There is a deep sense in which the current japa phenomenon—the alarming spate of Nigerian youth leaving the country in droves—is an indictment of the many years of bad leadership Nigerians have endured. When the EndSARS protests occurred in 2020, it was the moment Nigerian youth were protesting the deleterious state of the Nigerian state, represented by the galloping youth unemployment statistics and the lack of sufficiently impactful policy attention to their plight by successive Nigerian governments. And that protests did not end well. And so, we can connect the dots between the legitimacy of the Nigerian youths protesting their right to a better future, and their communicating with their feet to indict a state that wants to silence their demand for a better life.
And that existential flight of the Nigerian youth further adds a terrible debilitating dent on Nigeria’s capacity to achieve her development agenda. And the reason is clear. Nigeria, like the African continent, is a demographically youthful country that is already primed for developmental achievement. And only waiting for a fuse. Its youth bulge places it in a unique position to swing a human capital coup that will transform her developmentally through harnessing the youthful energies in various dimensions of the nation’s economic progress. Unfortunately, the EndSARS protests and how they were handled tell a different story about government’s readiness to deploy the youth bulge. This, in a capsule, is the Nigerian post-independence predicament.
To recapitulate, Nigeria has not progressed too far beyond Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s political skepticism about Nigeria’s national credentials. As at the immediate post-independence period, Awolowo was certain Nigeria was a mere geographical expression. There was not yet at that time any fabric of national sense of belonging that could have fostered national integration. Nigeria is now sixty-three years old, and I doubt there is yet any way by which we have transcended Awolowo’s skepticism about Nigeria’s national unity. This national stagnancy becomes all the more poignantly tragic if placed side by side the development progress that has characterized countries like Malaysia and Singapore—countries that were on the same pedestal with Nigeria sixty-three years ago, but that have leapt beyond their underdevelopment.
The same type of ideological pragmatism that elevated Singapore beyond the western-generated ideologies and development paradigms has been missing in Nigeria’s development trajectory. On the contrary, since independence, the Nigerian state has remained deeply mired in several theoretical discourses, from structural dependency to global neoliberal capitalism in the shape of the Washington Consensus moderated by the World Bank and the IMF. Outside of a possible ideological direction Nigeria could take, all other issues have fallen through into the crack of national misdirection. One example suffices. And this is Nigeria’s lopsided federalism founded on a unitary centralism which fails to allow the federating units to develop according to their unique comparative advantage which enable development competition. And the unitary centralization has since become the opportunity for more primitive accumulation by Nigeria’s political class whose collective greed has generated a Richman-Lazarus complex: the impoverishment of Nigerians through the accumulation of 90% of the wealth in the hands of just 1% of the population.
In Singapore and other industrialized economies, the elite and political class act in a supposed counterintuitive manner. Let me illustrate with an apocryphal story regarding Lee Kuan Yew. he was asked about the dynamics of the actions he took, together with the political class in Singapore, that drastically made the state a developmental state. He was alleged to have said: “There were two options for me. Either I get corrupted and put my family in the Forbes list of the richest people in the world and leave my people with nothing. Or, I serve my country, my people and let my country be in the list of the best ten economies in the world. I chose the second option.” Lee Kuan Yew chose to believe in Singapore, and to invest his leadership capacity in her future possibility. Singapore’s developmental state generated the strategic framework that made it possible to (a) implement sound macroeconomic policies that could alleviate poverty, create employment, and grow a strong, sustainable and competitive economy that could facilitate the well-being of the citizens, (b) promote popular participation that can lead to the indigenous ownership of the development agenda, (c) built a sound institution of public administration that is professional, citizen-friendly, technology-enabled and meritocratic, with a capability readiness to efficiently achieve service delivery, and (d) mobilize state resources, administer budgets and manage public finances productively, transparently and accountably.
In Nigeria, the political class has been motivated by the first option that the elite who take their countries seriously, and gamble on development, often reject. And this leads to a genuine interest in the conceptual understanding of the question: who is a politician in Nigeria? This is a question that critically resonates with me and my professional endeavor. It is definitely a very tough time being a political scientist in Nigeria and trying to fathom the political dynamics of a state that has resisted almost all political analyses. But being a politician is a different ball game entirely. And I have often asked myself, despite the politician’s relative positioning in the critical space for change management: do I have the capacity to function as a politician in Nigeria? In my inaugural lecture, I leaned on Max Weber’s distinction between “living for politics” and “living from politics.” Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive, as Weber also recognized. Living for politics signals a vocational endeavor that sees politics as the means for achieving some noble cause that could enhance the betterment of a state and her citizens. But then, such a politician could also have to make her living from politics. living for a cause could also mean living from such cause. On the contrary, however, there could also be a situation where a person could live from politics without living for it, or making it a means to greater ends.
Living off politics without an underlying cause that makes politics a means to an end of development and progress. This is the essence of the bad politics that the average Nigerian politicians is known for. “Who is a Nigerian politician?” is therefore a fundamental question that goes to the heart of the place and role of the political elite in nation-building. Apart from the Lee Kuan Yew example, Arnold Toynbee made the crucial argument that civilizations are distinguished by the prominence of creative minorities—“those who proactively respond to a civilization’s crisis and whose response allows that civilization to grow.” In A Study of History, Toynbee’s argument is that every civilization has a spiritual dimension that can be restored or renewed. It is that creative minority that Nigeria needs in order to recuperate her national greatness through institutional renewal and developmental resurgence. This is the noble cause that demands living for politics; that brings the politician and the institutional reformer together. It is in this sense that I could ever fathom staying in the corridor of political power—the hope that a set of political class could whip up the political will to push through specific sets of reforms that will constitute the core of national regeneration.
Nigeria’s future is a delicate one that could only be righted through a visionary leadership coalition between the political class and the institutional reformers, working together to strategically redirect Nigeria’s ship of state. The political elite, like Lee Kuan Yew and his band of revolutionaries, must first commit elite suicide and be resurrected as allies of Nigerians, armed with an ideological coherence that mobilize youthful human capital, comprehensive institutional reforms and strategic policy intelligence to generate a development agenda that will stimulate a productivity paradigm geared towards infrastructural development. All these coalesce into the political will, for instance, to reengineer the business model that powers the public service through the MDAs in terms of performance management, human resource management and productivity. And transforming the public service into a formidable engine that marks Nigeria’s entry into the fourth industrial revolution demands, as a fundamental imperative, the recruitment of a new breed of transformational professionals that are knowledgeable and technologically-savvy to push the bounds of the civil service as a world class institution into the twenty-first century.
Transforming Nigeria into the image of our desire is first a function of a recalcitrant optimism; the belief in the possibility of Nigeria, united and developing positively. The optimism that the beautiful ones have been born already and are waiting for that strategic realignment of leadership on which Nigeria’s qualitative metamorphosis depends. Says Bob Iger, the CEO at Disney: “What I’ve really learned over time is that optimism is a very, very important part of leadership.” What will lead to elite suicide in the first place is the willing optimism of the political class to gamble on development, on the hope that Nigeria and her diversity can be harnessed for a better development agenda. Gambling on Nigeria demands initiating a political cause worth living and dying for; it implies lighting the fuse of development by opting for the option of serving Nigeria.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa
Retired Federal Permanent Secretary
& Professor of Public Administration
