speech by governor rauf aregbesola at harvard, massachusetts
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SPEECH DELIVERED BY THE GOVERNOR OF THE STATE
OF OSUN, OGBENI RAUF AREGBESOLA, AT THE
MONTHLY SEMINAR OF WEATHERHEAD CENTER FOR
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS, ON WEDNESDAY
FEBRUARY 20, 2013
Protocols,
NIGERIA: THE DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGE
I am most pleased to be in this world-renowned institution,
Harvard University, and to stand before these highly esteemed
academics. I am particularly grateful to the Weatherhead
Center for International Affairs and Prof Jacob Olupona for the
privilege of this invitation. Every modern society is a reflection
of the modernity of its intellectual institutions. With its endless
production of world-class scholars who have brought their
sterling expertise to bear on governance and policy formulation,
this great university has been at the frontier and cutting edge of
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the political, economic and technological modernisation of
American society. The gown is truly in tandem with the town.
I am conscious of the wisdom shared with you by my illustrious
compatriots who preceded me on this same podium,
particularly His Eminence, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar
III, the Sultan of Sokoto, Niger State Governor, Aliyu
Babangida, Ambassador Walter Carrington and John
Campbell, Prof Adefuye and others.
As political leaders and politicians, our own task is to seek to
govern; therefore my task is fairly simple because I am here to
address you on the challenge of development in my country,
Nigeria. Happily, this happens to be an area within our purview,
as the task of engendering development in a society falls
squarely on the shoulders of its leaders.
Development is one subject that has engaged the attention of
scholars, statesmen, international organisations and political
leaders. I do not wish to detain this august gathering on the
proper definition of this subject. I will however take it as given
that Nigeria is a developing country in so far as the extant
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parameters of income per capita, life expectancy, the rate of
literacy and so on are low, compared to countries designated
as developed.
According to the 2010 World Bank data on Nigeria, the GNI per
capita is $1,280 while life expectancy is 52 years. And only 43
per cent of the population has access to safe water.
United States, in contrast, as a developed country, has a GNI
per capita of $48,650, life expectancy of 78 years and 94 per
cent access to water.
These figures however are tools of analysis by economists. The
real fruits of development are the strength of state institutions
for law enforcement, transportation, economic production,
defence, knowledge production, arts and entertainment and
cultural (and national power) projection.
I think the term ‘developing’ as applied to some countries, is a
euphemism because the appropriate term should have been
‘underdeveloped’. Developing suggests that a nation is in
transition, in a kind of metamorphosis, with visible and
undisputable signs. However, on the contrary, some of these
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countries are in reverse development and the only visible
growth about them is the human population. Developing then
should translate to at least visible signs that certain measures
are in place that are making parameters like GNI and life
expectancy to be rising.
The challenge of development therefore is how a nation
strengthens its institutions and mobilises its human resources
to produce the fruits, not necessarily on the scale of United
States, but on that which will guarantee the good life for its
citizens.
The challenge of development in Nigeria has varied
dimensions, which have been copiously written and widely
talked about. Hence, I will only be adding my voice to an
already large body of materials, but with a perspective that
derives from my own experience as a public policy maker in
Nigeria’s State of Osun.
For us to be able to get out of our present predicament we must
understand where we came from and how we got here. In order
to do this we must begin from the beginning. Hence, it is well
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worth repeating the ‘over-emphasised’ point that the foundation
for Nigeria’s underdevelopment was laid in its colonial history.
Nigeria was a cultural, linguistic and religious congery of
diverse peoples. It was amalgamated, ruled and administered
for the convenience and in the interest of the colonial overlords,
with little consideration for the good of the peoples therein.
It was therefore the case that, at independence, what was
handed over as a country was such a political and
administrative liability that its consequences soon began to
hunt and hurt its human constituents. These consequences
were such that they operated to hamper the country’s capacity
to leverage it’s widely acclaimed ‘huge potential’ for
development. The numerous dimensions of our development
challenge have been amply articulated. But for my purpose
here, I will identify the following.
Ethnicity
Nigeria from the start has been a heterogeneous mix in terms
of its cultural, linguistic and ethnic makeup; a reality that
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necessitated the need to create unity out of the diversity.
However, the cruel realities of colonial rule fostered the
politicisation of ethnicity. The internal disarticulations
engendered by colonial rule among the country’s inheritance
elite, and the manner of granting independence, ensured a
preference for the political mobilisation of ethnicity to secure
political power.
It was, for instance, never in doubt that the British favoured a
section of the country and its elite as successor and did
everything possible to ensure that the reins of power were
handed to this group at independence. This served to entrench
antagonism and suspicion among the different ethnic groups in
the country, and created an atmosphere where the spectre of
ethnic domination became a national obsession. This has
worked to focus governance efforts, not on development, but
on how to achieve or preserve advantageous power positions
for the ethnic groups. This has been the case to date.
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Federalism
The attendant issues and inherent problems of a multi-ethnic
society are supposed to be settled or at least mitigated through
the institutional mechanism of federalism. However, the ways
and manner in which our federal practice has played out has
compounded the problems of our diversity, rather than resolve
them. The unwieldy federal structure handed over by the British
and retained by our inheritance elite, made for an unbearable
political burden under which the First Republic eventually
collapsed. As Rotimi Suberu and Larry Diamond pointed out:
‘The First Republic labored under immense structural strains
largely induced by the British colonial legacy’. Instead of having
‘coordinate’ units working together, Nigeria has been run as a
federation of unequal units with inbuilt potential for instability.
In the days of regionalism, one of the regions – the North – was
configured to swallow the two others put together, thereby
making Nigeria a morbid federalism from the start. According to
the law of federal stability advanced by J. S. Mill in his
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‘Considerations of a Representative Government’, one part of
the federating units must not be so powerful as to be able to vie
in strength with the others combined. And when the regions
were broken up into states, the latter were little more than
appendages of the centre. They still are.
In essence, Nigeria’s federalism has moved from what was
described as ‘the regional dogs wagging the federal tail’ to a
situation where the federal dog has been wagging the states’
tails. The problematic imbalances in the country’s federalism
have made a federalism scholar, John Ayoade, to ponder
whether ‘the Nigerian federation was a design error or … an
error by design’. The peculiar type of federal system we run
continue to pose serious challenges to our capacity as a
country to make meaningful development impact in the lives of
our people through the other federating units that are closer to
the people than the centre.
Military Rule
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When the military first came to power, it raised a false hope that
it would serve as a bridging force and a force for stability for
society, given its imperative of centralised command and
control, organisational discipline and internal cohesion. But it
soon became clear that the Nigerian military was much less
united than assumed. The military in fact came to reflect and
reproduce the ethnic cracks and fissures within the society
such that, among its personnel, in the words of A.R. Luckham,
‘[i]nterpersonal trust was lacking and the situation became
increasingly defined in primordial categories of interaction, like
tribe and region’. The eventual breakdown of the army along
ethno-regional lines culminated in the Civil War of 1967-1970. It
is still in doubt whether that institution has recovered from that
affliction.
The military supposedly intervened in the nation’s politics in
order to correct the problems confronting the polity which the
civilian rulers could not manage. However, the military proved
to be more of a compounding factor in the country’s
development woes. Indeed, it was the military that effectively
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changed our federal practice into de facto unitarism. They
progressively strengthened the Federal Government, starting
with the breakup of the fairly strong regions into weakling states
that have little more than the capacity to pay the salaries of
their workers.
Worst still, military rule in Nigeria has enthroned and embodied
everything that was antithetical to the development of the
country. Destructive dictatorship; repression of opposing but
qualitative inputs into the political process; institutionalisation of
pervasive corruption; devastation of the economy; spread of
mass poverty; alienation of the population; militarisation of the
polity; and perpetuation of divisions in society, are some of the
damages inflicted by military rule on the country. In his ‘A
Radical View of Nigeria’s Political Development’, Julius
Ihonvbere came up with this damning verdict. For him,
‘military rule closes existing democratic spaces, promotes
sycophancy and mediocrity, encourages waste and corruption,
and more importantly, encourages political arrogance,
intolerance and general undemocratic attitudes. The advent of
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the military in Nigerian politics has done a major disservice to
the nation’s political development’.
It is this sort of performance record that made Chief Obafemi
Awolowo to conclude that the worst civilian regime was better
than the best military government.
Religion
Apart from language, culture, history and geography, faith is an
inherent feature of our diversity as a nation. The three major
religions in the country are Christianity, Islam and traditional
religion. As a very strong element of our diversity, faith
permeates the archetypes of our people and exerts a powerful
influence on their existence and outlook on life. However, faith
on its own is not so problematic; but when it is mixed with
politics, it can be a very lethal combination.
The report of the murderous activities of a religious group in the
North, Boko Haram, has been disturbing, fuelling pessimism on
the fate of the country. What has been projected about the
group is its religious face. This regrettably is a misreading of
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the situation. It is essentially the manipulation of religion to
achieve certain political ends.
Unfortunately, the politicisation of religion has been a
persistent characteristic of our national existence, with its
attendant challenge to our development effort. Years of misrule
has made religion a handy tool for the manipulation of the
people by the ruling elite. I should like to dwell a bit on the
effect of this on the Northern part of the country where it has
been most potent. The orgy of mindless violence that we have
been witnessing in recent times in the North is a culmination of
this sort of manipulation and it has far less to do with Islam, and
far more to do with the deplorable material condition of
existence of the people. It is therefore no accident that those
parts of the North where the raging campaign of terror has
originated, and festered, have also been the worst hit by
chronic unemployment, gruelling poverty and hideous lack of
education. And these are the incendiary materials for the kind
of explosion that has been happening.
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Available statistics clearly show these parts of the country to be
the ‘lowest of the lows’ in terms of human development indices.
For far too long the northern ruling elite has employed religion
to enthrone and foster a regime of privation, penury and
destitution among the masses of the people. When you subject
a people to a combined assault of poverty and unemployment,
and deny them the mitigating factor of education (in the sense
of carefully nurtured and cultivated intellect that can be
rationally applied to deal and cope with existential challenges),
what you are doing is to systematically breed monsters that will
constitute menace to society.
Religion without education is a very potent way to disempower
people. It is to deprive them of hope and aspiration to make
something meaningful out of their lives. Used only as an
instrument of subjection and subjugation, without helping to
address the material needs and aspirations of the people,
religion will ultimately lose its relevance. The prevailing
economic disempowerment of women in this part of the country
in the name of religion can only lead to unpleasant social
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consequences. For, to deprive a society of half of its productive
forces is to economically cripple that society and stymie its
prospects for development.
It is absolutely inconceivable that a society will make its female
constituents unproductive and be economically viable for the
long haul. If, as history furnishes us, women were allowed to
participate in the wars to expand the frontiers of the Islamic
faith, it is only logical that women be allowed to partake in the
drive to expand the frontiers of economic production. To do
otherwise as it presently obtains in the North is unarguably un-
Islamic. The survival of the faith – no less so the survival of the
society and the country at large – is tied to its capacity to
generate wealth.
The Leadership Question
For me, by far the most challenging dimension of our
development problem is that of leadership. Our inability to
overcome other identified obstacles to development in the
country, including the historical tragedies of colonialism and the
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Slave Trade, are a function of leadership failure. As formidable
a challenge to development as the colonial heritage is, its
persistence and resilience can only be put down to a conscious
choice on the part of the country’s leaders not to change it. At
any rate, there has been the intervention of time and we can no
longer blame colonialism for our woes after 53 years of
independence. Yes, colonialism determined the trajectory of
our development in 1960, but we could have changed that
since then.
Again, the pervasive underdevelopment of nigeria can be used
to illustrate the crisis of leadership in the country. The Nigerian
ruling elite, due to its own perverse socialisation and reinforced
by the dysfunction of the colonial state, has tended to be
smugly accustomed to maintaining a lifestyle that is
disconnected from economic productivity. Aided by its long hold
on political power at the centre, this has in turn furthered the
view of the state and public office as means of wealth
acquisition. Thus, the situation is typical of Claude Ake’s
insightful observation about the country that ‘wealth is
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tendentially dissociated from effort, from productive capitalist
enterprise. [With the effect that it] has deprived Nigerian
capitalism of its competitive and developmental impetus’.
Any development effort that tends to take away their privileges
is sure to have a ‘shock and awe’ impact on a culture of
indolent wealth acquisition.
The point being made here is that leadership crisis is the basis
of the violent eruptions in the North and similar occurrences in
other parts of the country. This is not peculiar to the North.
Other parts of the country are embroiled in varying degrees of
violence and will soon catch up with the North, except effective
leadership emerges at the national and local levels.
Hence, what Nigeria requires above all else is leadership. This
is visionary leadership that is conscious of its mission; leaders
whose convergence of interest and internal solidarity and
cohesion would crosscut societal cleavages. Leaders who
would be able to establish effective hegemony over the society
and break the nation out of the vicious circle of misery and
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underdevelopment to the virtuous circle of development and
progress.
The need for leadership in our country is so stark that there is
little disagreement about it. Dr Mu'azu Babangida Aliyu, the
Governor of Niger State, affirms this unassailable fact in his
speech to the Chatham House last year. He contended:
‘Indeed, surmounting the challenges of today’s world requires
leadership with a moral compass — character, vision, integrity
and courage to take difficult decisions to enhance socio-
economic development, irrespective of whose interest is at
stake’.
The difficult decisions required to enhance socio-economic
development in Nigeria must necessarily include addressing
the structural imbalances in our polity, particularly with regards
to our federalism. This will liberate the states from centrally
imposed encumbrances and enable the people to enjoy the full
benefits of good leadership.
A major challenge of leadership in Nigeria is the
institutionalisation of a fair and legitimate process of political
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contestation through which genuine leadership emerges.
Notwithstanding that there has been four cycles of elections of
a four-year term since Nigeria’s return to civil democratic rule, it
is still very difficult to have free and fair elections in which
choices are freely made and the people’s votes count. This is
the biggest problem of post military Nigeria from which every
other problem derives. Leaders that do not derive their
legitimacy from the electorate will not be subject to their control
and will not likely take policy options that are acceptable to
them.
Secondly, in the process of manipulating elections to impose a
particular, usually an unpopular leader, certain institutions
would have been compromised or emasculated with
consequences that would reverberate long after the dust of
election has settled. For instance, a judge that was
compromised at the election petition tribunal can also be
compromised in civil and criminal suits after the election. Law
enforcement agencies that were used to rig elections would be
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handy to silence protests emanating from politically robbed
citizens. The possibilities are endless.
I am one of the few fortunate ones that were able to assume
their mandate after winning election, but this was after almost
four years of exertions and legal fireworks. I was persecuted
and unjustly incarcerated. Our state was under virtual siege
while our supporters were killed, hounded into exile and jailed
on spurious charges. We were not deterred. We confronted the
terror of the Nigerian state and against all odds, we triumphed. I
believe the international system can help better by taking more
than passing interest in Nigerian elections. If international
observers, foreign governments and organisations can help to
enthrone a regime of free and fair elections, they will have
fewer interventions to make in Nigeria’s affairs. Politics is the
father and mother of development; we have the lesson of
history that no nation can climb the ladder of development
without getting its politics right.
I cannot end this piece without mentioning the impact of
globalisation and global capitalism on the development effort in
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Nigeria. One visible impact of Western popular culture as
expressed in entertainment and lifestyles is the swamping of
indigenous cultures and erosion of values. In the West, the
values that drive innovation, enterprise and production are
separate from the popular culture. However, when this popular
culture hits a developing country, it took over the youths and
disconnects them from their own culture and its values that
promote innovation, enterprise and production. Large swaths of
young people have been disconnected from the values in their
own cultures that predispose them to development and have
been left disoriented. We discovered this after my inauguration
and one of our first acts in office was to start a campaign of
mental reawakening by reminding them of whom they were and
of their past greatness. Our people were virtuous and these
virtues manifest in codes of chivalry, hard-work and ability to
triumph over vicissitudes and challenges. We have to provide
this mental infrastructure as a foundation before we can begin
to build the superstructure of development on it.
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However, global capitalism, with free movement of goods and
services, is killing the local industrial capacity, taking jobs from
people and creating an army of malcontents. Agriculture (for
food and industrial raw materials) has been under siege. It has
become far more profitable to trade in goods manufactured in
Asia and other parts of the world than to engage in industrial
production. Other consequences of unbridled capital like debt
peonage and capital squeeze by the West have indeed
arrested development and helped to foster large scale poverty.
We have the lesson of history on this that we cannot really be
rich when we are surrounded by poverty.
I must enter a caveat here that outsiders are not responsible for
our condition, even if they have played some roles in it. We
must take responsibility for our underdeveloped state and work
out our own salvation. Nigerians have to create the right
leadership for themselves who will mobilise them for
development.
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Leadership in Osun
Permit me here to share with you how we have surmounted
some of the leadership challenges we faced when our
administration was inaugurated on November 27, 2010.
We discovered that the greatest challenge facing our people is
jobs and within 100 days, we created 20,000 public sector jobs
in what looks Keynesian. This should not sound strange. I am
abreast of the literature that put job creation largely in the public
sector purview. However, for developing countries at this critical
stage, critical state intervention of this nature is necessary. But
I digress. I must let you know that this intervention reinflated the
economy of the state with immediate impact in every sector.
The policy was so successful that the World Bank commended
us, asked to understudy it and immediately recommended it as
a model of youth engagement and mass employment for other
states.
As part of our education reform, starting from next month, we
are introducing Opon-Imo, an IPad-like computer tablet, which
is a smart electronic teaching aid, to our secondary school
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students. This tablet is pre-loaded with 17 subjects that
students offer during West African Senior Secondary Certificate
Examinations (WASSCE) in the form of lesson notes and
textbooks. It also contains six extra-curricular subjects in sex
education, civic education, Yoruba history, Yoruba traditional
religion, computer education and entrepreneurship education.
Also to be included in it is 10 years past questions and answers
to be provided by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board
(JAMB) and the West African Examinations Council (WAEC).
The tablet has bridged the gap of carrying books in sacks, their
wear and tear and subsequent replacement and also provides
ready learning tools. Opon Imo neither has internet connectivity
nor does it interface with other devices in order not to distract
the students. Knowing that power is still a problem, especially
in rural areas where there is no electricity, a solar charger will
be supplied with it.
Through this initiative, the state government seeks to expose
pupils of its senior secondary schools to information technology
at an early age.
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Our investment in computer for secondary school pupils was
born out of our conviction that the future belongs to the digital
age and it will be disastrous if our youth are not prepared for
this. The computer has become the centre of the universe
whether it is mainframe, desktop, laptop, handheld (as
telephone) or palmtop.
In addition, we have commenced the construction of 100
elementary schools, 50 middle schools and 21 high schools.
We are the only state providing free meals for elementary 1-3
pupils and free uniforms to all pupils in public schools.
Our agriculture development programme is ambitious. We
established Osun Rural Enterprise and Agriculture Programme
(OREAP), a multi-ministerial programme that straddles the
Ministries of Agriculture, Local Government, Youth
Development, Works and Finance. This programme has
provided at the last count about 15,000 direct jobs in crop
farming, fishing, apiary, poultry, beef chain and related
industries. Our target is to capture five per cent of the huge
daily food market in Lagos and the South West.
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In our drive to change the lot of our people we are propelled by
the singular idea that effective leadership is the surest and
quickest path to development. Overcoming our development
challenge is not as impossible as it has seemed over the years;
what has been missing is leadership, and this is what we are
determined to provide for our people. We are convinced that by
giving good leadership to the people, we will inspire them to
rise to the challenge of developing themselves and their
society. We subscribe to the wisdom of late President Ronald
Reagan that ‘[t]he greatest leader is not necessarily the one
who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the
people to do the greatest things’.
I thank you for giving me your valuable time.
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