It is becoming so hard for me to discuss the Nigerian economy now. It is even harder to write about it or anything at all, most especially the economic prosperity and poverty reduction we owe the people. This is an area in which I have abiding interest. Over the past six years, I have written this column in the hope that our poverty reduction programmes would by now have yielded visible results. Unfortunately, this can no longer happen; not with Boko Haram, herdsmen and now bandits changing batons in the marathon race of killing of our citizens. It is really much easier to write about politics because of the crisis of leadership that has apparently overwhelmed everyone, resulting in the total failure of governments, national and subnational, to protect the citizens.
The standard approach to problem solving is to first recognize, understand and then apply solutions to a problem. But in Nigeria, we don’t do that. We can’t identify a problem by its name, lest we name an important person or group of people, who may jolly well be behind it. “Our forests have been occupied by strange people”. Who are the strange people? Don’t ever try to name them, even if you know. This is the only country where aliens invade forests and attack citizens everywhere and the people call them bandits. What a word! These must be a special type of thieves. The president has promised to move 100 million people back to the prosperity they used to know. But he did not say how many more will get back into that black hole due to the activities of bandits. The rest of this article is taken from an earlier work of mine.
Our poverty reduction strategies will profit from a commitment to first seeking, and then properly understanding, how poverty comes about. Doing otherwise would be a fatal error in any effort to improve the condition of the poor. The correction or avoidance of such error is our current interest in this column. A pathway is never good enough until both sides of it are rid of weed; we begin today to more specifically identify what we consider the architects of poverty, or more appropriately the poverty generators in Nigeria. We believe this is an exercise that will produce good results because it will enable us to unmask the elements behind poverty in this country, and understand why poverty seems to get more intractable, the more we try to fight it. Understanding the causes of poverty, we hope, will not only sharpen our focus on strategies to reduce it but also stimulate and direct pointed remedial measures at it.
The political system in Nigeria is our number one suspect on the list of poverty generators in the country. I understand that for some strange reason, the study of history is being de-emphasised in Nigeria, but we need to do a bit of it here. The first group of Europeans to visit Nigeria were the Portuguese, who came to the Benin Kingdom in 1485. They were however superseded by the British, who arrived in Benin in 1553. The interest of the British in the natural wealth of the kingdom of Benin led to the development of significant trading relations. It wasn’t long though before the Oba of Benin discovered the hidden intentions of the British, including the plan to establish a colony over the kingdom. He then tried to cut communication with the British who responded very forcefully with guns and canons that weakened and practically commenced the obliteration of the Benin kingdom. That was what later became known as the Benin Expedition of 1897 – a very ferocious and punitive attack that resulted in the stealing of Benin artefacts that are yet to be completely returned to Nigeria. At the end of the day, the British established a Colony in Nigeria and soon the whole of Northern and Southern Nigeria became one colony for the British to plunder and exploit. Once you are colonized you will surely be plundered. This is probably why the word colony is never welcome anywhere in the modern world.
Although the British are gone, the idea of colonization remains attractive and functional around us. Perhaps, in a bid to completely drop that toga of the colonial political past, our leaders travelled further north to pick up the American governance style – the presidential system of governance. And the stage was set for the mass production of poverty-stricken people, as one group recolonizes another through political office holding.
The presidential system was introduced by the military through the flawed military constitution of 1979. Perhaps, also it was felt that since Nigeria is called a federation, it would be well-served by a constitution type that has served the greatest democracy in the world – the United States of America. But the truth is that Nigeria is neither a federation nor a democracy, to say nothing about the quality of leaders that make the presidential system work in America, in comparison to the kind of political prostitutes and tribal champions we have all over the place. Have we heard of anyone who decamped from one party to the other in the United States, even with the emergence of outsiders like Donald Trump? The focus is on the nation and they keep their eyes on that ball. Here we keep our eyes on the purse and our share of the cake. Nigeria is currently witnessing a gale of defections by professional defectors for reasons other than good governance. In the next one year, honour will flee and Nigerians will sit back and watch adult comedy by clowns that somehow strangely extracted the title of honourable from their country. The economy will barely breathe and poverty gains traction.
In addition to producing uncontrollable leaders with executive powers, the cost of the presidential system is another reason why it should not even be touched with a 20 foot pole. Today, we see legislatures that are openly robbing the people; impeachment is sold for cash and looting in the form of obscene self-allocated salaries and retirement benefits are rife. We see people get into government houses and emerge as emperors stealing everything, including those nailed to the ground (because they also steal peoples’ land) and in such measures as to single-handedly hand pick their own successors. At the end of the day, the people are reduced to observers, jobbers, slaves, paupers, armed robbers and political thugs, who perpetually serve those privileged to grab power. This is why no matter how much we budget in Nigeria, the country goes nowhere. The money will be stolen by leaders who are not accountable to anyone but themselves. This system of government is a disaster. No country at our level can survive with it because it is too expensive and unaccountable. It survives here only because those who ought to change it are the ones milking the nation.
There was a novel by James Hardly Chase titled “There is always a price tag”. Before the school system was run down, such that people who spoke Queens English were derided and said to be speaking grammar or turenchi,and all kinds of exotic and backward languages like Pigeon gained ascendancy in an English speaking country, we all read literary works like those of Hardly Chase. That book projected the debatable idea that everyone can be bought or paid off. Today,the system of government has made it true that there’s always a price tag. We have people who are still dogged by their primordial backgrounds exercising executive power. They are prone to many frailties including nepotism, which is the worst form of corruption.If you add the fact that executive powers corrupt absolutely, you have leaders who belong to jail houses but will not go there because justice has got a price tag. There are people here spending the rest of their lives blocking investigation and trials. This is why we have politicians who say one thing today and another tomorrow because their words reflect only the body language of those holding evidence of their crimes.
The presidential system of government is a winner-takes-all system, laden with opportunities for sleaze. It offers great premium to office-holders to be corrupt and works where there is high level of education, strong institutions, proper federal structure and detribalized leaders. Nigeria scores zero in all of these. That is why you do not try it unless your institutions are strong enough to correct and punish those who misalign themselves with their oaths of office and the constitution. Nigerian institutions are subsumed in their leaders who pick and choose what misalignment to pamper or punish. In our judgement, the biggest poverty generator in Nigeria is her political system and form of government that literally turns the gun against those it is meant to defend.The best they can expect is to die of poverty.Reform or change the political system and poverty will fell your impact.
Emeka Osuji
