Thursday 29 July 2021
CAN NIGERIA EVER DEVELOP?
Anti-Development Values of Political Leadership in Nigeria.
The values of premitive acquisition of wealth prevalent among political class since the Advent of military intervention in democracy in the 60s has boomeranged into underdevelopment CULTURE for Nigeria as amalgamated nations.
For every good Nigeria history student, it is observable that the first set of political leadership that featured Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikwe, Anthony Enahoro, Tafawa Balewa et all were highly scholastic valued.
Our anti- development values originated from the emergence of military in the sixties. This led to emergence of leaders of low scholastic values and consequently low perception of development, such as the then Gowon, Obasnjo, Buhari et al .
This structure ever since has been static in our political domain. Consequently a latter dimension to this phenomenon is religious nepotism of the northern protectorate of the amalgamation. From the body language of these special breed of leaders, followers from that region have imbibed concept of percieving knowledge as "Western culture". This has culminated into a brainwashed movement such as Boko Haram, Bandits and kidnappers who have openly declared war against knowledge.
On the other hand, in the southern protectorate, where we have the so called "educated elites" the concept is still very narrow and it has an unfortunate toll on the young generation. Many of the educated political elites down south still see development as "capacity to purchase state of the art manufactured products. Others see it as acquisition of massive static structures. Such concept is obvious in special interest in real estate, emergence of economically floating FCT, Banana Island, etc. and less attention on stuffs like research, power generation and education. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to observe if our leaders really see any relationship between research and development (R and D).
At this junction, what is development?
There are a lot of literatures by concerned scholars on this topic already. But to simplify this for the sake of perception of ordinary mind, let's focus on it as " capacity building". For example, a people with capacity to produce electric motor and integrated circiut are more developed than people that live in mansions and cruises around in electic vehicles with an I- phone.
Coming around to our present day context of nationhood, the culture of apathy towards capacity building has passed through generational phase. Education to government now is a " commercial good" as opposed to social good. At the receiving end are the young generations
who are now placing more emphasis on aquisition of IT devices for entertainment purposes as opposed to real inherent opportunity of "difussion of innovation".
This differentiation of shared values, makes Nigeria question a complex one.
Ashby law of requisite variety states: every complex problem requires procedure of equivalent complexity to control it"
However, in the case of Nigeria as it is now, there is no capacity to create a procedure of equivalent complexity to develop.
Let us ask ourselves, what is the capacity of Nigeria to build conventional five simple machines?. Why are our hospitals substandard? Is it because there are no qualified doctors? Of course not, it is largely because there are no state of the art medical equipments and power to drive them.
Just recently minister of transportation talked about why the standard guage rail was not given to local contractors. He opined that they lack requisite equipments and experience. Just recently again an APC chieftain claimed Buhari's regime is the best in the country because it has built many road and rail infrastructures. All these instances are confirmation of parochial and narrow minded understanding of what development is to an average political class in Nigeria.
Some years back, Microsoft founder Bill Gates visited Aso Villa where he advised the players there to invest in "human capital" first before physical capital. Our erudite vice president, responded by pointing out government's efforts to do that with automatic cash transfer to extremely poor people. This another scenario of misconception of what development should be.
Obviously, Bill Gates was talking about capacity building while VP Osibajo was making reference to poverty alleviation which is far away from poverty eradication. The latter can only be achieved by capacity building.
If we continue the same way since independence, to keep selling our natural resources to purchase manufactured products, our dream of development remains a mirage adifinitum.
Conclusion.
The way forward to resolve a complex questions of Nigeria is to resort to simplification. This can be by the way of restructuring or by the way of breaking down the structure into smaller manageable units.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)