NIGERIAN DEVELOPMENT
by John Edward Philips
I. INTRODUCTION
From the very first time I visited Nigeria as an undergraduate in 1974, I recognized the enormous potential of the place. Nigeria was still feeling the heady rush of OPEC oil money, had great big wide open spaces with agricultural potentialresources, an outspoken press, a diverse, intelligent and talented population with an obvious entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to work to get ahead. This was a country I wanted to know better. Nigeria seemed a country destined for greatness, having finally[TF1] solved the dilemmas of its first Republic and the civil war that ended it. What could possibly go wrong[TF2]? A few years later when I was a graduate student at UCLA I asked a Nigerian fellow graduate student whether he really believed that Nigeria was about to develop. He replied that he didn’t see how it couldn’t, since all the theoretical preconditions[TF3] were there. I couldn’t argue. I didn’t want to argue because I agreed with him.
A generation later, after a few lost decades for Africa in general and some bad crises in Nigeria in particular, although nothing like the situation in the Congo or even Sudan, it is impossible to be so optimistic. Indeed cynicism and pessimism have been referred to as the Nigerian factor, as more and more Nigerians have given up hope for their country and tried to grab as much for themselves and their family as they could get away with. The problems are enormous and ignoring them won’t make them go away.
Major world powers have taken to imploring Nigeria to mend its ways and get about the business of developing its potential. The United States chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton, was recently in Nigeria where she criticized the Nigerian ruling class in very undiplomatic terms.
The most immediate source of the disconnect between Nigeria's wealth and its poverty is a failure of governance at the federal, state and local levels. Lack of transparency and accountability has eroded the legitimacy of the government and contributed to the rise of groups that embrace violence and reject the authority of the state.[1]
Chinese ambassador Liu Guijin was also in Nigeria for consultations shortly before Secretary Clinton’s visit. Any criticisms he may have had of Nigeria’s shortcomings must have been muted and/or behind closed doors. Ambassador Liu is, after all, a professional diplomat, not a politician. His public pronouncements, however, were clearly less than forthcoming about the history of the Nigerian – Chinese relationship.[2] One can only assume that his private conversations were more honest.
It is with sincere modesty that I accept your invitation to give my own perspectives on Nigeria’s situation. Political Science was only a minor field for me when I did my Master’s degree at UCLA, and I did not pursue it as an outside field when I did my Ph.D. in history there. Although I have been to Nigeria several times and follow its affairs through the Internet I haven’t actually visited in years and my current research has been in other directions. However, as some of you know, the African Studies Review, the official journal of the African Studies Association in the United States, asked me to write a review essay about political science studies of Nigeria a few years ago. As you don’t know, the professor who supervised my M.A. work in political science, Richard Sklar, once told me that I should be treated as a national resource in Japan, or something like that, I can’t remember exactly. It only struck me because I have become so used to being ignored in Japan. If a great scholar like Dick Sklar has so much confidence in me to analyze Nigerian politics then I think I should defer to his judgment anyd attempt to give you the best explanation I can of the situation there.
II. Causes general to Africa
Causes of Nigeria’s development dilemma can be divided into those general to Africa and those particular to Nigeria. Nigeria does not exist in a vacuum, and in fact many of its problems are not dissimilar to those of its neighbors. While many of its problems are unique to Nigeria, or at least of a much greater magnitude in Nigeria than elsewhere on the continent, many of Nigeria’s problems are very typical of those of Africa as a whole. This is to be expected in a country with arbitrarily defined colonial borders and a very recent sense of nationhood. That situation is typical of Africa, but it is not the only cause of Nigeria’s, or Africa’s sense of underdevelopment. Indeed it may be entirely irrelevant to Africa’s plight. The United States of America is just a little over 200 years old. One hundred and fifty years ago it was possible to argue that it was not even a single country but a group of countries in alliance. That question was not settled without a bloody civil war. Yet today the United States has the world’s largest economy and the world’s strongest military. Being new is no barrier to being great.
Africa’s greatest problem is its climate. Developmental economists have long noticed the strong correlation between climate and development. Africa is the most tropical of all continents and as such it is the least developed.
In addition, Africa’s being the place where humanity originated makes its disease environment the worst for humans. Organisms evolve together with their diseases and predators, in a constant evolutionary arms race. Coffee, like human beings, originally evolved in Africa. Today more coffee is grown in Latin America than in Africa because the disease environment for coffee is worse in Africa. Cacao evolved in Meso-America. Today, more cacao is grown in Africa because the disease environment for cacao is less dangerous in Africa. Human beings evolved in Africa, but today more human beings are grown (if that’s the right verb) outside of Africa because the disease environment for humans is far more dangerous inside Africa than it is outside of Africa.
Of course policies could be adopted to mitigate the effects of climate and disease. Specifically garbage collection and sanitation would be very inexpensive preventive measures that could easily be taken to reduce the disease factor. However, education probably has to precede policy change in this matter. The germ theory of disease is not as widely understood by the mass of the population in Africa as the efficacy of modern, scientific methods of disease treatment is. Thus policies that train expensive doctors and nurses for expensive clinics are far more popular with Africans than are inexpensive policies to dispose of piles of rotting garbage. The doctors and nurses regularly flee to countries where they will be able to get even higher salaries, but the piles of rotting garbage are only disposed of by goats, whose contributions are too often unappreciated. Thus the disease factor remains, inhibiting African development.
But other climate related policies would have to be adopted in the industrialized world, specifically the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which probably represent the greatest imminent threat to Africa today. Africa is on the frontline of the global warming crisis, yet Africa has contributed nearly nothing to causing the crisis. As we consider what the Africans can do about their own plight, we should also consider, if not how others have caused that plight, at least how others are contributing to it now, and what we can do about it. If Africa’s development is not really our responsibility, we should at least refrain from making Africa’s predicament worse than it already is.
To return to the question of the general causes of African development, the small size of the market in any African country is another major problem. This is not simply a matter of the small population and limited purchasing power of that population. Nigeria is, after all, in some of the least bad shape of any African country. But no small country is capable of going it alone in development. The United States’s development didn’t really take off until the Transcontinental Railroad made a continental market in 1869. Even today, the emerging economies are the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China. The tiny Asian tigers (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea) were only able to develop as island platforms manufacturing for the US market. China itself was able to generate surplus value largely by exporting to the world’s largest market, the United States. Until a transcontinental railroad and a continental market transform Africa, or until the Lomé Convention is revised to allow Africa to manufacture for European markets, or some other large market becomes available to African production, so long will economies of scale not be economic in Africa.
I realize that this position puts me directly at odds with those of the hegemonic Bretton Woods institutions. When I spoke at The Joint Japan/World Bank Graduate Scholarship Program at Tsukuba University,[3] I was politely informed that the experience of the Asian tigers showed that size was not a barrier to development. No amount of explanation of the different circumstances was taken seriously. As long as the so-called International Community is hostile to African market access or market building, so long will Africa be unable to create the economies of scale necessary for development.
Related to the small size of the African market is the permeability of African borders. It is true that this means that manufactures from one African country can reach other African countries without passing tedious, expensive and often corrupt customs checkpoints. But it also means that African countries without tariff barriers become passive smugglers of tariff-free manufactures from the developed world to other African countries that are trying to build their infant industries.
When I was a Fulbrighter in Nigeria during the Buhari regime we Fulbrighters listened to a lecture by the IMF negotiators about the negotiations with the Nigerian government. They boiled it down to three sticking points: the tariff, the overvalued currency, and the petroleum subsidy. I said I could understand their points about the currency value and the petroleum subsidy because of market forces, but I asked why they were insisting that Nigeria abandon its tariffs. The United States didn’t develop without a high, protective tariff to develop its infant industries. Why were they asking others to ignore our own experience? The negotiator thought a bit and responded that they weren’t really so strong on that point, and if the Nigerians agreed to the other two points it would probably be an acceptable compromise to let them have the tariff. How effective that tariff would be without an honest customs service or defensible borders is another question.
Related to the problem of arbitrary, permeable borders is the assumption of the colonial governments that set up those borders that Africa had no history before the colonial era, and that historical processes were not at work in pre-colonial Africa. Ironically, the result was the freezing of historical processes in colonial Africa. The expansion of some groups at the expense of others was halted to ensure that each group remained in its “traditional” (i.e. immediately pre-colonial) territory. Absorption of other groups was also halted as “ethnic” identities were created and/or frozen. New national institutions and eventually identities were created. The result was a system of overlapping governments, traditional and modern, which function in a sort of delicate symbiosis that seems strange to outsiders. In Hausa the traditional administrative hierarchy is called “hukuma” (from the Arabic word for government) while the modern imposed hierarchy is called “gwamnati” (from the English word “government”). Other African languages have similarly different terms for the two systems of administration, one traditional, one modern.
This dual hierarchy is in fact found all over Africa. I am not arguing that this system is itself a barrier to development, although I do think that it is a possibility that should be considered. Rather I argue that it is the symptom of a system of colonialism that assumed that external institutions could be imposed on Africa’s own ongoing social and political evolution. I have been in the archives in Nigeria, and I was amazed that the early colonial conquerors assumed that they would be there for centuries. In fact, as Brigadier Lugard was working out his system of indirect rule, the very first president of Independent Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe, was being born to one of his clerks. If the colonial interlude was more traumatic and effective than many Africans imagined, colonialism itself turned out to be far briefer than many Europeans imagined.
The new post colonial situation has been that of a system of modern nation states, or “citizen states” as the Japanese refer to them. While many of these new states have collapsed or even imploded, others have been more or less successful in creating a feeling of national identity and identification among their citizens. I was in Nigeria during the Second Republic, shortly before the Shagari administration expelled illegal aliens. A Nigerian friend warned me not to visit another friend I had because he wasn’t a Nigerian, but really a Ghanaian. He told everyone that he was from Sokoto, but he was really from Ghana. I was amazed because the person telling me this was the same “tribe” (Hausa) and religion (Muslim) as the other friend. His prejudice was purely national. I could think of no stronger evidence of the reality of African nation-states.
Personally I have always liked Ghana and Ghanaians. In fact, on the same trip to Nigeria I stayed with Ghanaian friends in another Nigerian city. I tried to warn them that they might be vulnerable in event of a deportation order. An election was coming up and the scapegoating of foreigners was an obvious possibility in my mind. “Mexicans don’t vote.” I said. All they had to do to be legally resident aliens was to go down and register their ECOWAS passports at immigration. They just laughed at me.
“This is Africa.” they said, insisting that no one cared about passports and immigration checks. They turned out to be wrong, of course. As was I. According to reports from the Nigerian press even legally resident Ghanaians were forced to move. Africa may no longer be Africa, but it is not a modern, western bureaucratic state either. What it is today is not obvious to me. What it is becoming I will not even try to guess.
Related to the political, economic and even social reality of these modern African states is the lack of infrastructure connecting them. Here I am not just thinking of the transcontinental railroad I mentioned before. On my first visit to Africa I went overland from Ghana to Nigeria and back to Togo. This was a densely populated strip of coast with a vibrant economy, but the international borders of the area obstruct this economic activity and hinder possible economic development. A federal African union could build a high speed rail and an expressway from Lagos to Accra, to the benefit of all countries in the path. Without a body with the power to tax (especially through a tariff barrier) and to spend on internal improvements, even the free trade zone of ECOWAS cannot make the necessary infrastructural improvements that will make the possibility of the ECOWAS market a reality.
Related to the problem of the limited size and arbitrary borders of the nation state, and especially to the difficulty of patrolling those borders, is the problem of dumping of surplus industrial production by developed countries. So long as there are African countries willing to subvert the tariff barriers of others, so long will African production be undercut in its own markets by the surplus production of others. To give a Nigerian example, the northern Nigerian cotton belt possesses an obvious natural advantage in textile production, and in fact many textile mills were set up in Kaduna and elsewhere in the cotton belt. A combination of American subsidies on cotton agriculture and Chinese surplus production of cotton textiles for export has effectively wiped out the once flourishing Nigerian textile sector, and has even been one factor that led farmers in the area to switch to food crops in preference to the cotton crop, which once fed a textile industry that exported from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and from the Mediterranean to the forests of central Africa. The Lomé Convention restrictions on African development mentioned above preclude African production exporting outside the continent.
One cause of the smuggling problem (and the difficulty in stamping it out) is the alienation of Africans from their modern governments. The patriotic identification of many African people with their governments is real and is not just tied to soccer games, but the alienation of many is also real. Government is conducted in foreign languages by elites, often from other regions. It has rarely been something that organically evolved in place. The Hausa term “bak’in Bature” (literally “black European”) applies equally to African-Americans and to senior government officials. European rule has never left, in the eyes of many villagers. Nor have any but a handful of African countries even been able to supplement their foreign official language with any indigenous tongue. I often ask Japanese students to imagine if their Diet had to conduct proceedings in English, or if their education had been carried out entirely in English from fourth grade. It is a great testimony to the linguistic ability of Africans that so many African countries have been able to conduct their affairs both domestically and internationally in foreign languages, but we must not romanticize their abilities. It is and has been an enormous hardship for them to do so, and African language policy is a conundrum that I can imagine no solution to. At the very least it limits the production of educated scientists, engineers, medical and other technical workers first to those with the necessary linguistic skills to get an education in a foreign language, and then limits it further to those who have the necessary mathematical and technical aptitude. Few if any countries outside Africa place such barriers on their educational system.