The above title is local parlance for the injunction, “ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. This proverb has found expression in popular variants, including quotes popularized by or attributed to William Watkinson’s (it is better to light a candle than to curse the dark), Mahatma Gandhi (“be the change you wish to see”), and John F. Kennedy’s (ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country). Kennedy’s may be particularly difficult to buy into in a country where many stakeholders are inclined to believe that the country is undeserving of such allegiance. Interestingly, it has some resonance with the African human rights regime which emphatically foregrounds the correlation between rights and duties.
This worldview offers a segue for my preliminary thoughts on harnessing the role of the diaspora for national transformation. To flesh these out, I borrow from Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty which is a critically acclaimed text in contemporary political thought and in international development.
Hirschman worked on the premise that dynamic organizations, including firms and governments, experience deterioration in the quality of outputs that confronts their clients or citizens with two options: “exit” which they can exercise to quit the entity without counteracting the decline or “voice” which they can deploy to agitate for and influence change. Hirschman then proffered “loyalty” as the mechanism that stems exit and augments the role of voice. Despite the global relevance of his book, it is noteworthy that the core thesis that he articulated in 1970 occurred to him while he was ruminating over the decline of the railroad service in Nigeria.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty are concepts that I find very useful in thinking through some challenges of the agenda to leverage the diaspora to improve the outcomes and impacts of national transformation. The interplay of the alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in organizations capture the predicament of many in the diaspora who are neither strangers to exit – having voted with their feet in dissatisfaction with the country’s downward spiral – nor to voice which they typically intone to decry gaps that they aspire to bridge at home. To my mind, however, the idea of loyalty as a tension valve in mediating the symbiotic interaction between voice and exit is very significant for constructive dialogue about how to harness the role of the diaspora.
The racial reckoning that heightened in the contemporary epoch in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death adds to the urgency of such dialogue, captures the challenges that abound in nation-building even in the so-called advanced democracies, and begs the question “loyalty to what?”
The immediate past President of the United States, Donald Trump, crassly trumpeted and exploited “make America great again” as a campaign slogan. Yet, a key takeaway of the siege of the US capitol that he orchestrated on January 6, 2021 is that the clearest path to “make America great again” is to “make Americans American again” in ways that build on core social values to invigorate the essence of democracy as government by the people for the people.
This speaks to the question of “loyalty to what” and clarifies the primacy of popular sovereignty in nation-building. My loyalty is less to the Nigerian state and more to the Nigerian society and/or people. That being the case, I hold myself as accountable as I hold the state for its failures in delivering on the social contract. This proposition may come across as counter-intuitive at first blush. But it is not on closer scrutiny.
As “we, the people” lament the crisis of governance and politics in our consolidating democracy, we must reflect on our own complicity in perpetuating the crisis. On one hand, we often act surprised that we perennially have bad leaders; on the other hand, we collude in failing to pipeline the infrastructure to reduce the risk of revisiting the same sins by systematically embedding enterprises to promote and protect core shared values we celebrate as foundational for equitable national transformation.
Against this backdrop, I doubt that any of us can unequivocally claim that we have invested sufficiently to “make Nigerians Nigerian” since we gained independence from British colonialism. Thus, I take exception to common tendencies which assume that ceremoniously rallying around a “nation” that was the amalgamation of arbitrary boundaries as relatively recently as 1914 is an adequate basis for meaningful self-determination, let alone for forging a sustainable national identity.
If we invested in Research and Development as a strategic portfolio in the public sector to address the root causes of leadership dysfunctions, for example, I suspect that we would not be as focused disproportionately on structural reforms to the diminution of cultural fundamentals. In this vein, we would explore, if not privilege, the transformative potentials of virtue ethics – civic virtue, literacy, and learning – to nurture in both candidates and electorates public-spirited citizenship equipped to elevate public good over self-interest seamlessly.
The privilege of serving as the Minister of Mines and Steel Development for the Federal Republic of Nigeria opened my eyes to the possibilities that abound for our national transformation. For example, it did not take rocket science for me to realize that unless we digitized our records in the Ministry, it would be routine for important files to “take flight” or be literally sat on by self-aggrandizing bureaucrats. The costs of yawning gaps in constitutive capacity exemplified by the digitization shortfall contribute to Nigeria’s reputational disadvantage as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. The scenario of files that grow limbs and flee at critical junctures vividly establish both the opportunistic prevalence of what is conflated as corruption and the market opportunity that exists for solving problems like that.
Resigning my appointment to return to the security of tenure that I earned as an academic may have been my most forceful exit. My voice continues to find concrete expression in the various forms of social enterprises that I have championed. However, in the final analysis, loyalty remains the impetus for my relentless efforts to leverage my intellectual capital to probe a better way forward for us as a people.
Loyalty accounts for my constructive impatience with relatively tone-deaf comparisons of Nigeria and my country of refuge in the diaspora which not only had a head-start on the Westphalian nation-state imposed on us, but substantially invests in planning and leveraging lessons of its lived experiences to improve objective realities. Loyalty is the pivot for my restating the saying that “one who waits to figure out the whole way before taking a step will spend eternity standing on one foot” to encourage the diaspora help create the enabling environment that they perceive as fundamental for their engagement. And I dare say that one can explore and implement this possibility independent of the problematically dominant state, even if it will take longer to achieve without state support or action.
Against the foregoing backdrop, what if we minimize the constrains that threaten the reach and scope of our engagement individually and collectively, and approach those with the recalcitrance of a problem solver or with the resolve and resilience of a diaspora youth like Grace Amos who has brought her skills and competences as an engineer to bear on testing a model to repair a breach in basic education delivery?
What if, for example, I primarily approach the manifold challenges of politics and governance in Nigeria as a “Maker Lab” of sorts, instead of as a revolting cesspool? What would be my strategy to tackle some of the most pressing problems therein and to learn therefrom? Frankly, my paramount concern would be figuring out how demonstrate, adapt and scale an enterprise for succession-planning that improves the odds of building capacity to internalize salient ideals and values as a pipeline for cultivating virtuous and ethical Nigerians to lead across the political economy.
Professor Obiora who took degrees from the University of Nigeria Nsukka, Yale Law school and Stanford Law school, is a former Minister of the federal republic of Nigeria and is currently professor of law at the University of Arizona.
