Nigeria at 64, where individual comfort trumps national greatness (2)  

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 

Nigeria has survived a Civil War, multiple military coups, a serious election crisis, two presidents who died in office, and a president-elect who died in custody. You cannot call that a failed state. That for me is not a country with weak institutions. Thanks to the internet, we are distant from reality in our country as well as around us. As long as we are not France, the United Kingdom, China, or the United States of America or even South Africa, whatever we achieve would be called into question. As bad as the Nigerian economy was in the last 8 years, Nigeria has created more private wealth than most countries in Africa. Yes, many have gotten poorer. Some have become richer too. Families who, 20 years ago, could not afford admission fees of foreign universities are paying highly priced flight tickets for their children or themselves to study abroad.  As bad as we seem to describe the situation in our country today, very few would like to go back to Nigeria of the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s or even the 1990s. Yes, we are not where we want to be. But we have come a long way. 

I know there are many who think of our people as ignorant fools who are too weak to complain and have resigned their faith. This even comes from those who have had the opportunity to serve Nigeria at the highest level. We hear people who talk at our people complaining about how disappointed they are because the people are not protesting enough. The reality is that the people in the villages are still proud men and women who would not want to depend on anyone for their livelihood. They will accept whatever sacrifice it takes to turn Nigeria around if the political class could act responsibly enough to gain their trust. What they do not want, however, are government decisions that erode the value of their labour through currency depreciation every 30 years. It is, by far, the biggest injustice in Nigeria.

The last few elections have convinced me that most Nigerians believe in Nigeria but not in the current political class, either in opposition or in government.  And this has nothing to do with the North versus South versus East hogwash. The total number of Nigerians who were able to vote in the last Presidential election was less than 40 million in a country of more than 220 million people. In the recent governorship election in Edo, the total number of eligible registered voters was more than 2.2 million. The total number of those who voted for the three leading candidates was less than 600,000. The new governor was elected with less than 300,000 votes. That is less than 15 percent of eligible voters if we choose to ignore those who could not register. In practical terms, the meaning of citizen in Nigeria today is still very narrow. This is not bad so long as the focus is on expanding it.

But what do our Senior Advocates of Nigeria and their likes talk about after each election? In plain language, they complain their candidate did not win.  Of course, not with this much candour. One has to read between the lines to get to the heart of their complaints. The words they use are reform INEC and the Judiciary. None of them seems to care enough about how this country can guarantee for all eligible citizens the basic right to vote. Elite discussions, election after election, give the impression that our elections are a context between people who want power much more than they want a country.  Politicians, and this is what most of our intellectual elites are, who diminish the reach of their legitimacy to retain power deny themselves the opportunity to exercise real leadership and power.

The biggest threat this country faces today is not economic collapse; it is not Boko Haram; it is our elite’s confiscation of what Nigeria means and their attempt to edit out the lived experiences of many of our fellow countrymen and women from our collective consciousness. When most Nigerians hear about Internally Displaced People, or flood in Borno, it is as distant to them as what is going on in Sudan right now.  But mention Bobrisky! At a time when most powerful nations are reintroducing some form of mandatory military services for their young boys and girls, extending the meaning of our Nigerian citizenship beyond current narrow reach is a matter of national security. 

One indication of the hubris of our elites is the form our youth empowerment programmes take. We have about 2.4 million unemployed graduates in this country.  Whichever way you look at it, these are people with the best chances of getting a decent job in Nigeria today. And in part they are also among those who have benefited from some sort of investment from the state. These are also the core targets of most, if not all, of our youth empowerment programme. The more than 50 million unemployed or poorly employed who did not go to school seem to be nobody’s business.

The reason for this is simple, the educated class and their parents are among the loudest in this country. They and their parents are also among the first to get out of this country when presented with the opportunity. It is also this class of Nigeria who fund projects like the biggest churches in the world when many of their countrymen depend on donations from abroad. It is the children of the few Elites who benefited greatly from Nigeria that turned our cities and now villages into places where, in 2024, we have more churches than schools and hospitals combined.

The wickedness is so blatant, the brutish nature of it so unthinkable that one just has to ask how did we get here? How does one make sense of the fact that a few educated Nigerians have convinced our people to build churches instead of hospitals for themselves or schools for their children. That those who brought us here are called Men of God is the best irony I could imagine. Or is there anyone who believes that if 50 percent of churches were schools and hospitals our people would not be better off for it. Yet in this broken reality of ours, we romanticise spiritual gangsterism by describing it as the work of God.

The idea of returning Nigeria to what some called the 1963 Constitution, Regionalism or, if the reader prefers, true federalism with the Northern, Eastern and Western regions is predicated on the belief that, after more than 50 years of effort to integrate the various communities or ethnic groups that form what we call Nigeria, we have now realised that Nigeria cannot be more than close ethnic bound regions who work to live peacefully as neighbours. While to some this may be a realistic view, it is, to me, not only a confession of our failure and a lack of appreciation for the sacrifice made to get us here, but a misreading of the current Nigeria situation. 

If we can give ourselves some distance from the various noises in the media and from those whose university credentials and titles appear to be too big to the point of clouding their judgement and look at the most successful states in Nigeria today, we will see that these are also the states with the largest number of Nigerians from other states. Those are the most ethnically diverse parts of our nation.  If Lagos, Kaduna, Kano, Port Harcourt, or Ibadan were businesses, and the metrics for their bottom lines were economic growth and national integration, what some call failure today is a 20-year project of other more homogenous cities in our country. 

This is not just a Nigerian thing. Human beings, the world over, go to where their productivity could generate more wealth. As economists would tell us, often, the places these immigrants left behind are, on the long run, better off for it. Japa is not because those who leave hate Nigeria. The promise of earning more, of security and the life such earning could afford is an important factor. There are more successful non-Yoruba men or women living in Lagos today than at any time in our history. And Lagos is not alone in this.  The ability of places like Kano, Lagos, Abuja, or Port Harcourt to attract investments and skilled professionals from all over the country would be key not only to our nation’s economic growth but her integration. 

The challenge before this generation is not to retrace our constitutional steps in the historical wilderness of the past 64 years. That would be a colossal waste. The challenge worthy of our talent is to develop each part of the federation in a pareto efficient way; that is in a way that the growth of some is not at the expense of others.  There is no path to greatness or development for this country or any of its regions that goes through regionalism, confederation, or whatever failure-inspired idea of the future some of our eminent patriots are suggesting. As anyone who shows enough interest in the recent economic growth of India could testify, no Indian leader since her independence in 1947 has centralised political power as the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Yet India has seen a sustained level of growth unimaginable 30 years ago. If India could organise one and a half billion people speaking close to 20,000 languages, with 22 official languages, into a prosperous nation and a rising global power, I would like to think there is enough intelligence and will power in Nigeria today to organise less than 250 million people into a prosperous, proud, and integrated first black nation on earth. For this to happen we have to stop defining ourselves by the fear and violence ridden interactions or failures of yesterday and focus on the challenge this moment in our history throws at us.

I agree with the concerns raised by the Northern governors about the ongoing Tax Reform. But the current WE versus THEM rhetoric is not helpful for any region. When a Nigerian Senator tells us that their people do not want an increase in Value Added Tax, that may be true. But those the Honourable Senator referred to as ‘our people’ are also Nigerians and, therefore, our people too.  And rather than focusing on what Nigerians do not want, it may be more helpful to talk about what they need right now and how to get it.

Even if our senior government officials accept to work for free, the resources generated from such patriotic self-sacrifice would not address any of our national challenges. Our people, and by this, I mean all the poor people in Nigeria, do not need a government handout. What they need is a hand so that they can stand on their own feet. The current economy in which every government policy plunges our most vulnerable, honest, and hard-working people into unspeakable poverty cannot continue. That we are borrowing money just so our people could remain this poor should inspire us to do things differently.

I agree there cannot be a proper Tax Reform without an accompanying 5 to 10 years funded development plan for some of the poorest states in our country. The details of such a plan, the funding of which should be conditioned on the progressive increase of the recipient state internally generated revenue to make up for the gradual phasing out of federal government intervention, could be ironed out concurrently with the discussions on the Tax Reform bill in the Senate. The conversation about who is to blame for this or that may be interesting to some. What our people are expecting from our political class, however, is leadership.

To those who still do not understand why our country needs a Tax Reform now, it may help to know that Kenya, a country of 55 million people, has a budget of around 28 billion dollars for the year 2023-2024 while the Senate of Nigeria, a country of at least four times the population of Kenya, passed a budget of 34 billion dollars for the same year. If you are wondering, why is it that the Nigerian army is fast becoming a drone firing police force, wonder no more. Check the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics data on the changes to real household consumption rate relative to Gross Domestic Product and ask who are the most impacted by say, a 24 percent drop in Q1 of 2023. Civilisation, it is often said, is a thin veneer, scratch below it, and you will find anarchy, poverty, and insecurity.

The choice before us is clear: we can continue to borrow to manage this level of poverty until no one is willing to lend us more money or we can take a stand and say, for the sake of those coming after us, ‘those who have more have to consume less’. Tax is how this is done effectively. I get the argument that our politicians are corrupt and spend a good deal of national wealth on themselves, etc. But refusing to pay our fair share is not a position of responsible citizens. Politicians come and go but a national character formed by demanding more when we contribute little can only create the kind of states the French economist Frederic Bastiat defined as “the great fiction by which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else”. Reality can be violent in dispelling such fiction when taken too far.

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