Unlocking the Nigerian growth potential  

DAMILARE EBENIZA

Damilare Ebeniza studied Political Science and International Relations in Nigeria, Benin Republic, and France, with a research focus on Nigerian history, economy, and foreign politics. He has experience as a conference interpreter and external relations management across Chad, Niger, Mali, and Guinea Conakry, for governmental, regional and international organisations in West Africa. He is an analyst for West African Democracy Radio in Dakar, Senegal and actively contributes to critical dialogues shaping the region’s socio-political landscape. Proficient in French, English, and four additional non-Nigerian African languages, he embodies a commitment to cross-cultural understanding and effective communication. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com 

In a world of rapid changes, certain things have to remain constant if we are to remain in charge of our destiny. Prime among these things is the idea of change itself. That is the ability to appreciate not only how things have come to be what they are today, but also the capacity to identify the key drivers of that change. A society’s ability to identify and influence these key drivers determines whether that society is able to mobilise its resources to chart a path of its own choosing, or just blindly careen towards an unknown future.

The first part of this article was about identifying the key driver behind the economic situation our nation now finds herself.  Perhaps the best summary of this was succinctly made in recent time by some of the Nigeria Labour Union leaders: If politicians can spend as much money as they now spend on themselves; surely the Country is rich enough to pay half a million Naira of minimum wage. To both the politicians and the labour leaders, Nigeria’s problem, it seems, is not that of productivity, but that of a fair distribution. If we are to get out of this situation, our nation urgently needs another kind of public discourse. As Einstein was quoted to have put it, ‘we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them’. 

The sort of public discourse I am referring to was alluded to by the former Governor of the Nigeria Central Bank and new Emir of Kano, Muhamnmadu Sanusi II, in his Igbinedion University Okada Eight Convocation Lecture delivered in 2010. The Emir began his lecture with this simple yet profound sentence: “Nigeria’s economic aspirations have remained that of altering the structure of production and consumption patterns’’. There is only one way to do this: Reduce our current consumption and invest in key areas of our economy to unlock our people’s productive potential.

In case you are wondering what is meant by ‘Nigeria productive potential’, let me quote from a 2014 book titled The triple package, How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America by AMY CHUA AND JED RUBENFELD: ‘Among black immigrants, Nigerians are the largest and most successful group. In 2010, there were some 260,000 Nigerians in the US., a mere 0.7 percent of the black American population. Yet in 2013, 20 to 25 percent of the 120 black students at Harvard Business School were Nigerians. As early as 1999, Nigerians were overrepresented among black students at elite American colleges and universities by a factor of about ten. As Nigerians graduate from these schools, they have predictably flourished. Nigerians have done particularly well in medicine. Overall, Nigerian Americans probably make up around 10 percent of the nation’s black physicians while medicine may not even be the real Nigerian forte. By comparison to other blacks in the United States, according to a PhD dissertation on high-achieving second generation Nigerian Americans, “Nigerians dominate’’ investment banking.  Or as one Afro-American analyst at Goldman Sachs joked recently, “if my only life experiences were at Goldman, my impression would be that Nigeria must have a billion people, because most of the black people I met were Nigerian.’’ It may be worth noting here that all this was before the current Japa phenomenon.

How are Nigerians able to succeed massively in a land where the race to the top is among the toughest, but not in their own country? How many more generations of Nigerians do we have to force out of this land or force into crime before this level of collective failure is something we no longer tolerate?  

If we are serious about building a nation that works, we need to elevate our public discourse beyond building boreholes or selling off national assets to fund palliatives. The failure to manage the initial crisis in the 80s and the 90s has sown a seed of mistrust in our society between those who lead and the people. The fruit of that seed has permeated every aspect of our public life as a nation to a point that one of the key skills for success as a politician is the ability to water that seed of mistrust. The consequence of this is that the minimum level of trust required for our society to confidently chart a course for a better future is absent. Our public discourse is more and more dominated by muddled headed babblers whose best contribution is in pulling us apart.

Let me conclude by sharing with the reader a metaphor on how I see Nigeria. Each ethnic, political, or religious group in this country is like the two hands of a pianist. For the pianist to produce great sounds, the two hands have to work together, or if you prefer, collaborate. For this collaboration to be possible at all, each hand has to maintain a level of autonomy vis-a-vis the other. In other words, each hand has to be able to play its tune independently. The collaboration comes in precisely at the level of coordination of the artistic expression of each hand to form a coherent whole. Each side brings something unique that when put together produces a greater tune than each hand could have produced alone.

What we seem to be doing is tantamount to each hand doing the best to obstruct one another from playing. Great tunes demand long hours of hard work together. Nigeria has been at this for more than 77 years now. It is time to unleash that “unified interest beyond the realm of tribal jealousies’’. This is the only way to stop our great country from becoming the prison of nations.

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