Two recent events; first, the hard hitting remarks of a former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and the 14th Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, at the just concluded Kaduna Investment Summit, as well as this week’s annual Chief Emeka Anyaoku Lecture, which the keynote address was delivered by this columnist, have set one thinking about good governance and its centrality to a country’s well-being.
One of the good points of Sanusi’s intervention, part of which has been quoted in the opening paragraph, is that he employed the relevant statistics not to occlude Nigeria’s harsh reality but to paint the picture as it is. For example, demonstrating that Nigeria spends more than its total earnings to service her ever soaring debts, he explained that if the country continued on that rate, it would mean that next year, at least, we would use all our earnings to service, not pay up debts, and then go a-borrowing to make up for the difference, given that debt serving gulps down over 100 per cent of our income. In other words, after borrowing to service our debts, we will have to keep borrowing to pay salaries, build infrastructure, and maintain health and education.
This shows how really desperate the economy has become, and makes one wonder whether like the fictional Rip Van Winkle who slept for several years and, on waking up, expected that the world would have remained the same. Those who had the charge to run our economy were not fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
Along the same lines, The PUNCH, quoting the Debt Management Office, reported on Saturday that under the Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) regime, our debts galloped from N12.12tn in June 2015 to N39.12tn this year. That is not the end of the story. The administration is seeking to borrow a humongous N8.80tn to finance the deficit in next year’s budget. It will take a careful analysis for one to match the scale of borrowing, the character of the debts with deliverables, and how much of the fund extended to us will meet integrity tests but that is a matter for another day. The point to note here is that Sanusi was not being merely sensational, but letting the public see what a straitjacket Nigeria will have to wear soon given the enumerated borrowing spree.
This brings us to our elusive search for good governance, which is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “the effective and responsible management of an organisation, a county etc. which includes considering society’s needs in the decisions it makes.” We can interrogate this definition which focuses on the quality of decision-making by asking why our earnings have dipped so dramatically at a time when the price of oil made an upward cascade in the world market. A good deal of the answer connects oil theft, which has afflicted what is supposed to be our cash cow for over a year now. Sadly, we still do not know whether anyone connected with that subversive activity have been arrested or even apprehended: a silence that is becoming characteristic, not to say dangerous, as it connotes that those who are in a position to arrest the racket may be looking the other way while Nigeria bleeds.
Matching this to the definition of good governance as a feature piloted to be the public good and sound decision-making that is in the collective interest, there is obviously a disconnect. Why would a highly indebted country inching towards bankruptcy allow the goose that lays the golden egg be so ravaged? There is no doubt, therefore, that to the extent that good governance is cardinal to the building of a nation and the husbanding of its resources, it cannot be said that the trauma Nigerians are going through is a result of careful, calculated and qualitative decision-making. Somewhere along the line, those who were expected to have taken responsible decisions may very well have dropped the ball.
This is not the only area in which the principles of good governance have not been applied. Good a thing, security forces are combining to smoke the bandits and terrorists out of their dens, presumably, to clear the ground for the peaceful conduct of the forthcoming 2023 elections. What is not clear, however, is whether that spirited action could not have been taken a year or two ago before several of these groups occupied communities and territories, becoming more formidable and more daring, while we appeared to look on hopelessly. It would have been tidier and nicer if the current offensive, for which the security apparatus deserves kudos, had been undertaken before more direct attacks on the Federal Capital Territory and threats to the President put the nation on tenterhooks. Returning to good governance will now happen, hopefully, in circumstances of emergency, including the continuing war on terror with associated costs and with a financially straitened economy struggling to service hefty debts, while struggling to maintain governmental apparatus.
It is not clear how and why Nigeria got into its current mess, but it at least has the option to return in 2023 to a far less murky and marshy terrain than it is in now. Still on good governance principles, a fortnight or so ago, the governors of the Northern states rose from a meeting to demand the creation of state police in order for the country to fully address and be better equipped to tackle spreading terrorism and banditry. Recall that this demand has been articulated times without number and some states even went ahead to introduce Amotekun in the South-West, Ebubeagu in the South-East, Benue State Volunteer Corps in the Middle Belt and a similar outfit in Katsina State. This implies that the logic of an over-centralised security institution is being overtaken by events and the danger of being overwhelmed at the community level by adventurers from neighbouring and far countries. In spite of the clamour and outcry from afflicted Nigerians, the recent constitutional review exercise did not take account of this influential demand, again showing that the proactive character of good governance are often ostentatiously ignored or sidestepped.
If Nigeria will find its way out of the enveloping woods, we must turn the forthcoming elections into a vote for good governance rather than allow the country to drift further into uncertainty, and the failure to apply to techniques of state building, political order as well as take decisions which will secure not just our future but that of our offsprings.
It was a former lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University, Dr Patrick Wilmot, who said that unless Nigeria charted a new path, future generations would ask why there were so few wise men among us.
It is not too late to avert such a dreadful scenario, but the way out must be a reset of leadership in Nigeria via the auspices of good governance.
Professor Ayo Olukotun is a director at the Oba (Dr.) S. K. Adetona Institute for Governance Studies, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye.
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