By Tunji Olaopa
I have deliberately crafted the topic of this piece to link the status of the Nigerian state as a republic to the aspirational desire, embodied within the forthcoming election, of transforming the fortune of the country through a decidedly ideological willpower that aligns the future to a vision of Nigeria. When the electorates go to the poll in all democratic context, that act is symbolic of a desire and yearning to keep drawing the state closer to an ideal. And that is done either through the removal of a leadership that seemed to have fractured that vision or through the election of another who the electorate believed could facilitate the transformation that takes the state closer to an idea of utopia. Abraham Lincoln had something fundamental in mind when he insisted that “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” And I think William Shakespeare fathomed what that meant when he made Cassius to utter, in Julius Caesar, that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Cassius juxtapose fate and human character and will power to make whatever one wills to happen.
The historical evolution, developmental trajectory and future possibilities of the Nigerian state are not in our stars (which is evidently divinely enabled in more than equal measure), but in our determination to transform the limitations and resources of the state into a policy architecture, national value capital and productivity framework that make life worth living for Nigerians. And since independence, Nigeria, through its consecutive governments, have been reaching for that ideal of a developmental state that is capable and efficient, without ever achieving it. I am not sure if the situation of ancient Athens was worse or not, as historical comparisons have their limitations and utility. However, we have the evidence that the democratic experiment had decayed so badly in Athens that the leadership no longer saw the significance of a critical citizenry in what Socrates and his interlocution meant to achieve. Socrates had to die for tyranny to keep reigning.
In 1963, Nigeria became a republic. Over the cause of its conceptual trajectory, the meaning of the republic has shifted, first, from any government defined around the idea of the common good, to a form of government where the leadership is procedurally elected according to constitutional imperatives. This differentiates a republic from a hereditary monarchy. In contemporary times, a republic is a democratic government where sovereignty lies with the people who then govern through their representatives. It is in this sense that Nigeria declared herself a republic to claim the possibility of translating the wish of Nigerians into a solid policy architecture that produces tangible development results. From the first republic to the fourth, the Nigerian governments have been straining at the governance and development equation without much significant successes. Three out of the four republican experiments were taken over by military rule. The experimentation with democratic governance began all over again in 1999, and so far, it has been turbulent as all Nigerians know.
When Plato, the Greek philosopher, began writing his magnus opus, Republic, it was a work motivated by disillusionment and hope in equal measure. Socrates, his teacher, had been killed and the democratic experiment was in freefall. The death of Socrates, for Plato, was the final death knell about the corrupt tendencies of democracy. So, if democracy could preside over the unjust killing of someone like Socrates, Plato argued, there is then a need for another government, an ideal one, that will take justice seriously. And so, Plato began crafting the contours of an ideal society that has the capacity to facilitate the good life through good politics. Plato’s Republic is a fundamental act of reformist social re-engineering. From the guardians who have the reflective capacity, in the mold of the philosophical king, to the educational system that generates them and others, who properly situated, according to the law of justice to render service, transforms the Republic to become the site of good governance.
- S. Eliot was perceptive when he insisted that “There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.” The real and the ideal are coterminous. We move to the ideal from the perspective of the real. Or, what is the same thing: the ideal is what enables the strategic re-construction of the real. This is what gave birth to Plato’s Republic. And if we contend that Plato wrote about a utopia, then we can counter that it is the vision of the utopia that precede the emergence of the real. The House of Maktoum saw Dubai from the lofty core of a vision. Even the name of the city, from the Arab proverb, “dabadubai”, speaks about the influx of money. And consistently for many decades, this vision passed through the strategic and focused policymaking architecture of this family until Dubai arrived as a site of governance wonder out of the shape of a mere village.
The Nigerian republic was equally preceded by several visions. As part of the founding negotiators of the Nigerian state, Chief Obafemi Awolowo was equipped with both the historical, political and philosophical sagacity to assess and reflect on the past and future of the Nigerian state. This is what he did in The People’s Republic. It is a serious and strategic act of vision that locates Nigeria’s present in a critical assessment of her colonial past, and envisioned a vision that subordinates Nigeria’s greatness to upholding the social contract in a true service to Nigerians. For Awolowo, the Nigerian constitution constitutes the institutional framework for reconstructing the Nigerian state. It is the constitution that outlines the framework for ordering a good society. The constitution encodes the blueprint by which the leadership desires, through policy initiatives, to keep rearticulating the direction of a state. The anomalies that Awolowo saw in the first instantiation of the Nigerian republic has become aggravated over the next three instantiations. Even the democratic experiment has not been able to erase the deep ethnonational and institutional cleavage that make divisiveness and underdevelopment possible.
This, perhaps, demonstrates the essential basis for restructuring the Nigerian state. Unlike the vast desert of the Dubai, Nigeria began life as an amalgamated territory. With independence, the plurality that defines Nigeria, as a mere geographical expression, rather than be federalized to facilitate the belongingness of the diverse constituents, was through bad policy unitarized into a centralized entity supposedly operating a federal constitution. This constitutional lopsidedness has been the source of many institutional and governance aberrations. Nigeria’s monocultural economy, for instance, draws strength from crude oil to centralize Nigeria’s wealth and kill regional innovation and initiatives. It swallowed the cocoa plantations of the southwest, the groundnut pyramids of the north and the coal industries of the east. Restructuring the federation simply means making it more constitutionally possible to allow for the comparative advantages of each geopolitical zone to manifest in advancing the governance possibilities of Nigeria.
Even more critical to the constitutional restructuring is the need to empower local governance into a developmental mode. Within the unitary dynamic of Nigeria’s federal constitution, the local governments have become comatose in developmental terms. As is, no local government can supervise grassroots governance in Nigeria. It is that bad. The exclusive and concurrent lists of the constitution have emasculated the residual list and taken the developmental and democratic initiatives out of the reach of the local governments. The exclusive list contains sixty-eight items. The concurrent list, powers shared by the federal and state governments, further decimate the capacity of the local governments.
Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones could facilitate regional governance and development corridors that could become the strategic component of a reconstructed and diversified economy, complemented by crude oil. And no incoming leadership should be deceived that local governance sustained by the principle of subsidiarity can be exempted from such vision of a constitutional re-engineering. The grassroots are where a large swarth of Nigerians want to participate in democratic dynamics, as well as contributing to the economic growth of this country. It is where the social contract can factor them into good governance, especially through the many traditional institutions (like the traditional chieftaincy), local frameworks (like the thrift societies), and local governance arrangements (like the Optimum Community approach—OPTICOM—recommended by the late Professors OjetunjiAboyade and Akin Mabogunje).
From Plato’s Republic to Awolowo’s The People’s Republic, the fascination of the ideal for building a great nation cannot be underestimated. A nation is constituted by the visioneering of the ideal by the leadership, and concerted efforts of all others, including the people, within the change space where good governance is concocted in tune with democratic aspirations and developmental objectives. The excuse of anyone that will take on the task of re-engineering the Nigerian state cannot be that of being bereft of ideas and frameworks of the ideal.What Nigeria can and should be is very clear. What is lacking is the administration and leadership acumen, backed by a transformational political willpower, that will translate the visions of the ideals and the appropriate ideological framework into institutional forms that can then deliver good and services, as well as infrastructural miracles, to Nigerians.
- Olaopa, a retired permanent secretary, is Professor of Public Administration
