The US Elections

Four years ago, this columnist was probably one of the most enthusiastic pro-Obama platforms you could find. From the day I read The Audacity of Hope, and as the implications of a historic Barack Obama presidency dawned, my support for Obama became unqualified and resolute! Ironically, I had started off supporting Hillary Clinton rather than Obama when the Democratic primaries started, until I read Obama’s books and switched my support based not just on racial affinity, but for the inspiring and bold ideas enunciated in those books. By and large, I’ve been disappointed by Obama (and Clinton!). I do not know what he stands for! Obama has attempted to run a presidency that takes no risks. I recall that even during the period leading to the passage of his signature legislation – the healthcare reform – Obama passed the “transaction risks” to the House Democratic Caucus as he tried to minimise any negative impact on him if the legislation failed. It was the same attitude (or is it a strategy?) during the mid-term elections as he tried to distance himself and his presidency from the fortunes of his party’s congressional candidates, resulting in the famous “shellacking” which his party received resulting in the loss of the House of Representatives to the Republicans. It is in the area of foreign policy that Obama’s strategy has caused the most harm, in my view, resulting in a more chaotic global political and security environment. America has been right or wrong many times in history, but never has the world been unclear about what the US stood for! Under Obama, one cannot quite say the same. Obama has taken the strategy of passing the risks of global policymaking to others whenever the outcome was not predictable, resulting in a situation in which American leadership has been missing at critical moments. There are many illustrations of this, especially as the so-called Arab Spring developed. The US has not sufficiently stood by its values in Egypt (until after the recent Libyan debacle exposed the folly of that strategy) seemingly willing to tolerate marginalisation of women and religious minorities. Across the Middle East and North Africa, the US ignored the obvious presence of Al Qaeda and other terrorist-inclined forces seeking to gain ascendancy in the newly “liberated” countries again until the explosion in Libya consumed an American ambassador and three US embassy officials. Iran is four years closer to a nuclear bomb as Obama appeared to send mixed signals to Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs about America’s resoluteness to prevent an Iranian bomb. When the citizens of Iran protested on the streets after a fraudulent election, Obama hedged his bets, and the Iranian regime crushed its protesters! Pakistan continues to play tricks with the US, collecting billions of dollars in US aid and yet acting like the US were an enemy! The Egyptians do the same, and the newly elected Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi, has visited China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while Egyptians have heckled and booed Hillary Clinton when she visited Cairo! Even in Nigeria, the US seemed to hedge its bets on Boko Haram! I also am quite uncomfortable with Obama’s social policies. I often wonder whether Obama, Clinton and other US liberals believe it is possible to build a successful society solely on the basis of homosexuality, abortion, welfare and taxing the rich! Surely, society must be built on more substantive values! What are those substantive values which these liberals believe America must be built upon? It is impossible to tell. Now the US Democrats have indeed taken the unprecedented step of taking out any reference to God from their party’s platform, a final confirmation perhaps that their vision of society, despite occasional pretensions, is one in which faith plays no part! Already, it is possible to detect that the next liberal agenda in the US (once gay marriage is out of the way!) is likely to be legalising marijuana! On their part, the Republicans have not fared much better! They have often acted as though they preferred that Obama fail, rather than do anything to assist in prompting recovery of the US economy, at some point looking like a nasty party that just said “No!” Often, their positions were just plain unreasonable and there are elements within the party who really seemed like racists who would go to any lengths to make sure a black man failed as president. However, the Republicans are different from Obama in one important respect – we always know where they stand! And I suspect that some of their values are a more sustainable basis of organising society – enterprise, a strong economy, an America that leads in the world, an opportunity society and strong relationships with allies. As the Americans go to vote next Tuesday, the choice before them is quite clear. Obama seems to want to move the US towards a more European welfare society with higher taxes, lower faith and more social safety nets. The Republicans are strongly resisting that journey and want to promote enterprise, individual responsibility, lower taxes and a traditional view of US society. Four years ago, I strongly endorsed Barack Obama. This time, I abstain!

Progress on Power Privatisation

President Jonathan moves closer by the week to probably his greatest legacy as Nigeria’s elected leader-completing the privatization of the power sector! Fate perhaps has destined that it was Jonathan’s lot to transform power sector dynamics in Nigeria, as the template for what he is now executing had really been put in place in 2000/2001 at the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) when the Power Policy was written. It was the same period that a Telecommunications Policy was also designed at the Bureau, except that the telecommunications one became law two years later in 2003 in form of the National Communications Commission Act. Indeed even before the legislation was passed, the policy had been meticulously implemented starting with the 2001 digital mobile license auctions which kicked off the transformation of the telecommunications sector in Nigeria. The power sector was however a totally different kettle of fish! First of all, the policy was half-heartedly implemented even by those who should have been its advocates and custodians. Indeed the executive and legislature appeared to have entered into a conspiracy against the Nigerian people as they kept the draft bill to provide legal basis for policy implementation in the shelves of the National Assembly from 2001 till 2005 when the Electric Power Sector Reform Act (EPSRA) was eventually, and apparently reluctantly, passed. When EPSRA became law, I rejoiced hoping that perhaps the sector bureaucracy and the relevant political elite were now ready to relax their grip on the sector, but as usual we underestimated the Nigerian capacity for self-destruction. Instead of proceeding with swift implementation of the new framework encapsulated in the new law, the then administration made a 180-degree about-turn with a new National Integrated Power Project (NIPP) which has turned out to be one of the most notable policy scandals in the Nigerian nation. NIPP was philosophically the direct opposite of the framework envisaged in EPSRA which sought a private sector controlled power sector, with generation and distribution sold to private investors, while transmission which was a natural monopoly concessioned to private managers. The law also provided for an independent regulator, the National Electricity Regulatory Commission and unbundling of PHCN into multiple distribution and generation entities. NIPP on the other hand was sold (probably by enemies of the impending reform and bureaucrats and politicians who wished to award contracts!) to the government as a required emergency intervention by government which was required to invest in emergency power. Unfortunately anyway, by the time EPSRA was enacted, the government of the day had embarked on a major national distraction called “third term” and probably the NIPP could play some role in oiling the wheels of the third term project! It was only after the failure of the third term project that government sought a rushed completion of the privatization and concessioning of the PHCN entities, a process that could not be concluded until late President Umaru Yar’ adua took office and (illegally) suspended EPSRA implementation! Yar’adua and his Chief Adviser on Energy, Rilwanu Lukman were completely opposed to the notion of privatization of the power sector, most probably in defense of perceived, but in my view misguided regional interests! Even though EPSRA a law enacted by the National Assembly and assented to by ex-President Obasanjo, remained the law of the land, Yar’adua and Lukman disavowed it, and Lukman came up with a bogus and unrealistic alternative based on continued government control which required the public sector to invest $85billion into the power sector. No lessons were learnt from the failures of the NIPP scheme, even as it appeared that the Yar’adua regime actually partly orchestrated its failure by first stalling it and then deliberately misinforming the public about the amount spent. Given this tortuous background of power sector reforms since the 1999 return to civilian rule, President Jonathan deserves commendation for seeing through the subterfuges and re-instating the process of sector reform based on the framework envisaged in EPSRA. That was what the President’s Power Sector Roadmap purposed to do, and as the countdown to the end of the process looms, appears set to accomplish. Credit must also go to the former Power Minister, Bartholomew Nnaji who fought tooth and nail to escape all the traps laid out by highly-placed anti-reform elements, though he was eventually consumed. We eagerly await the operational take-over of the transmission company to Manitoba of Canada who won its management contract; conclusion and handover of the privatized power generating entities; and conclusion of the process in relation to the distribution companies as well. But no one should take those who oppose power sector privatization for granted. For them it is not over until it is over and they will continue to mount rearguard actions against its successful conclusion to the very end. President Jonathan and the folks at BPE and the National Council on Privatisation (NCP) must be vigilant and must sustain the admirable political will demonstrated sor far in the sector.

The Imperative of State Police

Evidence of the near complete breakdown of law and order accumulates all over Nigeria-over forty students are killed, mostly by slitting their throats, probably by fundamentalist religious groups in Mubi, Adamawa State; four undergraduates are lynched by a community mob in Aluu, near Port Harcourt; in Kaduna more than twenty citizens are murdered early in the morning allegedly by armed bandits for having the effrontery to challenge their activities; in Jos killings of indigenous villagers by so-called Fulani herdsmen resumed with twenty killed last week-all these in the last two weeks only! The notion that a single national police force will successfully police all 910,770 square kilometres of this nation, more than four times the size of the United Kingdom, covering the activities of our 165 million people, double the population of Germany and Egypt is doomed to failure! It is the same way the concept of PHCN or NITEL failed simply because it is an inefficient way of organising delivery of service! Beyond its inevitable ineffectiveness, a federation in which you have state and federal legislatures, laws, courts and governments which has only a federal police is a major constitutional aberration! Even unitary Britain does not have a single unitary policing system!!! It devolves policing to the community level. Why do we think we can defy common sense and produce positive outcomes? The essence of the state’s law making power is the ability to enforce compliance with the law. A government which has constitutional power to make laws, but lacks a police force to enforce those laws is a constitutional toothless bulldog! The governors in the twelve Northern “Sharia” states understood this logic, which is why when they passed Sharia laws early in this republic, they created Sharia State Police (called Hisbah) to enforce it! It is one of the supreme ironies of Nigerian political sophistry that having created religious state police, the same Northern governors are the main opponents of other states establishing their own state policing systems!!! Globally, federal states have federal police (such as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)) as well as state, town, city, university and even borough police forces. As I mentioned earlier, even an otherwise unitary state like the United Kingdom recognised the need for an exception in terms of the devolved structure of policing simply because the alternative of a centralised UK police would neither be effective or efficient. Policing is a community-based activity-the police officers should have a thorough knowledge of the communities they police, its customs, neighbourhoods, roads and alleys etc. sending a stranger to police a community is simply a colonial approach to policing (which may have been tolerable from the colonialist’s point of view since he was more interested in intimidating the natives and suppressing dissent) which could never succeed in a modern democratic system. One of the silliest arguments being proffered against state police is that the state governors will abuse it! Is the federal government not abusing federal police? Has it not been used to rig elections? Do our federal police not engage in routine extra-judicial killings? Does it not often act as a service provider offering escort and protection services to anyone rich enough to afford it? As far as I can see, the propensity for a state police composed mostly of indigenes and long term residents of an area to abuse its own citizens is far less than that of a colonial, imported police alien to the culture and beliefs of its host community! And that is our daily, practical experience!!! In any event, I believe that state governors already have considerable scope to abuse their powers against opponents or non-indigenes if they were so inclined. They have powers over land, state judiciary, civil service, building and planning approvals, state universities, radio and TV stations, taxation etc. To their credit, I have not seen any significant incidences of systematic abuse of these powers by most state governors. More importantly we have the courts to check abuses of citizen’s rights by any government, state or federal. Fortunately the court charged with enforcement of fundamental human rights under our constitution is the federal high court!!! The other argument offered often is that states cannot afford to run a police force of their own! This of course flies in the face of the reality that across the country, any state that seeks minimal improvements in policing effectiveness has by-and-large taken over funding of their state police commands from the federal government! We know of the Lagos State Security Trust Fund (Ogun, Oyo and other South-West states have followed suit) and the significant spending by Rivers and other Niger-Delta states on the federal police. But then the substantive issue of devolving more powers and revenue to the states and local governments to better empower these tiers which are most relevant to our people’s lives remain a necessity. I also believe using the example of Lagos State that any serious state will include non-indigene, resident groups in the manning of any state police, simply from the standpoint of effectiveness. Lagos state has non-indigene teachers, civil servants, judges, commissioners and other political appointees. Why won’t they employ non-indigenes in their state police? There is a peculiarly Nigerian absurdity in which current and retired police officers are shouting loudest against state police. Given the non-effectiveness of the model they have presided over, why should we listen to them?

Diversity and Shared Vision

I am writing this from Prague, Czech Republic, the nation rescued from totalitarian rule by the poet Vaclav Havel and his colleagues in the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989. It is a landlocked country in Central Europe bordered by Poland, Germany, Austria, and its former “other half” in the old Czechoslovakia, Slovakia. This is a historic town and place of culture, though I haven’t had time to do my tourism. I will, though, once I’m done with my primary purpose of coming here. I intend to see the Old Town, River Vlatara, Jewish Ghetto, Lesser Quarter, the Iconic Prague Castle, Charles Bridge, and ride on the classic tram. I intend to also see the legacies of communism and the Cold War – the former communist police headquarters, a real nuclear bunker, and the biggest statue of Lenin. After the Velvet Revolution, the old Czechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved on January 1, 1993 into independent Czech and Slovak Republics. The Czech have benefitted from democracy, enterprise and independence – Czech is the first former COMECON (the pro-Soviet Council for Economic Assistance grouping of Socialist and Eastern bloc countries) nation to become a developed country with the highest human development in Central and Eastern Europe and ranked as the third most peaceful country in Europe. But back to my reason for being in Prague! I am attending the 32nd Annual Conference of the Strategic Management Society (SMS). I arrived in Prague Saturday morning and the conference commenced with a welcome cocktail that evening. Sessions commenced 8am on Sunday (!) and I’m taking time out midway into Monday to write this, but what has most caught my attention was not any of the academic presentations but the speech given this afternoon by Carlos Ghosn, the winner of the SMS Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s conference. Ghosn is the chairman and chief executive of Nissan Motor Co. Ltd, chairman and chief executive officer of Renault, and head of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, an unprecedented case of a single individual heading two separate companies with combined annual global sales of 7.2 million vehicles. I was fascinated not just by Carlos Ghosn’s business profile and achievements, but by his background – Ghosn by his own words was an embodiment of global diversity. He was born in Brazil of Lebanese origin; studied in France and is essentially a French citizen; and he again unusually became CEO of a Japanese company, Nissan! I will leave out the very important business and strategy issues Ghosn raised in his speech, but let me talk about the part of his speech which relates to this article. In commencing his speech, Ghosn reminded us of his multi-national background, his birth in Brazil and return to Lebanon, and contrasted Brazil in which he learnt about harmony in diversity and Lebanon where he noticed that diversity involved significant risk and conflict. In spite of this potential for risk and conflict, Ghosn celebrated diversity (race, ethnic, gender, age) and endorsed it particularly in the context of the firm, but also in the national and global contexts. At the end of his really powerful and thought-provoking speech, I asked Carlos Ghosn a question that perhaps would naturally occur to a Nigerian worried about the problems of ethnicity, religion and perpetual conflict in Nigeria, and remembering that I was visiting a country that had found peace and development only after shrinking into its ethnic and cultural authenticity – “What factors, in your view, accounted for the harmonious diversity in Brazil contrasted with Lebanon in which diversity was a source of war and crisis? And what lessons can we learn from this contrast in the corporate and national contexts?” The award winner’s response drew on his experience in the Nissan-Renault Alliance, an alliance, we must remember, of culturally, ethnically and nationally divergent Japanese and French/European businesses. He noted that at the inception of the relationship when a vision and project was yet to be defined, the collaboration looked sub-optimal as both partners focused on each others’ negatives. The French managers complained about Japanese attitudes and vice versa. However, once the leadership created a compelling vision and inaugurated a tough project, both sides focused on the goal, and indeed leveraged each other’s strengths and unique perspectives. The Japanese took planning, strategy, systematic thinking from the Europeans; the French took execution and commitment from the Japanese; and both sides benefitted from each other, creating synergistic outcomes. He warned – “Don’t ever promote diversity where there is no vision and project!” That is the problem with Nigeria. We have assembled very diverse ethnicities and religions into a country but we have not defined a shared vision of what the essence is, where we are going and how we would live together. There is no shared vision; and there is no shared project. The outcome is a dysfunctional state in which each individual takes care of himself and his family; each ethnic group distrusts the other; communities war against their neighbours; and people kill others in the name of religion. If we refuse to agree to a common purpose and project, this situation will get worse, not better!