 Published
October 19th, 2011
Preliminaries
Let me begin with a mission statement in
regard what I am about in this intellectual endeavor. This
series is primarily designed to steer the conversation at
the public square progressively away from negativities as
indicated in the politically inspired destructive criticisms
and blind attacks to, in the words of former US president,
Ronald Reagan, one of constructive engagement knowing as we
all do that the goal is and remains always about growth and
development of our dear nation as opposed to mudslinging and
virulent attacks for their own intrinsic values. It appears
to me that there are folks out there in the political arena
who see politics as an end in itself rather than a means to
an end and live and die politicking 24/7, 365 days year in
year out. That is totally unhealthy.
That should not and cannot be the motivation
of true patriots or in a figure of speech, of the bees, but
of termites and locusts that revel only in destruction
rather than building. Politics surely has its place and
might be inherent in a democracy, but a third world nation
cannot afford the luxury of elevating politics over and
above development as Washington politicians in the US are
currently doing, deliberately, willfully and callously
inducing man-made systemic paralysis on the institutions of
government while China surges ahead bent on catching up with
and overtaking the United States as she has already done to
Britain, Germany and Japan all in one decade, to become the
pre-eminent global military and economic superpower. While
the United States, already a hyper-developed state, can
perhaps afford that luxury, if she doesn’t care about China,
Nigeria simply can’t, because she is still chronically
underdeveloped and playing her own catch up game with her
peers. And that, ipso facto, impels her to place development
over and above politics. A quick case study can be made here
by way of comparison between and amongst nations:
Washington, D.C., nowadays, is not exactly
your ideal political role model for budding democracies due
to its present highly toxic political atmosphere. But it
shares parallels with Nigeria. When, for instance, a nation
is under terrorist attacks as has been happening lately in
Nigeria and all opposition politicians can do is to launch
scurrilous, opportunistic attacks on the government rather
than those who seek to kill us in our places of work without
provocation, one begins to wonder if politics has no
boundaries in Nigeria. If that was how American opposition
politicians reacted to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade
Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington,
D.C., the war on terror would have taken a different shape
altogether. On the contrary, Americans banded together and
rallied behind their government and went to war as one.
Criticisms of Bush came only after alleged WMDs, which was
the official excuse for the war could not be found after
more than a year of thorough searches with huge resources
wasted in the efforts.
Of course there were glaring serious security
lapses for which people ought to have been held accountable
as it’s often the case in ordinary times. However, at a time
of national calamity politics must take the back burner and
did in fact take the back burner, replaced as it must with
statesmanship and overflowing patriotism. And so with one
voice the US Congress swiftly passed the War Resolution
authorizing President GW Bush to levy war on Afghanistan
rather than pointing fingers at his failure to prevent the
attacks and getting caught up in destructive
self-recrimination as Nigerian politicians have allowed
themselves to indulge in.
Such self-restraint for the love of country
in the face of national calamities is the hallmark of a
democrat and statesman as opposed to opportunistic and
destructive criticisms. Given the chance the critics would
not have done any better when they, themselves cannot be
counted on to secure their own little backyards in their
states. Bottom line: Politics has no place in any nation at
times of national emergencies when our collective security
is at stake. I, therefore, personally hold in very low
esteem those whose only motivations to come to the public
square to ventilate their positions is to pull down for the
sake of it, targeted particular individuals in positions of
authority at the drop of a hat without contributing in any
way, shape or form to the advancement of society either by
proffering solutions or being the very solutions themselves.
And these include persons who have held positions of
authority and responsibility in the nation in the past with
no appreciate legacies to their names. There are times for
election campaigns and there are times for leadership and
governance. It cannot be politics around the clock. This is
not to defend any individual in government but to lay down
clear markers and rules of engagement in the public square
without which nothing but anarchy and misguided outbursts
reign.
Fortunately, we have history to guide us. The
late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo for instance, was a noted
critic of what he considered, rightly or wrongly, to be bad
government’s policies from his own perspective, and
perspectives may differ from one individual to another
because there is no one-single highway to development. Chief
Awolowo was, at one time officially the Leader of Opposition
in the Nigerian Parliament in the First Republic and the
leading opposition politician in the land for decades, right
up to his death. But never for once did he criticize without
proffering alternative policy options or solutions to those
to which he had objected.
Not exactly a disciple of the late sage
myself, but only an admirer, this author takes pride in
standing in the Awoist tradition of constructive criticisms,
i.e., not to levy criticisms in bad faith but rather always
keeping an eye on the ball—i.e., the growth and development
of our people, locally, nationally, continentally, and
racially. If politics is about politics it has lost its
bearing and therefore relevance to our lives. It is about
development, no more, no less—politics of development, that
is. And to that I must now quickly train my guns. I invite
the reader to come on board the train and ride with me in
this rather fascinating intellectual journey.
Development! Development! Development! It is
an 11-letter magic word that is on the lips of every
politician and leader—the high and the mighty and even the
faceless “ordinary man in the street,” who too, perhaps more
than anyone else, wants to feel the real impacts of
development in his life. We all love to be associated with
it in one form or another. We are enthralled by its beauty
and overawed by its size, grandeur and complexity. We desire
it in our lives, in our community, in our nation, in our
continent and in the world at large. And the absence of it
brings sorrow and miseries to us all. Countless books,
articles, journals, theories and even institutions are
devoted to it and its study. Yet it remains elusive to
millions of people, communities and nations all over the
world. It is everywhere yet it is nowhere in our lives. It
is about improvements in the human conditions and
improvements, real improvements do not come cheap, which
explains its relative elusiveness and scarcity.
There is perhaps no other word in the English
lexicon that has graced the lips of men and women more than
the word “development.” The concept has had such a grip on
the consciousness of humanity that it has become the very
essence of our beings—the core mission of our earthly
sojourn and, therefore of our daily strivings, individually
and collectively. The truth, however, is that man is made
to develop and grow not just physically in a biological
sense, but also materially, socially, spiritually and
emotionally, and not the other way around, and that’s why we
are instinctually drawn to the faces of development.
When, for instance, a project is completed
and commissioned in our community, we feel good and want to
be associated with it in some way, but when that same
project is taken down we all except the arsonist feel sad
and want to be dissociated from the act of its destruction.
We desire for the culprit to be brought to justice, unless
of course, it is by an act of nature not man. We have the
innate desire to build and grow and not to destroy, and that
is the spirit of development that is caged in our soul. It
is thus a thing of the soul that mirrors and parallels our
physiological, biological growth.
But it has not always been this way since the
beginning of man’s earthly sojourn. That spirit had been
caged for eons. And that caged spirit had been fighting to
get out of its entrapment for millions of years before it
finally found its freedom. It lay virtually dormant in the
souls of our human progenitors for millions of years.
Amazing! Isn’t it? Think about this to get the perspective
right: Development was not a notion associated with our
pastoral progenitors or even of primitive societies that
tended to be static and remained pretty much static for
eons. As the science of archeology has taught us, human
development did not get off to a good start until man was
able to fashion hunting weaponry from stone in what is known
as the “Stone Age.” That singular achievement marked the
beginning of development. And since then man’s quest for
growth and development has known no bounds, so much so that
it has now acquired the character of competition not only
for individuals but for social units such as commercial
institutions as well as nations.
It is, therefore, puzzling given this innate
desire in man to grow and develop that there are still some
leaders who seemingly and inexplicably do not want to
develop and grow their communities and nations but to
destroy them by plundering their resources, and refusing to
repair and upgrade broken infrastructures especially in
third world countries like Nigeria. It goes against the
grain of nature. Such persons seem to personify our
ancestors in whose souls lay dormant the encaged spirit of
development. In other words, they are primitive species of
homo-sapiens, who managed to pass through the cracks of
evolution and found their way into our age of rapid growth
and development but unable to bring themselves in tandem
with it. These are the human oddities of evolution.
However, this has produced an admixture of
human drags and human propellants of development living side
by side within the same geo-political environment—producing
counter forces, with some pushing up and others pulling
down. Make no mistakes about it, there I are those in every
human societies that are opposed to development and those
who want it so bad. The precise ratio of these two opposing
forces determines the rate of development, or for that
matter, of stagnation that any nation is able to generate at
any given time.
A nation saddled with a large pool of
anti-development population i.e., one without a culture of
growth and development will of course remain underdeveloped
while the opposite is true for one with a large pool of
pro-growth and pro-development population, i.e., one with a
culture of growth and development. The urgent task before
the nation’s policy makers, therefore, is to reduce the
anti-growth and anti-development population to size and
increase the pro-growth and pro-development population. In
practical terms that means systematic and deliberate
development of a culture of growth and development in the
citizenry. This series takes its title from this cultural
phenomenon for that reason.
Culture is everything. Intangible, yes, but
it is the key that opens the door to all human growth and
development. It is the driving force behind all human
progress. There is simply no growth and development without
its animating culture with its currents flowing underneath
just below the surface. It is the forces behind the steady
flow of electronic gadgetry from Japan and the US and behind
the cultural domination of the world by the United States in
music, social networking, movies and technological
innovations. Flowing beneath these accomplishments that have
taken the world by storm is the river of culture.
Precisely how and when this can be done in
the case of Nigeria is reserved for the third part of this
series coming after this. This second part is about the
elements of development and how they should be carried out
and organized to form a cohesive synergistic whole in order
to derive maximum benefits from them rather than dolling
them out from on high as tokens of development.
It is appropriate to state, therefore, that
on the whole, humanity’s fascination with the concepts of
growth and development springs from an innate desire to grow
and expand as opposed to inertia and it is as true of the
individual as it is of groups and nations alike. As earlier
indicated, it would appear that the desire to develop and
grow is innate in us rather than acquired, and it is
embedded both in our genes and in or souls. Due to our
natural affinity to growth and development, therefore, smart
politicians seeking to exploit it to their advantage have
been quick to associate themselves with this twin concept,
appropriating it both in their manifestoes and campaign
stumps. However, while our political leaders glibly talk
about “growth and development” only a negligible a few know
what it truly means and fewer still know how to bring it
about.
Development Defined
What then is development? What are its
features? It is simply the taming of nature and the mastery
of our environment through scientific, artistic, managerial,
sociological and technological instrumentation and processes
for the benefit of man. In other words, it is the
progression of man from primitive state of simplicity to
modern state of sophistication in life. While technology has
undoubtedly simplified our lives in several ways, it has at
the same time introduced a level of sophistication, and
frankly speaking, complexity in its operational profile,
that only the relatively educated individual can benefit
from it. In a nutshell, development is the continual
improvement of our material, environmental, social, mental
and spiritual conditions.
The terms “primitive” and “modern” must,
however, not be taken as absolutes. They are relative, for
what is “modern” today may become “primitive” tomorrow.
Modernity and primitiveness are therefore time specific.
In identifying the elements of development,
however, we must resist the temptation to include only
tangible things and processes that we can see and feel.
Development is not only about tangible, material things or
systems, but also about intangibles and processes. It,
therefore, goes way beyond the physical landscape spanned by
roads and highway networks, railways, bridges, skyscrapers,
mosques and cathedrals, universities and hospitals, air and
seaports, automobiles, ships, airplanes, computers,
televisions, ATMs, elevators, escalators, factories,
military weaponry, plants, labs, telephones, equipment,
libraries, ex-cetera, ex-cetera, and all the other incidents
of technology that constitute parts of the ecosystem of
development.
While these physical elements are important,
they do not tell the whole story of development. At best
they only present a partial view of development. Development
includes perhaps more importantly the arts, which furnishes
the inspiration for scientific and technological advancement
and breakthroughs. Think of Sci-fi, which stands for
“Science Fiction,” for example. Science and technology owes
a lot to it. What was once science fiction has become our
modern day technological marvels, including airplanes,
computers, telephone, even the space programs, just to
mention but a few areas. The creative imagination of science
fiction writers brought forth these technological
breakthroughs by pointing man in the direction of those
possibilities and thus redirecting his efforts towards
attaining them. Besides, technology is empty, in fact, dead
without contents and management. For example, the movie
equipment is useless without the ability to use it to
produce content. Computers and the internet are useless
without putting contents in them. Televisions are useless
without putting contents in them. Those who do the
programming and news reporting and the rest of the contents
we find in television are not technologists and scientists,
but artistes, reporters, editors, programmers, program
directors and the likes without whom there would be no
television and all the cable networks including the movie
industry itself. Technology cannot manage itself and has to
be managed by professionals who did not necessarily create
the technology in question the same way economists manage
our economy without creating the economy itself. And that is
why cameras are useless without photographers who manipulate
them to record memorable events and automobiles are useless
without drivers who had no hand in building them. And when
we appreciate good photographs, for example, we are not
thinking of the camera that recorded them even for a
fleeting moment. The camera itself that produced them falls
into our subconscious as if non-existent. The same is true
of movies and the internet. The inventor is totally
forgotten. How many people who use the World Wide Web know
anything about Berners Lee who invented it? And how many
people care to know anyway? How many people who troop to the
movie theaters know or care to know about the inventor of
the movie camera? Not many. But they care about the movie
stars and movie directors who gave contents to the movie
camera invention and become celebrities. And that’s why the
creators of contents for technology are as important if not
more so than the creators of the technology itself, and both
are part and parcel of the development process with neither
subordinated to others. We must not forget that humans are
the interfaces and operators of technology.
To put it metaphorically, Silicon Valley is
useless without Hollywood and the one cannot exist without
the other. That is why the development of the arts and
management capabilities in a nation must go hand in hand
with the development of sciences and technology, because it
is the arts that breathe life into the inert, lifeless body
of technology and it is management that commercializes,
creates an industry out it and makes it a going concern. As
such, artistic and management education are just as good as
science and technology education.
Besides that the products of technology
themselves benefit tremendously from consumer market
research by marketing companies. Product design and features
are dictated in part by consumer preferences, demographics,
governmental regulatory requirements, and intellectual
property constraints that must be taken into account and
complied with. That IPAD in your hands, for instance, is not
entirely a product of science and technology alone, but of
marketers and legal practitioners whose inputs informed the
final design of the product. The graveyards of technology
are filled with products that could not make it to the
markets and stay there because they did not jell with
consumers and even Apple itself has quite a bit of them
too.
It is, therefore, a huge mistake to promote
technology at the expense of the arts and management
disciplines and vice versa. There are parents and even
governments who seek to promote one above the other,
thinking in their ignorance that the one could exist without
the other or that the one is more important than the other.
It is not the business of government and parents to dictate
what disciplines should be accorded priorities and what
should be pulled back. The market place will determine that
and allocate resources accordingly. However, it is the duty
of government to build a culture of development around these
broad themes while not directly partaking of the development
processes itself.
Program not Project
Development must not take place in an
unplanned and haphazard and uncontrolled manner, and this is
not just about physical structures like roads and buildings
but about industries and their interrelationships as well as
their relevancy and synergies. Provisioning of
infrastructural facilities, for instance, is no doubt part
of development, but tossing a borehole and a bridge here, a
block of classrooms there, and ten-kilometer road over
there, and bringing the whole world to commission them with
fanfare before they’re washed away by the next rains and
winds (forces of nature), is no development, but mere
“projects” commissioning.
Nor is development indicated by simply
throwing universities all over the place like mushrooms that
produce nothing by way of new knowledge that is of benefit
to humanity or even to their immediate environments. A
borehole standing alone is no development but a single
project completed. It may produce water but so what? Of what
use is a borehole to a hungry or jobless man? What does it
mean to a sick man with no access to healthcare facility? Of
what use is it to the villager with no means of
transportation outside his village to the town or city? Does
it mean a thing to a man who has no roof over his head when
the night falls? Does a borehole provide education and
improve the minds of men? All of these are more must form
the basis of development not just throwing one project or
the other at rural dwellers and call that development. For a
borehole to have any relevance to development, it must not
stand alone but become part of a development program
having other components to it that meet the basic needs of a
community, which may or may not include other boreholes in
several locales. In other words, an integrated
development plan is what is required not isolated
projects. Politicians who run around promising rural
dwellers boreholes are, therefore, not talking about
“development” but about projects and development is not
about projects but programs.
Any leader who knows what development is
talks about programs not about projects and the late Chief
Obafemi Awolowo (of blessed memory) was one such leader. For
example, Awo launched free education and free healthcare as
well as rural integrated development programs under bigger
program styled “Five Cardinal Programs,” which in themselves
contain hundreds if not thousands of “projects” in
healthcare and education as well as integrated rural
development mini programs.
A borehole standing alone in a village is no
evidence of development of the village but of the existence
of a water facility albeit a primitive one at that. Nations
are not called “developed” because they have one facility or
the other standing alone, however huge it might be. To be
called “developed” a nation must not only have a variety and
multiplicity of such facilities serviceable to different
social and economic needs of a people but more importantly
such facility must form a seamless and integrated whole.
Thus when a I get off a plane in a developed country, I
expect to be driven off the airport in a decent cab on a
standard, well maintained highway, not one filled with
potholes with the sidewalks littered with trash or overgrown
with weeds, to standard hotel of my choice. I expect also to
be driven by a decent and friendly driver who values my
patronage and shows it too, and be received at the end of my
journey by a courteous, welcoming front desk at the hotel.
On my way from the airport to the hotel, I
don’t expect to be harassed by hordes of beggars or assailed
by an unsightly environment with open drains filled with
filth and raw sewage. In the same vein, I don’t expect to be
confronted with mountains of decaying garbage left
un-cleared on roadsides, oozing out offensive stench.
And after checking in, I expect the lights to
be on not out, even momentarily, and the cold and hot water
running uninterrupted throughout my stay. I don’t expect to
have dead phones in my room or armed robbers prowling in the
corridors and vicinity of the hotel. If I have to get some
cash to take care of business I could simply swipe a card
and pronto! Raw cash is spat out into my waiting hands from
a mechanical contraption called Automated Teller Machine
(ATM). A God forbid that I develop a cold or headache I
would not be flown abroad for treatment, because I expect
that there would be standard medical facilities to take care
of such health conditions or emergencies including ambulance
if needed.
My short journey from the airport to the
hotel would reveal to me whether I am in a developed or
undeveloped country. However, that short experience is
packed with the indices of development, which can be found
in a standard airport and transportation network, constant
electricity and running water, good telecommunication
network, hospitality industry, beautiful landscapes devoid
of shanties, sound financial system and good healthcare
facilities. The important thing, however, is that my
hypothetical journey from the airport to the hotel and maybe
to the clinic or hospital too, was a seamless experience in
which I encountered all the incidents of developments
mentioned above and many more not included in this scenario
in an integrated whole—seamlessly transiting from one to
another with each meeting my particular needs at different
time points when the occasion arises.
That is the meaning of
development—provisioning of infrastructural and other
facilities in a seamless integrated whole with updated
technologies that are not far apart in time. A nation cannot
claim to be developed when it has a first class airport in
the midst of dilapidated cabs, rickety roads, shanties
towns, sub-standard and ill-maintained buildings all around
its towns and cities. Standards have to be maintained across
the board in relative uniformity, not some super high,
others super low.
What this boils down to is that development
entails a culture of standardization of goods, services and
infrastructures, which is wholly absent in Nigeria. It has
no place for “anything goes,” or tokenistic gestures of
development. When we build roads the roads must answer to a
national standard both of construction and maintenance. When
we build hospitals, schools, and hotels, they must answer to
national standards both in construction and maintenance.
When we build houses, residential or commercial they must
answer to national or regional standards, including of
course zoning, which should in no way be inferior to
national standards. The same goes for other areas
development and across the board, otherwise the nation will
not have the attributes of a developed country however much
we may be hankering after that status. It takes deliberate,
sustained and programmatic efforts, not wishful thinking.
Are we there yet in Nigeria? Why is it that
large sections of federal highways are failing only a few
years after their construction in Nigeria when highways
outlive their builders in other countries? It’s because of
cutting corners and lack of standards even in our
transportation infrastructure, which is the lifeblood of any
economy. Why are substandard drugs and products
proliferating in Nigeria? It is because there are no
standards even in our healthcare infrastructure that is
responsible for a healthy and productive citizenry. Why are
our higher educational institutions on strike every quarter
of the year without university teachers caring about the
quality of their graduates? It’s due to the absence of
national standards.
If Nigeria has had the foresight to enact a
Failed Bank Decree, it should do a similar thing in the area
of infrastructure projects with a “Failed Project Act” that
would ensure minimum standards in project design, execution
and maintenance. The culture of “anything goes” must be
replaced with the culture of “nothing goes” unless and until
it meets with national or regional quality standards. This
is a matter of gradually growing that culture to displace
the present culture of anything goes in the name of
development.
Is that too much to ask of a nation desirous of being a permanent member of the Security Council and aspiring to become the 20th most development country by the year 2020? Is that too much to ask of the largest black nation and democracy on earth? I don’t think so. Nigeria must be cognizant of her place and manifest destiny as the leader of the black race and accordingly do things that will ennoble the black race rather than things that portray the race as second class. She must set the pace for others to follow. The resources are bounteous and the brains to do the work are sitting right there in that country. She has no business languishing at the bottom of the development ladder with her peers miles ahead.
Is it too much to ask of the government to
work out minimum standards of living for all Nigerians? Or
we don’t care about standards? I don’t think so. If we don’t
care about standards we should be rest assured that we are
already being judged by the standards designed by others and
applied to us whether we like them or not since we ourselves
lack standards, and the results are appalling—to say the
least, from infant mortality to urban chaos; poorly
maintained infrastructures to rickety health facilities. How
could a nation with dry taps and with cities and towns
bristling with boreholes rather than modern waterworks,
purport to launch satellites? There is a huge technology
disconnect. How could a nation fed by peasant farmers be
talking about nuclear power plants? The technology gap is
too great. Nigeria has been doing projects scattered here
and there with many of them purely white elephants rather
than development.
It makes absolutely no sense at all to be
aspiring to master the moon when you have not even mastered
the earth. Those nations going to the moon have mastered the
earth. Mastering our terrestrial environment is prerequisite
for mastering the celestial environment and Nigeria should
follow closely in the footsteps of those who have been
there, done it, because just like democracy, development is
a process, not finished product to be imported in
containers, cleared at Apapa and Tin Can Ports and erected
in Abuja and state capitals. It is not by dumping factories,
schools, hospitals and what have you here and there
haphazardly that Nigeria will get to the promise land but by
careful painstaking, methodical, systematic planning and
execution. And this would appear to be commonsensical enough
to warrant further elaboration even if commonsense is not so
common even in high places and in the court of princes.
For example, the nation spent huge sums of
money to construct the National Theater, Iganmu, Lagos,
which was part of the FESTAC 77 jamboree, complete with a
brand new town, named “FESTAC” town. Does anybody still hear
about the National Theater, today? Perhaps only rats do so
today. The magnificent and imposing edifice was overgrown
with weeds just like Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe Center in Zungeru.
Why? It is because there was no cultural policy linked with
the construction of that Bulgarian edifice. And once the
FESTAC jamboree was over and the guests had gone home to
their countries that building went under as well, together
with the FESTAC town that was turned into another urban
ghetto, just like Ajegunle or Mushin. Everything quickly
went into a state of disrepair and disuse with billions of
naira flushed down the drain. The example of the National
Theater is replicated throughout the nation at all
levels—local, state and federal. Were that institution tied
to a sound, comprehensive cultural policy, the nation’s
cultural exports would have by now attained dizzying heights
since 1977.
The same is true of our National Stadia. What
is the nation’s sports policy and objectives? Why is it the
business of the federal government to get itself involved in
sports development just by building stadia and owning a
national team thus injecting itself into a purely private
sphere that should have grown sports to greater heights in
the country if only government should just get out of the
way and allow for steady and business like sports
development in the country? Sports is big business and
should and must be treated that way by leaving it in the
hands of businessmen and women to develop and grow. It is
not just for national prestige by showing up at world cup
tournaments and returning home empty handed with no
trophies. Is it not clear from the perennial failures of our
national teams in international sports fiestas that it is
government that is killing sports? It is time for government
to get out of the way because it is truly behind Nigeria’s
underdevelopment in all ramifications.
Government itself is the biggest cultural
impediment to growth and development in Africa because it is
standing in the way of entrepreneurship in Africa and the
people themselves have blindly put their hopes and
aspirations in government that is not in any position to
deliver for them now or in the future or come eternity. It
is indeed sad.
Franklin Otorofani is an attorney and public
affairs analyst.
Contact:
mudiagaone@yahoo.com
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