Author: The Nation

By Ethelbert Okere

Two recent developments in the country seem to have inadvertently re-oriented Nigerians from certain attitudes and perceptions that hitherto characterized – and negatively too – our collective psyche. One is the crisis that arose from the redesignation of the national currency –  the naira – and the other the victory of Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu at the February 25, 2023 presidential elections.

Let’s take the first. With the cash crisis, Nigerians now seem to have began to hold their national currency in high esteem. They treated the naira with so much disdain. It is said that Nigeria is the only place in the world where its people “spray” money – sometimes in foreign currency – and proceed to march on it – at parties.

In the course of the current crisis, we saw pictures of bundles of naira – believed to be in millions in some cases – being dug out from where they were buried in homes. Where else on earth does such practice go on?

Nigerians hitherto gave the impression that money is not the problem but how to spend it! They lavish money on things that would attract frugal spending in other climes, including richer countries. Take a look at our weddings, burials, even government (public) functions and you would agree that Nigerians have the worst psyche about money; a big contradiction given that the same Nigerians are said to be among the poorest in the world. Although it is possible that the old habit may return after the current crisis, there are quite some noticeable positive changes in the attitude of Nigerians to their national currency.

Let me give an illustration with this personal experience. I don’t know how it began but it happened that I personally developed the habit of having small denominations of the naira in my possession – N20, N10, even N5 notes; and there was this female acquaintance who kept mocking me about it. “How can you be carrying this type of money about, big man like you?”, she would always say. Then came the current cash crisis. One day, she scampered into my office – I had not seen her for a while – and, in a frenzy, she said she didn’t have even one kobo on her. And going by her countenance, it was not difficult to believe her.

Innocently, I told her that I had only old N50 naira notes with me – I had just gotten about N5000.00 through a friend in my bank – and that I knew she doesn’t like small denominations; just as I brandished some of the notes; whereupon the young lady virtually knelt down, pleading that she wouldn’t mind.

Take another instance. There is a Business Centre in town where I usually go for after-office assignments, whose proprietor once berated me for paying him the sum of 200 naira in 50 naira notes. He had said to me: “Oga, We Are Not Selling Crayfish Here”. But a couple of weeks ago, I was at the same place and behold the same proprietor was in a shouting bout with another customer who refused to accept “change” in old, dilapidated 100 naira notes from him. He said to the fellow angrily: “You people are the ones spoiling this country”.

Even though the entire thing may be an aberration rather than the outcome of a scientific realignment of market forces, the current cash crisis is beginning to impact positively on the collective psyche of the people as far as money is concerned

Whether this will eventually lead to a sustainable culture of frugality in the management of both private and public resources is a different matter but there can be no doubt that there is a change in how Nigerians perceive money and which change  has enormous potentials for our country depending on how the current episode ends.

To be sure, the fate of the naira is not determined by the attitude factor. Our experience with the naira arises from monetary and fiscal policies that have been unable to create the right atmosphere for a stable national currency. So, if the experience of the cashless policy crisis helps in inculcating in Nigerians a better attitude to money and a culture of thrift,  it would be a welcome development but more importantly, it should serve as an incentive for the incoming federal administration – of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu – to pursue monetary and fiscal policies that would enhance the purchasing power of the naira and encourage savings.

In Nigeria, aggregate savings is abysmally low; and without savings, there will be no investments; and without investments, there will be no growth; and without growth, there will be no development; and without development, there will be no jobs; and without jobs, there will be no savings and the misery cycle of poverty continues.

There is this theory that the cash crisis was deliberately staged in other to stop Tinubu from winning the presidential elections. True or false, that should encourage the incoming administration to pursue policies that will shield Nigerians from sinking deeper into the abyss of poverty – a situation that is due mainly to the ever dwindling value of the naira. The expectation, therefore, is that by the time President Tinubu does one year in office, Nigerians would have began to realize that what they were compelled to go through – in a bid to stop Tinubu, as some claim – was a sacrifice that was worth it. 

The next is on religion. Among other things, Senator Tinubu’s victory on a Muslim-Muslim ticket signifies that religion may no longer be an issue in determining who becomes Nigeria’s president. That does not mean that Nigerians will cease to have passion for their individual faith but they would realize that pragmatism rather than religious sanctimoniousness would achieve better results if the aim is to win a presidential election in Nigeria.

During the electioneering campaign, I was once asked by a pastor whether Muslims in the country would have allowed a Christian-Christian ticket. My reply was that in the first place, the question was academic and too hypothetical to deserve an answer. However, I went ahead to explain that no presidential candidate or political party in Nigeria would present a Christian-Christian ticket if it was determined to win the election; the reason being simply that any presidential ticket that is not targeted at getting the majority of the votes from Muslims in the country will fail.

This is the plain reality not because Muslims are superior to Christians but because the demographic reality of Christians in the country does not lend itself favourably to a Christian-Christian presidential ticket. Even though Tinubu and Shetima are not the first Nigerians to win the presidency on a Muslim-Muslim ticket – Abiola and Kingibe did it in 1993 – the recent case became extremely controversial for reasons that are not difficult to fathom.

It would not be incorrect to say that next time, we may not witness the level of animosity the Tinubu-Shetima ticket generated, since our Christian folks would have realized that politics is a hard, cold and calculated business which gives room for religious conservatism only when it is in furtherance to an electoral victory.

Summarily, therefore, the success of the Tinubu-Shetima ticket may have, by default rather than design,  signaled a reorientation of Nigerians away from the politics of “who will represent my religion”. Happily, Senator Tinubu’s pedigree suggests that that may not really be a problem afterall. Why should there be with a man who is a Muslem but whose immediate family members are all Christians; his spouse, in fact, a pastor in one of the leading Pentecostal churches in town. Asiwaju Tinubu himself tells the story that on a table beside their matrimonial bed lie two books: one the Holy Bible, the other the Holy Koran.

I have said nothing to suggest that there is no need for “balancing” of religions in our national politics. I rather think that given the heat generated by the Muslem-Muslem ticket and even though it succeeded against all odds, political parties will be hesitant to field a same faith presidential ticket next time. If we extrapolate the argument, it is safe to say that  the recent development would also help people of both religions – Christianity and Islam – develop their faith better.

At the height of the controversy, I had an encounter with a pastor who openly boasted that he would “stop serving God” if Tinibu and Shetima win the election. My concern was not the prospects or otherwise of the ticket succeeding but on the questionable faith of the pastor. Was he really serving God in the first place, a God whom he threatened to abandon on a whimsical worldly excuse boarding on a mere electoral contest?

There are many lessons to be learnt by the generality of Nigerians from the recent presidential election but perhaps there are even greater lessons   to learn by the President-elect himself:  Magnanimity in victory and a stoic determination to prove the cynics wrong.

• Okere is Director-General of  Imo State Orientation Agency

AFTER the establishment of Lagos as the capital of Nigeria, migrants from other parts of Nigeria and some from the neighbouring countries of Togo and Ghana were attracted to Lagos where they settled down to make a living and raise a family. They very quickly meshed with the people who preceded them as settlers in Lagos. Today these people are confirmed Lagosians, their Togolese or Ghanaian names notwithstanding. All through this period, all the migrants were fitted into the pot that was Lagos and all their various cultures were seamlessly merged to create a distinct Lagos flavour.

It is not clear if the migrants who came to find their fortune in Lagos intended to stay on as permanent residents but in reality, what happened was that maybe in spite of themselves, they found that they became trapped by the honey pot that was Lagos and several generations later they have become Lagosians. For most of them, there was no other place to call home, unless they were forcibly reminded of their migrant status as indeed the Ibos were in 1966. That was when Lagos, through no fault of the people of Lagos, became patently unsafe and they had to go back, many of them to places they were sure they had left behind permanently, at least in purely physical terms. And their strong desire to resume their Lagosian identity was confirmed as they returned to Lagos as soon as the tragic Civil war which broke out in the wake of their exodus from Lagos ended.

For more than a century, the population of Lagos grew steadily and the migrants who were in the main responsible for this increase could be assimilated into the tempo and culture of the city life which they must have found to be as strange as it was alluring. Within a short period of time they had become Lagosians and had cultivated the airs of urbanites who began to look down with some degree of condescension at those unfortunate people in the interior who were still bound by the physical inconveniencies of their immediate environment. They did not discriminate between people from their immediate hinterland, fellow Yorubas with whom they shared a language even though the Lagos dialect separated them as surely as other characteristics like skin colour. To the Lagosian, if you spoke their language, you were most welcome but if your Yoruba had the unmistakeable sound of some interior dialect, you were despised and pitied in equal measure. Many of us, who were dismissed as ara oke, people from the hills, were quickly and ruthlessly put in our place. This was no doubt an incentive for the recent migrant to correct the strangeness of their speech as quickly as possible. This issue of language was brought home to me shortly after we arrived in Lagos.

The family had gone on a Sunday visit to the Bar Beach, something which new arrivals in Lagos did almost as a rite of admission into the city. We, the children were still in high spirits as we went over our experiences at the beach and looked forward very much to having our supper as soon as we got back home. Driving through Lagos of the early sixties on a Sunday evening was a pleasure all by itself as the well lit roads, were definitely an attraction and the lightness of the traffic was conducive to sight seeing and being Lagos, there was always something to see. There was however a slight holdup at the Sabo roundabout, caused mainly by one of the huge municipal buses which occupied more than a fair portion of the road. The delay was not long but it was long enough for my father to shout at the errant driver to move his vehicle out of the way. Without missing a beat, the driver leaned out of his cab and told my father to shut up. But his choice response was not limited to that advice.

Go back to your bush village, you wretched Ijesaman!’ he shouted at the top of his voice.

We were all stunned. How on earth could that man have known that our father was from Ilesa? But my father just laughed and pointed out when we asked him that it was his accent that gave him away and made it possible for the bus driver to identify his place of origin with unerring certainty. If a man speaking Yoruba, albeit not in the Lagos dialect could be so brutally put down, what sort of response was reserved for someone who spoke another language entirely. For this reason, if for no other, people who lived in Lagos of the sixties spoke Yoruba and not just Yoruba but Lagos Yoruba to the exclusion, at least in public, of any language other than English. This language situation was another pole around which life in Lagos revolved and around which the numerous migrant groups which had settled in the city gelled and became identifiable as Lagosians.

Although many people came to Lagos as tourists and hurried back home wherever that was after a few days, the magnet that drew people to Lagos was work but this was only because they were paid for whatever work they did. One minor character in Chinua Achebe’s No longer at ease stated baldly that what brought him to Lagos from his village across the Niger was money. If he was only interested in working, he would have stayed at home where there was more than enough land for him to break his back on raising a few crops. There was work back home but what he wanted was money and Lagos was going to provide it for him. The streets of Lagos were not paved with gold but there was money to be made in Lagos. In their flights of fancy many of the migrants made money in Lagos whichever way they could and sent it back home to  build a house in their village into which they hoped to retire into at some point in their lives when their desire for the good things which existed in such profusion in Lagos would have been sated past the point of satisfaction. Many of the people in my father’s circle of friends acted on this impulse and built solid houses in Ilesa for when they returned home. For most of them, this was no more than a pipe dream. They built the houses alright but none of them, except my father acted on the second part and retired to Ilesa long before he died. The point to be made here is that the allure of Lagos is a terminal condition. Once you are hooked, you are finished with life back home wherever that was, in fulfilment of the observation that money made in Lagos tends to stay in Lagos rather like the popular saying that what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas. Transferring money from Lagos to some other place in the interior is as good as burying the money in some hole in the ground. This is why there are many beautiful but empty buildings standing abandoned, forlorn and slowly decaying in my neck of the woods, as indeed is the case in many other parts. That relocation to Lagos from the interior tends to be irreversible and has in recent times turned to be a stepping stone to other pastures beyond the sea. We have therefore come full circle and resumed a migration which was first forcibly undertaken by people captured as slaves and transported in slave ships across the Atlantic. The descendants of those who were enslaved, transported but returned to Lagos and even those whose forebears escaped the anguish of what was euphemistically described as the middle passage are now, for all sorts of reasons following in the footsteps of those that had no choice in the matter. They are now sending money from their various places of exile back home to build futuristic houses which in their turn will stand empty and spectacularly useless in years to come.

Lagos, then as now bubbled furiously as there were things happening virtually everyday and all round the clock. Nightlife in Lagos was operated at a very high level. You could catch the performance of live bands in every corner of Lagos everyday including Sundays and parties were held in relays so that one went from one to the other without missing a beat. After all as the saying went, Lagos life na so so enjoyment. Lagosians had time for nightclubbing and parties but at the same time they demonstrated a love, it may even be said, an obsession for sports. There was a table tennis board in front of every other home, especially on the island and most of the table tennis stars of that period were Lagosians , some of them like the Santos brothers sporting those Latin names associated with Eko. Boxing was also a very popular pastime with boxing clubs dotted all over the city and the annual Collister belt  boxing tournament holding centre stage every year. Boxers from every part of Nigeria made the annual pilgrimage to Lagos to emulate Hogan King Bassey, Rafiu King, Nojeem Mayegun and other world renowned pugilists who put the name of Lagos on the global boxing stage. The Race Course, now concreted over and called Tafawa Balewa Square was a vast sports centre with dozens of pick-up games of football going on at any one time but given up to horse racing every Sunday during the racing season and cricket every weekend from September to April after which the notorious Lagos downpours made it impossible for cricket to be played. Many sporting events went on in their season every year but then as now the king of sports was football, played at various levels in different venues, from the local five a side pitches in Onala on the Island and Evans Square in Ebute Metta, where future football stars delighted their adoring fans, right up to the iconic KGV Stadium at Onikan, named after King George V at one time the King of England and by extension the man who ruled over the colony of Nigeria and other dominions across the seas. Lagosians of that period turned up at the stadium to watch titanic struggles between local teams. It was also the venue for the hugely popular Zard cup competition between Lagos secondary schools and of course, the Challenge cup finals which attracted the attention of people from across Nigeria who in those days followed every dribble and every kick on the pitch through radio commentaries which brought everything alive to anyone with just a modicum of imagination.

I arrived in Lagos as an impressionable ten year old in 1960. And what a year that turned out to be for Nigeria, with special reference to Lagos. It was the year of independence and the memories of the preparations for the independence celebrations went on for months before the first of October when an ecstatic nation welcomed the coming of independence. Unknown to us at the time, that was the best of times because even then, the clouds which brought destructive rains to the city on the lagoon were beginning to form above the cloudless skies which smiled benignly upon the place below in that year when the capital of the British colony of Nigeria became the capital of Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa.

IF I am asked to give a succinct and apt summary of the entire challenge faced by the Nigerian state in terms of her policy architecture and development management, in spite of contestation in the development literature, I will not hesitate in stating clearly and unambiguously that it is the challenge of policy implementation; the whole dynamics of getting things done. By elimination, the implication is that the challenge cannot be located as that of the dearth of development ideas, insights, models and paradigms. Right from her independence, Nigeria has been inundated with several ideas, both local and global, about development policy and frameworks. And yet, policy outcomes keep getting bogged down in the murky waters of political shenanigans. This means that the new administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu has its challenge mapped out, in red, for it. There is no shying away from this postcolonial predicament that had limited and kept limiting Nigeria’s capacity to honour the terms of her social contract with Nigerians. Hence, the Tinubu government will soon be inundated with the impatient agitations of Nigerians for a quick and tangible fix that will address their sufferings. And they are justified since they have not been given any real deal for the past sixty-three years of sovereign independence. And the new administration is obligated because that is the reason for seeking office in the first place.

How then can we begin to understand this policy execution challenge? It is simple: how can an administration in Nigeria transition from governance vision and policy intention to policy outcomes that elevates and transforms the quality of life of its citizens? Failure to understand and give critical and political attention to this question lies at the heart of the governance failures of successive Nigerian administrations. The new Tinubu administration cannot afford such glaring mistake. And so, a fundamental case must be made out of the question of how policy intentions get circumscribed in the dynamics of policy execution that occasion policy failures in past administrations.

Modern states all across the world are distinguished by the traditional four functions they discharge as part of their administrative responsibilities—security i.e. securing the sovereign territory against lawlessness, policy formulation and implementation, governance regulation and service delivery. The capacity to perform each and all of these functions very well within an integrated framework in the governance context is what delivers the dividends of democratic governance to the citizens, and it enhances the state’s competitive and human development rating in global reckoning. With these functions, we have the metrics to differentiate between high-performing states like China, India, the United States, Botswana, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirate, Germany, Rwanda and the Asian Tigers (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea), and low- or even under-performing countries like Nigeria that is still cluelessly stuck within a dysfunctional vicious cycle within her arrested development. 

From the perspective of governance, there must be something these states are getting right in the connection between leadership, politics, and policy articulation. For instance, there is a trajectory of relationship that links elite bargains to development bargains. In other words, development is a function of elite nationalism and the extent to which the political class of a state can commit elite suicide and gamble on development on behalf of the people they are leading. In Nigeria, low manifestation of elite nationalism has made it really difficult for the political class to set aside their personal and egoistic class interests in ways that enable them to clearly and ideologically discern and navigate the deadly developmental landmines strewn all over our governance landscape by the neoliberal implication of ideological apparatuses and frameworks to which Nigeria is beholden. And here, the factor of development gamble of the Asian Tigers’ elites comes into bold relief. From within the ideological ambit of the developmental state, the leadership of the Asian Tigers were able to define a policy space that consciously and critically weighed the benefits and shortfalls of external influences, especially the type that came from the World Bank, IMF and the other cohorts of the neoliberal policy dynamics. Their developmental circumspection paid off! 

Since we cannot argue that Nigeria has been stumped by the lack of vision documents, development plans and blueprints, or even policy expertise, the locus of the new administration’s focus must be directed at the possibility of mustering the political will to undermine the mystified Nigerian Factor, and face the global neoliberal consensus in order to begin the crafting of an enabling policy architecture to drive development. And to achieve this translates to creating the delicate balance between ‘doing the right things’ (a function of decision making quotient) and ‘doing it right’(project and change management effectiveness), and overcoming the various political, cultural, structural and systemic constraints that trapped past well-meaning policies and intentions of Nigerian leaders in the dynamics of implementation.

There is first the conspiracy of elitist interest that ensures there is a poor resource allocation that focuses on elite bargain than development calculations and taking care of the national interest. Other constraints follow: (a) the disconnect between policy design and implementation due to weak implementation planning, risk assessment and incompetent change management strategies; (b) unstable and poorly managed macroeconomic policies; (c) policy and project discontinuity; (d) public service low capability readiness; (e) political interference; and finally (f) deep-seated political and bureaucratic corruption. In essence, development has failed not because Nigeria lacks the blueprint or paradigms to make it happen, but due to the dynamics of the politics that the political elite plays with Nigeria’s development potentials.

Let me outline what we can regard as the “politics of policy implementation” that Nigeria has played for many years, a politics the new administration must take into serious consideration if it does not want to fall into the category of failed administration right before it commences. This politics throws Nigeria’s development and policy non-performance right into the frame of the 2005 World Bank review findings about policy and development projects in Africa. According to the finding, 29% of development projects ever get completed, 45% of on-going projects are rated as satisfactory, while 26% of such projects invariably get cancelled. Such a review can never backstop a solid development project of a developmental state. The politics of policy implementation in Nigeria is founded on the following assumptions and practices.

One: there is that dangerous presumption, that the new administration must resist, that once policies and development plan are designed, they are automatically implemented by the public service. And such a presumption is against the background of a scant investment in implementation analysis and planning, as well as the failure to facilitate the capability review, determine public administration system’s capability readiness, and strengthening of the MDAs as the powerhouse of government administrative functionality. The MDAs, that is, are not working according to any specific theories or praxis of change that can guide the functional integration of blueprints or paradigms. This kind of policy inattention draws attention to the policy contradiction: launching a national development plan and strategy that are not implementation ready in terms of adequate capability review of the MDAs integral to ensuring implementation success. Two: this presumption is compounded by the uncritical reliance of past governments on policy experts and consulting firms who are tasked with designing high-end policies that are then dumped on MDAs whose capability reviews and implementation readiness have been neglected in the first place. The extroversion of the policy design is then compromised by poor functional integration. The truth is that most of these consulting firms lack the appropriate deep content and solution frameworks that are in tandem with the context of policy dysfunction they are supposed to work with. Three: governance policy or project are hardly subjected to feasibility test determined in terms of scope and expectation that are captured by their framework of time, cost and risk assessments before they are pushed into implementation. This makes it very difficult to benchmark funding projections for these policies and projects against revenue estimations, as well as facilitating in-built flexibilities that enable the policies and projects to adjust to volatilities and contingencies. 

All the issues raised above constitute binding constraint that will undermine any governance possibilities the new administration require to make a success of democratic governance. Undermining the binding constraints demands returning to the fundamentals. The first and most significant is that the new administration needs to interrogate the framework of how government business is currently being conducted. Governance successes is necessarily a function of how government business engages the complexities of the policy design and execution processes within a results-oriented frame. And that entails undermining the structural gaps between policy objectives, development strategies and policy outcomes. This demands second, setting the public service on a performance curve with the institution of a performance management system. This means that the public service must, for example, unfailingly now deploy KPI-based metrics to replace the cumbersome annual performance evaluation report (APER). And at the backend, it becomes imperative to have a monitoring and evaluation system supported by databases that enable staff and program continuous assessment, human resource development rooted in iterative performance gap identification, supervisors-staff dialogue and multisource feedback mechanisms for overall national development policy tracking and reporting.

The governance mantra must be on getting the balance between doing the right things and doing it right. And this cannot be achieved through the wanton multiplication or even duplication of governance plans, programs and blueprints. What is needed is sequencing the blueprints into a coherent and feasible implementation programme, with the right amount of political will behind it. This gives the success of democratic governance a 95% chance of succeeding. The new administration needs that fighting chance!

•Olaopa is a Retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Professor of Public Administration

tolaopa2003@gmail.com