Nigeria: master of the shuffle dance at 53

A number of commentaries gave the impression that Nigeria just turned 53 years old on that day. The assumption in this manner of thinking is Nigeria was zero (0) years on independence on October 1960 – a mathematical impossibility. Honestly I am not sure if the year Nigeria got her political independence could be the […]

A number of commentaries gave the impression that Nigeria just turned 53 years old on that day. The assumption in this manner of thinking is Nigeria was zero (0) years on independence on October 1960 – a mathematical impossibility. Honestly I am not sure if the year Nigeria got her political independence could be the watershed for calculating the age of the country or the time the North and South was amalgamated into one country in 1914 or even when Flora Shaw, the girlfriend of the then colonial Governor-General Frederick Lugard suggested the name in 1898 to designate the British protectorate on the River Niger.
Reading through the various commenta-ries on whether there is anything to celebrate at 53 reminded me that we all wear tainted binoculars through which we filter the realities that confront us. In this sense, both those who see nothing to celebrate, and those who believe that everything is OK with the country tend to see the country from a very narrow prism. The cup is either full or empty. There are only two shades of colours: black and white.
Does the country really have anything to celebrate about?
I am not too sure that I agree with analysts who postulate that the greatest achievement of the country is that it has remained together despite many challenges. I see no creative input from the entity called Nigeria or anything suggestive of an effort from such a position. Rather it conjures the sense of fatalism which we generally use to rationalize our inactions, complacency and plain incompetence.
In my opinion the greatest achievement of the country – and this is not down to any effort from the country – is the generalized belief among Nigerians that things ought to be better. This is what the American political scientist Ted Gurr would call ‘relative deprivation’— “the tension that develops from a discrepancy between the ‘ought’ and ‘is’ of collective value dissatisfaction.” Ted Gurr titled his book Why Men Rebel. In the Nigerian context the crisis of relative deprivation and its consequences is a major reason why the country cannot afford to continue on its path of complacency and inaction. And it is something positive in my book since any major change will necessarily have to start with a sharp dissatisfaction with the way things are as against the way people believe they ought to be.
To give an example: when I was growing up in Onitsha in the 1970s, each time NEPA – the precursor of PHCN- ‘brought the light’ after prolonged power outage that would last for days, everyone would scream ‘up NEPA!’. There was no sense of anger at the power outage – at least not in the little world I knew.  If NEPA ‘took the light’ again, there would be a few sighs of ‘NEPA!’ and everyone would reach out for their lanterns or candles. I studied in secondary school (1975-1980) with lantern and even when the school got a generator around 1979, it was still a luxury to be enjoyed for a few hours at nights. If the generator was not turned on for weeks, no one complained. Even in my university days (1980-1984), lanterns and candle lights were still common accessories. It was accepted that it was the prerogative of NEPA to ‘bring’ and ‘take’ ‘light’ whenever it chose.
Now Nigerians rightly get angry because there is no regular power supply. The same crisis of expectation that we see in the electricity generation and distribution sector we also see in the other sectors of the national life. In the political arena, people complain about the structure of the country and make various recommendations, including calls for a sovereign national conference. The intense hunger among Nigerians to bridge the gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’ in the country, often expressed in different ways is, in my opinion, the country’s greatest achievement. It suggests that things cannot continue for too long to be the way they are. Something has to give in.
Nigeria embodies several paradoxes some of which feed into the  crisis of Gurr’s relative deprivation,  helping on the one hand to engender hope and on the other hand to put pressure on the country to bridge the gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’.  One of this is poverty amid huge potential. Apart from the country’s huge population, which could potentially be translated into a huge market, on December 12 2005,Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs investment bank economist in a research paper listed Nigeria among the Next Eleven (also known as N-11). These were a group of 11 countries – Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey, South Korea, and Vietnam which O’Neill identified as having a high potential of becoming, along with the BRICs/BRICS, the world’s largest economies in the 21st century. The criteria that Goldman Sachs used were macroeconomic stability, political maturity, openness of trade and investment policies, and the quality of education.
As politicians are wont to do, the Obasanjo regime tried to reap political capital out of this by suggesting that the country’s elevation to the Next Eleven was due to its management of the state and economy. Nigerians love the hurrah effects that are suggested from such elevations. For them, it is an indication that the gap between what is and what ought to be is about being bridged. However as the material circumstances of the people continue to deteriorate despite the whiffs of optimism from such elevations, the crisis of relative aspiration is only deepened. And as this happens, systemic pressure is intensified. The systemic pressure itself is a warning sign that Nigeria, ever the master of hanging on the precipice without falling over, can no longer continue to count on its luck. Unbeknown to the Goodluck administration, each time it plays its politics of GDP growth –  how the economy has been doing well under its management –  it unwittingly increases the crisis of relative deprivation among the people, which in turn puts pressure on the regime to bridge the gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’.
Another evidence of the sort of ‘revolution’ that has taken place in the minds of Nigerians is with respect to their analysis of why things are the way they are today. Not too long ago, the weeping boy for almost all of the country’s woes was colonialism or neo-colonialism. It was largely a feel-good theory that blamed everyone but Nigerians for the lapses and shortcomings in the country. Now people blame the country’s leadership. Implicit in this is a transition from a feel-good analysis to a certain belief that even if someone helped to push us down, the ultimate responsibility to get up is our own. I foresee a situation where in the next couple of years people will move from blaming the government to sharing the blame with the government. This, in my book, is revolution of the mind, which can only increase the systemic pressure for change.
The prevailing condition of ‘relative depriva-tion’ in the country operates on a substructure of real challenges on the ground. The first in my opinion is a country where nothing – or just a few things work. On top of this is that it is a low trust economy – no one trusts anyone, not even that contracts duly signed by concerned parties will be observed. In a low trust society, the tendency to cut corners or resort to self -help tends to be very high. No one trusts the police or other state security apparatuses; you do not trust that if you deliver your goods to a customer he will transfer the money to your account as he promised just as the business man does not believe that if he transfers the money first, the goods will be delivered. Trust on government is even worse than the deep distrust among citizens and various ethnic and religious groups. When for instance the Academic Staff of Universities complain that the government reneges on agreement, people often laugh and wonder to which group the government has ever kept its promise. And the truth is that many of those who accuse the government of reneging on promises are themselves masters of doubletalk, of saying one thing and doing the other. The society is therefore one piece of chaos, with people openly professing their trust only in God.
There is security challenge and serious infrastructure deficits.  But worse than these, is that there is a rapid de-Nigerianisation process, with people stampeding out of the Nigeria project into primordial identities where they seek to negotiate meaning for their lives, often regarding the Nigerian State as the enemy. If this trend continues, we risk having Nigeria without Nigerians.
What is the way out? President Jonathan has now bowed to the pressures from some quarters and inaugurated a committee for a National Conference. I am among those who believe that such a conference could become a platform for a vocal minority – the usual suspects – to grandstand and complicate the search for solution to the myriad of challenges that confront the country. I truly hope I am proved wrong.