By Isaac Megbolugbe
“Nigeria has refused to leverage her endowment to step into national unity and greatness”.
Professor Tunji Olaopa
“The project of nation building and development which Nigerians espouse is a journey without
maps, undertaken in moral anarchy towards an uncertain destination.”
The late Professor Claude Ake.
“The Nigeria project is a simple one: there is a need to achieve national integration through a sustained effort to translate Nigeria’s ethnic capital into a framework of civic nationalism that brings everyone into a clear vision of what Nigeria is and what it could be.”
Professor Tunji Olaopa
Professor Tunji Olaopa declared in the concluding chapter of his fabulous memoir: The Unending Quest for Reform that Nigeria continues to fail to become a nation till 2022. Will 2023 be the turnaround year that we have longed for? A lot is riding on what and how the tremendous pollical power in the hands of the incoming administration is used for. Will the President-Elect Asiwaju Bola Tinubi inhabit the spirit of the Late Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore who chose for his country to arise and join the constellation of first word nations instead of putting his family in the Forbes list of the richest people in the world. Will he play for glory and immortal legacy and be the historical leader who finally got it right for Nigeria and in the right way? Olaopa offers him a tremendous gift in the form of his recent memoir. Professor Olaopa asked for a reset to start over and return to fundamentals. The foundation of every country that has joined the first world of nations in the last and this centuries started with the establishment of a developmental state which then served as the platform leveraged to build the architecture of a Nation State. I agree with him. It is doable. It might work. Olaopa’s corollary to a capable developmental state is a functional and efficient public service. Here, he is superbly prepared to help the country realize this capability.
Going back to fundamentals is akin to post-independence expectations of Africans including Nigerians, from their anticolonial nationalists. “It was the hope that independence would be accompanied by the emergence of a capable developmental state that could deliver the strategic framework to (a) implement sound macroeconomic policies that could alleviate poverty, create employment, and grow a strong, sustainable and competitive economy that could facilitate the well-being of the citizens; (b) promote popular participation that can lead to the indigenous ownership of the development agenda; (c) build a sound institution of public administration that is professional, citizenfriendly, technology-enabled and meritocratic with a ready capability to efficiently achieve service delivery; and (d) mobilize state resources, administer budgets and manage public finances productively, transparently and accountably.”
Olaopa’s vision of a functional and efficient public service involves the founding of a civil
service system under the prompting of a comprehensive and coherent reform agenda. This reform agenda is impressively explained, justified, and described in professionally laden terms in the memoir.
He molded himself in the image of the Late Professor Ojetunji Abayode both in essence and existentially. Abayode was the master and Olaopa was the apprentice. Abayode modernized Nigeria’s policy architecture and produced a master national development plan in the form of The Second National Development Plan (1970-1974). Olaopa wants to do a similar thing for Nigeria’s civil service system and thereby modernize the national development and governance management architecture which will complement Abayode template for policy and planning for national development of the country. Olaopa has also completed his professional maturation and poised to lead his country into joining the ranks of world class public administration systems.
Isn’t Olaopa amazing? He was initiated into Nigeria’s public service as a knowledge-motivated bureaucrat. He became an expert-insider and later mastered the Abayode’s scholar-practitioner model which embodies a distinct relationship between the personal and the professional. In a way, Olaopa’s memoir narrated the bricolage of his life both personal and professional in a beautiful escapement that is brought together in a unifying identity of scholar-practitioner praxis of public administration. I believe that Professor Olaopa is a gift and a blessing for the country, a once in a generation talent that Providence has superbly prepared for a time as this. It will be a sort of tragic irony for the Nation considering the rascality and depravity that have gone on in postcolonial Nigeria.
Olaopa is no under any grand illusion. He worries about the reality before the country and considers the challenges before her to be much more daunting and complicated. While his vision for the country is clear to him, he does find the journey confusing. Given the professional status of his generation, the task of crafting a value proposition for immediate transformation of Nigeria into a developmental state should not be too daunting to accomplish.
Before outlining a portfolio of initiatives, that the President-Elect touched on during the recent presidential campaign, capable of constituting a transformative program that could produce a developmental state for the country surely and quickly, let us review how Olapoa discusses how we got here.
One more thing. Olaopa is concerned that debate among political elites concerning the future of the country has degenerated to choosing between restructuring and self-determination. The risk of Nigeria breaking up is no longer a theoretical but a practical possibility. In the private sector, when a company is failing or has failed, the Board of Directors typically press the emergency button and bring in a turnaround team. This turnaround team either puts the company on a sure footing or puts it up for sale or seek a merger. Similarly, the incoming administration needs two teams. First a Turnaround Team that can focus on turning the country around and put her on a sure footing as a developmental state. Two is a Governance Team to attend to the business of the country and the wellbeing of citizens. Both teams report to the President-Elect each with its own focused agenda. In essence, the administration must turnaround the economy and clarify the essence of this country as a state to regain broad based credibility and a mandate to resolve the Nigerian Factor that has bedeviled the performance of the county for so long. With such a mandate, the administration will be well positioned to transform the developmental state into a Nation State and put her on the road toward greatness among the league of first world nations.
Back to Olaopa’s journey. Olaopa locates himself at the forefront of the narration about how Nigeria has struggled to emerge as a capable developmental state, not to talk of as a Nation State. He believes that providence had projected his being into the cauldron of the unfolding and unraveling of the Nigerian state. Professor Adeshina Afolayan, Head of Department of Philosophy, University of Ibadan agrees. In his commentary on Olaopa’s memoir he observed that Olaopa’s self and the nation have indeed merged in a struggle for realization.
Olaopa’s quest for reform crystalized in 1992 when providence and reality fused together to land him at center of political gravity and the seat of government of Nigeria. He was already prepared by his research and reform task that he had set for himself. His sense of mission is captured in the following statement in his memoir.
“The new republic, to use my platonic metaphor, could only be rehabilitated and reconstructed right
from within the center of the old one. I told myself, right from the beginning, that I had to walk as circumspectly as I could manage and that was not only in terms of knowing my way around the city alone but also knowing my way through the corridors of power. Abuja then became, for me, a metaphor for so many things positive and negative. It became the very center of my reflections about Nigeria and what could go right for her.”
Next, Olaopa was transported from the center of gravity when he was summoned by The Presidency of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida to be right within the vortex of governance and government at Abuja. This was when Olaopa realized that the speech writing responsibility he had could serve to facilitate strategic communication between the government and the governed. More importantly he learned how speech writing could be used as a tool for policy management and enhancement of
leadership in governance. It was at the Presidency that God’s favor located Olaopa with Professor Ojetunji Aboyade who was at the time the Chairman of the highly powerful and hugely influential Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC) who promptly requested Olaopa’s redeployment to PAC.
Olaopa’s quest for reform of the Nigeria’s government got a substantial boost when he was posted to the Personnel Management Department of the General Services Office in the Office of the Secretary
to the Government of the Federation. This was where he served as the desk officer for the implementation of the 1995 White Paper Panel on Public Service Reform headed by Allison Ayida. Olaopa became the secretary of the White Paper Panel, and he was also able to build his absorptive capacity to formulate understanding of the public service that later enabled his doctoral research.
Olaopa’s doctoral research reminded him what he has perceived earlier in wiring the biograph of Professor Ojetunji Abayode. Substantial and deep understanding of policy and implementation comes from integrated interrogation of both theory and practice. The complexity and difficulty of discerning the content and context of Nigeria’s civil service system demand a comprehensive, robust, and coherent
understanding of the issues, concerns, workings, and challenges of the civil service system in Nigeria.
As an aspiring reformer, he realized the need to build up his administrative management acumen so that his ideas and proposal can accurately correspond to the reality of the Nigerian situation. A coherent and robust rejuvenation of the civil service system in Nigeria demands nothing less.
Olaopa had numerous opportunities within and outside Nigeria’s civil service system to accomplish his mission of personal and intellectual understanding about how the public service worked and how it could be redeemed from the weight of its own debilities. His memoir discusses in extensive details, elegant prose, beautiful poetry, and cogent pontifications of his extensive experiences and insights.
In conclusion, Olaopa doctoral research into the public service system and his practical experience
of the inner workings of that same system have prepared him intellectually and professionally. He got validation of his ambition and mission to reform Nigeria’s civil service system from both the Late Professor Emeritus Akin Mabogunje and President Olusegun Obasanjo. President Obasanjo actually gave him an order in one instance as follows: “Go there and give the required technical support to get the best institutional reform strategy for the country. Good day” Also, the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation approved the establishment of The Bureau of Public Service Reform (BPSR) that was proposed by Oloapa. The BPSR was tasked with the responsibility of coordinating and reporting on ongoing reforms implementation. It was designed to be an engine room institutionally positioned to foster the required linkages with concurrent reforms. The BPSR was in the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation for overall strategic oversight.
Now to the task of building the developmental state. Olaopa’s vision of what he called the Nigerian national project in his memoir has the stated purpose of integrating Nigerians into one integral whole and facilitating their well-being. This project is at three levels- a vibrant economy, a world class civil service system, and a vigorously dynamic civil society. In his memoir, Olaopa outlines the three components of the Nigeria Project as follows:
a. the material/infrastructural level which include the system of production, distribution, consumption, and exchange.
b. the institutional dimension involving the system of institutions, organizations, the procedural mechanisms underlying democracy and so on; and finally,
c. the social relations, culture, values, beliefs and attitudinal
orientation of the people.
We here briefly outline a program of initiatives that can address the first component which constitutes the realization of the developmental state for the country. This is the foundational platform for any authentic nation building, a sort of Promise Land implying that the country has indeed crossed the Jordan River. Nigeria left Egypt in 1960 but has been wondering in the wilderness since then.
From 1960 to the present-day Nigeria, various military, and civilian-led regimes in power
established and implemented their own economic development policies to mixed degrees of success and failure. With each regime came a new program or initiative to transform the national economy. It was not until the Obasanjo administration, beginning in 1999, did the first effective framework to manage the economy took effect. Known as the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategies (NEEDS), it incorporated values-based Government and institutional reforms as part and parcel to achieving wealth creation, employment generation and poverty reduction. Before the Presidential Buhari Administration, the importance and wide acceptance of NEEDS is evidenced in its use by subsequent administrations within their own policy and program reforms for managing the economy.
Unfortunately, the desired outcomes for the national economy have not been fully achieved. We summarize the drivers behind these missed expectations in 13 “C’s (the first 3 from the Goodluck Jonathan Administration):
1. As quoted from President Goodluck Jonathan Administration): “Nigeria’s development efforts have over the years characterized by lack of Continuity, Consistency and Commitment.”
2. Concentration: Lack of concentration of efforts over time, place, and people to achieve critical mass to transform the economy of a region and impact a group of people.
3. Coordination: lack of coordination across policies, people, and place to achieve a
targeted objective or objects of development.
4. Collaboration: lack of collaboration among relevant stakeholders within a
community of development.
5. Community: Lack of specific focus on places or region as an objective of economic
development, not an object of welfare.
6. Comprehensive: lack of comprehensiveness of policies, program, and projects to
accomplish the holistic task of development transformation. Too much emphasis on
partial lists of problems, with the set of problems to be solved changing from
administration to administration. All aspects of a problem must be addressed until
development takes place.
7. Cooperation: Lack of cooperation among stakeholders, which government, private
sector, and civic or community sectors.
8. Convergence: Lack of a pathway toward convergence of efforts and processes in the
total development of place or an economy. Policies must be in place to ensure that development is considered and addressed across all sectors of the socio-economic
environment.
9. Concurrency: lack of orchestration of policies, program and projects based on a
structured understanding of what it takes to unleash development of different targets of development.
10. Consolidation: lack of mechanisms to achieve consolidation and prevent leakages of
development benefits. Consolidation is essential towards accumulation and agglomeration of efforts to induce development.
11. Capitalization: lack of socially constructed markets to ensure the capitalization of
development efforts into differ categories of wealth: community, market, and
financial capital, etc.
We propose a bifurcated approach one for the long-term and one for the short-term. The short-term is for the duration of the first term of the incoming administration. The long-term is for the Governance Team to figure out. We expect that there will be a convergence once the developmental state is established and a mandate is secured from the Nigeria people. Meanwhile the Turnaround Team should be tasked with formulating and implementing simultaneously four initiatives that constitute a portfolio of development projects in the service of Nigeria’s transformation into a developmental state. Two will be designed to connect Nigeria to the global economy as a participant contributor, not only as a consumer. One will be anchored by an economic base of financial services, innovation, and technology. It will transform Lagos into a global city and the financial hub of Africa directly connected to a network of global financial centers including Wall Street, London, Tokyo and Singapore. The other other will be to accelerate and enhance the Calabar Deep Seaport, otherwise referred to as Bakassi Deep Seaport. This is to be built in Idua-Inwang village in the Esighi community of Bakassi Local Government Area of Cross River State downstream of the existing Calabar seaport. It would be the deepest seaport in Africa upon completion with a 16meter draft and a key wall of 680 meters that would allow all sizes of vessels to berth. The project is still in the pre- project implementation stage so opportunity still exists to enhance the project and make the proposed sea port The Porty City Capital of Africa capable of serving the whole of Africa and Middle East. The biggest ships will be able to come from Europe and Asia to berth so that lighter ships can come from different parts of Africa to serve Africa and Middle East.
The other two projects will anchor regional economies. The first is to bring Lake Chad Basin back as a vibrant regional economic footprint. The Lake Chad today is a shadow of and a far cry from, its magnificent origin and its size at its apogee about 7000 years ago in 5000 B.C. The Chad Basin, as we know it today with Lake Chad as its focal point, extends over the area covered by its primordial inland sea and beyond and is estimated to be about 2,434,000 square kilometers. Lake Chad is a freshwater inland lake, a large oasis in a part of Africa’s northern semi-arid Sahel zone. It is well-endowed with huge reserves of groundwater, crude oil and gas, and mineral resources including salts, gold, uranium, titanium, and bauxite. Nigeria can provide innovative leadership under the auspices of the Lake Chad Basin Commission to recharge the basin with transfer of water from the Congo River basin via a 2400kilometer long canal. Obviously, there are major political, economic, finance, technical challenges and the political will and executive capacity to overcome to execute such a huge project. But that is the kind of project management capability that a turnaround team can deliver in the service of the President-Elect to project courage and leadership capability toward the transformation of the Lake Chad Basin into a vibrant regional economy covering many of the countries that are members of the Lake Chad Basin Commission and even those that are not.
The second is to choose a state to serve as a prototype of how to develop a regional anchor economy. The Late Professor Mabogunje once illustrated the need for every region or state unit within the country to build her own economic base on its own resource endowments or ingenuity. He compared the State of Texas to the State of Nevada. Texas has oil resources. Neveda is in the desert but chose to build her economy on entertainment and gabling. Both states are flourishing based on different economic base.
In the 21st Century, every state should be able to build an anchor regional economy. Nevertheless, first things first. The state must establish a robust social overhead capital through development of natural resources, processing, manufacturing, and services. Then it must seek the application of knowledge across sectors and evolve into a knowledge economy. This way such a state should be able to transform her local economic base into an anchor regional economy. An anchor regional economy can be compared to that of a rocket economy. It is a regional economy that is operated in the orbit of economically advanced regions in a both a national and continental context.
Using Ondo State for illustration, state local economic development practice tended to have followed standard protocols in regional economic development. There has been limited creativity and opportunity for value creation. What Ondo State seems to have done to date is seek economic growth through investment promotion that will create jobs. Consistent with other economies that receive large revenues from national resource endowments, there has been less emphasis placed on expanding the local tax base as incoming investors are provided with all kinds of tax incentives. The state seems to have been partially behaving like the industrial developers like those of the US South during the 1950s and 1960s whose main preoccupation was to sell the locality and its industrial sites to prospects seeking locations for manufacturing facilities. The developers use various analytical tools and techniques not so much to understand the economic base as to advertise, market, and sell location to industrial prospects. The developer focuses on promotion and recruitment efforts in lieu of the long-term, economic development picture. Modern economic development practice encourages a macro, strategic view of the regional economy in all development actions. It requires comprehensive analysis and creative problem-solving skills in conjunction with marketing and salesmanship efforts. The Turnaround Team under the direction of the President -Elect, led by a master economic developer, could provide a tailored methodology to be employed as a guide for the practice of economic development by Ondo State as a prototype that could be later developed in other states. Master economic developers have concern for the entire economy, not just for the agricultural base, mining base, manufacturing base or the healthcare sector. This implies that the master economic developer must be equipped with state-of-the-art analytical skills as well as access to modern creative problem-solving capability to be able to create a program of investment opportunities that could be communicated in a manner that will attract global capital into the locality.
To transform Nigeria into a developmental state, I briefly outline a few strategies in which the incoming administration must invest its political capital. The size and scope of the proposed project portfolio is necessary to yield the kind and scope of development dividends that would make the difference. Between what many said impossible, possible. What people said is a confounding enigma, clear and breathtaking. What has been up till now a parade of troubled and failed ventures, profitable. I know that the Late Professor Claude Ake said “The project of nation building and development which Nigerians espouse is a journey without maps, undertaken in moral anarchy towards an uncertain destination.” Olaopa in his wonderful memoir has offered the nation a map and a compass. The incoming administration must not present itself as politically diffident team. It must rather have courage and display a high level of dexterity in its deployment of political power and the strategic utilization of talents and human capital. May God grant the wisdom required to turnaround the country. Amen.
Isaac Megbolugbe is a former practice leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, retired professor, Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University, and a fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. He resides in the USA.
