The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Obafemi Awolowo

  • From the ‘Dikko affair’ to the Dikko committee

    From the ‘Dikko affair’ to the Dikko committee

    Nigeria’s younger generation may not know who the man, Alhaji Umaru Dikko is. Therefore, asking if they know what he represents (or at least used to represent) is superfluous. That is the tragedy of a nation whose many pupils do not know who the great sage, the late Chief Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo was. A report, a few years back, indicated that right in Chief Awolowo’s hometown, Ikenne, in Ogun State, the only Obafemi that pupils in a school know is Obafemi Martins! They claimed not to have heard anything about Chief Awolowo. But that is Nigeria’s dysfunctional educational system for you; it is that bad. “A prophet”, they say, “is not without honour but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house”.

    Anyway, this write-up is not about Chief Awolowo; it is about Alhaji Dikko, who came into prominence in the Second Republic during the tenure of President Shehu Shagari, his brother-in-law. Ordinarily, many of us had since forgotten about Alhaji Dikko and would have preferred never to be reminded of that dark era that the man represented, but for reports last week to the effect that the 77 year-old man of the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN) infamy has been exhumed from wherever he has been hibernating all these years, to head the ruling Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) national disciplinary committee! Did I hear you say ‘disciplinary committee’? Yes, you heard me right; disciplinary committee. Other members of the seven- member committee are; Obanema of Opume Kingdom, Bayelsa State and King A.J Turner as deputy chairman, publisher of Champion Newspaper and member, Board of Trustees (BoT) of the PDP, Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, former deputy national chairman and BoT member, Alhaji Shuaibu Oyedokun, Hajiya Nana Aishat Kadiri, Barrister Hussaini Diraki and Senator Emmanuel Agboti.

    Those conversant with the story of Alhaji Dikko that we knew would readily say that with a man like him heading the ruling party’s disciplinary committee, then, the result is known even before the committee begins sitting. Unless of course the things the man used to do, he does them no more. I mean unless he has turned a new leaf, as they say.

    Just last week, I said something about the dearth of good people in the country. Well, some people will disagree with me and rather say that it is the failure of those in positions of authority to search for such people, or the reluctance of good people to make themselves available for public service because of the quality of people at the very top. What else could have made five governors run to Generals Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida, in search of solutions to democratic challenges if not for any of these aforementioned reasons? What our people versed in Pidgin English would dismiss simply as no more person. What I am saying is that there must be a dearth of people to enforce discipline in the ruling party for the mantle of chairman of a crucial committee as the disciplinary committee to fall on Alhaji Dikko. At least not the Alhaji Dikko that we knew.

    It is sad that the Jonathan government, apart from doing business as usual, is also suffocating us with the same spent forces that have had their time in leadership positions but made a mess of it. Alhaji Dikko belonged in that school.

    His role in governance in the country dates back to 1967 when he was appointed commissioner in the then North Central State (now Kaduna State). He was later to be secretary of a committee set up by General Hassan Katsina to unite the northerners after a coup in 1966. In 1979, Alhaji Dikko was made Alhaji Shehu Shagari’s campaign manager for the NPN. He was Minister of Transport from 1979-1983; a position he held simultaneously with that of the head of the presidential task force on rice. Interestingly, it was in the latter, rather than the former, that he became a national issue. That rice had to attract presidential attention in that republic showed how terribly bad the country was run because the rice that Alhaji Dikko headed its task force was imported. Again, that is a matter for another day.

    Such was the diligence with which he served Nigeria then that General Muhammadu Buhari who became head of state after overthrowing the Shagari government on December 31, 1983, issued a list of former government officials accused of a variety of crimes on his second day in power. Alhaji Dikko, who topped the list, was accused of embezzling several million dollars in oil profits from the national treasury. Despite strenuous efforts to locate him, he simply vanished, leaving no trace of his whereabouts. He was eventually trailed to the United Kingdom where the Buhari government attempted to bring him back home in a crate with 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.5 meters dimension, in what was famously referred to as the ‘Dikko affair’. Thank God the mission failed; otherwise, Alhaji Dikko would have been brought back to Nigeria in a crate like some imported cargo! One had to go this far for our ill-fated younger generation to know that their beloved country has not just started to wobble and fumble; it has been like that for decades. The sad thing is that while many fellow backbenchers like us are finding their way out of the woods, we are getting more and more entrenched in it. Anyhow, fellow Nigerians, this is the man that our ruling party has thrust forward as chair of its national disciplinary committee!

    Without doubt, the PDP as it is is highly undisciplined. It therefore needs someone, a strict disciplinarian to knock some discipline into its members’ skulls. But one wonders where to start the discipline from, or what form of discipline the party is thinking of, especially when one considers the action of some of its leading lights, including President Goodluck Jonathan. Or, how else do you capture a president who hosted as winner, someone who lost an election conducted among only 35 people? How many good persons would want to serve in a government in which such illegality thrives? Maybe it is only the PDP that understands its concept of discipline that it wants instilled into its members, because there is discipline and there is discipline. The NPN that Alhaji Dikko was a prominent member of was everything but disciplined. A party that is disciplined would not claim to have landslide victory in an election which was visible even to the blind that it lost. Little wonder that the Shagari government’s ‘landslide’ victory eventually became what someone referrred to as ‘gunslide’, to the delight of millions of Nigerians who had watched with disbelief as the then NPN stole votes in broad daylight, the same way the PDP has done in some places.

    The multi-million naira question now is: can Alhaji Umaru Dikko give what he does not have? Unless the aphorism that one cannot give what one does not have is about to be proved wrong, or unless the kind of discipline the PDP envisages is the one associated with the NPN (for which the present ruling party itself has become notorious), then, the ruling party may be on the way to defining discipline in its own image, a thing that eventually led to the collapse of our inglorious Second Republic and ultimately, the ‘Dikko Affair’.

    All said, for good or for ill, my dear reader, join me in congratulating Alhaji Dikko over his new appointment and at the same time welcome him, once again, to national limelight, after many years in the cooler. I wish him and their PDP whatever they wish themselves.

  • The second coming of Western Nigeria

    The second coming of Western Nigeria

    As the old West heaving and inching its way forward once again leaving the rest of the country roiling in the quagmire of potential state failure? This is a very dangerous question to ask, given the potential of the Nigerian post-colonial state to equalise underdevelopment and backwardness. While it is on record that the post-colonial state in Nigeria hardly produces growth and development, it is also on record that it can reduce growth and development as a result of malignant, ethnically motivated vendetta.

    Yet just as it happened at the dawn of the Nigerian Republic when Obafemi Awolowo’s visionary governance drove the region to the very frontline of modernization, it does appear that something is stirring in the old west all over again. It is a development worthy of closer scrutiny. For as they say, there may be quite some architecture remaining in old ruins.

    But it is morning yet on this new day of creation. Before the question of development can be broached, there are theoretical hurdles to be scaled. There are templates and rubrics to be established and some fundamental developmental posers to be raised. In the interest of both nation and region, there are troubling posers to be addressed. For development to be holistic, integrative and redemptive, the evolving paradigm of governance must itself be subjected to merciless and astringent scrutiny.

    From the rump of the old Benin empire where Adams Aliu Oshiomhole is turning the old municipal village of Benin to a modern metropolis, to the sprawling chaotic mess of the old Yoruba war camps of Ibadan that Isiaka Abiola Ajimobi has laid a fierce siege to and on to Lagos which has regained its lost glory as the pre-eminent megalopolis of Tropical Africa, something new is gradually emerging from the old West.

    Two weeks ago, a fortuitous trailer accident on the Lagos Bye pass forced snooper to traverse the entire length and breadth of old Ibadan and one was shocked by the transformational typhoon that has swept off the urban debris. From Agodi it took exactly five minutes to get to old /Dugbe through the gleaming Queen Elizabeth Avenue and the new miracle of the former Mokola metropolitan mayhem. From what used to be the ultimate town planners’ nightmare of Dugbe, it took three minutes to get to Molete through Oke Bola. Formerly, this was a whole day’s journey.

    And this is not discounting the emerging miracle of Osun state and the transformational fury of Hurricane Rauf. Snooper has not visited either Abeokuta or old rustic Ado Ekiti, but if the reports from the joyous residents of these ancient Yoruba cities are to be believed, they are being frogmarched to the very frontiers of modernity. Even the worst critics of the ACN governments in these states are privately puzzled by the pace and frenzy of the unfolding radical reengineering and the mobilization of the populace for visionary self-actualization.

    For a people long accustomed to evil and inept governance, it is easy for cynics to pooh-pooh these developments as token trifles. But we must start from somewhere even if it is at the level of the profoundly symbolic .The critical posers that need to be raised are these. When is real development? Is modernization the same thing as westernization? Can modernization become a driving ideology in itself for a political elite? If this is so, can the vision of urgent modernization blur, obscure or even replace the old binary division between the capitalist and socialist visions of societal transformation and their third way mutants and variants?

    We ask these questions not out of intellectual indolence or mere political grandstanding but from genuine puzzlement and as a mental tool for understanding the fundamental human impulse for capacity building and societal transformation in all its clashing disparities and sheer differentiation of vision often based in culture and history. Just as there is no single route to human salvation, there is also no single route to national development. All happy nations are ultimately the same, while every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own unique way.

    What unites successful nations is the huge transformational leap they have taken for their people and not the preferred method and methodology of rapid development. All transformational political elites have a firm vision of where they want to take their countries and how they are going to get there. Human tragedy is an orphan but societal triumphs have many foster parents.

    For example, while India with its chaotic and sometimes infuriating democracy is ruled by liberal democrats with a passion for transformation, China is governed by humane authoritarians with a passion for the uplift of their people from the abyss of poverty and immiseration. In Singapore, we have seen how an ageing autocrat with stellar vision drove the backwater peat bog and colonial slum from the Third World to the First World in one single generation.

    The leaders of the fabled Asian Tigers have managed to deploy the traditional strengths and residual values of their respective societies to force their respective countries into global reckoning. Often, they have managed to turn the table on western nations in an economic battle of wits and will. The runaway success of Japan and China has led to a potentially momentous restructuring of the World Economic Order.

    In Brazil, particularly after the advent of the iconic Lula, Brazilian leaders have concentrated on a radically humane transformation through the policy of lifting millions of people from millennial peonage and the poverty trap. The current unrests in that country are a profoundly ironic tribute to the success of that scheme.

    It is not a twenty cents revolution as a leading western newspaper puts it—cynically referring to the raising of gasoline price by that amount. It is rather the return of the long repressed, of unfinished business and of a twenty per cent revolution which has come to demand its full wage. In Chile and Argentina with their better educated workforce and more durable middle classes, the leaders opted for western-style market reforms to drive the transformation of their respective societies.

    What then is the lesson to be learnt from all this? The first is that all human societies, when led by the correct elite, are naturally forward looking. Any human society that chooses to look backward, like Lot’s children, will be frozen forever in the oceanic and salty sand of time.

    As we have seen with the examples of the countries mentioned and with the Industrial Revolution in England, the intellectual and spiritual Revolution in Germany, the political Revolutions in France and the USA, all human societies are driven by a fundamental impulse towards modernization. Modernization needs not be accompanied by violent revolutions, but if it is, so be it.

    This is why it is unfortunate that while many Nigerian patriots are burning the midnight oil about how to redeem and transform the nation, some members of the Arewa Consultative Forum are insisting that the current misbegotten structure and lopsided federation should be left as it is. These political dinosaurs should be told that they represent a human tragedy for the nation.

    Having ravaged and ruined Nigeria for the better part of fifty years, they are no longer in a position to dictate terms to the nation. If their claim that all is well with the current structure of Nigeria were to be believed, then the sorry and sordid state of the nation and the north in particular is a stinging rebuttal.

    Modernization is not the same thing as westernization. Every human society must find its own preferred route to modernization. As the Chinese famously put it, it doesn’t matter what name you call a cat as long as it catches mice. In a recent article comparing China with India, Amartya Kuma Sen, the great economist and Nobel laureate, noted that as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese leaders concluded that there was no fundamental qualitative difference between the average Japanese and the average westerner.

    The only difference was in human capacity building. They thereafter set to work, building a template for human transformation which survived the rabid militarism of the Japanese feudal ruling class. When the warlike ethos was leveraged into massive production after the tragic war, the Japanese work force gave western economies a good run for their money.

    It seems then that for all human societies, the golden key for unlocking rapid transformation and accelerated modernization lies in human capacity building and the relentless accumulation of human capital. As they set about transforming the old west, the modernising trailblazers will need to look more closely at the issue of human capacity building.

    Human happiness is the measure of all things. This is where Chief Obafemi Awolowo excelled and the gains have survived disastrous military incursion into the polity. In whatever transformational schemes embarked upon, they must also set much premium, like Awo, by accountability and transparency. There is a hysterical and traumatised electorate out there.

    Often, successful human societies rely on tropes from the past to energise the present. This is because you cannot step into the same river twice. The old monolithic and near homogeneous west has been shattered, fractured and balkanised by military incursion, leading to uneven economic development and the development of uneven political consciousness. Much of what goes on in the region today is driven by healthy peer rivalry rather than a solid holistic vision of regional development. It is left to the new leaders of the region to come up with an integrative, unified and harmonised framework which can drive even faster development.

    Finally, it is important to remind the emergent modernizers that paradise cannot exist surrounded by hell. Nigeria is currently a hellhole bristling with delirious denizens. Two options are available. It is either the new leaders of the old west insist on the immediate convocation of a sovereign gathering of Nigerians which will restructure the country and free the creative genius of its diverse people or they must be at the vanguard of a pan-Nigerian electoral revolution which must inaugurate a new nation. The current status quo has completely exhausted its political and historic possibilities.

  • OBJ at 76

    OBJ at 76

    If Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the first premier of Western Region and opposition leader in the First Republic, was, as the late rebel leader, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu described him posthumously, the best leader Nigeria never had, former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who celebrated his 76th birthday yesterday, will probably go down in history as Awo’s anti-thesis of sorts; arguably the most endowed Nigerian leader who had the opportunity and luck Awo never had but blew his chance to be truly great.

    General Obasanjo is probably the most hard-working and energetic leader Nigeria has had. The story is often told of how, as chief of staff of the assassinated head of state, General Murtala Mohammed, he would work into ungodly hours after council meetings to prepare notes on what actions needed to be taken and by whom, and yet be the first on his desk the following morning. Today at 76 – probably older as his estranged son, Gbenga, has said – he has remained as hard working and energetic as ever.

    Not only is the young septuagenarian probably the most hard-working and energetic leader Nigeria has had. He is also one of the country’s most intelligent and knowledgeable, as anyone who has had even the most casual interaction with the man will testify. His intelligence and knowledge is also pretty evident in several of the books he has written and in his media interviews and public speeches, especially those delivered off the cuff.

    Again, the man has proved himself as effective and decisive a leader as any in the world. Issue after issue, the man took decisions quickly and pursued his goals with single minded determination.

    Not least of all, the man is probably Nigeria’s luckiest leader. From being the field commander on hand to first accept Biafra’s instrument of surrender after his predecessor, General Benjamin Adekunle had virtually finished all the dangerous fighting, through surviving the coup attempt of 1976 and succeeding his assassinated boss, General Mohammed, to returning to power in mufti after barely escaping the gallows at the hand of his near-nemesis, head of state, General Sani Abacha, Obasanjo seems to have the knack, or the luck, if you will, of being at the right place at the right time.

    The trouble with the man is, first, he was never really as disinterested in power as he or his friends and associates would like the world to believe. Second, it is pretty obvious to even someone with half an eye, that the man, at least in his second coming, put his virtues more in service of himself than in that of his country.

    As we all know the man became a world celebrity when he apparently kept the word of his boss and surrendered power in October 1979 to an elected government. The operative word here is “apparently.” Apparently, because, as I have pointed out on these pages more than once, there is evidence to suggest the man didn’t really want to leave back then. That he eventually did was partly because his putative attempt at getting the last summit of the then Organisation of African Unity he attended as head of state in Monrovia, Liberia, to include a statement in its communiqué that Nigeria was not ready for democracy, failed. He also left because three of his most powerful lieutenants, his second-in-command, General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, his army chief, General T.Y. Danjuma, and his police chief, Inspector General of Police M.D. Yusuf, insisted the men in khaki must return to the barracks where they belonged.

    Whether the man wanted to leave or not, the fact was that he was sensible enough not to risk being thrown out. To that extent he deserves credit for leaving. However, after tasting the forbidden fruit of power, in a manner of speaking, the man apparently developed a huge appetite for it. An evidence of this was his failed, perhaps at that time, unrealistic, ambition to become the Secretary General of the United Nations. Another was his initial acceptance of an offer by military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, to him to head an interim government after Babangida “stepped aside” in 1993, the interim government which was eventually headed by his fellow Egba, Chief Ernest Sonekan.

    Probably the most conclusive evidence that the man’s eventual return to power in 1999 was not mere accident but a thing he had deeply desired was a story my friend, Mr. John Dara, the presidential candidate of the National Transformation Party in the 2011 elections, once told me on a visit to his rather modest office in Abuja.

    Pretty early under General Sani Abacha’s regime in 1994, he said, Obasanjo once asked him through one of his brothers-in-law to become his presidential campaign manager. Apparently Dara came highly recommended to Obasanjo as a chieftain of the powerful Middle-Belt Forum and the man who managed the improbable success of Chief Otedola in beating Alhaji Lateef Jakande in the Lagos governorship elections conducted under General Babangida’s transition programme. Dara also had a reputation of being a big thorn in the flesh of the late Dr. Sola Saraki, the undisputed godfather of the politics of Kwara State where they both came from.

    At first, said Dara, he declined. Not long after that he was approached by a younger brother of General Sani Abacha through a friend to also manage the general’s plan to swap his khaki for mufti in spite of his promise that his regime will be brief. Again, said Dara, he declined.

    However, after persistent pressure from his friend, he relented somewhat and agreed to meet Abacha’s younger brother. Still the meeting, he said, did not produce the desired outcome for his host. His argument was that Abacha was likely to face at least two formidable, possibly insurmountable, obstacles – General Yar’Adua, whose presidential ambitions as a retired officer was an open secret, and General Obasanjo who had become a credible and effective moral voice at home and abroad against military rule.

    Following this observation, he said, his host revealed that in a matter of weeks these obstacles would be removed. Thus sufficiently alarmed, Dara said, he contacted Obasanjo’s in-law and told him he was now ready to meet with the general, not to handle his presidential campaign as such, but to warn him about the danger he faced. The meeting eventually held and he warned Obasanjo of the danger. The general never heeded the warning – not even after it was confirmed by his friend, former American president, Mr. Jimmy Carter, when he warned the general not to return home from a trip abroad.

    Obasanjo, never one to be accused of cowardice, returned home from his trip. The rest, as they say, is now history; he, along with Yar’Adua, were duly picked up by Abacha’s security men as coup planners and sentenced to death. International pressure on Abacha forced him to commute the sentences to life but only Obasanjo came out alive, following the mysterious death of Abacha in 1998.

    He was soon drafted, seemingly reluctantly, to become the president that would heal the deep wounds inflicted on the country by, among other things, the crisis of the cancellation of the presidential election of June 12, 1993 whose presumed winner was the late Chief M.K.O. Abiola.

    Sadly and tragically, instead of healing wounds, Obasanjo allowed himself to be consumed by vengeance for the wrongs he suffered. Instead of leaving vengeance to God, as a self-declared born-again Christian, he went after everything he apparently believed Abacha stood for. Presumably, as he approached the end of his second term in 2007, he came to the sudden realisation that he was leaving little of a legacy behind by which history would judge him kindly.

    Predictably he tried to secure a third, some would even say, an indefinite, term with its obvious implication of diverting resources, material or otherwise, from serving the public interest. Equally predictably – Nigeria has for long proved the political graveyard of anyone who thought he was indispensable – his bid failed.

    At the same time, the man who first left office in 1979 with a reputation of someone who did not abuse his office to amass great wealth, today has the sad reputation of a man living in soulless opulence. It was as if in his second coming, he’d concluded that his relatively Spartan conduct in his first coming was a mistake.

    All his recent efforts at revising the record of his public career notwithstanding, history will certainly not be as kind to him as a leader with his great qualities deserved. He had the opportunity to use those qualities in his country’s best interests like no Nigerian leader ever had, but he blew it.

     

     

     

  • Between Hernando De Soto and Obafemi Awolowo

    Between Hernando De Soto and Obafemi Awolowo

    I must confess that I was totally at a loss as to why the organisers of the 2011 annual Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu colloquium to commemorate the 59th birthday anniversary of the former Governor of Lagos State and National Leader of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) decided on the choice of the noted Peruvian Economist, Hernando de Soto, to be the guest lecturer. Yes, ‘de Soto ranks among the most cerebral economists and public intellectuals of our time. He is especially venerated by neo-liberal, conservative Think Tanks and publications. For instance, The Economist magazine has described him as a potential Nobel Prize winner. The Times of London enthused that his book, ‘The Mystery of Capital’, had provided “The blueprint for a new industrial revolution”.

    Hernando de Soto in ‘The Mystery of Capital’ sought to unveil the reason why capitalism has been such a tremendous success breeding remarkable prosperity in the West while it has failed in many other parts of the world. Since the publication of his book in the Year 2000, capitalism even if of a largely state-centred variety, has flourished in non-western countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia and Japan. But the capitalist ethos is still struggling to take root in many ex-communist countries as well as Africa where capitalism spawns unprecedented poverty, inequality, exploitation and alarming corruption. As I listened to the distinguished guest lecturer on that occasion, I could not but admire his brilliance. However, I had a feeling he was not properly acquainted with the realities of contemporary Nigeria and so had to speak in general terms dwelling largely on the contents of his seminal book.

    Why do many nations fail to create strong market economies that can empower the majority of their people to create wealth out of their abundant but dormant assets? Hernando ‘de Soto blames this situation on the absence of an information network that keeps accurate records of property ownership and other economic information. Many small entrepreneurs, he contends, operate in the informal sectors of the economy. They lack legal ownership of their property. Consequently, they cannot enter into meaningful legal transactions. Since their property has no recognition in law, they cannot obtain credit, sell their assets or expand their economic operations. Hernando ‘de Soto makes the startling discovery that the majority of the world’s poor actually sit on tremendous but invisible and therefore useless wealth because their assets have no legal validity and is therefore excluded from the formal economy of their respective countries.

    A key concept in understanding ‘de Soto’s thought is what he calls ‘dead capital’. Citing the examples of Peru, Haiti, and Egypt among others, he demonstrates that a majority of the poor that operate in the informal economy sit on ‘dead capital’ – shanties, land, decrepit buildings, shacks – that is worth a fortune in monetary terms. However, because such properties lack legal titles, they cannot be transferred from the informal to the formal sectors of the economy through legal validation. He characterises such assets as ‘dead capital’ because lacking legal recognition, they could not be utilized to raise capital to create wealth or expand businesses. Applying his methodology to Peru, for instance, ‘de Soto’s Institute for Liberty and Democracy, helped to implement property sector reforms which gave titles to over 1.2 million families while also helping some 380,000 firms previously in the black market to enter the formal economy.

    Yet, does ‘de Soto not have an overly optimistic, even romantic, notion of capitalism? Is moving people from the informal to the formal economy through legal titling of assets a sufficient condition to ameliorate poverty and create prosperity? How appropriate are this economist’s ideas to the Nigerian reality where the financial sector is dissociated from the real economy and those with valid, legal assets cannot obtain credit and do meaningful business at the prevailing rate of interest? How about the millions who lost their homes to the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the west where legal titling of assets has taken firm root? Does the serious economic crisis from which the United States and Europe are still struggling to emerge not indicative that there is something more fundamentally wrong with capitalism today than ‘de Soto suggests?

    However, on further thoughts I found that ‘de Soto’s concept of ‘dead capital’ helped me to better appreciate aspects of the thought of the late statesman, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, that are clearly more relevant to the contemporary Nigerian and African condition. ‘de Soto’s economic thought starts and ends with property. Move the poor into the formal economy by titling their assets and everything else will be added unto you he seems to suggest. On the other hand, Chief Awolowo’s political thought begins and ends with man. In the fourth of his Kwame Nkrumah memorial lectures delivered in 1977, Awolowo posited thus “Man is the sole creative and purposive dynamic in nature: everything else by comparison is in a state of inertia…Other things being equal, and barring frictions, it can be said without fear of contradiction, that a man who is healthier and stronger physically, who is more developed in his subjective mind and who is more purposeful psychologically, will economically be a better dynamic active, causative agent, and achieve more quantitative and qualitative effect than any other man who does not have these attributes”. We can thus see why education, healthcare and full employment loomed so large in Awolowo’s welfarist agenda. Without proper education, efficient health care, good nutrition and productive engagement, man will be no better than ‘dead labour’, which like ‘de Soto’s ‘dead capital’ will be unable to maximise its potentials both for individual and collective good.

    Let us end with further insight on Awolowo’s thought on this subject. In his words “The sum total of what we have said is that man is the prime mover in every economy. Cocoa plantations, oil wells, rubber, oil palm produce, copper, groundnuts, timber, iron and steel, etc, are not. All these things in their natural states are either passive, inert and in a state of rest, or purposeless when in motion. Their induced rest in any place, or motion or acceleration towards any direction, depends on man alone”. My summation: Man, not property must be the centre piece of any progressive economic policy.