What do we lack?

“I must say that today is a sad day for me. And I think it should be for all Nigerians, when 20 leaders of the leading countries in the world are meeting and Nigeria is not there. This is something we need to reflect upon. We have the population, we have the potentials, we have the ability and capacity and we have the will. What do we lack? Is it the will that we lack? Honestly and sincerely, to realise these potentials…potentials are nothing unless they are realised. No matter the potential you have, unless you work on it, it will not be realised. No matter the potential you have, unless you work on it, it will not be realised. We must realise it and lead the nation to realise it. This is what we must do and PDP must do to realise its potentials.”-President Umaru Musa Yar’adua addressing the PDP National Executive Committee (NEC) on Thursday April 2, 2009 in Abuja.

President Yar’adua must be commended for raising these weighty and serious issues. It is somewhat comforting to know that this matter agitates our President’s mind as one might otherwise have thought from the actions of the regime that we didn’t care what the world or even domestic audiences thought about us. But all Nigerian patriots must take up these questions and help the President, his party and his colleagues in government at the federal, state and local government levels find the right answers to these important questions. Fortunately or unfortunately we don’t have any other country!

I was tempted to give a short, one-word, ten-letter answer to the President’s enquiry-leadership! Chikena!!!But then I decided to interrogate the questions more carefully and see whether we can reach some deeper diagnosis. I discovered that there are in fact several things we lack which I will outline here. First, an enlightened elite with a consensus on where we want to take Nigeria to, and how. We have a short-sighted, self-seeking, selfish and parochial elite. I can also add self-destructive. Our elite cannot identify their long-term sustainable interests. Everyone seeks personal short-cuts and compromises the system. When an individual is in power, he forgets he will one day leave, and acts only for personal benefit instead of creating a system from which all can gain. It is not unusual for such persons to start complaining bitterly when they leave office.

Our elite do not recognise that poverty and under-development breed crime, insecurity and social crisis from which even the wealthy suffer. Rather than build a hospital, the Nigerian elite steals the money, and then flies their relatives to South Africa, Egypt, England when they are sick. Secondly we lack a committed and selfless political class. I once listened in shock to a gubernatorial aspirant in my state disclose that when a leading ‘godfather’ recruited him into politics, he was clearly informed that this was not about service to anyone but themselves! So we have entrepreneur politicians looking for food to eat! Unfortunately by the time they have more than enough to eat, stealing has become a habit and they can no longer stop!

Thirdly we do not have a national identity and purpose. We think in terms of Northern, Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw interests and the like. Our narrow ethnic, sectarian, group and communal agenda are stronger than the national identity so we often see the same issue in different lights based on misguided considerations. As a result the nation is immobilised as we seek a lowest common denominator to which everyone has no objection, rather than a highest common factor to which all agree. Fourthly we do not have a progressive value system and social ethos. Our social values have degenerated as a combined result of oil, unaccountable governments and corruption. Today our values are defined almost exclusively by money and power and society is undermined as each individual acts against the interest of sustainable society.

Fifth our public life is not characterised by resourcefulness and productivity. While individually Nigerians have these characteristics in abundance, our country has developed a prebendal culture of sharing, consumption and distribution rather than production. We gather all finance commissioners to Abuja every month to share oil proceeds rather than (as in the first republic) every region or state contributing resources based on its productivity. There are other things we lack-a professional and courageous civil service (we used to have this, but it was destroyed by the military purges and corruption); our business class is not universally committed to innovation and entrepreneurial value creation (instead with some exceptions, we have a rent-seeking, contractor, crony capitalist class); our military started by giving us officer-gentlemen like Gowon, Mobolaji Johnson and Hassan Katsina, but ended up with Abachas and El-Mustaphas; and there are many other things we used to have that we have destroyed-a principled world-class academia, vibrant student’s unions and labour movements, media, religious institutions, and the professions, many deliberately destroyed by soldiers or politicians or subverted by corruption. And then I realised that I had come full circle. It all boils down to leadership! All of these things are about leadership! Mr President, what we need is leadership!