Stumbling into the next 100 years

Why? Lord Lugard carried out the Amalgamation with effect from January 1, 1914. Was the Federal Government too busy replying some letters that it forgot about the date? If your birthday falls on a certain date, will you tell your friends that you have decided to hold the party next month? Given the Nigerian Government’s […]

Why? Lord Lugard carried out the Amalgamation with effect from January 1, 1914. Was the Federal Government too busy replying some letters that it forgot about the date? If your birthday falls on a certain date, will you tell your friends that you have decided to hold the party next month?
Given the Nigerian Government’s penchant for celebration, it announced soon after we concluded the 50th Independence anniversary celebrations in October 2010 that we will be marking Amalgamation in 2014. Several of our newspapers took a cue from that and came up with special packages to mark the day but government itself came up with nothing. Why are newsrooms more efficient than State House even though they have far less money?  
We do not as yet know what the official celebration of Amalgamation day will entail. I suspect that there will be many long speeches. I would like to appeal to our officials not to deliver any speech of the kind that Rear Admiral Promise Fingesi delivered at the opening of the Second World Black Arts and African Festival [FESTAC] in January 1977. As the Federal Commissioner for Special Duties and President of FESTAC, Fingesi was shouting at the top of his voice even though there were hundreds of microphones in front of him. His speech lasted nearly two hours.
If we are wise, we should use the occasion of this anniversary not so much to lament on the calamities and the missed opportunities of the last 100 years but on what we should do in the next 100 years. Now, it is difficult for a country to peer into the next 100 years. There are too many factors that cannot be predicted with any certainty that far into the future. One big imponderable is technological change which could alter whole scenarios within a few years. We also don’t know what other nations are planning. We don’t know which power will dominate the world by the end of this century, whether it will be a friendly power or a hostile one. We don’t even know whether the human population will continue to grow at an exponential rate or it will level off and possibly even fall at some point.
The environment is also a big imponderable. If humans ignore current warnings and continue to pour greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at current rates, temperatures could rise, polar ice sheets could melt, sea levels could rise and inundate most coastal areas. Our national priorities would then change and we may have to move proud Lagosians in Dangote trucks and resettle them in Niger State, for example.
Other wild factors include the possibility that a huge meteorite could collide with Earth and bring human life to a screeching end the way it did to the dinosaurs 50 million years ago. Aliens from outer space could also invade Earth and make all of us slaves. Or even, people of the First World could abandon this earth in space vehicles and establish new colonies on the moon, in which case we Africans can resettle in Texas or make the best out of the prairies and the Rockies.
I think it is better if we forecast what Nigeria can do in the next 25 or 30 years. There are three areas that I think need to be tackled in order for us to make a start towards a greater future. For example, it is nearly 30 years since we did any national planning. The First National Development Plan of 1965-70 took this country somewhere despite the disruption brought by political crises and the Civil War. The Kainji Dam was built under this plan. The Second National Development Plan of 1970-75 also achieved many things. It laid grounds for the launching of UPE [universal, free compulsory primary education]. It created the second generation universities and most of the Advanced Teachers Colleges [ATCs].
The Third National Development Plan of 1975-80 probably achieved the most, I think. Two big factors in its success were the good fortune of the Oil Boom and also the sense of direction of the Murtala/Obasanjo military regime. Most of this country’s key infrastructure in roads, education, health, industry, aviation, oil refining and sports was built in that period.
Now, we actually launched a Fourth National Development Plan that was to run from 1980-1985. However, the civilians that took over in 1979 soon forgot about it. Nobody wanted to coordinate anything anymore. Unlike under the military when states must key into all Federal plans, Federal and state governments often worked at cross purposes in the Second Republic. To cite one small example, agents of the Oyo State Government under Governor Bola Ige sneaked in the night and demolished the first Shagari Housing Estate built at Oyo town in 1980.
The soldiers that ruled from 1983 to 1999 never talked about a National Development Plan again. Sometimes they came up with interesting ideas such as Abacha’s Vision 2010, later modified by civilians into Vision 20:2020. The last time I heard any mention of that in an official speech was more than two years ago. The authorities at various levels prefer the current chaotic state of affairs where everyone does what he likes in terms of development effort. Federal, state and local governments embark on projects to appease a political power broker. Governments many times get the idea to pursue a project when a contractor submits an unsolicited “proposal.” Despite the lack of national planning, a lot of infrastructural projects were built in the last 14 years, especially by state governments. That we didn’t derive maximum benefits from all these was certainly due to lack of sync.  
A second area that deserves effective tackle in a 25-year National Plan for Nigeria is corruption. Officials now pile up personal interest upon personal interest in every contract award and it is a wonder that some things get done at all. Of course a lot of things never get done for this reason. Many projects were started and abandoned midway, and many things were bought by governments that turned out to be of no use at all and were left to rot in stores or in yards.
Maybe all the corruption in Nigeria did not serve an entirely useless purpose. Four decades ago, there were few big business ventures around that were not owned by government. Since then, the pell-mell transfer of public funds into private pockets, or what Marxist economists called primitive accumulation, has enabled the setting up of privately owned housing estates, schools, universities, hospitals, factories, farms, airlines, shipping lines and banks. In a way it made Nigeria more efficient, somehow.  
I do not however want to say a kind word about the corruption of the modern day. When General Obasanjo railed in his 1977 Jaji Declaration against what he called “conspicuous consumption,” he never envisaged huge mansions and castles, private jets and yachts, endless family shopping trips to Dubai and Europe, wholesale sending of children to foreign schools and ceaseless medical trips to Egypt, India, Dubai, Europe and America.
Then there is the small matter of quality political leadership. There is growing consensus today that many of this country’s leaders at all levels are not up to the task intellectually, politically or technocratically.  Many observers attribute this to election rigging but I suspect it is more deeply rooted than even that.
The best celebration of the Amalgamation centenary would therefore be for someone to produce a blueprint for Nigeria to resume a certain level of national planning, curb corruption at all levels and produce a politico-electoral process that churns out quality leadership. That is, unless we want to stagger, reel and stumble into the next 100 years.