I am not sure what to say about us, Nigerians. Should I
praise the Nigerian spirit for resilience in the face of a misery index those
from countries seen as the pits of hell want to get away from. Or should one
castigate the people of the country for acting like zombies as their inchoate
economy retrenches further, facilities collapse in such a manner that a Nigeria
regional manager for south African Airways uses words that suggest our major
airports are epidemics waiting to breakout. But if truth be told, what puzzles
me the most about the Nigerian condition is the total loss of a sense of shame
in people who hold positions of public authority in Nigeria. Their swagger in
the face of south bound reality beggar’s belief.
A few years ago, I encountered the motto of a secondary
school. I fell totally in love with it. But now I am wondering if the last line
should not be doctored a bit. The motto urges students to work hard and play
hard for: “when wealth is lost, nothing is lost. When health is lost, something
is lost. When character is lost, all is lost.”
But I feel that extant experience suggests that when a sense
of shame is lost, all is lost. May be a fourth line should be when shame is
lost nothing can be salvaged.
There is hunger and anger in the land. In some desperation
and despair stand up in sharp relief. But you would not guess that when the excellences
cruise past in long motorcades that drain the public treasury. How did we get
this way? I have struggled to understand how societies fail, in human
history. This is why I have found
efforts of people like Jared Diamond to offer explanation, in Collapse, for
example, quite intriguing. Given, the place of my birth, it should not be a
surprise that my biggest challenge has been Nigerian’s failure to make progress
and the bigger tragedy of the phenomenon I have come to identify as progressive
degeneration where, safe a few examples, governments have been progressively
worse, suggesting that learning is a problematic idea. That grabs my attention
as a teacher, especially one who has done some work on organizational learning
and know that unless the rate of learning in an organization is equal to, or
greater than the pace of change in the environment, Rewan’s axiom, the
organization is dinosaur-status bound.The logic suggests that with climbing the learning curve and
getting a return on Experience, those that follow should do better than the
ones who bore the costs of errors not foreseen. But not so in the Nigerian
experience. Compare governance and governing in Nigeria before 1975, with
today.
Imagine current reality. The economy is inchoate and reeling
from largely self-inflicted error; the power sector is in disarray and manages
to aggravate the misery index in ways difficult to describe to anyone who has
never lived in Nigeria. The aviation sector is a pain merchant causing people
hardships that make the fear of travel the beginning of wisdom. The roads as
alternative means are not much to look to. After a recent road journey from
Benin to Abuja my body was clearly calling for medical help but I was afraid
that to reach a doctor may result in iatrogenic intervention where the medicine
could do more damage than the disease, evidently the case with policy and
problems in the country. Elections have become wars and public office holders
consume resources for infrastructure and growth, in the enjoyment of the
perquisites of power.
All these may bring the normal to the brink of tears but
they do not trouble me as much as the fact that those on whose watch a country
is crumbling walk with such swagger you feel you have just left the requiem for
a sense of shame. If shame has not been buried in Nigeria, all of us should be
acutely worried that the state of things is the moral equivalence of war.
Nations at war mobilize all available resources, define clear strategies. Few
know which direction we are travelling and even many inside privately plead
they are outsiders in government.
What is holding Nigeria back from doing what is right for
the next generation to know progress? After much ponder, I am convinced the
problem is culture; In particular, the culture of the dominant political actors
in Nigerian history. Nigeria has suffered state capture since 1966 and the
group of soldiers who ceased the Nigerian state that year, retain a firm grip
50 years after, even if crisis of legitimacy forced them from time to time to
install fillers like the Shagari, Yaradua, Jonathan stop-gaps.
Culture matters. Long before the Harvard Colloquium on How
Values Shape Human Progress I was certain that culture had great consequence
for progress. While people like the Peruvian Economist Hernando De Soto down
play culture in arguing that institutions are central to how man makes
progress, my own Growth Drivers Framework, draws both, and a few other
variables, into explaining why some countries are poor while their peers
thrive.
So the question remains why did Nigeria stall when less
favored Asian counterparts surged forward in the 1980s. The so called Resource
Curse study at the World Bank in the mid-90s domiciled the problem with Oil, to
an extent, if you extrapolate. Then Oil boomed again in the first decade of the
twenty first century and Oil producing Arabs like Quater, UAE, and others
developed dramatically. Again, Nigeria stalled. In my view the class of 1966
cannot help itself. It was socialized into a view of triumph as the Hunt. The
hunter mindset is kill and share, divide and rule. Nation builders on the other
hand, as Farmers sow and water. They gather together those around so the pool
of Labor will make harvest easy.
The class of 1966 is a class of hunters so that even though
part of their entitlement mindset is that they fought a Civil War to unite
Nigeria, the reality is that the nature of their hunter orientation manifests
in conduct that has done more to disunite Nigeria than enemies of Nigeria could
do if they desired its break up. Because of their booty, war treasure, view of
how they see government the class of 66 sees all who suggest a different way to
make the country move forward as scavengers looking for a piece of this bush
meat they have hunted down. They lack the worldview that there are people whose
only motivation is to be proud of the Green passport they carry. So they seek
to incorporate those who are disposed to bowing before them and despise the
independent minded.
They found clones who were Governors between 1999 and
recently. Those proved to be accelerators of the Nigeria collapse. Nothing
better shows that than my fight with them around the need for savings. They
squandered oil receipts with nothing to show. But they still swagger today,
many still in government.
The culture of the class of 66 drove us, first hesitantly, then
with deliberate speed into the cusp of a failing state. But it will be unfair
to lay our downfall at the feet of the class of ‘66 alone. Our failure to speak
truth to power, produced a generation that looked away rather than call a spade
a spade. We were reduced to a generation that Bob Garratt would describe as
“maliciously obedient to patently stupid instructions” from power.
The class of 1966 itself fractures roughly into 3 groups I
label the Modernizer Wannabes, the Narcissistic Influencers and The Entitlement
Minded Praetorian Guard. In their intragroup competition they sometimes pour
out voluble, vengeful and vain glorious, vituperative vilifications they
unleash a vile, venomous, vexatious volume of vicious vendetta that numbs
polity and poisons the investment climate. The effect on our political culture
has been the gift of a cadre of political actors who care more for protocols,
charter flights, presidential fleets, and motorcades than the fact those they
govern people living in conditions of great misery. They betray a failure to
understand that leadership is other-centered conduc as self love defines public
choice.
I have never understood how people could sleep, chartering
planes with taxpayers money, when many of the taxpayers cannot afford more
primitive commutes to their place of subsistence eking out of a living. But if
you understand the culture of the class of 1966 you will appreciate why it is a
time of insensitivity to the plight of the rest of society. An army of occupation can rationalize things
in amazing logic.
I reflected on these ideas for years but as the engaged
citizen, I looked for and worked at ways we could mitigate these tendencies. In
2015 the evidence came in fully. The class of 1966 is problematic beyond the
“share the Gala, share the booze” mentality. The class of 1966 has crippled the
dreams of two generations because entrenched in their culture is the absence of
a sense of shame.
I doubt that Nigeria will make progress until the eclipse of
the class of 1966 is total.
Courtesy: Pat Utomi.
