Daily news in Nigeria is awash with both literature and data that show how Africa’ s most populous nation has fallen behind peers on vital indicators of economic growth and development.
This situation is due to a lack of inclusive governance structures and a movement among business owners that can reverse the trend, according to experts that gathered at the second public lecture organised by The Niche, a Nigerian newspaper, in Lagos on Tuesday.
“It is now obvious that successful societies in terms of prosperous and peaceful development are those that have striven for inclusiveness in the midst of diversity in their political and economic systems,” said Anya O. Anya, former CEO, Nigeria Economic Summit Group, at the lecture themed ‘Business and Accountable Governance: The Obligation of Leadership’.
Over 6,000 years of documented history show that absolutist governance systems have little or no respect for the rule of law, suppress disruptive creativity and encourage an extractive economy, which confers profits and wealth to the friends of those in power. These absolutist systems stimulate enormous degrees of social and economic inequalities that lead to revolutions, such as the French Revolution of 1789 that abolished the feudal systems.
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In 1979, business leaders reversed the economic fortunes of New york after the city went bankrupt and shed over 1 million jobs. A coalition of business leaders co-opted freedom fighters in 1987 and started a process that brought down the apartheid government in South Africa. The Business Against Crime initiative under President Nelson Mandela used a similar approach to combat crime.
“The most critical stakeholders in any country are the citizens, in whom sovereignty reposes and business owners who are the most invested. For any meaningful change to take place, these two categories of stakeholders must arise and steer the course of governance,” Innocent Chukwuma, director, West Africa at the Ford Foundation, said.
Some of the tell-tale signs of Nigeria’s ailing economy include an economic growth rate of about 2 percent and a population growing at 3.8 percent per year, almost twice the economic growth rate. The Debt Management Office says Nigeria’s debt as of 2015 was a little over N12 trillion but has ballooned to over N25 trillion as of 2019 and the country will spend 60-70 percent of total earnings in servicing debt.
