All roads last Thursday led to No. 2 Dendo Road, off Ahmadu Bello Way, the commercial artery of Kaduna City. The address houses perhaps the newest think tank in Nigeria and potentially the most influential. This is the Gusau Institute, the brainchild of Lt-General Aliyu Gusau Mohammed, until last month our defence minister and easily Nigeria’s longest serving spymaster if only because he holds the unique record of serving as the country’s National Security Adviser thrice.
On the said Thursday the Institute formally opened shop with a seminar on how Africa will possibly shape out in the world’s political economy by the year 2040, and which of its countries will play the leading roles in helping it begin to realize its potential. As debuts go, it was hard to identify a better topic and a better keynote speaker.
This piece, however, will not dwell much on the seminar itself, incisive and thought-provoking as the keynote paper and the responses it provoked from the main respondent and the large and distinguished audience were.
According to the keynote speaker, Dr Jakkie Cilliers, Executive Director of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), a leading South African think tank, Africa may be rising, but by 2040 it is still unlikely to play more than a marginal role in the global political economy. Within the continent, however, the five biggest players, he said, would be Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa and, of course, Nigeria, its most populous country and biggest economy. “If,” he said in the summary of his paper, “Nigeria were to take the necessary steps that would see far-reaching changes to the governance issues and social challenges that currently beset the country, it could become Africa’s lone superpower.”
Without any doubt one of the big governance issues and social challenges facing the country, if not the biggest, is the Boko Haram terrorism which is widely regarded as a consequence of the bad governance that has bedevilled the country’s for almost all of its nearly 55 years of independence. It was hardly surprising therefore, that the chairman of the occasion and the country’s first Chief of Defence Staff and one of its finest officers and gentlemen, General Alani Akinrinade, contended in his opening remarks that perhaps the biggest task before the Gusau institute is to come up quickly with a military doctrine that can tackle the novel challenge of Boko Haram’s type of internal insurrection.
Of course there are other governance issues and social challenges besides Boko Haram. There’s corruption. There’s unemployment. There’s acute power and infrastructural deficits. There’s illiteracy, laziness and inequity, etc. None of these is amenable to quick fixes. All which means the Gusau Institute has its job cut out for it, namely, to research into how these problems can be tackled and seek to influence public policy accordingly.
With one of the richest private libraries in the land – possibly richer than that of Arewa House, Kaduna, a think tank affiliated to Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and certainly richer than the Kaduna State Library – coupled with the fact that its founder has arguably the most extensive global network of intelligence gurus among the country’s spymasters, the institute should be able to live up to its promise of becoming one of the country’s topmost think tanks before long.
Already, its library which, according to its librarian, Mrs. Marlene Maritz, has over 17,000 titles and more than 25,000 books – many of the titles have more than one copy – is where post graduate students of most universities in Kaduna’s catchment area, notably the degree awarding Nigerian Defence Academy, the state’s own university and ABU, go to for up to date answers to issues in their research projects.
And since it started functioning quietly nearly two years ago, the library has, according to Mrs Maritz, donated thousands of books to universities, mostly to Kaduna State’s, and to secondary schools. Besides, the library has a rich trove of newspapers and magazines with plans to make them digital for easy reference. It also has an even richer e-library which can be accessed via wifi from the premises.
By all counts – the quality of the keynote paper, the quality and quantity of the audience, the clock-like efficiency of the organization, you name it – the institute’s inaugural lecture was a huge success. But, as the founder told this columnist in not exactly those words, you are only as good as your last outing. And so the institute is already planning to surpass, or at least match, Thursday’s seminar.
Next time, the focus will reportedly be on domestic socio-political history, so to speak; the stories of the leading figures of the team without which Sir Ahmadu Bello, the first and only Premier of the North, would never have built a legacy which has remained unmatched and for which he has always been singularly praised. The moral of the seminar clearly would be that a tree does not make a forest, a thought that must surely be exercising the mind of our new president, Muhammadu Buhari, as he sets about bringing the “change” for which the nation, tired of so much barefaced venality and incompetence, elected him. One can only pray and hope that he is able to raise a team of such quality as Sir Ahmadu’s.
It is a measure of how great the great man’s legacy is that, as Professor Ango Abdullahi, vice-chancellor of ABU over 30 year ago and the emergency respondent to the paper – the scheduled respondent and current vice-chancellor, Professor Ibrahim Garba, was unavoidably absent – pointed out, Sir Ahmadu’s last budget for 1966, the year he was assassinated in our first military coup, was equivalent to that of Kaduna North Local Government which is only one of the over 400 local governments that exist today in the North!
The Gusau Institute is, of course, only one of a relatively large number of think tanks this country can boast of. According to a global rating of think tanks by the University of Pennsylvania, USA, Nigeria, with 46 think tanks, ranks second only to South Africa with 87, in the number of such institutes in each country. These are, of course, puny compared to, say, America’s which has over 1,800 out of a global total of over 6,300. But then America is centuries older than most African countries, is more populous than all of them and has a democracy with the richest economy in the world.
With 46 think tanks – and still counting – the Gusau Institute obviously has a lot to compete with. These come in various shapes and sizes. There are state sponsored ones like the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, our own equivalent of Chatham House, London, and the Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER), Ibadan. There are party sponsored ones like those of the erstwhile ruling PDP and private ones like the Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA), established in Abuja seven years ago by Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, until last month, our one and only Coordinating and Finance Minister.
Given its founder’s global connections, commitment and knowledge, the Gusau Institute should outclass most, if not all, of these in a not too distant future. Certainly, it will be a key player in generating the ideas that should truly transform our country into the greatness destined for it by its size and resources, human and natural.
Re: Saraki as President of the 8th Senate
Sir,
Saraki needed not to have acted the way he did. He may have won even if the entire 109 senates participated in the election. Nobody would have cried foul. When God chooses a man, he makes him to endure; unlike when a man through desperate ambition chooses himself.
Funso Enoch,
Ilesa, Osun State,
+2348033779630.
Sir,
Your piece in The Nation today (June 17) has revealed you as one of a very few writers and political commentators whose understanding of political science and its application to social reality is, to me, an embodiment of excellence. Majority of Bukola Saraki’s critics couldn’t even, perhaps because of bias and sentiments, fathom the principle of power separation. That was why some senators loyal to (Senator Ahmed) Lawal chose to attend a meeting arranged by APC when the President had even issued a proclamation which stipulated that sitting should commence at 10am.
+2348025498722.
Sir,
I had thought the election of Dogara as Speaker should have assuaged the fears of Christians in the North just like Akume if he had been elected Senate President. But you didn’t acknowledge this fact. For me you just set out to discredit Saraki and I am disappointed.
+2348033315859.
Note: In the light of the controversy that this subject has continued to stir, I’ll publish more and longer reactions next week, God willing.
M.H.
