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It’s Nigeria’s biggest and most recurrent dream since independence in 1960. That is the dream for stable electricity through the development of the dam potentials on the Mambilla Plateau in Taraba State. Mambilla is a rare gift of nature. It is one of God’s rare acts of benevolence to humanity. And it is not an accident that this facility is in Nigeria’s own Taraba, one of the country’s most divinely favoured states in the country. It is also not an over-statement to say that the Mambilla Plateau was God’s chosen squab for the launch of a technological revolution that would end electricity power epilepsy that has crippled development in our country.
Our first set of post-independence leaders discovered the huge potentials on the Mambilla. They jumped and danced in celebration and then followed it with a vow to waste no time in turning these potentials into amenities and facilities which the country and its people can profit from in the nearest future. But they were not spared the time to actualise their dream. Their era was cut down. But the Mambilla dream survived. Their military successors kept it in abeyance for the 30 years that they controlled the political affairs of the country. Mambilla was a dream too irresistible to be killed even by the most naive among our political leaders. Yet, and very surprisingly, it has remained only but a dream. Why?
That question is frequently asked without the answer that can soothe our nerves and ease our frustrations. And out of my own personal frustrations I’m compelled to ask today: Why has Mambilla remained only but a dream more than 50 years after? I have noticed that the Mambilla Hydro Electricity project has been a constant item on the political campaign agenda since the birth of the present political dispensation in 1999 but even that did not help the project much. President Olusegun Obasanjo rekindled the dream by taking the first significant step of awarding contracts for the project. After that nothing happened again until President Goodluck Jonathan came. He expanded the scope of the project to generate 3,050 MW instead of 2,600 MW and revived the long standing agreement with the Chinese hydro technological experts. He also appointed three Chinese companies for the project. That succeeded in keeping the dream aglow.
That is all that has been achieved in over 30 years on a project that has been variously and appropriately rated as the foundation of the nation’s technological revolution. Those years which were also the years of great turn-around in the financial fortunes of the country never succeeded in taking the nation anywhere reasonably closer to the actualisation of the great Mambilla dream. They only ensured that the dream was not deleted from our minds and the national memo pad.
We are almost two years into the four-year tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari. He, like his three predecessors, promised the nation some serious action on the Mambilla project. But all he has done since he came into office is a visit to China to discuss Mambilla. The visit has only brought some Chinese experts to the Mambilla plateau to assess the terrain. Since then, nothing has happened again. This has given rise to fears that his tenure on which the nation has pinned so much hope to take radical steps that will move the nation closer to the actualisation of the Mambilla dream may as well expire in 2019 without much progress made. This fear is already causing goose pimples for many Nigerians who had hoped that President Buhari is the Messiah that Mambilla had been waiting for. And I am one of such Nigerians.
This does, however, not amount to a suggestion that the Buhari administration has failed already on the Mambilla project. No. It is only an expression of worry over the largely unenergetic attitude of the administration on the project. The expectation was that the administration, given the commitment it made on the development of the nation’s electricity power resources on its way into office, would hit the ground running. That is still missing. And that is the reason for the growing anxiety.
But Buhari remains the hope for the translation of the Mambilla dream into the reality that Nigerians expect and have waited for in the past 30 years. Their expectation is that his administration will do much more and quickly too. As at now, nothing really is happening on the Mambilla. The administration should not leave Mambilla the way it met it. Let the nation see concrete steps in the form of construction work. The first is the access road to the site of this biggest electricity power dream in the West African region. The road will serve as a very loud and unequivocal statement of government’s commitment to the project. It can do much more with a greater political will within the time at its disposal. The state government whose responsibility it is to evaluate, coordinate the compensation and resettlement of the people who will be destabilised by the project should be mobilised by the Federal Government to immediately commence this aspect of the job because precious time is already being wasted doing nothing.
It is true that resources at the disposal of government have greatly dwindled in the past few years. But this should not affect projects that are a priority. The present state of chronic power epilepsy makes the Mambilla hydro electricity project a desperate priority, if not a national emergency. The administration should find a realistic way to fund the project, even if it means approaching external funding agencies.
Stable electricity is one of the greatest legacies that any government can bequeath the country and its people. Nigeria, despite its huge economic potential has one of the worst problems with electricity power supply. It has made the country one of the highest importers of generators. A lot of the country’s hard-earned foreign exchange is squandered annually on these items. It is an understatement to say that it is the reason many Nigerian manufacturing companies have gone down and out. Many of them had to relocate to neighbouring countries where electricity is much more stable. It is difficult to quantify the extent of the damage that poor electricity has done to the Nigerian economy. It is simply enormous, to say the least.
Let’s take the desirable steps now to halt this very sad and unfortunate trend that we have condoned and encouraged for several decades. Let us save the nation’s economy from the jaws of stagnation inflicted by power epilepsy. Let us also insulate our people against chronic poverty through employment generation which is always a direct and predictable outcome of power stability. Let us give Mambilla hydro electricity project all the attention it requires. It a prized legacy and President Buhari should aim at earning the very enviable reputation of becoming the first Nigeria leader that took the nation closest to the dream of electricity power stability.

NIGERIA today is caught in the vicious stranglehold of another economic recession attendant on the drastic drop in the international price of crude oil, the commodity on which the country’s ever so vulnerable economy is almost solely dependent. Over the last three decades, it has been the same repeated story of a vicious cycle of boom periods predicated on soaring oil prices and a frenzy of massive, mostly non-essential, imports only to be followed by a recessionary economic phase caused by the inevitable collapse of oil prices.

Like the previous ones, this recession is characterized by half-hearted declarations of commitment by government to the diversification of the economy through the revitalization of agriculture and solid minerals to break the oil dependency syndrome, the drastic cut down on imports and an aggressive promotion of self-reliance. Yet, humongous foreign loans are sought, which end up only sustaining the continued inflow of all kinds of luxuries and dispensable commodities for the pleasure of an errant elite, including those which can easily be produced locally, even as we wait for the next oil price surge that will enable us enter another gilded era of massive oil revenues and huge, largely unproductive, expenditures while we accelerate our vehicle of complacency and poverty of ideas along the same well-worn path of illusionary progress.

But the vital question is what really is the fundamental nature and defining essence of the developmental quagmire in which we have been bogged down for the better part of our post-independence history? The right answers cannot be found if the wrong questions are posed. Is the current recession, for instance, just a transient economic crisis from which we will soon recover to resume our imagined interrupted trajectory of development or is it that we have not even commenced on that voyage in any meaningful way almost six decades after independence? The late great economist, Professor Bade Onimode, in his book, A Political Economy of the African Crisis argues that the protracted African crisis is not merely an economic crisis as the features of threatened starvation, massive unemployment, growing deficits and debts, disequilibra in different markets, and sluggish economic growth are only surface manifestations of a more deep rooted problem. In his words, “Fundamentally, the African crisis is one of underdevelopment, the central problematic of the African continent and the Third World generally.

This makes the crisis both structural and historical. But though underdevelopment is largely an economic phenomenon, the African crisis is also accentuated by serious social and political problems as well as an intellectual crisis”. Onimode goes on to list several features and manifestations of the social and economic aspects of the African crisis before returning to the intellectual dimension saying “Then, too, there is the intellectual crisis, which results not merely from the lingering colonial mentality and foreign intellectual domination, but from the dominant bourgeois scholarship’s fundamental irrelevance to African social reality, especially in the imported social sciences”.

It was this, and perhaps most serious, intellectual strand of the African crisis that a dynamic young journalist, Areoye Oyebola, courageously and fearlessly tackled over four decades ago, specifically 1976, in a bomb of a book, ‘Black Man’s Dilemma’ which easily ranks among the most illuminating books to come out of post colonial Africa. It was a veritable and exhilarating call for a fundamental mental revolution as a necessary and inevitable condition for Africa’s liberation from the humiliating throes of underdevelopment.

The ‘development of underdevelopment’ a phrase popularized by the late Latin American ‘depedencia’ theorist, Andre Gunder Frank, is what we have consistently witnessed in post colonial Africa as the borrowed intellectual paradigms and the neo-colonial social and economic policies slavishly adopted by African leaders have woefully failed to extricate the continent from the horrible and dehumanizing pit of underdevelopment. Journalist, educationist, author, one time commissioner in the former Western State, politician in the Second Republic and now traditional ruler in his native Ibadan, Areoye Oyebola, who recently turned 80, would still have had his place assured in history as one of Nigeria’s most distinguished sons if the only thing he accomplished was the writing of this book.

The publication of ‘Black Man’s Dilemma’ caused a veritable uproar generating sustained public discourse in the media for a considerable period. I followed the debate at the time as a young boy through write ups in my father’s daily copy of the Daily Times even if I had only a vague understanding of the issues. In an updated version of the book published in 2002, Oyebola expressed no regrets for the strong views he had earlier expressed in the 1976 edition saying he had actually underestimated how acute the black man’s dilemma was when he wrote in 1976.

Africa remains as marooned as ever on the pitiable Island of ever increasing backwardness despite the frenzied accumulation of western artifacts of modernization – exotic vehicles, mobile phones, skyscrapers, sophisticated aircraft and airports, modern highways etc – virtually none of which we can produce by ourselves. Oyebola avers that Africa must sincerely and courageously face up to the reality of its backwardness. In particular he believes our intellectuals should stop glorifying an absolutely non-existent so-called great African past. Drawing from his extensive travels across the United States, Europe and Asia, he compares his experiences with what obtains in Africa and concludes that “the much vaunted black man’s contribution to civilization are comparatively negligible.

Africa, in particular and the black world in general have contributed very little to the modern world and the enrichment of civilization. For if the truth be known we are simply backward”. According to Oyebola, “Nowhere in Africa can one find the type of heritage I have seen in Europe and Asia. And the intriguing questions that have persistently crossed my mind are; what efforts were my black ancestors making when such great architectural, aesthetic, technological and scientific achievements were taking place in Europe and Asia? Did my black ancestors achieve any original and durable form of political and social organization comparable to those written records I have seen in Europe, Asia and North Africa?” He wants Africans to ignore the liberal white scholars who exaggerate the black man’s contribution to civilization.

Oyebola vigorously takes issues with scholars like the late President Seder Senghor of Senegal, Chiek Anta Diop and Chancellor Williams who claim that ancient Egypt is an African civilization. “Black people’s, he says, “should stop claiming credit for the highly developed culture and civilization of the Phoenicians, who were Semitic, or the civilization of the pure Hamites or that of the Berbers of the Maghreb, the Moors and other white peoples of Northern Africa. For the blacks to hold to the idea that the Egyptian, Carthaginian, Ethiopian and the Maghreb civilizations were products of black man’s ingenuity is to live in a world of illusion. And this won’t help the race”.

He agrees that the black man recorded some commendable achievements in arts, religion, political organization and production techniques in the old Ghana, Mali, Kanem-Borno, Benin, Yoruba, Bunyoro-Kitara, Zimbabwe among others. But these pale into significance when contrasted with the contributions of other races in North Africa, Middle East, Europe and Asia.

Furthermore, he argues, not only is the originality of some of these contributions questionable, the limited progress achieved in these overhyped black states are relatively recent compared to what other races had contributed to enrich human civilization over centuries through inventions, technological innovations and advanced social and political organizations. His words: “It will be more profitable if we accept the reality of our situation and find out why we were and are still so much behind the rest of the world, especially in contributions to science and technology”. He laments the fact that not a single black nation has made an original breakthrough to modernity and contends that until this is done, the black race will continue to be a laughing stock and the world’s underdog.

THE success of the democratic experiment in Nigeria depends on the capacity of the Nigerian state to achieve a fundamental reform of the public service. And this is because the public service constitutes the institutional framework that translates democratic policies into an efficient service delivery mechanism that delivers democratic dividends to the citizens. Specifically, the public service is the instrumental pivot around which the Nigerian state can deal with its infrastructural deficit in terms of electricity, good road network, education, good healthcare system, etc.

In other words, it is only through a sufficiently capacitated and efficient public service that the government of the day is able to transform good policies into infrastructural dynamics that spells socioeconomic development in a state. This assertion simply refocuses our attention on the crucial significance of the institution of the public service in Nigeria, and the urgent need to get back on track with the reform of its base fundamentals.

This is one of the reasons why successive Nigerian governments since 1999 have focused on reforming the public service as a critical plank in their socioeconomic blueprint for transforming the Nigerian society. The euphoria that greeted the Buhari administration and its change slogan has gradually been whittled down by the protracted economic recession which has affected every aspect of Nigeria’s society, from banking to the ordinary markets.

Change is a complex phenomenon. It is subject to all manners of variables that could transform its intended objective negatively or positively. As far as I am concerned, the possibility of a change dynamics that would transform the architecture of democratic governance under Buhari has not been defeated. But this is not to be blind to the temporal limitation to the present administration. With just about two years to go for the government, a lot needs to be done to transform Nigeria’s socioeconomic fortunes.

Certainly, there is a whole lot of spirited effort by current policy makers, but the impacts are not decisive enough to be felt by the rank and file. And without mincing words, I am certain that a direct and committed investment into the reform of the public service constitutes one of the administration’s tops and surest legacy point. Given the evidence of administrative history in Nigeria, the Buhari administration can no longer ignore the imperative of a decisive public service reform intervention which elements could crystallize at not just a focused conference, but a spirited implementation of a civil service performance improvement programme with an immediate, short and medium-term change components.

The conference bit which this piece addresses, will be a high-powered democratic summit of all the significant stakeholders in the task of good governance in Nigeria.The essence of such a conference would be to outline a strategic framework of action that could be distilled quickly from numerous existing technical papers, strategy documents, research findings, official reports and White Papers with inevitable gaps addressed within the framework of change management strategy.

The mission will be to beef up the public service capability readiness to become strategic partner in delivering the much desired change in most cost effective manner given current fiscal crisis and with passion that is matched with a critical mix of strategic, tactical and operational skills and competences through evidence-based targeted technical support to MDAs. Since independence, successive Nigerian governments have assiduously worked on one form of reform dynamics or the other to deliver on government promises to the citizens.

Each government brands a new governance reform initiative that will intervene positively in the lives of Nigerians. But at no point in Nigeria’s administrative history has the public service system risen to the challenge of good governance. This is a difficult claim, but its truth can be defended. What is often celebrated today in the public service history as the golden age of administration in Nigeria are clear regional public service initiatives, the most famous of which is the Western Region Civil Service dynamics under Chief Simeon Adebo.

The Awolowo-Adebo administrative model throws up a politician-bureaucrat relationship framework that truly facilitated the transformation of the Western region in terms of the seamless manner in which policies mutated into infrastructural achievements. The other story of administrative achievement has to do with the famous “super permanent secretaries” and the administrative exploits that held Nigeria together after the tragic horror of the Nigerian Civil War. What the exploit of the super permanent secretaries proved was simply that the Nigerian public service has the capacity to rise up to any challenge of emergency and change with an intelligent administrative leadership, the sense in which Bob Garratt argues that the fish gets rotten from the head.

Thus, between the successes of the Western region civil service and the post-civil war Nigerian civil service, we have been given a hint into what the civil service system in Nigeria can achieve if properly primed to succeed. And yet, despite the strings of genuinely crafted reform initiatives from 1954 till date, the public service is still struggling to make a significant democratic impact on the lives of Nigerians.

A public service reform conference will have the objective of surveying the trajectory of administrative reforms since 1954, and distilling its high and low points, its insights and shortcomings, and the possibilities involved in engaging those insights within the context of transforming the public service, within the vision of a public service “delivering government policies and programmes with professionalism, excellence and passion.”

This advocacy for the public service reform conference is grounded on the opening up of the governance space in a manner that will enable the participation of non-state and non-governmental actors to participate in the crafting of genuine programmatic intervention strategies for implementing public service reforms.

The most immediate challenge confronting such a proposed conference is that of how the existing blueprints on public service reform in Nigeria, deriving from fourteen reform initiatives from 1954, could be harnessed into a formidable strategic framework that would transform the public service into an efficient and professional institution that can backstop democratic imperatives in Nigeria.

In one important respect, the conference cannot succeed without some antecedent conditions. I identify three urgent administrative protocols.

The first is the revitalization of the National Association of Public Administration and Management (NAPAM) as the focal point of a community of practice and service that will provide a link between academics, practitioners and the public on administrative issues in theory and practice. It is within the context of such a community of practice that (a) the issues—short-, medium- and longterm— involved in calibrating the change agenda for reforming the public service can be properly outlined and presented; and (b) the critical mass of stakeholders required for the conference would be identified and mobilized.

The second pre-condition, following on the first, is the setting up of a national monitoring protocol, within the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), that benchmarks, monitors and evaluates administrative progress in the MDAs with appropriate sanctions and rewards. And the last institutional protocol that must be in place is a national integrity system (NIS). The NIS in any state constitutes a strategic structural framework for safeguarding important institutional reform and values, especially against the scourge of bureaucratic and political corruption.

The deeper aim of the NIS is to facilitate a wide-ranging transformation of the work culture, grounded in a national value dynamics, which will check the tradition of immediate gratification which leads public servants to undermine public service efficiency and growth capabilities. While the APRM constitutes the framework for benchmarking global and African best practices, the NIS constitutes the ethical framework for ensuring that reforms are not undermined from within the very institution to be reformed.

Good governance is serious business especially if a state must justify its democratic credentials. A public service reform conference would be saddled with an agenda that seeks to reinvent the dynamics of public service reform in Nigeria through getting the fundamentals of such reforms right, from conception to implementation and the management of the reform. •Olaopa is the executive vice-chairman, Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP)