USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: PROF. Olukotun's Column

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-----Original Message-----
From: Faith Adebiyi <faithadebiyi01@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2016 12:19:07
To: <ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>
Subject: PROF. Olukotun's Column

NIGERIA AT 56: BETWEEN ADVERSITY AND OPPORTUNITY
AYO OLUKOTUN
Tomorrow, Nigeria's Independence Anniversary coincides with what some have
described as the worst recession in its postcolonial history. Economists
disagree over the depth and possible length of the slump, but it is hard,
if not insensitive to ignore the tell-tale signs of adversity all around
us, especially as it affects the embattled citizenry, several of which are
dying silently, some coping in heroic ways with the severe downturn.
Come with me first however, to Oloibiri, a small community in Ogbia Local
Government of Bayelsa State, which on November 30 this year, will mark the
60th anniversary of oil-find in Nigeria. Oloibiri, recall, was where
Nigeria's status as a petrol dollar state was born, with the first crude
oil export emanating from there in 1958. That community, despoiled, ravaged
and abandoned by the Nigerian State and oil multinationals, remains today
an open sore and a mockery of its illustrious antecedent as midwife of our
once glittering oil prosperity. A British engineer recently testified to
this when he reportedly said "I have worked in several oil producing
countries and I have never seen an oil producing community as desperately
poor and neglected as Oloibiri ".
Needless to say that Oloibiri and its picturesque abandonment is a metaphor
for the tragic failure of the Nigerian State to employ our collective
wealth to uplift the material status of the majority of its people,
including, especially the people of the Niger Delta. Presidents, governors,
'arrangee' elections have come and gone but Oloibiri, like most of our
communities sits in abjection, watching with frustration what great uses
the oil wealth has been put by an infinitesimal proportion of the elite.
Successive oil booms, even downturns have produced their billionaires
living in opulence of a scale comparable to American billionaires, but the
people who magically become real citizens only in election seasons are left
behind.
So where did the money go? That brings us to another dismal comparison
between Nigeria and other oil producing countries. In the on-going debate
about whether or not to sell our national assets, it became known that
several other oil producing countries had sold minority shares and stakes
in their national assets, in the case of Saudi Arabia, less than 5%. Why
were they sold? It was not to create another easy cash window and loose
spending for a consumptive elite, but to build up their Sovereign Wealth
Fund, so as to join the league of countries such as Norway and Abu Dhabi,
which have the highest Sovereign Wealth Funds, built up by modernising
political elites who prepare, not just for their own generation but future
ones as well.
Recall that Nigeria once toyed with the idea of a Sovereign Wealth Fund,
but it never really got off the ground because too many politicians and
their cronies wanted a piece of the action, with immediate effect. We do
not have a full account of how much money disappeared under the bend in
successive regimes, but if ongoing revelations are anything to go by, it
must be handsome enough to have transformed the country to an industrial
state with diversified avenues of wealth creation and earnings. Consider
the paradox: As an agricultural state, Nigeria built world class
universities which offered degrees as good as any in the English speaking
world; fashioned world class hospitals, created an emergent industrial
sector and scored a series of "Firsts in Africa".
Then came the petroleum rush and Nigeria had far more revenues from oil
than it could ever imagine. Then, institutions such as universities
multiplied, infrastructure expanded and opportunities for mass education
were to an extent seized. But this dizzying expansion, under Nigeria's
prebendal elite was not matched by quality. With each passing regime,
institutions, some of which once enjoyed global status shrivelled into
provincial organisations, universities which had ballooned to about 130 and
still counting, have long retreated, for the most part into mimicries of
their once glorious selves. Infrastructure became far less durable than
they once were, and under our emergent contratocracy, the phenomenon of
collapsed buildings, rickety roads, with short life spans, became more and
more pronounced. The professions, once the epicentre of an efflorescent
civil society declined, pushed to the back stage in the brave new world of
newly arrived political breeds, replete with tool kits for padding
elections, budgets, certificates, and justifying them as perfectly normal.
What went wrong? There was spiritual decentring, an ethical rank shifting,
and an aggressive philistinism celebrating easy money rather than time
tested virtues. In short, Nigeria lost its soul or sold it for a mess of
pottage in desecrating bazaars, in which the only value that counted was
how much money you had in your bank account. The politicians of the First
and Second Republics thought long and hard about national problems, wrote
books about them, surrounded themselves with think tanks, and engaged for
the most part in evidence based policy making. Today, in a shocking
lowering of the bar of public office, most politicians are educated
illiterates, several of them with forged or doctored certificates; do not
read any books or engage in intellectual activity at any serious level. For
them, the universe begins and ends with the Peoples' Democratic Party and
the All Progressive Congress, no wonder, all of Nigeria's problems for them
begins and ends with Jonathan or Buhari.
A broader perspective on our current economic challenges, was recently
provided by Professor Banji Oyeyinka, Director, Regional Office for Africa
of UN- Habitat. Postulated Oyeyinka: "Our current economic difficulties
stem in large part from our import mindedness, the absurd reliance on the
outside world for everything we use daily, eat, drink and build our
shelters with. Nigeria needs to diversify and invest heavily to bring back
manufacturing capacities and capabilities. The roots of our economic
problems run deep far back into our history and we are being naïve if we
ascribe the problems to events of the last one or so year alone".
Running deep similarly, is the recurrent question that will not go away in
a hurry, concerning under what terms and arrangements, should the diverse
peoples of Nigeria constitute a nation of unity in diversity. Most of our
leaders have merely postponed or papered over the huge cracks in the
national wall. Today's Nigeria, with several separatist agitations, evokes
the title of Karl Maier's influential book, entitled "This House Has
fallen". Not quite though, the house is in various stages of disrepair,
with parts of it crumbling but the edifice is repairable, if timely
renovations are made to it through a National Conference, using as basis
the 2014 National Conference. So, political adversity and divisiveness come
with the opportunity to reshape national destiny through interethnic
conversations that build bridges rather than bomb them.
Economic adversity also carries with it the seed bed of its own
amelioration, if we turn it to an opportunity to refashion the national
economy away from over reliance on imports, taking into account the need to
create new windows of economic activity in agriculture, services especially
Information Technology (IT) and strive harder to build a knowledge economy
by recovering our lost intellectual utopias. That is how to turn adversity
into opportunity.
In spite of all, Happy Independence Anniversary!

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