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07 June 2012 By Abdul-Warees
Solanke
There comes a time in the life of any nation desirous
of change, progress and development that difficult
choices and decisions have to be made. This definitely
is the time for us in Nigeria. But that choice or
decision is not for the government or the leadership
alone to make. While the buck may stop at the desk of
the leader, whatever choice or decision he makes in
the final analysis, is still subject to citizens'
approval and support. For us in Nigeria, the challenge
is not really of economic dimension, even though it
seems most manifest in the dismal macroeconomic
indices of productivity, employment, savings,
investment and consumption. Our real challenge can be
located within the structure of our polity which
invariably determines the color of our politics
dictates the nature of our governance and affects the
stability of our economy.
The issue is: we have not outlived the politics of
prebendalism in our land as we still grapple with
foundational elements of nation building crisis. The
attendant rejection of the removal of fuel subsidy by
many interest groups are pointers to the weakness of
our national cohesion, when the dominant themes of
discourses in the press and the airwaves have been
national restructuring, marginalization, corruption
and other negativities that compromise national growth
and development. In this scenario, no matter how
sincere or well intentioned a leader or government may
be in any reform initiative, the initiative will still
be a victim of circumstance.
The combination of the structure of our polity, colour
of our politics and fibre of our governance has so far
been dictating how various stakeholders within and
outside government support, validate and implement
reform projects and policies in the country. This
combination qualifies the aggregation of the elites,
the bureaucrats and technocrats, the labour movement,
the mass media and other interest groups on policy
issues we have to address as a nation. This being so,
our nation is usually constrained, whenever any reform
project is to be embarked upon, in the process of
decision making, the constituent of participants, the
sincerity of advisers, the range and rationality of
choices and alternatives and the quality and
acceptability of decision.
This time, we cannot afford not to get the fuel
subsidy issue right. It will diminish our status as
the African leader and question our legitimacy to
intervene in the problems of other African nations.
First, the courage of the government in admitting that
some hanky-panky and corruption does exist in
subsidizing fuel importation and addressing the
critical issue of deregulating the downstream sector
of the petroleum industry is very salutary.
Rationally, the solution is to break the backbone of
the cabal responsible for the economic leakage, and
one way of demobilizing the subsidy suckers is to
create very strong disincentives and deterrence to the
endemic corruption in the fuel importation business by
deregulating the downstream sector where most of the
game is played.
However, does this address the foundational elements
that are only manifesting in the economic realm? In
this context, we need to raise a dozen questions
germane to achieving success in our reform projects.
What development must INSPIRE our government? Our
post-independence experiences at policy and reform
projects suggest that we are almost always responding
to crises as the structure and forms of governments
that have dominated our history have largely being
dictated by emergencies and political misadventures.
Therefore, our policies and programmes, even if they
were genuine, were not been enduring. Today, we are
certainly in another economic emergency. The logic
here is if emergency management has not yielded for us
sustainability, we must return to long-term and long
range planning. My take on this is that for every
reform project in our country, we must draw
inspiration from countries with similar national
experiences and best practices in governance. Brazil,
India and China are good case studies for us just as
we have some fine lessons in reforms from Malaysia,
Indonesia and Singapore.
What policy must we INITIATE? At any point in time and
in every situation, our concern must be delivering
policies and programmes that ensure the greatest good
for the greatest number of people, with least
compliance lethargy. This entails rigorous
identification and analysis of issues and problems,
real, extant or potential. Again, this demands
foresight and sensitivity from the government.
Therefore, we must be interested in the likely
responses to reform initiatives by employing all
rational and behavioural analytic tools in our
predictions on outcomes.
Who must we INVOLVE? Critical to the success of any
reform project is the support and legitimacy of all
stakeholders and interest groups, beneficiaries or
victims. Without consultation, engagement and
collaboration with those to be affected, programmes
and reform initiatives are justifiably misconstrued,
opposed and rejected or they suffer apathy and
indifference even from the intended beneficiaries.
Strategic communication, wide consultation and close
collaboration are necessary to carry all along and at
best limit obstacles to pushing through.
What framework must we INSTITUTE? In consideration
of reform initiatives, experts and officials are
bordered by how well or how soon a programme will
yield the desired result. Such result is measured by
the efficiency, effectiveness, economy and the impact
of the tools and strategies adopted in the
implementation process to push through the reform
project. Since most reforms are bitter, painful and
unusual, they are necessarily prone to rejection.
Therefore, the framework that is best suited to
preventing policy shock and glut is one that gives
room for learning, coping and adjustment by those
likely to be affected and those implementing the
policies as realities on the field may alter
projections in the plan. Denoted as incrementalism,
such framework gives room for manoeuvring and building
on experience to correct mistakes. On the strength of
these questions, we can probe further other specific
questions that should guide our reform and
transformation agenda.
The first question setting the trend of my
observations, what must development must inspire our
government has a corollary in the following question:
Who must our government INSPIRE? Evidently, our
government must inspire the entire citizenry by the
quality of leadership provided (visionary, responsive
and transformational). In practical terms therefore,
our government must, through the services it provides,
the incentives and opportunities it creates for the
stimulation of growth, real employment and
productivity inspire in the citizenry the readiness
for trust, partnership and collaboration. It must
inspire the entire citizenry through the cost,
sacrifices and denials seen in our leaders. Those
visible incentives, sacrifices and denials ultimately
result in to savings for us, leading to the next
question.
In what must we INVEST? The answer is in everyday
discourse, but which we have been rather slow to
address as we engage in conspicuous consumption while
enhancing productivity and improving employment in
other countries. We must necessarily invest in
infrastructure and human capacity development for us
to be competitive in today knowledge economy. However,
it is not sufficient to provide the infrastructure and
develop human capacity without establishing effective
and efficient legal and regulatory frameworks that
will ensure sound, equitable and judicious
distribution, utilization maintenance and management
of those physical and human capital that are our
national assets. Without this mentality, our
investment will only be fragmental, misaligned and
wasteful. We must prevent the mistakes of the past in
our culture of public management.
Who must we INVITE? The reality of public management
and provision of public goods and services suggests
that big government is no longer suitable to achieving
result while government cannot do it alone. Gone are
the days that economies of scale are predictably
positive and manageable and public needs limited. The
bigger the size of government, the more elaborate the
hierarchy and processes and the more cumbersome,
wasteful and costlier in getting things done in public
interest. The option for our government is to
relinquish those areas of less national strategic
importance and seek partnership and collaboration with
private sector providers and foreign investors with
requisite expertise and financial strength, and whose
stake in the our economy transcends profit but
includes a commitment to national growth and
development.
What must we INCREASE? This question relates to what
we produce with our human capital assets and in which
we have comparative advantage. Our experts and
technocrats in various analyses presented facts that
clearly suggest that even though we are classified
among the oil-rich nations, we are still
oil-impoverished per capita when compared with many
other OPEC members whose production capacity outweighs
ours in spite of their lesser population. A resource
whose production process, distribution and marketing
does not engage a substantial percentage of our
population and does not guarantee us much comparative
advantage in the world economy cannot be said to be in
our ultimate interest. The paradox of oil production
and dependence in Nigeria is that while it is
enriching a leaking treasury, it is metaphorically
stifling productivity and employment in the real
sector of our economy. This is not to advocate the
shutting of our oil-wells but a call to rethink our
economic diversification agenda. When we advocate
diversification, we must be shifting focus to saving
and investing our oil earnings while also
concentrating on sectors with higher comparative
advantage and greater prospects of employment
generation, productivity and self-sustainability for
us.
What must we IMPORT? At a time we talk of our
industries being on the throes of death, producing
below installed capacity, diverted to merchandising of
imported items or have closed shops to relocate to
other countries, our ports are wide and welcoming for
all sorts of commodities while our borders are very
porous, our taste for imported items down to
tokunboh and over-used braziers and pants from
least expected countries like Vietnam and Myanmar have
only increased. We have to be objective in admitting
that being a net importing nation has only encouraged
conspicuous consumption with less employment
generation. We collectively have to reach an
understanding that our imports must be of those things
that grow and add real value to our capacity rather
than being dependent on others for everything. We must
moderate our consumption of what we do not produce.
What must we INHIBIT? This question is easily answered
in the previous explanation of what we must import.
Our government must discourage through strong
deterrence strategies commodities and items that
prevent the growth of our local industries,
introduction of incentives and subsidies to sectors
that are not immediately profitable and attractive to
local entrepreneurs who must necessarily be protected,
regardless of the globalization garbage talk.
What must we INVENT or INNOVATE? We must be sensitive
to the two demands of inspiring research and
development and growing our local industry. Our
government must therefore encourage invention,
investment and patronage of technologies appropriate
for our development stage. It is indeed absurd for us
to be importing hand pumps and simple grinding and
shelling machines fabricated in India while similar
ones produced by our hard working technologists rot in
the roadside showrooms.
What must we IMPROVE? In any reform initiative, it is
inevitable that that some vulnerabilities and negative
externalities will arise. They are the price we must
pay if reform must be productive. We must therefore
improve on our social security deliverables to
mitigate the impact of reforms and widen the arena of
dialogue and communication to imbue trust and
confidence that the evidently harsh and painful
decision is temporary.
Let us make no mistake. There are still many harsh and
painful policy decisions we will still have to make
and endure at all levels of our national life if we
must reach the land of our dream. Fuel subsidy is just
one. If the correct analytic tools are not employed
to arrive at the right decision, it makes little
difference whether it is retained or removed. But the
shock of the decisions must be manifestly and
immediately mitigated by the infrastructural and
social security deliverables.
Every responsible government acts in the interest of
the public, as whatever a government chooses to do or
not to do is the open definition of public policy.
Today, we blame our government and the leadership for
every ill that plagues our land, expecting it to act
with despatch in public interest. Yet, if government
must with the urgency and intensity we expect, it must
necessarily abridge the diverse, and often conflicting
vested interests that have limited our ability to
reach our full national potentials. Therefore, it most
step not only on the mighty cancerous toes causing
extreme pains in our body polity, but also crush the
feeble viral fingers of susceptible criminal
toddlers.The problem with our nation is the erosion
of a national culture built on INTEGRITY, defined as
an unimpaired character that stands public scrutiny
demonstrated by a well-ordered private and public life
devoid moral or material corruptibility.
When integrity is asphyxiated in any polity, the
essence of public service is lost as hedonism and
pursuit of vested interests takes the instinct of
virtually every stakeholder. We all lament that our
constitution is deficient in certain areas and
advocate that our nation must be guided by the rule of
law, yet we are not united around the core value of
integrity that needs to be addressed for the
protection of our collective national interest. We all
cry for national rebirth or reform without
appreciating the depth integrity deficit in our
national polity. There are three dimensions to the
compromise of this core value in Nigeria: Abdication
of public service, professionalization and desecration
of politics and celebration of corruption.
The sin of abdication of public service is a product
of desecration of the noble art of politics and
condoning of corruption in public and private life in
the country. Mahatma Ghandi, the man Indian deify as
father of the nation, in 1925 illustrated these vices
as politics without principle, wealth without work,
pleasure without conscience, knowledge without
character, commerce without morality, science without
humanity and worship without sacrifice. Our nation
rates very high in all these disturbing indices,
needing serious and collective intervention. In
discreet and practical terms, our government must make
fundamental decisions that would produce radical
changes in our culture of disdain. There is optimism
that the various reform initiatives of the government
will manifestly address these issues.
At the street level however, the understanding of
reform is withdrawal of rights and privileges and
curtailment of freedoms. Therefore, it induces
trepidation and rejection. Yes, reform may seem
punitive (and of course would ‘block' some vested
interests), its longer term goals and objectives are
to ensure equilibrium in the society by expanding
access to national wealth, ensuring provision of
public goods and services and guaranteeing protection
of life and properties of all citizens. The kind of
urgency we want the government to address the
accumulated challenges demands the initiation and
pursuit of radical reform policies that must
definitely inconvenience everyone in implementation.
They will manifest in rigid state control, seemingly
over-regulation of public life with strong monitoring,
compliance and deterrence strategies of enforcement
that out punitive in outlook. But we cannot in a world
of democracy and human rights afford official
high-handedness and return to a police-state.
Without being overly prescriptive, what our nation
needs in this difficult moment is the regulation our
public life in a manner that does not cause extreme
dislocation, nor induces shock and glut. Since our
first sin in Nigeria is the abdication of public
service, we need a restoration of pride in public
service through consolidation and alignment of the
public sector with recognition, empowerment and reward
of bureaucrats and technocrats who are invaluable to
national growth and development but have suffered a
high degree of de-motivation and insecurity in the
recent past.
The pursuit of our national reform project must be
real and tangible in its criminalization of corruption
in all its ramifications. It must of course seek to
de-professionalize political offices but ensure that
only citizens with impeccable record in public and
private sector management are attracted into politics
to continue "TO SERVE WITH INTEGRITY". The seed of our
national reform should be sown in benchmarking our
national core value on this vital index of good
governance. Our reform agenda should the capable of
exorcising the nation of the cardinal sins illustrated
by Mahatma Ghandi. In assuming public office and
conducting public affairs, we must adhere to the Seven
Principles of Public Life, the Nolan Principles:
selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability,
openness, honesty and leadership.
Reforming Nigeria is a hydra-headed challenge,
demanding a 360 Degree attention to reach our Canaan.
We must acknowledge and respect the genuine agitations
of many Nigerians on the future of our country but
such agitations and expressions will be meaningless if
the fundamental issue of evolving a national culture
built on INTEGRITY. This should be our beacon as we
engage ourselves in the subject of National Rebirth or
Reform. Happily, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has
in his national broadcast of Monday, given an insight
into what a New Nigeria will look like with the
definitive actions he has outlined to cleanse the rot
in our economy. It's gonna be "No business as usual.
The critical and urgent nature of the reform agenda
demands a correct appreciation of the mass media in
Nigeria as providing public service. The existence of
trust between the government and the press, and
involvement at every stage of the policy making
process will smoothen our ride along the difficult
path of reform and inspire our preparedness for
change. After all, Allah does not change the condition
of a people until they change what is in themselves.
We are on a long trek to Canaanland. Our government
must continue to give us assurance that ‘there is ease
after every difficulty', and light at the end of the
tunnel, and our leaders must be seen in our front in
the trek along the long, tortuous and narrow path. God
bless our country. Abdul-Warees is the Head of
Training, Voice of Nigeria, Ikoyi, Lagos,
(korewarith@yahoo.com
korewarith@voiceofnigeria.org ,
abdulwarees01@gmail.com ) 08090585723 |
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