NIGERIAN SECTORIAL UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES – The Igbo Perspective (Ka Obodo Were Ga N’iru)

Prof. Chinedu Ositadinma Nebo

Former Vice-Chancellor,

University of Nigeria, Nsukka

[Protocols]

It is with a deep sense of humility, apprehension and trepidation that I stand here with you to deliver the 34th Ahiajoku Lecture, 2010. This sense of humility derives from the status of this august gathering, which over the years has become a melting pot of complex Igbo cultural and intellectual ideas. I have followed up this lecture series, begun about 31 years ago by the then Governor of the bigger Imo State, a great Igbo stalwart, Dr Sam O. Mbakwe, and have noted that even with periodical change of governments at the State House, the Government, the people of Imo State have never compromised on the depth and spread of the Lecture topics and the quality of the Speakers. Their profiles speak for them: men of great intellectual, moral and material substance who wear on their caps colourful feathers of national and international achievements. Among these Igbo greats are Professors Echeruo, Okigbo, Afigbo, Nwabueze, Achebe, Drs Pius Okigbo and Bart Nnaji, to name this few. To be considered among the short-lists from which the eventual speaker would be selected is itself an honour but to be finally handed over the baton to ‘anchor’ this year’s lectures elicited so much joy and prayers of thanksgiving to the Almighty. Therefore, to the Imo State Executive Council, which by this invitation has reposed great confidence in me, I remain grateful and highly indebted, and I say ekene kwa m unu; ya dikwara unu mma; Onyenweanyi gozie unu.[Thank you so much; May you prosper in the works of your hands; May the Lord bless you all]

I also stand here today in apprehension of how this lecture will turn out, how it will be received first, among the Igbo, home and in Diaspora, then within and outside Nigeria for the Ahiajoku Lecture has gained a lot of international recognition, particularly after Professor Achebe’s delivery early last year. Moreover, this is an election period, and as usual the polity is being heated up with excitement and a heightened sense of trepidation for what the outcome of both the selection of the presidential candidates will be, and which political regional divide gets the presidential nod to rule this nation for the next four or eight years, as the case may be. The same wild election fever is also reaching a crescendo in the states and both the re-contesting incumbents and the new entrants along with their supporters are all warming up for the fireworks of 2011 general elections.

I have spent time in prayers over this assignment, as I regularly do over Nigeria, and have also spent time in meditation over this nation, asking questions as do so many Nigerians over what has become the state of our nation. I realized that it is not only the Igbo that have called on me to speak but that the Almighty God, the Lord Jehovah, will hold me responsible if I failed to speak the truth today. The theme of the 2010 Ahiajoku Lecture seems to me to have added more fire to this fever: Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century in Nigeria, with an Igbo perspective.

THE STATE OF THE NATION VIS – A – VIS OTHER RISING NATIONS

To all and sundry, Nigeria’s chronic underdevelopment, her miasmic posture, her anemic economy, her conflagrant polity and her disastrously porous security are all blamed on poor and inept leadership. This opinion is held, not only by Nigerians, but also by professionals in the developed economies of the world. It has not always been like this; something went wrong sometime, somewhere and somehow to bring us to the harrowing spell of successive inept national governments.

Before delving into the hydra-headed leadership challenges in Nigeria, let us take a brief moment to consider a few bright spots. Although there is so much to lament about Nigeria after our 50 years of nationhood, there are still so much to be thankful to God for and for which we shall ever remain grateful.

  • God’s goodness, love and mercy to us in spite of our unworthiness and misuse of His blessings.
  • Nigeria stands today a united country despite so much trials and ethno-religious conflicts that have threatened to destroy us as one people under God.
  • Nigerians are still very loving and peaceful people; our resilience as a people of faith in our nationhood, and our indomitable will to survive are exemplary.
  • We are very richly endowed with diverse natural resources in, including human resources, agricultural and mineral resources, oil and gas, etc.
  • The absence of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons, landslides, etc.
  • The great men and women who have offered altruistic service and given so much to their fatherland.
  • Our youths have remained mostly law-abiding in the face of provocations from a bitterly cruel socio-economic environment and under blistering deprivations.
  • Nigeria’s big brother role in the West African sub region that has helped to politically stabilize the region.
  • The ingenuity of some of our compatriots in various professional endeavours, the world over.
  • The country’s agencies, the NAFDAC, the EFCC and the NDLEA have gained international recognition as serious institutions fighting fake medications, financial crimes and illegal narcotic trade. There are a few loopholes here and there but much more progress has been made.
  • Our sons and daughters who are winning laurels abroad for their technological knowhow.

The list is by no means exhaustive and we need to thank God that there is so much grace amidst our woes and failures. There is no doubt that the Divine Presence is still with us as a people, and that if we heed His voice, our hope for a strong, virile and developed country will be realized. Although the atmosphere is that of despair and despondency and the demographics are alarming and disparaging, there is hope if we mend our ways and take on the challenges of leadership in more creative and constructive ways. We have cried enough, but done little. We have engaged in perpetual motion but little movement. When we moved, it was often two steps forward, three steps backward. It is now time to think ACTION, do ACTION, walk ACTION and fly ACTION.

NIGERIAN LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The 21st century is undeniably the knowledge explosion age. The information superhighway has shrunk the earth into a knowledge driven global village. It is estimated that about 80 per cent of all the scientists who ever lived are alive today. Globalization has now become a massive, irrepressible force that is ruthlessly trying to whip every nation into line. Global economies now appear to be so intertwined that what happens in one economy appears to have ripple effects on others. Environmental concerns are now occupying center stage as climatic factors appear to be distorted by the global warming phenomena. Security issues have also been globalized; terrorists are becoming sophisticated and are constantly working out new strategies of killing as many innocent people as possible in order to get attention. The result is a growing sense of insecurity all over the world and security officials at international airports are ever busy tightening security belts, and the result has been increased distress at the checking-in and security check-points. The fear of nuclear holocaust looms and there is an additional fear that one day a nuclear war-head may fall into the hands of these rogue terrorist groups. At the other end Mother Nature is spitting out fires in many sub-regions in the form of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, landslides, floods, etc, as man continues the unwholesome exploitation of ever dwindling natural resources.

While the developed countries worry over the management of technological breakthroughs and volatile economic landscapes, many developing and underdeveloped countries are cringing in poverty, hunger and starvation, woeful health conditions, high maternal and child mortality rates, energy crisis, youth restiveness, and high incidence of corruption, among others.

Nigeria, unfortunately, finds herself in the latter categories. Nigeria’s failure to develop and match such countries as the Asian Tigers who started the race to nationhood with us is essentially a leadership problem, a self-imposed crisis of underdeveloped psyche that makes our leaders enslaved to primordial instincts, such as: power acquisition as a means to self aggrandizement; undoing and sometimes, complete elimination of perceived enemies and self-propagation. For this reason, many view the Nigeria Government system not as a democracy but as a kleptomaniocracy.

EXAMPLES FROM WELL MANAGED ECONOMIES

GOLDMAN SACHS’ REPORT: The Rise of the BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India & China] and Emergence of the N-11

Ever since the US-based international investment bank, Goldman Sachs, made predictions on the BRIC and N-11 nations, the international community has been watching with keen interest what has been happening within the economic stable of these nations. Things have worked so fast in favour of the predictions that the bank has been churning out upward reviews of their earlier positions. You will find below what Goldman Sachs had to say in its original report (which it defended in the paper, "Dreaming with BRICS: The Path to 2050," in 2003

The report as originally published stated that:

  • China's economy will surpass Germany in the next few years, Japan by 2015, and the United States by 2041.
  • India's growth rate will be the highest—not China's -- and it will overtake Japan (today the world's second-largest economy) by 2032.
  • BRICs’ currencies could appreciate by 300 per cent over the next 50 years, providing a big tailwind for investors in BRIC assets.
  • Taken together, the BRICs could be larger than the United States and the developed economies of Europe within 40 years.
  • By 2025, BRICs will bring another 200 million people with incomes above $15,000 into the world's economy. That's equal to the combined populations of Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

According to Wilkipedia, “However, Goldman Sachs has now become more bullish [confident] on the BRICs since it published its original report. The size of China's economy overtook Germany's economy, a year earlier than expected, and has over taken Japan's in July, 2010. Goldman Sachs now believes that the Chinese economy will overtake the United States by 2027. And with India accounting for 10 of the 30 fastest-growing urban areas in the world and 700 million people moving to cities by 2050, its influence on the world economy will be bigger and quicker than was implied in 2003”. [Source: Wikipedia]

Closely following the BRIC prediction is the 2004 Report on the NEXT ELEVEN [N-11], where Nigeria is included among eleven nations warming up to also assert themselves in the global economic map. According to the original prediction, while China overtakes the United States as the greatest economic power in the world by 2047, Nigeria would become the 20th largest economy by 2025 and the 12th by 2050 ahead of two G-7 giants, Italy and Canada. Goldman Sachs now says China doesn’t have to wait for 37 years to overtake the US, that 17 would do it.

The Goldman Sachs Reports have changed the way many look at some of the so-called Third World countries. Here in our country the Report has been the basis of the Vision 20-2020. Buoyed by this confidence in the modest reforms of 2003 to 2005 the Government set a target of reaching the 20th mark five years ahead of time.

Now what is our interest in the Goldman Sachs predictions? Aplenty! We all know that the BRICs, as these four nations are sometimes called, have known poverty at a very large scale. But armed with a strong demographic profile, vast natural resources and an adjusted purposeful leadership, they have gone ahead, with vision, to assert themselves in the new economic order where demography has become a major factor in a world of increasing competitiveness. They planned for it, made it work and today are challenging the G-7 nations. None of these nations stomached corruption nor toyed with aberrant leadership.

In the pre-ICT world, economic advancement was not demographically defined; rather it came out of the level of the scientific and technological know-how each country was exposed to. The advanced countries of the Western Hemisphere hoarded as much scientific and technological information as possible leaving the Third World nations in the dust. Countries with large populations like the BRICs experienced major hiccups: we can well remember the near collapse of the Brazilian currency in the 80s, the widespread hunger in India and China [do not forget that Japan once colonized China, but today China has overtaken Japan as the world’s 2nd largest economy] and of course the socio-economic crisis, and then the political upheaval that followed it and finally dismembered the former Soviet bloc.

But in this new world of ICT, access to scientific and technological information has known very little restriction and these nations made the best of it, investing heavily in education, the process through which the intellectual capital is built. Theirs was a functional education and when the graduates came out there was an infrastructural platform from which they made the leap.

During the Nigerian civil war, the Biafran scientists and technologists drawn mostly from the then University of Biafra kept the short-lived republic alive for three years in the face of one of the world’s best enforced economic blockade of the then land-locked Biafra. What happened to all the exploits made in Biafra? How did we so quickly lose the massive technological momentum experienced in Biafra?

Writing in the chapter, The University and the Nigerian crises: 1966-1970, in the book “University of Nigeria 1960-85: An Experiment in Higher Education”, Professor V. C. Ike wrote extensively on the contributions of the university to the war efforts. An excerpt is quoted thus:

The Nigeria-Biafra war was, on the Biafran side, one of the most popular wars in history. Popular in the sense that it had a degree of mass involvement and mass support unmatched in these parts. Practically every member of staff wanted to be part of the war effort. And if the war taught academics any lesson, it was that no discipline could justifiably be dismissed as “useless”. Mathematics, Medicine, Theatre Arts, Music, Law, Chemistry, Agricultural Economics, History, Home Economics, Political Science, and English: each discipline had an important contribution to make to the war effort and to public well-being……It would be difficult to cite any field of human endeavour or national effort in which University staff, students, and alumni did not make an important contribution.

Professor Eni Njoku [the Vice-Chancellor, the University of Biafra] gave more time to public service than to the University during the war years. In addition to representing Biafra at practically every peace conference, he was also at different times Chairman of the Petroleum Management Board, the Exco Committee on Reopening of Schools, and the Biafra Examinations Board.

The Research and Production Group, popularly known as RaP, gave the scientists, engineers, and technologists at the University an opportunity not only to make invaluable contributions to the war effort, but also to surprise even themselves at their own inventiveness. Organized in “groups” (e.g. Engineering Group, Chemistry Group L/F1, Chemistry Group L/F2), and tucked away in a number of locations, staff of the University working hand in hand with professional colleagues from outside the University produced armoured vehicles, rockets and rocket launchers, mortar bombs, the dreaded Ogbunigwe [Weapon of Mass Destruction, (WMD)] and other weapons of war, refined crude oil into petrol and kerosene; made such essential commodities as soap; distilled different brands of alcohol from palm wine, et cetera. With so much new-found expertise at its beck and call, the University had little difficulty in setting up its own mini petroleum refinery at Eziachi, near Orlu, with assistance from Dr. M. O. Chijioke of the Faculty of Engineering.

Dr. B.C.E. Nwosu of the Physics Department was head of RaP. Virtually every member of the senior staff of the science and engineering faculties of the University not engaged elsewhere served in RaP.

What RaP provided for the scientists and engineers, the Propaganda Directorate did for University staff in the humanities and social sciences. The remarkable impact which the Directorate made nationally and internationally was as a result of the various inputs by scholars from various disciplines, including English, History, Religion, Music, Drama, Journalism, Economics, Sociology/Anthropology, Law, Political Science, and Education. Dr. I. I. U. Eke, then Research Fellow of the University’s Economic Development Institute, was Commissioner for Information as well as Director of the Directorate for Propaganda.