Reinventing Nigeria as a developmental state

The collective traumas that the mass of our population have endured in recent years – the insurgency in the north east, random bombing in the federal capital and elsewhere, nihilistic violence against innocent defenceless peasants by Fulani herdsmen, poverty and widespread misery, cultism in high and low places, the Byzantinism and graft by the political elites, prostitution, the breakdown of the family, the invasion of the church by wolves in sheep’s clothing, the collapse of public institutions, large-scale corruption in the public service, the frightful fall in moral values, and the millions of desperate internally displaced people – have broken the spirit and confidence of our people. On more than one occasion, prominent Nigerians have confided in me their fears about the future. Even among the ruling class, there is palpable anxiety that our nationhood and collective future is by no means a forgone conclusion.

In my moment of despair I sometimes wonder if the Americans were not right after all. These forebodings are made worse by the collapse of global oil prices and the deleterious impact on public revenues which have dwindled by more than 70 percent in less than a year, compounding the capacity of our government to deliver on its most important commitments. The youth of Biafra came out recently to demand their right to self-determination. We would be fools to dismiss their demands as the aimless noise of vagabond street urchins. Meanwhile, the denizens of Oduduwa issued a stern warning that Fulani marauders are personae non grata in Yorubaland. A prophet recently warned that there is no ‘agape love’ within the ruling APC coalition. Degrees by degrees, our confidence in a collective future are being replaced by a feeling of doom.

It was perhaps out of these concerns that elder statesman and former Commonwealth scribe Chief Emeka Anyaoku came out last week to advocate that we return to the regional government structure of the early post-independence era. He suggested that the six subsisting geopolitical zones should constitute the framework for the regional governments while the 36 states should be re-constituted into ‘development areas’. Emeka Anyaoku is a man after my heart. Classical scholar and first-rate international civil servant, he is a man of consummate gravitas not easily susceptible to frivolities. He speaks on authority and whatever he says needs to be weighed and considered with careful thoughtfulness. An elder statesman who speaks with such solemnity obviously has seen a grave storm ahead.

Consider our current constitution. We all have our suspicions as to who were its architects. It is a well-known fact that it was crafted from the smoke-filled chambers of General Abacha’s brutal dictatorship. Those who designed that document had no vision of one Nigeria. Rather, they filibustered new constituencies to place their sectional interests at an irreversible advantage. In all the civilised nations of the world, law-givers are never lawyers. This is true of Solon in ancient Athens as it is of Thomas Jefferson in eighteenth century America. When you place lawyers in charge of constitutional engineering, they will cripple the system with all manner of legal loopholes to make the country a crippled elephant fit only for feasting lawyers.

These same people have turned the higher judicature and the Supreme Court into civil servants waiting to take up their turn up the greasy pole. Gone are the days of giants such as Taslim Olawale Elias, Udo Odoma, Chukwudifu Oputa and Mohammed Bello. Anybody can become Chief Justice and serve his six months while retiring into the night of oblivion, never to be quoted in the common law reports of the Commonwealth and other civilised nations. Sadly, the arduous work of the political confab that was undertaken with so much fanfare and at such high cost to the national treasury is doomed never to be implemented.

The current conjuncture in which we find ourselves amounts to what the Americans would term a ‘perfect storm’. It is a constitutional moment that we would waste at our mortal peril. The times call for statesmanship, vision and creativity of the order of Joseph in Egypt and Daniel and his brethren during their exile years in Babylon. It provides the perfect opportunity for the restructuring of Nigeria and the re-engineering of its key public institutions. It has raised profound questions about the very meaning of Nigeria’s nationhood and whether indeed the country can endure as a single political community.

In fairness to Anyaoku, the current federal structure with a highly centralised Federal Government, 36 states and 774 local governments is inherently programmed to gridlock and immobility. When not stolen through a frightful maze of rent-seeking and corrupt practices, most public funds go into consumption rather than long-term developmental projects. For several decades, much of the budgets across the three tiers of government have gone overwhelmingly into recurrent spending, averaging 70 percent annually. This means that a mere 30 percent of public spending goes into capital expenditure which is essential to investing for future growth and prosperity. This is the very opposite of what obtains in a good number of emerging economies where 70 percent of public spending goes into capital expenditures and only 30 percent goes into recurrent expenditures such as salaries and consumption.

Nigeria is not quite the failed state that many have described. But it is evident that all the symptoms are there; including that phenomenon which the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington described as ‘political decay’. This situation arises when national institutions lack the capacity to maintain political order; when government lacks legitimacy and when the avenues for political participation are closed while poverty and chaos takes over.

It all boils down to the question of the state and its capacity to deliver those collective public goods that political philosophers since John Locke have identified as the central role of government. According to Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, experts in the field of state-building, contemporary civilisation is premised on the notion of states that are “capable of fulfilling a range of international and domestic responsibilities. As the locus of political authority in a country, the state’s decisions are simply assumed to have the capacity to implement those decisions, project its authority throughout the territory, possess a domestic resource base to meet its spending obligations, and have a legitimate monopoly on the physical means by which it can guarantee its citizens’ security”.

Retreating from the precipice of state failure requires Nigeria not only to restructure its institutions but to also frontally address the imperatives of state responsibility. The key functions of the state as understood in the twenty-first century requires the following key elements: the presence of the rule of law; monopoly of the use of violence; effective administrative control; sound management of public finances; massive investment in human capital, including education, health, knowledge, training and skills; enhancement of citizenship rights through expanded opportunities for participation and ensuring reciprocal rights and obligations to all citizens; development of a competitive and forward-looking market economy.

The effective exercise of state authority in a manner that promotes economic growth while ensuring political stability requires not only high quality visionary leadership; it requires a sound and professionalized bureaucracy. Public policies must be suffused with social justice, inclusive growth and what the political philosopher John Rawls termed the idea of ‘public reason’.

To secure our collective future and to salvage the state from the threat of imminent dissolution – and for a country with the size, resources and innate potentials of Nigeria – we need a new consensus among the ruling elites from across the country’s key constituencies. We desperately need to re-imagine the idea of Nigeria and rebuild the temple of our nationhood. What is crucial, in my view, is commitment to the creation of a developmental state that would accelerate the process of economic growth and wealth-creation. In contemporary development economics discourse, when scholars use the term ‘the developmental state’, they are generally referring to a country where the government has assumed the driver’s seat in propelling the course of economic growth and social transformation. According to my friend, the eminent American political scientist Peter Lewis, developmental states are those that have “successfully provided the collective goods for high growth and competitiveness”.

The developmental state makes ‘development’ its topmost national priority, encouraging citizens with the right mix of incentives to forego current consumption so as to maximize current consumption to achieve the goal of long-term economic performance.

Historically, the developmental state has tended to be rather authoritarian, with the degree of authoritarianism varying from one case to the other, depending on regime type, the nature of national conditions and the extent of the security challenges being faced. In Latin America and Asia, authoritarianism was almost always an inevitable characteristic of developmental states. The North African country of Tunisia is a good example of a developmental state where authoritarianism was legitimised as a vehicle for achieving accelerated growth under the regime of the erstwhile Zine Abidine Ben Ali. In our age of democracy and the rule of law, it is clear that rulerships are constrained by the policy space in which they can exercise power and authority.

Another feature of the developmental state is commitment to property rights, strong markets and the sanctity of contracts. This provides clear signals for foreign investors who also enjoy tax holidays and other incentives.

Most developmental states have also undertaken land reforms. Beginning from President Park in South Korea in the 1950s, most Asia Pacific nations that have achieved rapid growth and structural transformation have also been those that have implemented courageous land reforms. Their leaderships have also mobilised enough support to defeat resistance by landed oligarchies. The failure of the Philippines to join the ranks of the Asian Tigers has been partly attributable from the failure of its power elites to undertake land reforms.

Most developmental states have also invested heavily in human capital development. They have given priority to ensuring universal compulsory education, expansion of higher education, especially in technical and engineering fields, and in the training and acquisition of industrial skills by its workers.

Developmental states tend to insulate their technocratic elites from societal pressures by giving them the autonomy to develop and implement policies for rapid growth and structural transformation. They have done this through the reform of the civil service and the creation of a merit-based bureaucracy, with functionaries that are well-paid and possess a vision of national destiny and purpose. The technocrats enjoy the power to issue orders and to guide markets and impose discipline on the private sector. The state guides the markets, with strict controls over investment flows.

Unlike African nations that pursued import substitution industrialisation, the developmental states of the Asia Pacific anchored their development strategies on export-led industrialisation. For most of sub-Saharan Africa, import substitution created inefficiencies and distortions, often reinforcing the neopatrimonial syndrome. However, export-oriented development may not be universal to all developmental states. Brazil, for example, as a Latin American developmental state, anchored its long-term strategy on seeking to fulfil domestic needs and attaining a high level of economic and technological self-reliance while enhancing productivity and modernising agriculture to bolster food security.

The American political scientist Chalmers Johnson, in his seminal study on Japanese industrialisation and economic development, made a distinction between states with a ‘regulatory’ orientation and those with a ‘developmental’ orientation. He refers to the United States as a country that belongs to the first type. American industrialisation was largely spurred by the private sector, with government coming in largely as a regulator. Much of the impetus to industrialisation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America was provided by the private sector and by leading industrialists such as Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller, with financiers such as J. P. Morgan and the Rothchilds providing the capital. The government of the American Republic saw its role essentially as that of mitigating the excesses of the capitalists and their ensuing cartels.

Japan, on the other hand, is the prime exemplar of a country where the state played a central role in the industrialisation process. While Tokugawa Japan was dominated by the Shogun feudal aristocracy, the imperial administration of the time took a back seat as far as economic development was concerned. However, following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a re-invigorated government took it upon itself to modernise the society and industrialise the economy. Thus the state assumed a central role in the industrialisation of Japan; a process which has continued to our day, with government providing support to strategic export industries through MITI and other such institutions.

The rather astonishing transformation in the economies of countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea – the so-called ‘Asian tigers’ — provided a fertile ground for testing many theories about how developing countries could escape from the shackles of backwardness. A group of scholars based at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, England, were at the forefront of this new scholarly enterprise. The seminal work by Robert Wade was path-breaking in explaining the role of government in East Asian industrialisation. His work proved the fallacy of the ‘market-supremacy’ argument that was prevalent in the economics profession for much of the 1970s and 1980s as far as East Asia is concerned.

More recently, the debate has emerged in how the developmental state could be instituted in Africa. The Millennium Summit in New York in the year 2,000 and the emergence of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) generated new enthusiasm regarding Africa’s development trajectory. The ending of the Cold War, the seeming collapse of the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ and the Great Recession have made it imperative for new thinking about development and international economic relations. The free market orthodoxies of the recent past have been put into question.

Next week we shall conclude by considering the policy choices inherent in the developmental state model and their relevance for Nigeria.

 

Obadiah Mailafiya