I am not given to pontification, fortune-telling or prophesying but I decided this time to take seriously the message sent to me by a senior citizen in response to my write up of last Thursday, marking the Diamond Jubilee of Nigeria’s independence.
She said it is all okay to nostalgically reminisce about the past and tell stories about how good or how bad some aspects of Nigeria were many years ago. It is, however, more important, she said, to say what should be done so that the 120th anniversary of Nigeria’s independence celebration will be much more justified than the 60th.
At first I wanted to brush aside her observation and say, in the Nigerian way, “What is my own with 2080 since I will not be there to witness the occasion?” Even if by some miracle I am still there, I will be so old and so infirm that I will not be at Eagle Square, watch the parade on TV or even be able to read about it in a newspaper.
Nevertheless, drawing upon some of the lessons of the last 60 years (at least the part of it that I was old enough to witness), I could point out ten areas that, if properly thought out, wisely evaluated, carefully planned and conscientiously executed, could guarantee a happier future for Nigeria and a worthy 120th Independence Anniversary, if ever there is one.
First of all, we must guarantee our food supply, including its quantity, quality and pricing. Millions of people in Nigeria are hungry and malnourished, which does not make for a happy anniversary. In many countries of the world today, food is hardly a concern.
Instead, many people in rich societies throw away a lot of food, much to the chagrin of the FAO. Most other socio-economic and psychological progress is predicated on this need, to make food plentiful, qualitative and affordable.
I have no idea how this can be done but I remember what the then Managing Director of Nigerian Agricultural Bank, Alhaji Falalu Bello, said in 2001 that the most important thing you can do to Nigerian agriculture is to guarantee prices for farmers. That is more promising than getting CBN to dish out hundreds of billions in loans, a lot of which is squandered and much of it is not repaid.
Next, the population has to be healthy. The great journalist and historian William Shirer once wrote that at the start of Second World War in 1939, he saw British POWs captured by the German Army in Holland and Belgium. They were skinny and malnourished, he said, following decades of neglect by the British authorities.
In contrast, he wrote, German youths were well nourished and well exercised in Hitler’s summer camps, hence the dynamism of the German military machine. I am not saying Nigeria should go to war but we need healthy and well-nourished youths for rapid national development.
Next, is education. It is already becoming very difficult to prosper in this world without good education, and it will become increasingly so going forward. First of all we should eradicate the phenomenon of out of school children; how many geniuses are we missing among those millions?
Iya Abubakar, who became a professor of Mathematics in California and a Vice Chancellor of ABU Zaria, once said on James Audu’s NTA program ‘A chance to meet’ that he managed to stay in Middle School by accident and if he had gotten his wish to drop out, he would have been rearing cattle on the Adamawa plains for the rest of his life.
Okay, even when our formal schools are much improved from what they are today, there is still the need to restore that thing called reading culture. Again I don’t know how this can be done, but I still remember the incredulity in a university class of hundreds of students many years ago when I mentioned “Mount Kilimanjaro.” Not one of them ever heard of it. One of the students told me, “Sir, this is a Biology class and not a Geography class.”
In 1981 when US President Ronald Reagan appointed his friend Robert Clark, a judge in the California Supreme Court, as National Security Adviser, it was discovered in the Senate that he did not even know what Europe is. The US is powerful enough to get by but we cannot afford people like that in high Nigerian positions.
As part of preps for the future, Nigerian youths should spend less time chatting on the social media, doing selfies, hurrying to be the first to share fake news and rushing to offer opinions on all matters without proper reading and reflection. All those do not make for good preparation to assume future leadership responsibility.
Again I don’t know how this can be done. Social media distraction is a world-wide problem, but someone out there must have an answer.
Now, there is no way that our youths will get adequate prep for future leadership roles if they don’t get real work opportunities now. I got a job and collected my first salary before I wrote my final WAEC exam. After NYSC, I was unemployed for only six days before I started teaching in the university. I am not saying that prepared me for any leadership responsibility, but it is a shade better than carrying a degree certificate around for many years without a job.
Going forward, our economy needs to create hundreds of millions of jobs especially in agriculture; big, medium and small-scale industry and diversification into service sectors, leveraging on modern technology. I don’t know how this can be done but sure, there is a Deng Xiaoping lurking somewhere in Nigeria?
Perhaps we should slow down on our rapid population growth. How could families ensure good food, health, education and character training when an under-employed parent breeds lots of children and turns them on the streets to fend for themselves?
Even China regretted its billionaire population. A visiting Chinese Communist Party official told me as much in 2000AD, that Chinese government wished it had 500 million less people to cater for.
Another veritable prep area for 2080 is to reorganize and reorient the public service. Some elders will say, just bring back the civil service of the 1960s that we inherited from the British, which was slimmer, more efficient, more selfless and much more conscientious than the civil service of today.
It is impossible to return to the past, but it is also impossible to carry on like this into the future. As it presently functions, our public service at all levels cannot deliver on national programs, however visionary. What should be done? I don’t know, but some experts out there may have an idea.
The political order needs reworking. There is reason to wonder whether liberal democracy is suitable for less developed societies, African societies in particular. Right now we cannot do anything about it because the Western world rules the rest of the world and has imposed its own values on the rest of us. The situation is likely to change in the next two decades.
If, as looks possible, China supplants Western world as the dominant world power, it will not force everyone to adopt Confucian models of social organization. Liberal democracy will become an orphan without its Western godfather. African philosophers should better set to work immediately to produce a new, ideal political model for Africa. How I wish sages like Julius Nyerere were still around.
Many people are already saying that progress is not possible without restructuring the political structure for Nigeria. The original proponents of restructuring’s goal is to curb Northern advantages in the Nigerian federation, hence the hostility to the idea in the North.
Others later presented restructuring as a way to get our dysfunctional public services working. Come to think of it; if our future plan is for a West African Federation or even for a United States of Africa by 2080, restructuring Nigeria will become a small matter.
