigeria is not generating prosperity for its people; instead of improving their living standards, it is pauperising them. Of course, where poverty is rife, inequality would follow in tow. And Nigeria is a deeply unequal country; the gap between the rich and the poor is so wide that the middle class has virtually vanished. Yet, the expansion of the middle classes is a test of a healthy nation. 

Finally, what about state capacity? Well, it’s an open secret that Nigeria acutely lacks state capacity. This is a country where the government can’t deliver basic public services, where things like electricity, clean water, sewage systems, and public health, which the citizens of most other countries take for granted, are luxuries. Of course, the Nigerian state is not only ineffective but also corrupt. 

Nigeria has long been ruled by narrow elites feathering their nets at the expense of society; it’s a country where the government is not accountable and responsive to citizens. It’s a country where citizens lack effective political rights; where they can’t keep politicians in check and can’t easily get rid of corrupt and inept ones. Elections are not free and fair, and, thus, the citizens have no genuine voice in the political direction their country take. With massive rigging, vote-buying and disenfranchisements, how could they?

The foregoing is the state of Nigeria 65 years after its independence. If Nigeria is not a failed state, it is certainly a fragile one. It has all the symptoms of state fragility set in a seminal report titled “Escaping the fragility trap”, jointly published in 2018 by Oxford University and the London School of Economics. Young and educated Nigerians are fleeing the country in droves to have the chance to experience rich-country living standards and opportunities that are elusive to them at home. 

But here’s the paradox: the same Nigeria that seemingly can’t govern and transform itself from poverty to prosperity has citizens who are transforming other nations and running world bodies like the World Trade Organisation, ably led by Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a world-renowned technocrat. What, then, is the problem? Well, every symptom has a root cause. So, what are the root causes of Nigeria’s symptoms of state failure or fragility? 

Let’s turn to the famous book Why Nations Fail, written by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, which has sold millions of copies worldwide, and recently earned their authors the Nobel Prize in Economics. Its greatest insight is that nations fail because of their political institutions. Why? Because political institutions determine how a country is run, who has power in society and to what ends that power can be used; they determine the ability of citizens to control politicians and influence how they behave; and they determine the nature of economic institutions and who can take advantage of economic opportunities. In any country where the political structure centralises and concentrates power in the hands of a narrow elite, where there are no effective limitations on the use of power, especially checks against abuses of power and corrupt practices, progress is impossible because the exercise of political power in those circumstances will always put private interests above public good.

Now, without an iota of doubt, Nigeria is what Acemoglu and Robinson describe as an extractive state, where the distribution of power is narrow and unconstrained, where those with political power use their offices to amass wealth and use the wealth to sustain their power, and where there is absolutely no incentive for those in power to provide the basic public services that would improve the quality of life for ordinary people and to engender economic progress and prosperity for many, not a few. That’s the political, economic and social cul-de-sac that Nigeria is trapped in today, 65 years after independence.

Historically, critical junctures, defined as major events that can cause a sharp turn in the trajectory of a nation, have disrupted existing balance of political and economic power in many countries. For instance, the English Civil War and the American Civil War had transformative effects on those countries. But critical junctures have never transformed Nigeria from an extractive state to an inclusive one. Rather, any change has been path dependent, reinforcing existing institutions, or just tinkering around them, like the piecemeal constitutional amendments. Yet, what Nigeria needs are root-and-branch structural changes. 

Sadly, Nigeria is caught in a vicious circle. Politicians who enriched themselves through the existing pernicious system, and who bought voters, electoral officers and judges to get to power, will defend the status quo to the hilt. Those in opposition, eyeing political power, will portray themselves as change agents. But if they get power, they too, enjoying the same concentrated and unconstrained power, will do nothing to change the system. So, power struggle is not about transformative change but about capturing the state. That’s the vicious circle that is being perpetuated in Nigeria, deepening poverty, inequality and misery.

Yet, history is not destiny, and vicious cycles can be broken. However, that requires everyone – the media, civil society groups and the wider society – to fight for transformative change through coherent and persistent political agitations. Of course, it won’t be easy: vicious cycles create powerful forces towards the persistence of the status quo. But path dependency and vicious cycles are antithetical to progress and prosperity. Nigeria must break free from them. At 65, it must embark upon a path to unity, stability and prosperity. In other words, it must restructure its polity! 

*Dr. Fasan is a commentator on public issues