 Published
October 5th, 2011
In the heydays of communism/socialism, big
government was all the rage, seen in some countries as the
ultimate panacea to all human problems; the epitome of human
growth and development—and indeed of civilization itself.
The poor and underprivileged majority, ever resentful of the
rich and powerful in society saw in it huge potentials for
socio-economic equalization and, therefore, equal access to
the good life. It was supposed to be the great social
leveler that never was and can never be—but nevertheless
conceptualized as the social ultimate mechanism that would
heap all humanity into one huge social class, with none
above or below the other.
Propelled by Marxist/Leninist, utopian idealism,
experimentalist authoritarian regimes rearing their ugly
heads in the former USSR, China, Cuba, East Germany, and the
entire Eastern Europe turned their respective societies into
collective guinea pigs to launch massive social
experimentations in Marxism/Leninism. This wholly un-natural
ideological construct forcefully imposed and maintained by
saber rattling, fire-spitting, despotic demagogues such as
Fidel Castro, was soon to find converts in newly independent
nations across the globe, including Africa and Latin
America, where it ended up impoverishing and decimating
their entire populations.
There is no question that there are still diehard bearded
academics running around in our nation’s ivory towers
nostalgically mouthing discredited illusionary
Marxist/Leninist theories as the be all of all human
progress, and seeking to promote a moribund system that lays
all its emphasis on distribution rather than the production
of wealth. Unable to reconcile themselves with the reality
of death of their utopian ideological construct, they have
tenaciously held on to the belief in the resurrection of
communism more like the Christians do of the second coming
of Jesus Christ. Well, they have the tombstone of demised
communist state of the former USSR to show for the greatness
of their ideology. I would, however, advise those still in
denial to quickly come to terms with the reality and quit
brainwashing impressionable young students.
Communism/socialism was such an evil. Everywhere communism
reigned, people were fighting to escape it, and nobody
escapes from a good place; whether it was in East Germany,
with impoverished East Germans dying to scale the Berlin
Wall to a prosperous West Germany, or in Cuba with boatloads
of Cubans perishing at sea in their desperate attempts to
land their feet on US soil to escape the grinding poverty in
Cuba where food rationing, even of common bread, is the
order of the day till today; leaving behind empty shelves of
government stores for their trapped unfortunate compatriots.
On Cuban roads today could be found dilapidated US cars of
the 60s belching out smokes like chimneys with hardly a
modern car in sight.
While the evil twin systems lasted, big government replaced
God and despotic Stalin was quoted as mocking God, asking
contemptuously: How many troops does God command? In fact,
religion was all but outlawed in the former Soviet Union.
The state was God that would provide all the needs of the
citizens where everyone was theoretically equal enjoying
life in abundance. Before long, however, life-in-abundance
turned into life-in-want, with severe food shortages
happening in virtually all communist/socialist countries
leading to food rationing in government operated food
stores. An economic system that would turn common bread into
luxury item that citizens would queue for outside government
food stores to obtain or starve to death is nothing but the
very definition of an evil system. The citizens grew to
become utterly dependent on government, becoming veritable
zombies literarily, and utterly incapable of independent
thinking that was, in any case, outlawed by the state. A
people who rely on government to eat, drink, clothe, travel,
learn, work, reproduce, and even to think certainly cannot
go far in a competitive world. Needless to add that
creativity was the first casualty, that’s why nothing except
guns and bullets came out of the former USSR in terms of
consumer and capital goods. Only defense industries under
tight governmental control and in competition with the West
survived communism.
Though now belatedly transiting into robust market economy
for good after realizing the abject monumental failures of
the command economic system, with great success so far,
political China still bears these debilitating vestiges of
the communist/socialist paradigm in its political department
but even that too is gradually yielding its place. Communism
was an odd and un-natural political experiment that went
awry as it was destined to become right from the very
beginning despite its much touted promise in academia and in
leftist political circles, fathering corruption and mass
impoverishment. It was indeed a weapon of mass destruction (WMD),
for the millions who perished under it in brutal
dictatorships, and certainly a weapon of mass impoverishment
(WMI), for the millions who starved under it with empty
government food shelves. Never again! Yes, never again will
humanity be exposed to such barefaced evil preying on mass
ignorance and gullibility of citizens and humanity.
Therefore, no one needs to be reminded about the unmitigated
disaster and the sheer scale of human sufferings that
followed its reign and communism/socialism collapsed and
crumbled under its own weight like an old, dilapidated brick
house hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake—the type that hit
Japan, because God would not allow his people to live
forever under such dehumanizing conditions even if it was a
punishment for them as divine justice. So in His mercies,
the curse of communism was lifted from the shoulders of the
people. And once USSR brought herself down in a big bang
with Yeltsin’s counter revolution in the early 90s that was
encouraged by former President Gorbachev’s “Glasnost” and
“Perestroika” policies, the communist/socialist global
empire collapsed like a deck of cards and vanished from the
face of the earth, almost overnight. And that was the
defining event of the 90s leading to the re-integration of
Europe thereby making possible the present EU structure.
From Eastern Europe to Asia and Africa the liberated peoples
breathed the air of freedom for the first time, symbolized
dramatically by the fall of the Berlin Wall leading
inevitably to the re-integration of impoverished, socialist
East Germany with prosperous neighboring West Germany, to
form the united Germany of today—back to its pre-WWII
status.
Why have I taken the time to undertake this brief but
important historical excursion? It is for one and only one
reason—to learn an important lesson from it. And there are
several lessons to be learnt from the collapsed of
communism/socialism, one of the most poignant of which is
that big government is fundamentally antithetical to
sustainable development, and that development must be
initiated from the ground up by the citizens themselves
rather than from top to down by an omnipotent and omniscient
government before which the citizens grovel in penury. It
follows, therefore, as night follows day, that the bigger
government grows relative to the size of a country the less
developed a nation ultimately becomes and that accounts for
the collapse of the all-pervasive communist/socialist
governments and their decadent societies. And that
realization accounts for the moves by the Chinese and Cuban
authorities to embrace market economies and thus free up
commercial space occupied by decadent governmental
monopolies for the private sector to mine and prosper for
the overall benefit, growth and development of their
nations.
There is no indication that China, in particular, is
regretting the move to free market, certainly not with its
over 9% annual growth rate in GDP, which was unimaginable
and undreamt of under its former command economy. Today,
China is getting even more capitalist than the United States
itself that drove capitalism to its present dizzying heights
as the pre-eminent global economic ideology of choice.
Private enterprises have almost eclipsed the lumbering
government monopolies in China. China’s private sector is
thriving and responsible for its astonishing economic growth
in the last few decades, freeing up the government to do
what governments do best—regulation, defense, national
security, and infrastructure provisioning. Thus if a nation
like China could see the light and made mid-course
correction, no one needs to remind developing nations like
Nigeria, which way to go in her quest for development
because the facts on ground are self-evident. With the
engine of capitalism now powering its economy, China has
overtaken; first Britain, second Germany, and now, even the
industrial giant, Japan, to become the 2nd largest economy
in the world within a decade for two— and even aiming at
displacing the almighty United States in a short order.
Already, China has more automobiles and smart phones than
the US. Under communism China was the world capital of
bicycles with few Soviet-built automobiles. It has an
advanced rail transportation system that the US under the
Obama is struggling to catch up with. It has more internet
users than the US, and leading the US in other fields,
including but not limited to the production of engineers,
ship building and steel production, which are all but dead
in the US. And its defense production and industries are
catching up fast with those in the US with its production of
advanced defense systems and military weaponry including
aircraft carriers, stealth aircrafts and submarines, just to
mention but a few sending jitters down the spines of
Washington’s policy makers, especially so of the Republican
hue.
It’s nothing short of a miracle unfolding before our eyes in
our generation. That is what free market economic system has
done in China, allowing the government to plan ahead in
critical sectors mentioned above and freeing up the
entrepreneurial spirits of the Chinese just as it had done
in the west a century ago.
But how, in practical terms, did this come about? Here is
how: Earlier this week the American media reported the move
by a consortium of five giant US technology corporations,
led by Intel and IBM corporations, to invest a whopping
$4.5bn in nanotechnology “Research and Development” (R&D),
in New York State. Such announcements, which are regular
fares in the developed world in general, and particularly in
the United States, are totally unheard of in developing
countries, such as Nigeria, even on much smaller scales,
which of course, accounts for their backwardness and
dependence on developed countries in science and technology.
Both government leaders and private businesses in these
countries prefer to invest in political and social
jamborees, meaningless conferences, and corrupt schemes
across the board to investing in Research and Development.
And that’s why such collaborative research announcements
will not come out of those countries, which are permanent
consumers rather than producers of knowledge. Their
universities, including those so-called science and
technology universities, seem to exist not to advance the
frontiers of knowledge, but to regurgitate knowledge
produced by their counterparts abroad, which their lecturers
shamelessly and scandalously sell in handouts to their
unfortunate, captive students, and thereafter proceed on
strikes for the better part of the year, drawing salaries
for as long as the industrial actions last for months on end
to the chagrin of parents and students alike. If this is not
academic terrorism, I don’t know what is, seriously
speaking.
It’s a shame that a nation could boast of hundreds of
universities, polytechnics, and colleges of technology and
still cannot invent a single machine or device. You want to
ask what they exist for. Is it just to produce paper
engineers and technicians to service machines and engines
invented and produced in other nations? Is that how Nigeria
is going to become the 20th largest economy in the world by
the Year 2020 or Year 2050, if you like? Is this some sick
joke or something serious at all? I don’t get it. It’s
amazing and indeed mind-boggling how leaders in third world
countries think they could somehow be able to transform
their countries into developed nations without massive
investments in research and development. Sounds to me like
an airy dream or political sound bites, to be more precise,
to talk about Nigeria becoming the 20th most developed
nation on earth while doing nothing about what it takes to
get there. There is a definite path that leads directly to
that destination and if not taken will leave the nation
stranded in the wilderness of development. There are no
short cuts to it.
And US corporations are committed to taking that well beaten
path that has made the United States to become the global
super power economically and militarily in what is usually
referred to as military/industrial complex. This is not the
government but the private sector driving this development
paradigm, of course, with government’s oversight and
assistance where needed including fast tracked paper work,
tax breaks, and the like. But the government has not a
single share in these ventures and has no pecuniary
interests whatsoever in them. They are purely private
commercial ventures with no governmental involvement in both
ownership and management structures. The government itself
has giant research programs of its own relating to defense,
security, space, agriculture, transportation, and the likes,
which goes to underscore the premium placed on R&D by
developed nations. Working complementarily, these two
national forces help to drive their nations forward and
remain competitive in the global arena in virtually all
fields of human endeavors. After all, the internet was the
invention of the US Department of Defense (DoD), with its
APARNET program. Same with the Atomic bomb, which came out
of the Manhattan Project, and of course, Star Wars, just to
mention but a few.
But the private sector is the main component of these
national efforts, even in purely defense systems, by
companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin corporations,
for example. It is the essential engine room of US
inventions and innovations. Now, these five US corporations
led by IBM and Intel are doing this in addition to their
individual R&D budgets that already run into tens of
billions of dollars. Microsoft, Dell, HP, CISCO, Apple, and
indeed, virtually all major US corporations, including even
start- ups for that matter, are investing hundreds of
billions of dollars in R&D annually both in-house and in
universities and colleges, not only in the US, but across
the globe in far-away places such as India. The same is
equally true of major global corporations in all economic
sectors, including, but not limited to automobiles,
aviation, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, agriculture,
telecommunication, and so on, not to mention defense and
security. In fact, the R&D budgets of some private
corporations in developed countries far surpass the entire
national budgets of several third world countries, including
Nigeria. And it is needless to state that results of this
particular research collaboration and similar ventures in
the US will likely; in fact, almost certain to produce the
next generation of smart technology systems and products of
the future that will help the United States to maintain her
enviable position as the global leader in technological
inventions and innovations.
What that means in practical terms is that US corporations,
not necessarily the US government, are investing in and
securing America’s future, and by necessarily implication,
the world’s as well. A corollary of this is that the future
will be molded not necessarily by governments, but by
corporations investing huge resources in R&D. In fact, the
shape of that future is already being engineered in huge
laboratories across the US and to a large extent, in other
developed nations; again not necessarily by governments, but
by private corporations driven by acute competition and,
therefore, the desire to acquire a competitive edge over
their rivals. That is the reasons why new systems, products
and ideas are continually generated, not from third world
countries that are struggling to survive or socialist
countries with monopolistic command economies, but from
capitalist nations that are principally governed by market
forces and competition. So, if you are looking out for the
next IPAD, for example, or the next generation automobile or
aircraft, don’t look in the direction of communist Cuba or
Venezuela, but in the direction of the US, Japan, Korea and
Europe, where it is all but certain to come out pretty soon.
By the way, Amazon just came out with its version of IPAD
named “Kindle Fire” which of course doubles as E-Reader that
will compete with Apple’s IPAD, RIM’s Playbook, Motorola’s
Zoom and the rest of the pack. Don’t expect innovations like
these from third world or socialist countries, for the
reasons stated above.
What does this mean for third world countries like Nigeria
aspiring to become the 20th largest economy in the world? My
simple answer is that Nigeria will not get there until she
develops world class corporations able and willing to invest
in R&D like corporations in the US, Europe and to some
extent, Asia. There is no way the Nigerian government can
decree development from Aso Rock. It just won’t happen even
if the government has the will and determination to push it
through. The time has, therefore, come for both the
government and people of Nigeria to come to terms with the
fact that development will not come from above but from
below, and for the government to stop pretending or assuming
that it could bring about development all by itself—whether
it is about electricity generation, transmission and
distribution, and industrialization of the country in
general, which of course, includes the production of goods
and services. Nigerians must quit looking up to the
government for their daily necessities, and in particular
for giving them job. That is a government dependent
mentality spawned by socialism/communist mindsets that
should belong to the archives.
The reality, which many, including President Obama is
unwilling to come to terms with, is that governments do not
create jobs; businesses do! Therefore the empowerment of the
private sector is the key to opening the job doors now
firmly shut in both US and Nigeria. The role of government,
save in communist/socialist countries, which we are not and
will not become, is to provide “enabling environment” from
where businesses could take off and provide jobs for their
nations’ populations. If governments create jobs President
Barack Obama of the United States would be the happiest man
on earth today and his public poll numbers would not be so
miserable as they are today in the US. He would have created
hundreds of millions of jobs with the nearly $2 trillion
dollars he has pumped into the US economy to in the last
three years “with nothing to show for it,” to use Nigeria’s
parlance. Rather than creating jobs those trillion dollars
are hemorrhaging jobs in the US as could be seen from the
current unemployment numbers in the US. And big Obama
government has been cited as the main culprit, because as
government grows bigger it is apt to crowd out the private
sector that is the ultimate job machine to sit on the fence
and watch from the sidelines instead of being in the field
of play itself. This has been proved in a study by a team of
Harvard economists in the United States. So, it is not some
hypothesis pulled from the hat by Franklin Otorofani but
scientific truism. A lean government rather than the huge
and unproductive bureaucracy accounting for the biggest
portion of recurrent expenditures, as exists in Nigeria
today, is the way to go if real development is our goal. It
is not by pumping raw cash into the economy but by pumping
business friendly policies into the bloodstreams of
businesses that would wake up the lumbering economy. And
this is true of the US as it is of Nigeria and other nations
that have chosen the path of free market economy.
Presently, the Nigerian government is looming large in the
purely commercial life of the nation, seizing the so-called
“commanding heights” of the economy. And that is
counterproductive to the emergence of an industrialized
nation capable of attaining and holding the present as well
as taking on the future with supreme confidence. Remove oil
and gas from the equation and the Nigeria economy will come
tumbling down like communism in former Soviet Union. To say
the least, that is a very precarious position for a nation
to be in. It is indeed frightening that minus oil and gas
the nation could literarily shut down and seize to exist. By
the same logic, government’s huge involvement in higher
education though socially popular with Nigerians as it
affords every family access to higher education, is
nonetheless, equally inimical to progress and quality of
education. We all know how qualitative education was in
Nigeria when the missionaries were running the show before
the ill-advised nationalization and government takeover of
both secondary and tertiary education, and then began mass
production of both secondary and tertiary school graduates;
not necessarily all but in several instances, with dubious
and questionable academic credentials.
It is not the number of higher institutions that matters,
but what they are capable of producing and giving out in the
nation’s overall quest for development in terms of
transforming knowledge into visible products or services. As
one prominent American super banker and university
professor, John Allison correctly puts it, “public schools
don’t innovate.” In other words, public schools are not
major producers of new knowledge but avid consumers and
purveyors of old knowledge produced elsewhere and this fits
into the portraiture of Nigerian publicly owned institutions
of higher learning.
The federal government should, therefore, stop building new
institutions of higher learning just to produce unemployable
graduates and pay huge salaries to unproductive lecturers
that revel in industrial actions year in year out, but leave
that role for private universities to fulfill. Establishment
of institutions of higher learning should not be made into a
“federal character” thing. It is my prediction, therefore,
that the private universities springing up now in Nigeria
will soon overtake the government-owned universities if they
stay true to their mission, and that should come as no
surprise to anybody. Federal and state universities have no
defined missions and exist merely as ordinary institutions
wholly divorced from the nation’s developmental aspirations.
And many more are in the process of being established for
purely political purposes to satisfy federal character. But
federal character does not enjoin the government to
establish universities in every state and local government
in the nation. Other projects of need could be established
in places without federal universities. And, by the way,
nothing stops a state or local government from establishing
its own university if there is need for it. It is not
entirely a federal government business.
The Nigerian government, if it truly wants development that
leads to job creation, must hands off all commercial
activities forthwith with full privatization of all
government commercial establishments. And there should be no
sacred cows, including the NNPC that has become an engine of
corruption and sharp practices. The government is,
therefore, on the right track in initiating the
privatization program. However, the pace of privatization is
just too slow and tentative making it seem like an
afterthought. It has now taken more than a decade to private
NITEL and PHCN, for example. That is a shame. Handing off
government’s commercial undertakings to the private sector
unleashes the entrepreneurial and creative energies of the
citizens thereby making them less and less dependent on the
government at all levels. Nollywood’s takeoff to become the
third largest home movie industry in the world was a private
initiative. Left in the hands of government bureaucrats, it
would never have taken off the ground in the first place and
if, perchance, it did would have since crashed. The take off
the telecommunication revolution in Nigeria is another
example. Left in the hands of NITEL’s government
bureaucrats, only death follows as was indeed the case with
Nigerian Airways and NNSL, whose ships were all marooned and
seized abroad to settle debts. We could say the same for the
power sector.
The evidence is all over the place about government’s
involvement in commercial activities killing not only
industries but jobs right, left and center. If NNPC had been
in the hands of the private sector, Nigeria’s oil and gas
industry would have hit the stratosphere by now and the
incessant supply shortages would not be there. Acute supply
shortages are defining symptoms of socialist economies not
free market economies. That’s why the seeming resistance by
workers to the privatization of PHCN and NITEL is insanity
defined in the face of acute power shortages that are
crippling the nation’s industries. There is no reason why
the government should allow itself to be intimidated by
vested interests determined to scuttle the nation’s forward
match in the name of labor unions.
Today, millions of unemployed Nigerians are looking up to
the government to give them jobs. And even more are looking
up to the government to provide them with drinking water and
electricity amongst others. When the taps run dry, they
blame President Jonathan. When a portion of road fails, they
blame President Jonathan. When a local clinic runs out of
drugs, they blame President Jonathan. When lights go off,
they blame President Jonathan. And when a woman miscarries,
they blame President Jonathan.
Haba! Is there nothing that the citizens can do for
themselves by way of development in their own communities
even for profits? That, in and of itself, is symptomatic of
an unproductive and failed economic policy producing a
citizenry that is utterly dependent on government. What is
wrong with our engineers, technologists and business people?
Why are they sitting on the fence waiting on the government
to do all? What are they doing with the abundant solar
energy that the nation is blessed with? Where is the private
sector of this country? Why can’t they establish huge water
works, not boreholes? Is anything stopping Nigerian
businessmen and women from going into petroleum product
refining? Why rely on NNPC for the supply of petroleum
products? Why rely on importation of petroleum products
rather than refining them in the country through private
initiatives? Why wouldn’t private individuals and
institutions provide first class hospitals and health
institutions for the people? Why wait and rely on government
to do that?
Now, here is the answer: It is because the people have grown
up wholly dependent on government to provide them with each
and all social amenities, which is unfortunate indeed. Why
wouldn’t private corporations provide electricity, the same
way private companies provide telecommunication services?
The electric energy that powers the computer with which this
article was written was not produced by the government but
by Con-Edison—a wholly private electric company. When lights
go off as they did during Hurricane Irene, with downed power
lines, and people went without electricity for days, no one
blamed President Obama or even the state governors or city
Mayors, but the private electric companies providing the
services, and the state governors and city Mayors joined the
people in blaming them for not restoring power quickly
enough after the hurricane.
In conclusion, it is not written in stone anywhere that only
government, or for that matter, that only the Federal
Government must provide electricity, potable water, good
roads, qualitative education, and health services for the
people. The best universities, hospitals and medical centers
in the world are not owned and cannot be owned by the
government, but by private corporations. Wherever and
whenever government steps in to displace the private sector,
death and decay ensue. It is almost like the laws of nature.
A free people in a free market economy must not behave like
captive people beholden only to an almighty government
ruling their lives from the center, but must exercise their
God-given rights to better their lives through productive
economic activities and that includes the provision of
social amenities. Rural communities do it—I know mine did
it—and there is no reason why urban communities shouldn’t
and would rather wait in eternity on the government.
Let this not be a case of a free people not knowing what to
do with their freedoms—including , of course, freedom to
invent, innovate, and add value to our economic lives. Go,
do something for yourself and your country, and stop whining
in your couches and blaming everybody else but yourself, for
the nation’s economic woes. After all, it’s citizens just
like you that created the Microsofts, Dells, Amazons,
Yahoos, Googles, Twitters, and the Face-books of this world,
literarily out of nothing—in some cases from their home
garages and bedrooms, without waiting for the government,
and in the process created good paying jobs for themselves
and thousands of their fellow countrymen and women.
This does not in any way, shape or form excuse the
government from doing its part in infrastructures
provisioning as all serious governments do all over the
world in both developed and developing countries that are
forging ahead in the global competition but to encourage our
people to also do their part because development is not a
one-way street but a dual-carriageway--a partnership between
the government and the people. If the government is failing
the citizens in the performance of its duties to the people,
it is no excuse whatsoever for the citizens themselves to
fail themselves. That’s double trouble!
Franklin Otorofani is an attorney and public affairs
analyst---writing, not to condemn, but to inspire!
Contact:
mudiagaone@yahoo.com
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