- Towards a new national ethos
After the binge comes the inevitable hangover. Nigeria is in a stupendous alcoholic haze, full of groaning and grieving, filled with bitter regrets and sick recrimination. As every certified alcoholic will testify, the purgatory that must follow overindulgence is marked by drowsiness and dizziness; an overwhelming stupor accompanied by acute discomfort.
So, what do we call this peculiar Nigerian affliction, an economic calamity of the greatest order which devastates everything in its wake? It may feel like it, but it is certainly not the Dutch Disease, an economic distortion which arises when a society is suddenly flush with huge revenues from a novel and unexpected source leading to a dramatic appreciation of the national currency but also the loss of a competitive edge in other critical sectors of national productivity.
The Dutch people, a proud race noted for their Calvinist restraint and rectitude, quickly reordered their national priorities. It is to be noted that sixty years after the Dutch liberated themselves from Spanish rule, the merchants of Amsterdam were already sending goods all over the world from their low-lying redoubts. Meanwhile, their former Spanish overlords had blitzed their way into irreversible national decline as a result of ruinous inflation driven by free gold from the evil mines of Potosi.
The Nigerian economic disorder can also not be equated with what came to be known as the Norwegian Paradox. For a long time, economists were puzzled and confounded to no end by the Norwegian economic miracle of a high-performing economy that was not known to be based on innovative technology and cutting edge developments in Science and AI.
The Norwegians, modest and averse to technological modishness, went on to surprise everybody by creating the Sovereign Wealth Fund made of the nation’s entire earnings from petroleum resources. The vast holding would have insulated the nation against poverty, austerity and the vagaries and volatility of the market for the next two generations. It is to be noted that the Nigerian parody of this fund was burglarized in no time, leaving the nation at the mercy of the elements.
Finally, it is not worth the intellectual effort to compare the Nigerian economic ailment with the Russian oligarchs’ dystopia. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire and under relentless pressure from the west for market reforms, the Russian economy went into a tailspin. The Russian oligarchs, a consortium of assorted crooks and con-men, had a field day plundering the immense resources of their nation with merciless rapacity.
But they did not reckon with Vladimir Putin, a former KGB apparatchik and pan-Slavic supremacist, emerging from the woodwork of Stalinist repression. Putin, who nurses a visceral hatred and contempt for western values, made sure the oligarchs paid for all their infractions against their fatherland either with their life or long jail sentences.
The Russian economy responded to Putin’s severe therapy and quickly became a major global player all over again. Just as it was said of Josef Stalin before him, Putin has driven economic barbarity out of Russia by sheer barbarity. National character is national destiny.
As it can be seen from the preceding passage, Nigeria is in the grip of a uniquely baleful economic disorder. It is a severe ailment that is not responding to conventional treatment. Expectedly, people are coming up with different solutions and from different perspectives. This past week, Afe Babalola, legal luminary and founder of the innovative and groundbreaking Afe Babalola University, pleaded with the international community for substantial debt forgiveness for the nation.
On the face of it, this noble and patriotic call reminds one of the mid-nineties and the reparation lobby mounted by MKO Abiola. It was a massive assault which lacerated the conscience of the west and sent its ideological storm troopers into a panic mode. Abiola was not known to do anything in half measures. Those who mattered in the global sanctuary of power took note.
This writer at that point in time took a strong exception to the reparation campaign and made sure that the objection was felt in the right place. In a well-syndicated piece titled, Reparation or Repatriation, we argued in details why Nigeria needed more repatriation of money stolen and salted away by the political elite as opposed to fiscal reparation for the historic crimes of colonization and international slavery, a crime against humanity which had continued in one guise or the other till date.
Our well-judged suspicion at that point in time was that the whole reparation boondoggle might well be a cynical ploy by the Nigerian plutocrat to draw attention away from the epic state banditry that was unfolding in Nigeria on the watch of his military friends. It will be recalled that Margaret Thatcher famously opined at that period that judging from the humongous size of their overseas holdings, one or two Nigerians could actually offset Nigeria’s foreign debts with change to spare.
Since then, only the blind will fail to notice that state larceny has deepened into an All comers’ buccaneers’ bazaar with international complicity. Nigeria has been stolen blind by its political elite. It has reached a point where even an MKO Abiola would weep in his grave at the plight of the nation. We have finally arrived at Ground Zero.
A Nigerian government official this past week has noted that despite every appearance to the contrary, Nigeria is a very poor country indeed. His statistics cannot be faulted. The problem with statistics is that they can be used to arrive at dissimilar conclusions. Nigeria is not a poor country but a poverty-stricken country. Poverty is not natural to the country but has been inflicted on it by a derelict political elite. It is induced poverty which has now seen the nation rightly inducted into the hall of infamy as the poverty capital of the world.
To be sure, countries with smaller and more competitive population often fare better than much bigger nations when it comes to feeling the impact of natural resources. This is why the Saudis, Qataris, Norwegians, Libyans, Kuwaitis etc. appear to do much better than countries with humongous populations with equal natural resources. A huge population without commensurate knowledge and without adequate educational empowerment cannot participate in the creation of wealth which is a sine qua non for the advancement of human societies.
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This is in fact when huge populations become a disadvantage. But it is not a natural disadvantage. A population teeming with the medically unfit, unlettered peasantry and barely literate artisans cannot be expected to have the mental resources and the economic savvy to contribute to the harmonious growth of the society. Instead, they are a ticking social time bomb.
This is why sane and sober countries devote considerable amount of resources to the development of human infrastructure and what Obafemi Awolowo has called the mental magnitude of their citizenry. No country has ever been richer than the sum total of its people.
The galloping growth of population ahead of human capacity-building and economic development puzzled and perplexed early economists to no end. In a celebrated treatise, Thomas Malthus, who is regarded as the father of modern Economics, advocated a winnowing of the population through population control or outright curling of the populace.
According to the great econometrician, it is war, famine, mass emigration and natural disasters that do the surgical operation for humanity at that point in time. Despite the clinical rigour of his analysis, Malthus has been berated for the misanthropic glee and putative violence inherent in his moody prognostications. In a satirical contribution titled A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift advocated the killing off and consumption of children in infancy.
In our modern world, the Chinese have demonstrated how huge populations can be turned into huge blessing through a combination of scientific birth control and a radical re-education of the populace as well as its economic empowerment. They have achieved in a generation what will take other societies a millennium to achieve. It must be admitted that the terror and revolutionary retribution that accompany this type of radical transformation is not feasible in fractious, multi-ethnic colonial nations without core values and a core identity. They will quickly dissolve into their anarchic components.
With the preceding observation we have reached the primal issue and the core of Nigeria’s ailment as a political and economic entity. With that we have also reached a dialectical modification of our own earlier position. Yes, reparation and some substantial debt relief have become imperative for Africa. But even better and more imperative is the repatriation Nigeria’s stolen money from abroad. There should be a national reprieve or amnesty for those who willingly let go.
The justifiable cynicism and reluctance of the west in tracking and repatriating looted funds is predicated on the belief that the proceeds will be looted once again. This is where the political and psychological conditioning of the people matter a lot.
It is obvious that all the nations we have been tracking are conditioned by core values and national character to withstand and overcome debilitating economic crises. The Dutch and Norwegians with their Calvinist prudence and restraint, the Russians with their Slavic sense of self-worth and implacable pride, and the Chinese with their hardihood, innate discipline and effortless sense of superiority.
Until Nigeria develops a strong national identity matched by core values which are in tune with the dictates of political and economic modernity, all will be in vain. What we have for now as a substitute is a pan-Nigerian hedonism common to all the dominant fractions of the political elites which privileges consumption of western luxury goods at the expense of local production.
Yet our forefathers were never like this. It shows that something fundamental has gone wrong. The problem is that the rampaging mobs are closer than we can ever imagine. We can either choose to watch the irreversible slide into decay and death or do something urgent about it.
