In search of a one-sentence description of the main challenges facing the Nigerian economy, one could do no better than point to the need for rapid growth and development. Partly, as with all rising tides, this should lift all actors in the domestic economy.
But it should also help even out the current extremes of affluence and want. At a granular level, this reading of the problem is about several interlinked concepts and processes. In no specific order, it is about deepening and broadening the national education curriculum, while democratising access to it. Thus described, this section of the conversation is as much about riding the many streams of innovation in technology that the world is currently experiencing, as it is about ensuring that, at the minimum, our girl children complete secondary school. Increased labour force participation amongst women especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses fixes several problems. It boosts productivity, addresses population issues, and forces us to confront much of the gender biases that underpin our cultures.
Population concerns are readily alleviated by an efficient healthcare system, where users at least meet the cost of providing services. Full employment, on the other hand, is as dependent on the free entry of employers into the diverse markets that the country comprises, as the success of these employers are contingent on the absence of constraints to supplies in these markets. Unfortunately, when free markets are argued for as part of contributions to the discourse on economic growth and development, the tendency, at least, amongst large parts of our echo chambers is to presume the redundancy of the state. Yet the state is implicated in the efficient functioning of markets, simply by the need to maintain a regulatory environment that prioritises the welfare of consumers. When the state plights its troth to any other set of priorities, especially the building of national industrial champions, as has been the wont of our policymakers over the years, it nearly always distorts the proper functioning of markets, and by extension the allocative efficiency of the economy.
Over the years, Nigerians' growing economic needs (and the obvious incapacity of the state to meet them) has fuelled an often-internecine debate about appropriate policy choices. The market, advertised as the most efficient means of allocating domestic resources (except for public goods, where the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" might impede investment) is increasingly recognised by its advocates as most unkind to those who fail at it. Responding to the possibility of these failures, our policymakers continue to vote overwhelmingly to protect possible victims of market failures without putting markets in place. Denied the revenues from trade and commerce that markets support, government has gone about this duty of protection by leveraging its export of hydrocarbons. But because the oil and gas sector is an exclave (pace Chu S. P. Okongwu) of the economy, the spending that this policy choice has supported wrought more harm than good on the economy.
In the fraught environment that is the Nigerian economy today, this debate has both a new urgency and intensity to it. Today, there is a fín de siècle quality to the country, careening as it were towards an ineluctable date with a destiny whose outcome, based on our current experiences, may not be anything like we would have voted for.
Scary, though, this outlook is, at bottom, all the preceding are but symptoms of a deeper malaise. At the core of our problems as a people, is the nature of our politics. As the current government demonstrates anew, we do not do merit and competence well. Years ago, a much younger boss once told me that he was willing to trade "aptitude" in for "attitude" all the time. For, according to him, you could train for aptitude. Attitude, on the other hand, especially one that is not sufficiently deferential, is often ingrained, and harder to sublimate. So, across corporate Nigeria I have seen bosses encourage groupthink for as long as the ethics and values around which the group coheres are theirs.
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The resulting herd may make for good followers; but is never going to solve problems easily, as it is always looking to take its cues from the "leader". Consistent with the "kabiyesi" complex, our politics thrives on generating a herd of loyal followers, but no more. Our economy, alas, clearly needs much more than "idobale" (the prostration before elders and bosses by the youths and subordinates that the Yorùbá esteem as a mark of respect) and "aláyè" (preferment for explanations over action) to move forward.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
