The Bane of Nigeria's Political Growth.

Former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar (Left) and President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja on June 16, 2015

The upcoming Nigerian presidential election is obviously going to be a political tug of war between Buhari, the incumbent and Atiku, a former vice president. One of the factors that are making this election so interesting is the fact that both candidates are from the North. Both of them are Moslems. They are both Fulanis. And they are both politically smart enough to pick southern Christians as running mates. Besides rigging, each candidate will need to identify and sharpen his cutting edge or some unique selling point to outwit the other to achieve victory. 

It would have been really nice to see and hear the two men participate in a public debate except that Buhari has already excused himself. Yet, there are certain salient issues of national interest, the tackling of which, are better articulated openly by each of the candidates, and not their “spokespersons”. Among these issues are the downward-spiraling economy, epileptic power supply, Corruption (in broad context) and crumbling education. 

Sadly however, most supporters of these two candidates are too fanatical to care a hoot about the national interest. To them, the election is like the English Premier Football League or UEFA Championship while their parties are the favorite football teams. Irrespective of the quality of the teams’ performances, these people remain stuck in their love for them. And this is the bane of Nigerian political growth.

China and the Global Community.

On several occasions I run across these Chinese kids here in Georgia Tech, what surprises me is the type of courses they study. Almost all of them under Chinese government scholarship here to study in Americas best universities are studying courses that have to do with the future. They study artificial intelligence, systems science and engineering, and hard core courses for tomorrows World, their social lives are zero and they always hold sophisticated telephones. Very surprising, but China is a country that thinks ahead and every Chinese is a potential suspect.

Have you ever heard of the concept, made in China 2025? It is Chinese Development blueprint that had sent fear around the world. It is meant to transform China from a labor intensive economy that makes toys, cloths, pharmaceutical to one that engineers advanced products like robots electric cars, and space explorations. The Chinese are believed to be the most determined species of the human race. Once they set their minds to achieve a goal nothing stops them. 

Earlier today, I listened to a commentary where the presenter clearly stated that the Chinese state would not mind stealing technology and intellectual property just to meet their goal. I also read elsewhere, that Chinese kids are sent in droves to study unique courses like artificial intelligence, information systems, system science, robotic engineering, systems engineering in American schools. Surprisingly this is a deliberate state policy. You never see a Chinese student on scholarship studying arts, social sciences or religion.

What is most troubling is that they study these courses in America and United Kingdom top ivy leagues. They are here on full state sponsored scholarships. While the economies of the world including the United States are exporting production distribution and exchange in an era of globalization, China is pursuing an agenda of localizing production…

Princewill Odidi, A Development analyst writes from Atlanta.

Building Churches in Africa at the Expense of Economic Growth.

China is currently the world's leading economic power. Yet, in China, there is a zero tolerance for church existence. Finland has the most stable economy in the world today. Yet, there are less than twenty churches in the entire Finland. Switzerland has the second most stable economy in the world. In spite of that, Switzerland has fewer than thirty churches. Denmark is the third most stable economy in the world. But there are about 23 churches in Denmark. These countries are considered to have the highest number of atheists, but they are blessed.



Now, let's go to Africa. Over there are more than 10,000 churches  per region. There are 4,000 churches in the city of Yaoundé (Cameroon) alone. 4100 churches in the city of Abidjan (Ivory Coast). 7000 churches in the city of Kinshasa (Congo). 10,000 churches in the city of Lagos (Nigeria). Please note that Lagos City is four hundred and thirty times more numerous than the whole of Switzerland. In Africa, we have more churches than schools and hospitals combined. There are more pastors than doctors. Almost every Christian is a bishop, pastor, deacon, deaconess or evangelist. Almost everyone in Africa is "born again". Even, the Moslems have their own version of "born again" among them. Almost every Christian is covered with "the blood of Jesus". Jesus is actually considered as the "husband" of all single women (according to them) in "revival" churches. 

Almost every Christian is filled with the "Holy Spirit". Even, a con artist will start his/her "business" with a prospective victim by solemnly saying, "Let us pray". And the churches? Some of them are richer than some local governments and states combined. Yet, they neither pay taxes nor contribute to the growth of their communities besides the presence of their monstrous edifices. However, none of these claims is reflected in the moral elevation that is expected in such an environment. We are among the laziest, the most deceiving, the most corrupt, the most hypocritical, the most hateful on the planet today, with all our religious posturing!

Nigeria Could Teach the West a Few Things.

A trip is often defined by its surprises, so here are my biggest revelations from six days in Lagos, Nigeria. 

Most of all, I found Lagos to be much safer than advertised. It is frequently described as one of the most dangerous cities on earth. Many people told me I was crazy to go there, and some Nigerian expats warned me I might not get out of the airport alive.

The reality is that I walked around freely and in many parts of town. I didn’t try to go everywhere or at all hours, and I may have been lucky. Yet not once did I feel threatened, and I strongly suspect that a trip to Lagos is safer than a trip to Rio de Janeiro, a major tourist destination. (In my first trip to Rio I was attacked by children with pointed sticks. In my second I found myself caught in a gunfight between drug lords). Many Lagos residents credit the advent of closed-circuit television cameras for their safety improvements. 

So if you’re an experienced traveler, and tempted to visit Africa’s largest and arguably most dynamic city, don’t let safety concerns be a deal killer. 

The surprises mount. For all the negative publicity, many parts of Nigeria, especially Lagos, could and should serve as exemplars for religious tolerance. 

The reports of Boko Haram and terror killings are well known, and they reflect the interlocking and sometimes deadly combinations of regional, religious, sectarian and ethnic identities in the country, not to mention extreme inequalities of income and opportunity. Yet Nigeria has about 180 million people and is larger than Texas. The violence is the most frequently reported story in the West, but the underlying reality is far more complex and shows positive features. 

For instance, the city of Lagos is in many regards a marvel of religious tolerance. Nigeria is about 50 percent Muslim and 40 percent Christian, and the area surrounding Lagos is also highly mixed in terms of religion. That may sound like a recipe for trouble, but in matters of religion Lagos is almost entirely peaceful. Religious intermarriage is common and usually not problematic, as is the case in many (not all) other parts of Nigeria as well. Many top Nigerian politicians have married outside their religion, kept two separate religions in the family and enjoyed continued political success.  

Consider the scale and speed of this achievement. Lagos, with a population of about 20 million, is larger than many countries. It is the most commercially oriented part of Nigeria, and it grew so large only in the last few decades, as it attracted entrepreneurially minded people from many parts of Nigeria and other African countries. By one estimate, 85 new residents arrive every hour. That may sound chaotic, but in essence Nigeria has in a few decades created an almost entirely new, country-sized city built on the ideals and practice of religious tolerance. The current president, Muhammadu Buhari, is a Muslim who was supported in his election by many Christian leaders, on the grounds that he would fight corruption more effectively. His running mate served as a Pentecostal pastor.  

The recent history of Nigeria, Lagos in particular, is also a counterweight to some recent Western political trends. Many Westerners today fear resurgent nationalism, as illustrated by the U.K.'s vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump.

In Nigeria, nationalism is largely a progressive force, bringing the country together and allowing nation-building and infrastructure development. However imperfect or backward these processes might be -- Nigeria has at least 270 distinct ethnic groups and 370 languages -- in Nigeria one is rooting for nationalism to succeed. And it’s in Lagos, the country’s largest and most important window to the outside world, where the understanding of the importance of a common and stable national identity has made such progress. 

Many Westerners used to consider much of Africa backward in this regard, but we Westerners are learning again that national cohesion isn’t always so easy. Perhaps the political spectrum in many Western countries can realign itself in a direction analogous to some features of Nigeria, to ally liberalism and nationalism once again. 

Courtesy: Bloomberg.net

Nigeria - When a Sense of Shame is Lost.

 

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.

Nigeria and it's Power Problem.

I have always wondered why a 24-7 electricity supply has been so elusive in Nigeria. Governments come and go with each one unable to solve the problem. And even now that we have the Buhari government  (a supposedly "agent of change"), there has been no solving the power problem.

Will it ever occur to the Buhari government that unless it identifies power as a major foundation for economic growth, the nation will continue to wallow and grope in shameful darkness? Is the government claiming ignorance of a simple, elementary knowledge that without a constant supply of electricity, there will (for instance) never be a solution to the growing recession, inflation, unemployment and other problems in our nation?

As an ordinary citizen and a huge "Change" supporter, I wish to humbly advise our president to urgently take a deeper look at his cabinet composition and effect a change. For example, the ministry of Power desperately needs a zealous minister, one that will go beyond the call of duty, instead of being just another "business as usual", glorified civil servant!

The minister of Power does not have to be a politician. Nigeria is blessed with several experienced technocrats whose knowledge and selfless dedication can be effectively deployed toward solving our numerous problems. For instance, a patriotic minister of Power would have, by now, realized and tackled the factors working against the interest of the nation's regular power supply.

One such factor is constituted by the various importers of temporary electric generators. These generators come in different shapes and sizes. I was on Nigeria one time and was passing through the Lagos Marina. Poking out of some corporate skyscrapers were the "barrels" of giant generators that looked like those of artillery guns. In various residential areas are middle class poluttion-generating sets. Even, the poor folks have their own little generators a.k.a "I Pass my Neighbors".

Also setting up shops at various corners in every state of the federation are the importers of numerous rechargeable lamps, rechargeable fans and several other "rechargeables".

All these emergency importers will never want our nation's electricity supplies to be regular. And to this end, they will employ everything in their powers, including sabotage and corruption, to ensure that their individual selfish business continues to thrive at the expense of the people.

If a poor, ordinary individual like me can have this knowledge, a serious, altruistic cabinet minister will know, even much more!

Wake Up Nigerian Parents!

Years back in Nigeria, the most populous Black nation on earth, poor, illiterate parents produced Doctors, Engineers, Scientists, Accountants, Lawyers, Architects and Professors. I refer to the kids they produced as Group 'A' Children. 

These Group 'A' Children struggled on their own from the first grade to the twelfth grade to become notable personalities. As kids, many of them trekked to school barefooted and went to farm or did some menial works such as petty trading after school hours, to survive. 

Now Group 'A' Children, who have now become parents themselves, are producing Group 'B'  Children who are pampered and helped in their homework or school assignments from nursery school through high schools to tertiary institutions.  

Group 'B' Children are chauffeur-driven to very expensive schools or are sent abroad to study. They can watch movies from morning till dawn after school. They are treated like baby kings and queens with no household chores for them to do. They are served foods on some bright, shiny dining table. When done eating, their plates are removed and washed by parents or house maids. They are given expensive cars and clothes, not forgetting huge pocket monies to be wasted on dumb stuff. And in spite of getting help from parents in doing school assignments, many of these kids cannot properly express themselves orally and in writing.  

Group 'A' parents cared for their own parents and children. Group 'B' Children however struggle most of their growing-up years to find their feet, which some rarely find, even at the age of 30. They experience great difficulty in accomplishing the smallest of tasks on their own because they are used to being pampered and helped to think and do things by their parents (the group 'A' parents). Therefore, too many of the group ‘B’ Children are useless to themselves, their parents and the society. 

As a group ‘A’ parent, where exactly do you belong in the chore of parenting? If you belong to the group of those spoiling your kids instead of properly raising them, it’s time you stopped the silly pampering. Start raising your kids in the path of knowledge, wisdom, values and virtues. Let them face the truth and the realities of life. Teach them to grow into independent adults. Teach them to fear God, respect others and develop confidence in themselves. Parents, discipline your children to become disciplined adults, useful and not useless.