Kaduna: El-Rufai’s dying patient

“Writing history in letters of gold”. Those are the words with which President Buhari praised the Governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir El-Rufai, after commissioning a string of infrastructural projects in Kafanchan, Zaria and Kaduna during a two-day state visit last week. The President was evidently impressed by what he saw across the state, particularly […]

“Writing history in letters of gold”. Those are the words with which President Buhari praised the Governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir El-Rufai, after commissioning a string of infrastructural projects in Kafanchan, Zaria and Kaduna during a two-day state visit last week. The President was evidently impressed by what he saw across the state, particularly in the state capital and said so effusively, even for a man who is otherwise usually economical with praises for other people.

Now, I do not know what President Buhari saw in Kaduna, or how he looked or with what background information he interpreted what he saw. But in the 48 hours before the president’s visit, I was also in Kaduna for a two-day journalistic tour. My primary assignment was to interview the cleric, Dr Ahmad Gumi for the “Insecurity in the North: In Search of Solutions” series we are currently running on the Daily Politics programme on Trust TV, the sister media organisation to Daily Trust.

After the interview, I decided to look around the city to observe, see, listen and learn for myself the realities on the ground, as opposed to the images of El-Rufai’s work on social media. It didn’t take long for me to begin to have the impression that El-Rufai is simply killing the patient in the name of infrastructural development. All development programmes and projects must answer two questions: to what ends? And at what costs? When we subject El-Rufai’s infrastructural work to critical scrutiny, which we must, the results are far from the colourful portraits on social media.

It is often said that it takes pain to remove pain. This is true in medical practice as it is in development policy. But as all doctors know, if the patient dies, then the whole operation is a failure. Historians and sociologists of development know this too that when governments apply the wrong medicine to the ills of development, however, inadvertently, you will find untold stories of socio-economic wreckage and displacement behind glittering skyscrapers, expansive roads and growth numbers.

In my view, this is precisely the case with El-Rufai’s work in Kaduna. No one can deny the massive road and other infrastructural projects completed or ongoing in Kaduna today. The critical questions are, as ever, to what ends, and at what costs? In my view, El-Rufai’s entire projects are simply no compensation for the social and economic damage his work has wrought on the city. More importantly, his whole development agenda springs from a clear ignorance of what needs to be done in the first place. There are three reasons for this conclusion.  

First, about 65 per cent of Nigeria’s economy is informal in terms of employment and overall economic output, a statistic that is possibly higher in the northern parts. By comparison, the informal sector in South Africa is around 18 per cent. Indeed, a World Bank report last year estimated that over 80 per cent  of all employment in Nigeria is in the informal economy. Nigeria’s huge informal sector operates through street shops, roadside stalls, large and small markets, farms, mechanical and all mending and repair workshops, small-scale building and construction, utility services and the rather chaotic transport networks that support these in the form of taxis, tricycles, buses, motorcycles and so on.

These spaces, rather than industries and offices for professional services of the organised public and private sectors of the formal economy, are the nerve centre of the northern, indeed, Nigerian economy. They are the spaces where the bulk of all economic activities take place, where most of the jobs are created and sustained and where incomes for human development of any kind come from for many millions. The informal economy poses three problems for development policy, however.

It is usually comprised of micro actors in the economy such as the individual shop owner, the bus driver, the hairdresser, the tailor and so on. The sector is also largely unbanked and untaxed or grossly undertaxed. So, the informal economy yields little revenue streams to the public purse. And third, the informal sector makes urban infrastructural development significantly difficult precisely because of the large numbers of rather micro units of actors involved in rather chaotic settings.

The task of formalising the informal sector or of integrating it into the formal sector is thus an important policy challenge for developing economies with large informal sectors like Nigeria. This is the key challenge El-Rufai faced in Kaduna. In fact, it is arguably the single most important development policy challenge Nigeria faces: How do we move the large informal sector into the formalised economy?

But instead of deep thinking that this problem calls for, El-Rufai chose the headline-grabbing but a rather dangerous way out of the problem by demolishing homes, street shops, markets, stalls and other clusters of the city’s predominantly informal economy. After the bulldozing, the governor now has his more beautiful roads and flyovers, but the people and livelihoods that will support the roads lay in ruins as hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes, jobs, businesses and even lives.

However, because most of those affected are the poor, their groans have been muffled by the engineered cheers of the self-acclaimed Mai Rusau, on social media and elsewhere. The Nigerian media and academia have an obligation to bring forth and document those muffled voices in vivid detail, for balance and posterity, if for nothing else. This is why even though everyone can see the new look around town, there is little enthusiasm for the governor’s work by many residents, as many indicators in the city reveal.  

So, what is the alternative? It is true that before El-Rufai’s work in Kaduna, the old road networks had become overcrowded as population growth outpaced the existing infrastructure. This in turn caused a lot of ‘go-slow’ and hardship for most residents. But the solution lay in opening up new housing settlements and an efficient public transport system, not to destroy the local economy in the name of building double-lane roads. The solution to urban overcrowding is not always expanded roads but mass housing and mass transportation, including robustly enforced traffic rules.

Moreover, El-Rufai’s infrastructural development projects have created very few jobs locally and have generally been shrouded in a lack of transparency. At most sites where work is ongoing, you will find no more than a handful of workers. The implication of this is that the projects have not only displaced the local economy by unsettling hundreds of thousands of residents from their jobs, businesses and homes, it has also added very little value to the local economy by way of jobs or multiplier effects. For the poor, double lanes do not by themselves put food on the table.

The picture will be very different if most of the construction work had been through direct labour, a practice that, for township works at least, should be enshrined in law in a country with high rate of unemployment like Nigeria. The value-added to the local economy in jobs and overall multiplier effects would even have been far greater had the government sought to develop new mass housing and transport schemes, rather than seek to expand existing roads or build flyovers.

Given that there is little public information on the costs of the project, it is well possible that in the end, the costs of the roads, bridges and flyovers could be in the same region as say developing additional 30,000 to 50,000 new housing infrastructure for the state, which would have much better solved the problem of overcrowded roads the governor sought to tackle in the first place. But someday we might yet know.