A two-headed problem (or the FAULT is in our ELITES )
Our country (and our continent) is currently facing two very different but somewhat comparable problems that we are not in any stage of resolving because we have not acknowledged their existence. One problem (and its solution) lies with the private sector elite, people who were educated when our country offered better education, have been trained for jobs no longer exist, have made choices based on social status rather than the need of the society, and have invested not in transforming the society for the benefit of all, but in securing their space within a society that offers very limited opportunity to the majority.
What is the nature of this problem? First and foremost, the challenges that we face today arising from low productivity is either a challenge of knowledge, meaning that we have not acquired the right knowledge and therefore the right assets to resolve the problem, or it is a challenge of commitment, meaning that we prefer to deploy our resources and our knowledge into areas that may offer higher personal gain but does not begin to solve society’s problem. This simplification does not fully account for the implication of policies and bureaucracy or the very critical role the government must play if we are to excel, that will be dealt with later. For some reason, we expect that this problem, to the extent that we acknowledge that it exists, has to be solved by the government. They include the incredibly low productivity in agriculture, as epitomised by the low factor productivity per capita that has not changed significantly since independence, or that a huge part of our agriculture today is still subsistence agriculture and has not evolved into mechanised farming or adopted modern technology for productivity. This evolution in agriculture, it’s not the job of government, not solely. As much as government can provide support by creating agricultural institutions such as the many universities of agriculture across the country, or supporting the agricultural institute that are the R&D centres for improve productivity, at the end of the day it requires entrepreneurs, private sector individuals, who see the opportunity and are willing (and able) to bring in the resources needed to create businesses that are globally competitive and can then significantly improve productivity and lower the price of food in the country.
It is true that this would be a lot easier if the support from government was there. It is also true that if the country was more secured, there are many more farmlands that would be available. But in truth, the amount of land that is available, that is fully secured, that is accessible, that can be farmed today, is more than sufficient. Put differently, the real opportunity doesn’t lie in increasing the amount of land under subsistent cultivation. It lies in bringing in new knowledge and the technology and in investing in the economic infrastructure to increase productivity on the same amount of land. The excuse that security is the main reason why we have food insecurity is not sufficiently compelling unless we are determined to feed a nation of 200 million on the back of ageing rural farmers. What is more accurate is that even with the land that are secured, the productivity per capita is very low because it’s been left almost entirely to rural farmers, to people who have not had the benefit of attending the many universities of agriculture or have access to the knowledge and the capital that is available. To solve for food security, we must first acknowledge that the Nigerian private sector elite have yet to commit itself to solving this problem and are either relying on food import from countries that ought not to be feeding us or relying on intervention by government to resolve agricultural investment deficits. The intervention may come but it will never be enough, it will not be sustained and may come too late.
The role (and failure) of the private sector is one side of the problem, and agriculture is just one example. There are multiple areas where it is clear to me that the Nigerian private sector elite, be that the business elite, the intellectual elite or the professional elite must do better. First and foremost, we must re-focus our learning, our education, our certification in the fields that faces most challenges (food security, education, healthcare, energy) and represents our best chance at collective prosperity and individual wealth. And secondly, we must do better in taking responsibility for creating competitive (and collaborative) ecosystems, be it in retail, where it is currently dominated by entrepreneurs from other third world countries, or in commodity aggregation, where the largest players are non-Nigerians, or increasingly in manufacturing, where we continue to see investors from emerging markets committing resources into spaces we ought to dominate. We simply need do better than we are currently doing.
The second problem that exists, and unless it is acknowledged, cannot be resolved, is government’s conviction that the resources that is aggregated from the little that we produce is primarily for the purpose of maintaining government (and remaining in power). Specifically, the resources are allocated primarily for political rather than economic or social objectives. The infrastructure that are funded are based on political positioning and gain. The MDAs and the agencies that exist and to which people are appointed are primarily about securing political loyalty rather than creating an environment that attracts the best talents and rewards the desperately needed capital while protecting the consumers. And of course, the positioning of those who occupy government office is about demonstrating the power of office in the hope that it will better their chances in future elections. As much as we understand the sacrifice that goes into being a public servant, especially into becoming an elected public official, until and unless the public servants as well as our politicians come to the realisation that they will never have the support of a public that sees them as parasites, wilfully deaf agents who continue to maintain a lifestyle that is not accessible or available to the rest of the country, and that is not affordable to the public, until that changes, there is no way the public will support any reform agenda they put forward. The first step is to acknowledge that the government can no longer afford the life that it has created. That requires them not just to create a leaner and more disciplined government, but also to exercise restraint in how they provide for themselves from the public purse.
These two problems remain with us, not because they are difficult to solve, but because in the private sector we continue to deny that we have any responsibility or any role in driving the productivity that will create economic prosperity for all, and we continue to focus on the many failures of government that has made it harder, but not impossible. I say made it harder because in the same environment, operating in the same space, we have seen non-citizens come into various sectors and do well, while we continue to find excuses for not doing much. It doesn’t mean that the environment was better for them. On the contrary, they came in with no expectation, and because they have no expectation and no sense of entitlement, they accepted the challenges of the environment and focused on how to survive despite it, and in so doing, they’ve built businesses that are now vibrant and, in many cases, dominant.
This is a call to action. Until we think differently, even though we elected the government, we cannot yet depend on them in certain areas to solve our problems. We must first solve some of our problems, thereby empowering ourselves to hold them accountable to solve other problems. The proof that the private sector, in my view, has not done enough is we keep pointing to how well we thrive in other ecosystems. We thrive in those ecosystems because someone, quite often not the government, created the opportunities and oiled the systems and we simply plug ourselves into those systems to benefit from the hard work that was done. Some people, other than the flailing governments across the continent, must roll up their sleeves and do the work.
As for the government, ultimately their efficiency is a function of being able to drive (and tax) the energy, harvest the power, activate the collective will of the people, so that we move in one direction seamlessly. But for that to happen, the people must first trust that we are in this together. The idea that those who have access to power continue to have higher level of protection, as you can see with the amount of policing resources dedicated to them, they have higher level of access, as you can see with the way our budget is spent, and a higher share in the country, as they continue to thrive where others are barely able to breathe, will diminish many African countries and may extinguish some. Until the representatives of the people resolve this by bringing themselves to the same level as the people they represent, even if it is for a little while, we are unlikely to gather the kind of momentum that is necessary for the continent to thrive.
Two problems that can be solved, they can only be solved once we acknowledge that they exist.
AS
