The Nation, June 30, 2011
Imperative of developmental state in post-50 Nigeria
By Chikwendu Christian Ukaegbu 17 hours 16 minutes ago
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Most commentators on Nigeria’s semi-centennial anniversary in 2010 blamed the wasted opportunities and poor performance of the country on dismal leadership of successive governing groups. Beginning with the epochal class of 2011, orientation to leadership and governance must change if the next semi-centennial is to avoid the lapses, wastage and the unbridled deviance of past leadership. The new orientation, therefore, must be premised on the idea of a developmental state for Nigeria. A developmental state is not an abstract entity. It is people in leadership positions- nationalistic and patriotic elected officials, bureaucrats and technocrats in collaboration with the private sector-who proactively pursue policies and actions that transform the national socioeconomic environment while at the same time are accountable to those they lead.
A developmental state believes that the most important tool of development is human resource, citizens, who, with good leadership, can multiply natural resources to uplift themselves and society on a sustainable basis. A developmental state is similar to a transformational leadership. It is imaginative, courageous in asserting autonomy from domestic and external vested interests, constructs a utopia of the type of society it aspires to build, has bold visions, and takes bold steps to implement its visions. It makes leaders out of followers so that the latter can effectively mobilize the larger society to pursue the collective end. Subordinates of the apex leader, say the President, in a developmental state exercise capacity to mobilize those below them. In which case, ministers, bureaucrats and technocrats in the executive branch have high leadership propensities as well as freedom and motivation to use those propensities in the national interest. The national legislature of a developmental state is focused, courageous, imaginative, and makes transformational rather than mundane and self-serving laws. Such are the expectations at state and local government levels also.
Governors are leaders of mini developmental states. They must see the economic development of their states as their immediate and primary responsibility, not that of the federal government. If the federal government has primary responsibility for the development of each of the 36 states, what are states and local governments for? Since the end of the civil war, state governors, commissioners, state legislators and local government councillors have behaved like barons, lords, and vassals of the federal government in which the President acts as emperor in a feudalistic system. Everybody looks at the federal government as the only source of development and blames it for all developmental failures but overlook the perennial and intractable inertia at state and local levels. We read of billions and billions of naira of federal allocations to state and local governments yet the physical and economic ambience of states and local government areas, and the quality of life of their people, remain almost same year after year.
Whatever improvements and optimism observed in the lives of people derive from their personal struggles rather than from the efforts of their state and local governments to provide business environments that broaden and deepen the economic sector. In many instances, the infrastructures under the responsibility of state and local governments are hardly maintained, nor modernized, nor are they expanded to take care of growing populations. Many communities provide their own electricity and water, fix their roads, and refurbish their schools, even though the monies that are allocated to states and local governments belong to the people. State and local government officials should regularly hold accountability sessions in public town meetings to enable the people to know how officials spend public money and to provide opportunities for them to be participants in the development process.
Therefore the rule of thumb definition of development as’ improvement in quality of life of citizens’ is not a helpful model for steering development. Resources with which to improve quality of life do not fall from the sky nor can handouts, domestic or foreign, improve quality of life on a sustainable basis. Development is the result of the efforts and activities of the citizens themselves. Therefore my definition of development for Nigeria is as follows, development is the capacity of citizens, under the leadership of a developmental state, to deploy their creative and physical energies to transform their natural, social, and economic resources for a better quality of life on a continuing basis. In another venue, I used this conception of development to show how Nigeria can enhance its oil refining capability through the instrumentality of academic refineries; how it can expand the paint and plastics industries and create thousands of jobs by a simple policy anchored in a philosophy of environmental face-lifting, or how to strengthen, broaden and deepen national entrepreneurship and the industrial sector through state procurement of its needs from local firms except those products that are not available locally.
Recall, last year, when the Executive Council of the Federation approved the importation of one thousand plastic bins for garbage collection in Abuja. A development-conscious elite, i.e. a political elite that takes development seriously/a developmental state, can never do that. A government in one African country accepted a paltry $13 million from a foreign outfit to fish on its waters for four years. The superior fishing technology of the foreign firm quickly depleted the fish population, displaced indigenous fishermen and women, and increased unemployment and economic insecurity in the area. History shows that developmental states do not enter into agreements that put their citizens in precarious positions. A development scholar recently lamented that Nigeria’s 200 textile firms are now down to less than 40. A developmental state would not have allowed that to happen on its watch given the historical role of the textile industry in the industrial development of nations.
A developmental state knows that globalization creates winners and losers, and that guided free trade rather than unbridled free trade has been the norm in global capitalism from time. There is no known case of a pure neoliberal political economy at least in the last 500 years of the modern world system. Even European mercantilism which preceded the modern world system was steered by activist and interventionist states, developmental states they were indeed. I therefore submit that the history of the nation-state is the history of state intervention in the economy. Hence the political economy of national self-interest, including avoiding the debt burden, has been essential, and remains essential, for the success of national development endeavors.
Countries that make it on the development path seek ways to avoid the burdens of foreign debt. The cancellation of a sizeable chunk of Nigeria’s foreign debt by core countries several years ago took the country off the debt burden. The country was expected to restart its journey to development on a clean slate without the burden of debt servicing. But that optimism immediately died because Nigerian political officials resorted to borrowing from the same international actors and supranational agencies that forgave the country’s debt. Nigeria paid the final installment of its foreign debt in April 2006. By May 2011, only five years after freedom from debt, data from the Debt Management Office put the country’s foreign debt at $5.32 billion, steadily marching to the $18 billion debt forgiveness it benefitted from. Sadly, the debt relief dividend anticipated by the people and international agencies turned out to be a mirage after all. There hardly is an alternative explanation to this addiction to foreign indebtedness than the dependent mentality of the political leadership predicated on an absence of a development-conscious elite or a developmental state. Recourse to the developmental state therefore holds the key to an optimistic post semi-centennial Nigeria.
• Ukaegbu is Professor of Sociology & Development Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA (c-ukaegbu@northwestern.edu)
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