Memories, creative industries and national transformation

It gives me tremendous pleasure to be honoured with the privilege of delivering this year’s Lecture of the International Museum Day. This is an honour which serves, to me, as a consolidation of my enduring relationship with and unfettered affection for the National Commission for Museums and (NCMM), where I have had the privilege of […]

It gives me tremendous pleasure to be honoured with the privilege of delivering this year’s Lecture of the International Museum Day. This is an honour which serves, to me, as a consolidation of my enduring relationship with and unfettered affection for the National Commission for Museums and (NCMM), where I have had the privilege of serving as a Chairman of the Governing Board between 2000 and 2004. It is of course important to state that the NCMM itself is an outgrowth of the Department of Antiquities established, ironically rather reluctantly, to forestall colonialist hypocrisy of putting a piece of the meat in the mouth and seeking for it feverishly from a clean China plate in 1929.
Let me therefore begin by congratulating the Director-General of the NCMM, Mallam Abdallah for recalling me to the Commission with all the nostalgia that that recall entails.
 Nigeria is a country of great potentials and possibilities and these make it a great nation that can become the envy of all. The topic chosen above is a way of looking at how we can truly transform the nation’s economy through the much-neglected creative and cultural industrial sector at a time when the nation’s economy is in a serious distress, labouring disingenuously under an oil/gas twin mono-culture, to the criminal neglect of the nations rich endowments with numerous material and human resources.
Every society, Nigeria inclusive, must have a national economic vision, objectives and strategies for achieving that vision. No democracy can be said to be enduring and sustainable if it does not fulfil the economic requisites and expectations of its electorate. Professor Charles Soludo (2005) former Governor of the Central Bank espoused the inextricable link between democracy and economy thus: ‘the state of the economy is the determinant of enduring democracy; but democracy is a key pre-requisite for sustainable economic transformation… economic prosperity sustains democracy whereas widespread poverty and ignorance undermine it.’
Issues fundamental to democracy, such as human rights and the various freedoms and liberties, are concrete and meaningful only if the basic freedom from want, poverty and fear of survival are guaranteed. What is the quality of my freedom of expression if I can abuse the President at the Tafawa Balewa Square (renamed Gani Fawehinmi Square) in Lagos or in the press, while my children cannot go to school because I cannot pay their fees? The Nigerian economy is fraught with visional and structural incoherence. It is difficult for the ordinary Nigerian to outline, or explain to himself what the cardinal principles of the Nigerian economy are.  What is the character and structure of the Nigerian economy? If we care to reflect on the obtuse nature of the Nigerian economy since independence, we will find that it is characterized by decay and formlessness. It is an economic system in which no substantial benefit has accrued, through governance, to the people from the abundant natural resources with which the nation is amply endowed. It is a nation where there has not been an appreciable industrialization, investment or a dependable measure of public sector revenue generation/derivation. There is dismal over-government and an excessive dependence on government. It is a government by patronage, what Soludo again calls a ‘rented-entrepreneurial elite’ of big men without any productive source of livelihood, what the late juju maestro, I.K. Dairo, referred to in a very castigative tone, if rendered in its original Yoruba form, as ‘Directors without office, without work-place.’
It is an economy in which government is the sole source of (un) productive consumerist livelihood and galloping unemployment. From the Federation Account, where the revenue derived from oil sales flows, sharing goes on without let between the tiers of governance (especially between the Federal and State governments. There is little provision for capital growth, as no facilitating environment has been provided for business and investment. Employment growth is stifled and revenue generation for government is near-zero. This is the basis for the choice of our topic; the crucial necessity for a diversified economy from the standpoint of material and non-material culture.