A New Development Agenda for Nigeria

Sam Amadi

Things are worse than they may appear. Nigerian economy is in a bad place. The more frightening thing is that everyday politics compounds it and undermines the prospect of getting out of the mess. We ought to be jumping out, but we are digging in. President Tinubu inherited a mismanaged economy. But he is making it worse. The worst part of this debacle is that the politics of Nigeria (especially Tinubu’s brand of it) makes it more difficult to advance remedies for its maladies. It is true that there is no problem a determined people cannot solve. But that is if their politics does not undercut their determination. Nigeria’s tragedy is that its politics undermines any prospects of its recovery from the crisis of values and the collapse of socioeconomic wellbeing.

Today, I doubt if anyone will credibly contest that Nigeria is not heading to hell, if it does not correct course and quickly too. Whether at the levels of aggregate or the individual, life in Nigeria is poor and nasty, if not yet brutish and short. The fact that about 26.5 million out of 200 million Nigerians are expected to starve in 2024 speaks to the depth of the collapse of livelihood. The growing debt and shrinking revenue profile speaks to a near future that will not be markedly better. More and more people are rushing from average to extreme poverty in Nigeria because of rising food inflation and complete lack of social protection. In the meantime, Nigerian governing elites are isolated from the turbulence and are unwilling to change the fundamental of public governance. They are cautionary about inflation when it comes to increasing earnings for the lowest workers who are below minimum in livelihood. But they are bullish in stuffing the pork barrels for themselves and their cronies.

The current fight between Dangote and the Nigerian government over the fortunes of his giant refinery project is evidence of one unorthodox aspect of the Nigerian economic crisis. It is not just that Nigeria’s economy is captured by its elites and disconnected from the socioeconomic realities of its ordinary citizens. But even worse, amongst the capturing elites there is no consensus on how to expand the state coffers for their pilfering. That is a double stroke of misfortune. At least if the economy cannot work for the ordinary people, let is work coherently for the overlords. The rest of us can live on trickle-downs. But the Nigerian economy does not. It is incoherent to the extent that there is no principle governing its extraction and exploitation. It is just endless transactions. We are seeing the first evidence of a disaggregation of state capture.

The fight may not last long. At a point soon, we can be sure that the bureaucrats and oligarchs will make up and rally together. But not in a coherent manner, and not in service of any strategic agenda beyond self-enrichment. Developments in Nigeria continue to confirm Peter M. Lewis’s claim that although Nigeria and Indonesia are similarly corrupt, they grew apart because whereas Indonesia’s thieving elites had consensus on development, Nigeria’s lacked such.

The problem that the rulers of Nigeria should fear is that the disruption of the social order has added new threats to the instability of Nigerian political economy. Since return to civilian rule, the disruptive force of civic society against political establishment has been tamed. This is largely because the aperture for social disruption narrows in a democratic regime, no matter how nominal. It is difficult for citizens to learn the art of democratic intercessions, and democracies, even highly flawed ones like Nigeria’s, are clothed with some dignity that makes appeals to protests sound unreasonable. So, the regime survives as it stutters and stumbles.

But things have changed. In the past, incompetent regimes can muddle through to the next rigged election without much harm. It was easier to keep the people bottled. But no longer so. The contagion of ‘revolution’ across the world, especially the Kenyan example and the disruptive nature of new technologies and the autocracy of social media mean that fractiousness is a new social order. The state lives under continuous threat of disintegration. And the tools and skills of social herding of the people are deprived of their potence. The EndSARS protests are both a foretaste of what could be and a reminder that the charmed circles are no longer charming.

We have come to the end of power as Moses Naim famously put it in his book of the same title. The end of power means that hierarchy is no longer as important as it used to be. Network and narrative have replaced money and force as the currency of social management. Whether in the boardroom or the state house or the church, power is ended; replace by narratives and networks.

The economic implication of these tectonic shifts is that Nigeria’s dysfunctional economics needs a radical rethinking and retooling to even survive. We could be close to real Armageddon considering that the advanced west is trapped in its peculiar incubus and do not have extra bandwidths to spare for us. We are at a unique juncture in global political economy when there is attention deficit in matter of the global south, for good or bad. We will have to paddle alone to the shore. Considering that our fundamentals are terrible, a disruptive social order would compound the problem and push the crisis further down the tunnel. Things are very bad but could be terrible.

But there is solution. And it wears the toga of social regeneration of the politics of power. It is in the form of a new development agenda that is rooted in democratic citizenship. The Nigerian crisis could be a valuable thing if it leads to a new mindset on development. The textual and conceptual anchoring for the new development agenda is not far-fetched. It is right there in our constitutional text, Chapter 2 of the Nigerian constitution. The chapter lays down elements of a development agenda focused on the wellbeing of Nigerian citizens. The chief merit of the chapters and its articulation of the fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policy is that it provides actionable platforms to secure public trust in government and engender consensus on key approaches and outcomes of development.

With a social compact defined by the economic, social and political dimensions of citizenship as described in Chapter 2, we easily get around the political stasis holding back transformation. It will be easier to commit politicians to investment in a national development agenda if it is cast in terms of the policies and programs that advance national development. There would be incentives for such commitment because it goes with popular support and greater public trust. A social compact in the nature of the fundamental objectives and principles of state policy will clothe government with credibility and legitimacy to undertake radical restructure of the political economy. It will help to reduce social conflicts and enhance elite consensus necessary for social and economic development.

There is an obvious economic argument for reorienting economic development policymaking in Nigeria away from dubious neoliberalism to a social democratic model that is hinged on social production and social welfare. Such an economic model will build the human capital and requisite social capital for high and sustained economic growth. The growth imperative is not realizable in present prebendal, extractive and oligarchic economics. Apart from the usual severe business crises of Nigeria’s anarcho-capitalism, the current social fractiousness ensures that any dream for economic development of the sort that leads to escape of cyclical crises of extreme poverty and stagnant growth will end as mere dream.

The transition to a new development agenda built on the foundation of democratic citizenship will serve Nigeria’s political economy well by reinvesting resources towards resolving the national question. The nationality question in Nigeria has been a drag on the wheel of economic development. There is a reason why economic development in the past has been accompanied by a high degree of nationalism. One reason Nigeria has not developed the requisite degree of nationalism for economic transformation is because economic governance has alienated rather than mobilized the people. Focusing economics specifically on the welfare of the people will provide a lever to socialize Nigerians into an ideology of national development which will help to kickstart and sustain real development.

The economics of a social compact based on democratic citizenship can enhance commitment to social welfare and antipoverty strategies. Chapter 2 of the constitution enjoins public officials to manage the national economy in a manner that guarantees “maximum welfare, freedom and happiness on the basis of social justice, equality of status and opportunity”. The social compact commits Nigerian government to develop policy framework and take practical actions that institutionalize a comprehensive social security policy framework that is cost-efficient and ensures that no citizen lives in extreme poverty. It will provide incentive for legislators and bureaucrats to drastically reduce the cost of public governance to free financial resources for sustainable living wages for Nigerian public workers.

Another beneficial outcome of a new development agenda rooted in the chapter 2 social compact is that it will lead to high economic growth based on rural industrialization. Rural Nigeria has been abandoned and impoverished because of the perverse incentives of the oil windfall that feeds the comprador capitalism. If we refocus attention on the people we re-engage industrialization, especially rural cottage industry, and build a real rural economy that can nurture transition to techno-industrialization.

Some of the highpoints of such transition is the full mobilization of Nigerians under full employment of all natural and human resources for economic development; refocusing economic development away from oil and gas multinationals to micro and medium enterprises that are locally owned and producing goods for consumption and exports; focusing on public taxation and social sector expenditure in order to overcome rent-seeking and engender an ownership society where citizens have stakes in protecting democratic governance; supporting entrepreneurship through removal of bottlenecks to competition through sound macroeconomic policies; and revitalizing manufacturing and industrial complex.

Now, Nigeria is stuck at the primal level of state formation where political power is used for extraction for self and close kindreds. The economy in such a state cannot witness significant and sustained progress. Yes, we can produce a handful Dangotes. But the aggregate outlook will still be one of gross underdevelopment. Today, with entrenched social fractiousness, disarticulated anarcho-capitalism will lead to poverty and disintegration. The solution will be a development agenda intentionally constructed on the economic imperatives of citizenship.

The constitutional authorization for a different development agenda is right here. The justification is well-made. What is missing is a politics that is less chaotic, insane, neurotic and psychotic, and can breakthrough the narrow corridor of inclusive and other-regarding politics. Such politics is difficult, but not impossible, to construct in the present circumstances. Is Tinubu up to it? Will Tinubu inaugurate a new development by transcending the current political imperatives in which he excels? It does not look like he is willing or able. But who knows?