As Adlai Stevenson Jr. famously observed, “A hungry man is not a free man.” This truth conveniently haunts our troubled polity, where politicians tend to demand absolute electoral loyalty while offering nothing in return. But, again, can a hungry populace give their best while fending for themselves in a vacuum, and can one harvest where nothing was sown? For any political system to endure therefore, the social contract ought to be more than a one-way street. The two hands must clap: if we expect total commitment, we should first provide the security and the tools that make such commitment possible.
The contrast between a positive past and our present is deeply disturbing, and indeed ominous. We should do everything to prevent a catastrophic future, the fault lines of which are already visible in daily occurrences across the nation. The key issue which needs to be addressed is that Nigeria’s political establishment detains us in an appearance of disagreement without difference. This is akin to self-immolation, for no matter how much the elite believe they have ring-fenced and protected themselves against political turbulence, it never works that way in reality.
The contestation of ideas between the weaponisation of poverty and the creation of an illusory economy built on “palliatives” and assorted shibboleths is already unravelling, for it possesses no foundation. In a globalized economy and with the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the complexity and the reality of the uncompetitiveness of Nigeria’s economic structure is exposed by the day.
For instance, a recent report from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reveals that Nigerian pupils’ literacy levels lag behind those of most African nations. If this is not a warning of what is to come, nothing is. No amount of palliatives can disguise these realities, and any strategy built upon them will be dead in the water.
As leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmadu Bello and Awolowo demonstrated, a foundational base is the only sustainable, enduring structure. To paraphrase their collective vision: development does not begin with grand pretenses, but with basic infrastructure – water systems, schools, and dispensaries – followed by financial inclusion and agricultural storage.
As Nehru himself often stressed, if a nation commits to these foundational building blocks, it will return years later to find a profound and lasting transformation. In essence, what we currently refer to as “empowerment” is, in reality, a delusion. These are essentially civic, self-help community projects.
It will be in Nigeria’s interest to return to the foundational development planning, anchored by a National Democratic Agreement on the central ethos of that mission. We should balance life’s chances and opportunities by reinstating national planning – not to be confused with the rigid central control of a totalitarian state. The neoliberal framework inherited from the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) has proven to be a series of self-inflicted wounds. True national planning implies a genuine devolution of power to the grassroots. In practice, these initiatives should start at the ward level, drawing directly from the expertise of local development associations and civil society groups.
India and Malaysia provide clear examples of this model of national planning and nation-building. We have to return to it! Southwest states can achieve this by reviving their moribund Ministries of Regional Integration as the engine room for the task. The South West Development Commission (SWDC) should also be strategically engaged. Furthermore, the Economics, Sociology and Anthropology Departments of regional tertiary institutions should be actively integrated into a framework of applied research. This is how to reset the clock before everything melts in our faces.
As history has shown, such focused development will inevitably place other zones in a position to catch up. By whatever name we call or describe our predicament, the pursuit of stomach infrastructure is an agenda that is clearly alien to our common humanity; we abandon this truth to our collective detriment.
Unlike past initiatives such as the Western Nigerian Finance Corporation (WNFC) or the Western Nigerian Development Corporation (WNDC), which current “empowerment” scheme is actually based on self-regeneration? A first-year Social Science undergraduate could use a simple cost-benefit analysis to expose the self-deceit inherent in these increasingly convoluted “empowerment” schemes. Ideally, long-standing institutions like the National Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) should have led this charge long ago; had it maintained its institutional independence, such an assessment would have shattered this illusion and ended the mass distortion of reality.
Institutions like NISER should also conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of, for example, distributing Keke NAPEP as a path to the lower middle class. This stands in sharp contrast to how the Western Region Cooperative Bank fostered financial inclusion and credit aggregation. Those efforts effectively upgraded rural subsistence farming and developed distributive trades, fostering a self-regenerating petit bourgeoisie – a model colonial officers later exported to East Africa and Malaysia.
In ‘The Road to Serfdom’, Friedrich Hayek warned against fostering a dependency syndrome that starves individual productivity. That warning is the raw reality of Western Nigeria today. Dependency has turned governance into a living lie: a toxic wedge that fractures the very capacity for self-regeneration.
Consider the irony of a well-educated middle-aged man seeking “succour” rather than genuine empowerment, only to be turned away. The beauty is wasted when it becomes a grotesque ritual of survival that mocks a proud heritage, reducing decades of schooling to a beggar’s queue and the bitter harvest of a pauperized commonwealth.
Beyond the routine process of ballot casting, the current political establishment in Western Nigeria would do its constituents a favour by thoroughly immersing itself in the economic history of the 1950s and ‘60s as a first step towards the much-needed reform. An indispensable starting point is to highlight the seminal speech delivered by Awolowo to the Western Nigeria House of Assembly when he moved the motion for the establishment of the Western Region Cooperative Bank. This was never merely about founding a bank; it was an economic development paradigm designed to propel the region into modernity. Indeed, that speech remains a classic and should serve as the operational blueprint for today’s political class.
Awolowo possessed the distinct advantage of understanding the foundations of capital accumulation in Western Nigeria. The systems of financial aggregation directed at production in Ijesaland were so noteworthy that they fascinated economic anthropologists over a century ago, who studied and adapted these methods. Similar studies of trade and capital formation in Ijebu Province also proved invaluable, eventually influencing economic models in parts of the West, notably Germany and Scandinavia.
In O’ Level Biology, we learnt that a parasite, as it begins to feed on its host, assumes its own future. If only for the sake of their own children and grandchildren, the ruling elite should think beyond the obsession with electoral cycles and build a foundation for self-sustaining development. You may own a private jet, but what happens when you cannot even reach the airport simply because the town has gone tough and the gods have become weirdly angry? Interestingly, even animals show compassion within their own ranks.
Nigeria’s political class needs to return to its roots and transform these principles into foundations for sustainable development – the very goal Awolowo pursued with all the expectations and challenges. This requires profound intellectual rigour. In the words of the sage himself: “It takes the deep to call upon the deep.” Such reflection is urgently needed today in the Western Region, once a shining light on the hill, but which, to be polite, is now resting on its oars, or slipping into uncompetitiveness, if we want to be blunt.
May the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant us peace in Nigeria!
●Concluded.
