Many discussions about Nigeria today begin and end with frustrations about how the economy is punching below its weight and government policies are a rehash of the ruinous ones from 1983.
While Nigeria seems like a country where nothing works, there are pockets of success that continue to power it on.
Those pockets of success are made possible by the self-organising impulse of Nigerians who are ever willing to step up to the plate and fill yawning gaps vacated by the government.
Bring your own government (BYOG) is a popular acronym in Nigeria.
In the absence of the government, Nigerians generate their own power through petrol or diesel generators or solar panels. Some businesses even have contractual agreements with small power plants to keep lights on in their factories.
Self-generated power is rampant in Africa’s largest economy because the national grid is unreliable and is only able to distribute less than 10 percent of the country’s daily electricity needs. Nigeria has one-fifth the total power supply of North Carolina, a state in the United States, despite having 20 times the population of the state, and burns up to $8 billion per year on diesel fuel for generators.
When it comes to security Nigerians are on their own too.
Never mind constitutional provisions, protection of lives and property is also a do-it-yourself enterprise. There were only 219 police officers per 100,000, according to 2016 data by the World Internal Security and Police Index.
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Nigerians are also taking up social investments in education and healthcare to make up for the government’s neglect of sectors that get less in annual budgets than the government spends subsidising petrol.
Everywhere you look there’s a body of evidence showing Nigerians are willing to do for themselves just about everything the government has failed to do.
This incredible self-organising culture is probably the country’s only saving grace. The reason Africa’s most populous nation hasn’t self-destructed despite its many explosive problems.
This self-organising culture of Nigerians is not lost on Andrew S. Nevin, partner and chief economist at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Nigeria.
In a recent interview with BusinessDay, Nevin talked about his fascination with the self-organising culture of Nigerians, its impact on the economy and how the government can leverage it for inclusive and robust growth. Nevin contends that the self-organising culture of Nigerians is not getting the attention it deserves. To counter the negative narratives about Nigeria that get more attention, he has set out to compile stories about the self-organising culture of Nigerians.
“We all understand the very negative narratives that we hear about Nigeria and how nothing works, and all the grim statistics which I no longer even bother repeating because we all understand that,” Nevin said.
“But despite that, I also look around and I see things that work extremely well, and things that in other countries you might expect the public sector to do, but here, at various levels of organisation, just seem to get done by the people,” Nevin said.
He shared his observations with some friends and they decided they would highlight the stories of Nigerians’ self-organisation, sharing instances where people take up the task of organising a part of the society unprompted.
“Self-organisation happens in all societies and all nations, but I think in our environment where you cannot rely on other structures, it is particularly strong so we wanted to start to tell the stories not as a negative but as a strength,” he said.
Something to learn from Nigeria
Nevin and his friends want to compile these stories together in a book for a global audience. The hope is that other nations can learn something about this “strong” self-organising impulse of Nigerians.
“In fact, I have entered into discussions with some colleagues in India, who are fascinated by this because they say this self-organising policy has gone away because they’ve had centralized top-down directives for so long, starting with the British Empire period and so they are kind of very interested in this notion of a balance,” Nevin said.
What the book of self-organising stories will look like
Nigerians will be invited to share their stories in their own words on a website, a process that is currently running. These stories will then feed the book.
The book will have different categories drawn mostly from people’s story submissions and categorised under healthcare, education, infrastructure, energy and renewables.
The stories will be gathered in the three dominant languages to broaden the scope of contributors.
“It is fascinating to me because each different part of the nation also has different ways of approaching self-organisation,” Nevin said.
“Everyone is well aware of the Igbo apprenticeship system, which is a kind of a self-organising system that seems to be very successful at producing real value to the Igbo situation, but everywhere you go in the country we are finding more, more and more stories.
“We have got a group of five of us that are sort of working away to try to get these stories but the book is not by the five of us, the book is by donations,” Nevin said.
Nigerian entrepreneurs are unique
Entrepreneurship may exist everywhere but it’s different in Nigeria, according to Nevin. The impact almost always comes first to the minds of several entrepreneurs rather than financial gain.
”I think this is why Nigerians are unique,” Nevin said.
“I mean if you think of countries like the UK, Canada, the United States, China – which I have lived in and India – which I am also very familiar with, you will realise that entrepreneurship is popular, but people don’t think so much about delivering what can pass as social investments.
“Take education, for instance, 85 percent of students in Lagos go to private schools, which means there are hundreds of people who have stepped up and just started their own school with limited resources, limited support and delivering at least a good enough education that parents are willing to pay for. That is remarkable. You can also look at blue-chip companies like Dangote Cement and Lafarge, they produce their own power to drive the cement production so they had to in effect build the whole ecosystem themselves.
Yes, there is entrepreneurship everywhere but you don’t see this level of commitment,” Nevin said.
“I also know someone who is making an ambulance service for Lagos just because there is a gap there. I hope she does well with it financially but I do not think that is the primary reason for her drive, it is just that this is a gap in the market and she steps up and is going to fill it.”
“Sticking to education for a moment, His Royal Highness Muhammadu Sanusi II who is one of the SDG Advocates, organised a challenge around education and nine of the winners who got through to the final 10 were from Nigeria who started these amazing educational venture, and so one of them does education in prisons. Think about this for a moment, this is a part of the Nigerian community that most people would like to forget about. “The state has no resources to educate prisoners but this individual has stepped up and said this is actually something that is important, I am going to figure out a way to do this myself and it is just extraordinary,” Nevin said.
He goes on to cite another example of one of the winners who teach about dyslexia. Dyslexia is a general term for disorders that involve difficulty in learning to read or interpret words, letters, and other symbols, but that does not affect general intelligence.
It is an area that is not well understood and is often under-diagnosed in Nigeria where there are no state resources for dealing with dyslexic children.
“This person then creates a programme to deal effectively with dyslexia, so when
people look at Nigerians and say they are chaotic, they are not chaotic at all, you look at the way markets are organised and these are not imposed from the top,” Nevin said.
“In fact, it is probably more of a problem when the state tries to get involved than if it is left to self-organisation.”
Nigerians’ incredible knack for self-organisation can also be found in a plethora of professional organisations made of people who simply came together and have become voices to reckon with.
“I have always had great respect for the strength of the unions in Nigeria, it is something that we see declining a lot in the United States and to some extent in Canada, yet you still have these kinds of self-organising groups that have powerful voices and affect the trajectory of the country like the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) etc.
“In other countries, to be the NBA president would not necessarily be considered something you aspire to if you are a lawyer, you just want to focus on your own practice or your own firm but here it is a very important position to get together,” Nevin said.
How Nigeria make the most of this DIY system to boost the economy
Nevin’s advice to the government is that self-organising should be “embraced”.
“A lot of times you sort of feel like the government is fighting it, they are saying do not do this, we’ll have it this way, this law, etc. I think for the government, less is more, the federal government needs to do less and it could be putting more trust in Nigerians, even to the extent of saying, look, we are not going to solve that problem you get on with and we are going to solve other problems.
Nigeria’s federal government is however inclined to intervene in everything, especially where it doesn’t necessarily have the resources or the capacity.
“I have said it before that because of the self-organising ability, it should be very easy to govern Nigeria because a lot of people sort of get on with it or at least focus on the few that the federal government has to do, so I think that the lesson would be to embrace it, think of policies where Nigerians can be active actors and not passive and anticipate their positive or negative response on such policies,” Nevin said.
