Understanding the ‘Trouble with Nigeria’

Jideofor Adibe

pcjadibe@yahoo.com

Twitter: @JideoforAdibe

Following my last week’s column, ‘Radio Biafra and the Biafran Narratives’, I had an impassioned telephone conversation with someone - let me call him Ahmed- who said he was a “dedicated reader of my writings”. The point of the conversation centred on a statement in that last week’s article: “…unless the crisis in the country’s nation-building is resolved, every solution thrown at the country’s numerous problems will either be misunderstood or will also become part of the problem”.

Ahmed sought to convince me that the country’s fundamental problem is corruption, and that “once corruption is fought to a standstill or brought down to the barest minimum”, the country would be on a trajectory to getting its act together. For anyone who has been following my writings, it will not come as a surprise that I vigorously disagreed with Ahmed.  I believe that unless we get the definition of our problem right our solutions may at best amount to applying correct medications to the wrong ailment.

I will in this piece interrogate four popular diagnoses of the Nigerian condition –corruption, leadership, weak institution and insecurity.  

The Corruption Mantra

It has become almost a mantra or a pre-recorded message with most Nigerians that corruption is the main problem with Nigeria. While I accept that corruption is a serious issue, my personal opinion is that it is merely the symptom of a more fundamental malaise. It is wrong to elevate the institutional manifestations of a problem to its defining characteristic.

Corruption is a systemic problem that is exacerbated in climes where the nation-building process has manifestly failed – as in Somalia – or engulfed in deep crisis – as in Nigeria and several other African countries.  In my opinion the best way (methodologically speaking) to assess the effectiveness of any fight against corruption is to use the ‘before’ and ‘after’ benchmark – that is, to pose the question: what was the situation before the beginning of the ‘fight’ against corruption and what happened after the ‘fight’ started and afterwards? Procedural issues like how much money a financial crime buster succeeded in confiscating from people or how it has forced public figures to find other avenues of concealing their loot are really mere details.

If we have been right about corruption and the way to fight it, why has the incidence of corruption appear to be increasing rather than declining despite the EFCC and ICPC?. Why has ‘fighting corruption’ been a cornerstone policy of all the post-independence regimes in the country?  And what became of the previous contraptions and rhetoric used in fighting the ailment such as Obasanjo's Jaji Declarations (in his first coming) Shagari's Ethical Revolution, Buhari’s War Against Indiscipline (in his first coming), Babangida's MAMSER and Abacha's dreaded Failed Bank Tribunals?

The ‘failure of leadership’ argument

Chinua Achebe (1983), in his slim booklet, concluded that the “trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” In essence for Achebe and others who argue within this framework the principal reason why Nigeria has continued to underperform is simply because she has been unfortunate to be cursed by a recurrent blizzard of mediocre and corrupt leadership.

One of the problems with the ‘failure of leadership’ argument is the neglect of the influence of environmental variables – what we call the ‘Nigerian factor’ or political scientists would call system dynamics. In essence, for those who believe that the ‘trouble with Nigeria’ is squarely that of leadership, there is a wrong assumption that the environmental variables will lend themselves to whichever way the leader wants to manipulate them. There is also a wrong belief that the followership is necessarily virtuous. Adherents of this perspective equally fail to explain convincingly how this ‘good leader’ should emerge especially as it is commonly believed that a country often gets the leader it deserves or that that the quality of the leadership is a reflection of the quality of the followership.

The ‘strong institutions’ rhetoric

In his speech on 11 July 2009 to the Ghanaian Parliament at the Accra International Conference Centre, President Obama declared that “Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions”.

Since Obama’s famous speech, the new song, which is now held as bearing the cure for Africa’s numerous ailments, seems to have become: ‘Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions’.

Strong institutions

What is easily discernible when people brandish the new mantra is the tendency to equate ‘institutions’ with structures, organisations or public bodies such as the civil service, the police, the parliament and contraptions that fight corruption like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in Nigeria.  This manner of understanding ‘institutions’ is at best only partially correct because institutions are also rules, conventions, ethos that have endured over time . Even individuals, to the extent that they purvey a certain brand, which is consistent over time, can also be called institutions.

For laws to acquire the status of rules, they have to become customary and habituated over a relatively long period of time. In other words, such laws have become ‘institutionalized’. It can be surmised from this that where the institutions are strong, there will be a strong observance of the laws such that no matter the quality of the leader that you have the institutions will be strong enough to cover such a leader’s inadequacies. In essence when we talk of institutions, it must include habituating rule observance.

Strongmen

There is a feeling  that many of those who brandish the new mantra of ‘Africa does not need strongmen but strong institutions’ , often  use ‘strong men’ interchangeably with either ‘dictators’ or ‘charismatic’ leaders.  There is a fundamental distinction between a dictator and a charismatic leader: while the autocrat thrives on cowing the citizens and wants to be feared, charismatic leaders draw people to themselves because of the personal magnetism they possess. It is obvious that in fragile and polarized countries with weak institutions neither the dictator nor the charismatic leader will be good in encouraging institution building since people owe allegiance directly to them, not to any structures, processes or set of laws. Both set of leaders cannot encourage habituation of law observance outside themselves.  However since  institutions necessarily have to be built by people, and since the environmental variables seriously constrain leaders who will want to encourage such, how will strong institutions then be built in a country like Nigeria?

 Insecurity as the major problem in the country

With the wave of kidnappings in the country, especially in the South East and south-south, the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-east and violent armed robberies across the country, several analysts have argued that insecurity is indeed ‘the trouble with Nigeria’. For people who argue within this framework, insecurity inhibits foreign direct investments and scares away Diaspora Nigerians from returning home to invest in the country.

I will argue that while insecurity is a problem, it is not the fundamental trouble with Nigeria. In fact some of the purveyors of the security challenges in the country such as the Boko Haram are often responses to other perceived problems.  Without trying to trivialize the current security challenges, I also believe that it is an overstatement to say that insecurity inhibits foreign direct investment. The truth is that capital smells opportunity for accumulation and often moves into areas where it can reproduce itself - often regardless of the security situation there. Sometimes it moves into highly volatile areas like Iraq with its own security arrangements. 

Interestingly, a list of the 10 most dangerous countries in the world in 2015 published by ABC News Point listed USA at number 6 while Nigeria was not included in the list.

The crisis in the country’s nation-building process

I will argue, like a broken record, that ‘the main trouble with Nigeria’ - is the crisis in the country’s nation-building process. This perspective assumes that diversity is not inherently antithetical to nation-building because many of the most successful nations of the world were in fact built from an agglomeration of different ethnic nationalities. In fact as the experiences of Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi teach us, ethnic and cultural homogeneity do not necessarily guarantee the success of nation-building.

Though there is no unanimity among scholars on the meaning of ‘nation-building’, it is often used to denote a deliberate use of state instruments to build trust and create a sense of community among the nationalities that make up the ‘new’ states in the ‘developing’ countries. In essence nation-building generally assumes that someone is doing the building of the nation intentionally.

My position is that the nation-building process in Nigeria appears to have stalled, if not in severe crisis.  In fact all the past efforts and projects at building unity in diversity seem to be unravelling:  The crisis in Nigeria’s nation building, it would seem, feeds into the crisis of underdevelopment to create an existential crisis for many Nigerians. For many people, a way of resolving the consequent sense of alienation appears to be to delink from the Nigerian state into primordial identities - often with the Nigerian state as the enemy. I have elsewhere called this a de-Nigerianization process. 
Under the above situation, no leader or institution enjoys legitimacy across the major fault lines because people’s perception filters often coincide with their location in the fault lines.