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SPEECH DELIVERED BY THE GOVERNOR OF THE STATE

OF OSUN, OGBENI RAUF AREGBESOLA, AT THE

MONTHLY SEMINAR OF WEATHERHEAD CENTER FOR

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS, ON WEDNESDAY

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

Protocols,

NIGERIA: THE DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGE

I am most pleased to be in this world-renowned institution,

Harvard University, and to stand before these highly esteemed

academics. I am particularly grateful to the Weatherhead

Center for International Affairs and Prof Jacob Olupona for the

privilege of this invitation. Every modern society is a reflection

of the modernity of its intellectual institutions. With its endless

production of world-class scholars who have brought their

sterling expertise to bear on governance and policy formulation,

this great university has been at the frontier and cutting edge of

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the political, economic and technological modernisation of

American society. The gown is truly in tandem with the town.

I am conscious of the wisdom shared with you by my illustrious

compatriots who preceded me on this same podium,

particularly His Eminence, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar

III, the Sultan of Sokoto, Niger State Governor, Aliyu

Babangida, Ambassador Walter Carrington and John

Campbell, Prof Adefuye and others.

As political leaders and politicians, our own task is to seek to

govern; therefore my task is fairly simple because I am here to

address you on the challenge of development in my country,

Nigeria. Happily, this happens to be an area within our purview,

as the task of engendering development in a society falls

squarely on the shoulders of its leaders.

Development is one subject that has engaged the attention of

scholars, statesmen, international organisations and political

leaders. I do not wish to detain this august gathering on the

proper definition of this subject. I will however take it as given

that Nigeria is a developing country in so far as the extant

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parameters of income per capita, life expectancy, the rate of

literacy and so on are low, compared to countries designated

as developed.

According to the 2010 World Bank data on Nigeria, the GNI per

capita is $1,280 while life expectancy is 52 years. And only 43

per cent of the population has access to safe water.

United States, in contrast, as a developed country, has a GNI

per capita of $48,650, life expectancy of 78 years and 94 per

cent access to water.

These figures however are tools of analysis by economists. The

real fruits of development are the strength of state institutions

for law enforcement, transportation, economic production,

defence, knowledge production, arts and entertainment and

cultural (and national power) projection.

I think the term ‘developing’ as applied to some countries, is a

euphemism because the appropriate term should have been

‘underdeveloped’. Developing suggests that a nation is in

transition, in a kind of metamorphosis, with visible and

undisputable signs. However, on the contrary, some of these

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countries are in reverse development and the only visible

growth about them is the human population. Developing then

should translate to at least visible signs that certain measures

are in place that are making parameters like GNI and life

expectancy to be rising.

The challenge of development therefore is how a nation

strengthens its institutions and mobilises its human resources

to produce the fruits, not necessarily on the scale of United

States, but on that which will guarantee the good life for its

citizens.

The challenge of development in Nigeria has varied

dimensions, which have been copiously written and widely

talked about. Hence, I will only be adding my voice to an

already large body of materials, but with a perspective that

derives from my own experience as a public policy maker in

Nigeria’s State of Osun.

For us to be able to get out of our present predicament we must

understand where we came from and how we got here. In order

to do this we must begin from the beginning. Hence, it is well

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worth repeating the ‘over-emphasised’ point that the foundation

for Nigeria’s underdevelopment was laid in its colonial history.

Nigeria was a cultural, linguistic and religious congery of

diverse peoples. It was amalgamated, ruled and administered

for the convenience and in the interest of the colonial overlords,

with little consideration for the good of the peoples therein.

It was therefore the case that, at independence, what was

handed over as a country was such a political and

administrative liability that its consequences soon began to

hunt and hurt its human constituents. These consequences

were such that they operated to hamper the country’s capacity

to leverage it’s widely acclaimed ‘huge potential’ for

development. The numerous dimensions of our development

challenge have been amply articulated. But for my purpose

here, I will identify the following.

Ethnicity

Nigeria from the start has been a heterogeneous mix in terms

of its cultural, linguistic and ethnic makeup; a reality that

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necessitated the need to create unity out of the diversity.

However, the cruel realities of colonial rule fostered the

politicisation of ethnicity. The internal disarticulations

engendered by colonial rule among the country’s inheritance

elite, and the manner of granting independence, ensured a

preference for the political mobilisation of ethnicity to secure

political power.

It was, for instance, never in doubt that the British favoured a

section of the country and its elite as successor and did

everything possible to ensure that the reins of power were

handed to this group at independence. This served to entrench

antagonism and suspicion among the different ethnic groups in

the country, and created an atmosphere where the spectre of

ethnic domination became a national obsession. This has

worked to focus governance efforts, not on development, but

on how to achieve or preserve advantageous power positions

for the ethnic groups. This has been the case to date.

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Federalism

The attendant issues and inherent problems of a multi-ethnic

society are supposed to be settled or at least mitigated through

the institutional mechanism of federalism. However, the ways

and manner in which our federal practice has played out has

compounded the problems of our diversity, rather than resolve

them. The unwieldy federal structure handed over by the British

and retained by our inheritance elite, made for an unbearable

political burden under which the First Republic eventually

collapsed. As Rotimi Suberu and Larry Diamond pointed out:

‘The First Republic labored under immense structural strains

largely induced by the British colonial legacy’. Instead of having

‘coordinate’ units working together, Nigeria has been run as a

federation of unequal units with inbuilt potential for instability.

In the days of regionalism, one of the regions – the North – was

configured to swallow the two others put together, thereby

making Nigeria a morbid federalism from the start. According to

the law of federal stability advanced by J. S. Mill in his

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‘Considerations of a Representative Government’, one part of

the federating units must not be so powerful as to be able to vie

in strength with the others combined. And when the regions

were broken up into states, the latter were little more than

appendages of the centre. They still are.

In essence, Nigeria’s federalism has moved from what was

described as ‘the regional dogs wagging the federal tail’ to a

situation where the federal dog has been wagging the states’

tails. The problematic imbalances in the country’s federalism

have made a federalism scholar, John Ayoade, to ponder

whether ‘the Nigerian federation was a design error or … an

error by design’. The peculiar type of federal system we run

continue to pose serious challenges to our capacity as a

country to make meaningful development impact in the lives of

our people through the other federating units that are closer to

the people than the centre.

Military Rule

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When the military first came to power, it raised a false hope that

it would serve as a bridging force and a force for stability for

society, given its imperative of centralised command and

control, organisational discipline and internal cohesion. But it

soon became clear that the Nigerian military was much less

united than assumed. The military in fact came to reflect and

reproduce the ethnic cracks and fissures within the society

such that, among its personnel, in the words of A.R. Luckham,

‘[i]nterpersonal trust was lacking and the situation became

increasingly defined in primordial categories of interaction, like

tribe and region’. The eventual breakdown of the army along

ethno-regional lines culminated in the Civil War of 1967-1970. It

is still in doubt whether that institution has recovered from that

affliction.

The military supposedly intervened in the nation’s politics in

order to correct the problems confronting the polity which the

civilian rulers could not manage. However, the military proved

to be more of a compounding factor in the country’s

development woes. Indeed, it was the military that effectively

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changed our federal practice into de facto unitarism. They

progressively strengthened the Federal Government, starting

with the breakup of the fairly strong regions into weakling states

that have little more than the capacity to pay the salaries of

their workers.

Worst still, military rule in Nigeria has enthroned and embodied

everything that was antithetical to the development of the

country. Destructive dictatorship; repression of opposing but

qualitative inputs into the political process; institutionalisation of

pervasive corruption; devastation of the economy; spread of

mass poverty; alienation of the population; militarisation of the

polity; and perpetuation of divisions in society, are some of the

damages inflicted by military rule on the country. In his ‘A

Radical View of Nigeria’s Political Development’, Julius

Ihonvbere came up with this damning verdict. For him,

‘military rule closes existing democratic spaces, promotes

sycophancy and mediocrity, encourages waste and corruption,

and more importantly, encourages political arrogance,

intolerance and general undemocratic attitudes. The advent of

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the military in Nigerian politics has done a major disservice to

the nation’s political development’.

It is this sort of performance record that made Chief Obafemi

Awolowo to conclude that the worst civilian regime was better

than the best military government.

Religion

Apart from language, culture, history and geography, faith is an

inherent feature of our diversity as a nation. The three major

religions in the country are Christianity, Islam and traditional

religion. As a very strong element of our diversity, faith

permeates the archetypes of our people and exerts a powerful

influence on their existence and outlook on life. However, faith

on its own is not so problematic; but when it is mixed with

politics, it can be a very lethal combination.

The report of the murderous activities of a religious group in the

North, Boko Haram, has been disturbing, fuelling pessimism on

the fate of the country. What has been projected about the

group is its religious face. This regrettably is a misreading of

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the situation. It is essentially the manipulation of religion to

achieve certain political ends.

Unfortunately, the politicisation of religion has been a

persistent characteristic of our national existence, with its

attendant challenge to our development effort. Years of misrule

has made religion a handy tool for the manipulation of the

people by the ruling elite. I should like to dwell a bit on the

effect of this on the Northern part of the country where it has

been most potent. The orgy of mindless violence that we have

been witnessing in recent times in the North is a culmination of

this sort of manipulation and it has far less to do with Islam, and

far more to do with the deplorable material condition of

existence of the people. It is therefore no accident that those

parts of the North where the raging campaign of terror has

originated, and festered, have also been the worst hit by

chronic unemployment, gruelling poverty and hideous lack of

education. And these are the incendiary materials for the kind

of explosion that has been happening.

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Available statistics clearly show these parts of the country to be

the ‘lowest of the lows’ in terms of human development indices.

For far too long the northern ruling elite has employed religion

to enthrone and foster a regime of privation, penury and

destitution among the masses of the people. When you subject

a people to a combined assault of poverty and unemployment,

and deny them the mitigating factor of education (in the sense

of carefully nurtured and cultivated intellect that can be

rationally applied to deal and cope with existential challenges),

what you are doing is to systematically breed monsters that will

constitute menace to society.

Religion without education is a very potent way to disempower

people. It is to deprive them of hope and aspiration to make

something meaningful out of their lives. Used only as an

instrument of subjection and subjugation, without helping to

address the material needs and aspirations of the people,

religion will ultimately lose its relevance. The prevailing

economic disempowerment of women in this part of the country

in the name of religion can only lead to unpleasant social

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consequences. For, to deprive a society of half of its productive

forces is to economically cripple that society and stymie its

prospects for development.

It is absolutely inconceivable that a society will make its female

constituents unproductive and be economically viable for the

long haul. If, as history furnishes us, women were allowed to

participate in the wars to expand the frontiers of the Islamic

faith, it is only logical that women be allowed to partake in the

drive to expand the frontiers of economic production. To do

otherwise as it presently obtains in the North is unarguably un-

Islamic. The survival of the faith – no less so the survival of the

society and the country at large – is tied to its capacity to

generate wealth.

The Leadership Question

For me, by far the most challenging dimension of our

development problem is that of leadership. Our inability to

overcome other identified obstacles to development in the

country, including the historical tragedies of colonialism and the

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Slave Trade, are a function of leadership failure. As formidable

a challenge to development as the colonial heritage is, its

persistence and resilience can only be put down to a conscious

choice on the part of the country’s leaders not to change it. At

any rate, there has been the intervention of time and we can no

longer blame colonialism for our woes after 53 years of

independence. Yes, colonialism determined the trajectory of

our development in 1960, but we could have changed that

since then.

Again, the pervasive underdevelopment of nigeria can be used

to illustrate the crisis of leadership in the country. The Nigerian

ruling elite, due to its own perverse socialisation and reinforced

by the dysfunction of the colonial state, has tended to be

smugly accustomed to maintaining a lifestyle that is

disconnected from economic productivity. Aided by its long hold

on political power at the centre, this has in turn furthered the

view of the state and public office as means of wealth

acquisition. Thus, the situation is typical of Claude Ake’s

insightful observation about the country that ‘wealth is

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tendentially dissociated from effort, from productive capitalist

enterprise. [With the effect that it] has deprived Nigerian

capitalism of its competitive and developmental impetus’.

Any development effort that tends to take away their privileges

is sure to have a ‘shock and awe’ impact on a culture of

indolent wealth acquisition.

The point being made here is that leadership crisis is the basis

of the violent eruptions in the North and similar occurrences in

other parts of the country. This is not peculiar to the North.

Other parts of the country are embroiled in varying degrees of

violence and will soon catch up with the North, except effective

leadership emerges at the national and local levels.

Hence, what Nigeria requires above all else is leadership. This

is visionary leadership that is conscious of its mission; leaders

whose convergence of interest and internal solidarity and

cohesion would crosscut societal cleavages. Leaders who

would be able to establish effective hegemony over the society

and break the nation out of the vicious circle of misery and

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underdevelopment to the virtuous circle of development and

progress.

The need for leadership in our country is so stark that there is

little disagreement about it. Dr Mu'azu Babangida Aliyu, the

Governor of Niger State, affirms this unassailable fact in his

speech to the Chatham House last year. He contended:

‘Indeed, surmounting the challenges of today’s world requires

leadership with a moral compass — character, vision, integrity

and courage to take difficult decisions to enhance socio-

economic development, irrespective of whose interest is at

stake’.

The difficult decisions required to enhance socio-economic

development in Nigeria must necessarily include addressing

the structural imbalances in our polity, particularly with regards

to our federalism. This will liberate the states from centrally

imposed encumbrances and enable the people to enjoy the full

benefits of good leadership.

A major challenge of leadership in Nigeria is the

institutionalisation of a fair and legitimate process of political

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contestation through which genuine leadership emerges.

Notwithstanding that there has been four cycles of elections of

a four-year term since Nigeria’s return to civil democratic rule, it

is still very difficult to have free and fair elections in which

choices are freely made and the people’s votes count. This is

the biggest problem of post military Nigeria from which every

other problem derives. Leaders that do not derive their

legitimacy from the electorate will not be subject to their control

and will not likely take policy options that are acceptable to

them.

Secondly, in the process of manipulating elections to impose a

particular, usually an unpopular leader, certain institutions

would have been compromised or emasculated with

consequences that would reverberate long after the dust of

election has settled. For instance, a judge that was

compromised at the election petition tribunal can also be

compromised in civil and criminal suits after the election. Law

enforcement agencies that were used to rig elections would be

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handy to silence protests emanating from politically robbed

citizens. The possibilities are endless.

I am one of the few fortunate ones that were able to assume

their mandate after winning election, but this was after almost

four years of exertions and legal fireworks. I was persecuted

and unjustly incarcerated. Our state was under virtual siege

while our supporters were killed, hounded into exile and jailed

on spurious charges. We were not deterred. We confronted the

terror of the Nigerian state and against all odds, we triumphed. I

believe the international system can help better by taking more

than passing interest in Nigerian elections. If international

observers, foreign governments and organisations can help to

enthrone a regime of free and fair elections, they will have

fewer interventions to make in Nigeria’s affairs. Politics is the

father and mother of development; we have the lesson of

history that no nation can climb the ladder of development

without getting its politics right.

I cannot end this piece without mentioning the impact of

globalisation and global capitalism on the development effort in

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Nigeria. One visible impact of Western popular culture as

expressed in entertainment and lifestyles is the swamping of

indigenous cultures and erosion of values. In the West, the

values that drive innovation, enterprise and production are

separate from the popular culture. However, when this popular

culture hits a developing country, it took over the youths and

disconnects them from their own culture and its values that

promote innovation, enterprise and production. Large swaths of

young people have been disconnected from the values in their

own cultures that predispose them to development and have

been left disoriented. We discovered this after my inauguration

and one of our first acts in office was to start a campaign of

mental reawakening by reminding them of whom they were and

of their past greatness. Our people were virtuous and these

virtues manifest in codes of chivalry, hard-work and ability to

triumph over vicissitudes and challenges. We have to provide

this mental infrastructure as a foundation before we can begin

to build the superstructure of development on it.

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However, global capitalism, with free movement of goods and

services, is killing the local industrial capacity, taking jobs from

people and creating an army of malcontents. Agriculture (for

food and industrial raw materials) has been under siege. It has

become far more profitable to trade in goods manufactured in

Asia and other parts of the world than to engage in industrial

production. Other consequences of unbridled capital like debt

peonage and capital squeeze by the West have indeed

arrested development and helped to foster large scale poverty.

We have the lesson of history on this that we cannot really be

rich when we are surrounded by poverty.

I must enter a caveat here that outsiders are not responsible for

our condition, even if they have played some roles in it. We

must take responsibility for our underdeveloped state and work

out our own salvation. Nigerians have to create the right

leadership for themselves who will mobilise them for

development.

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Leadership in Osun

Permit me here to share with you how we have surmounted

some of the leadership challenges we faced when our

administration was inaugurated on November 27, 2010.

We discovered that the greatest challenge facing our people is

jobs and within 100 days, we created 20,000 public sector jobs

in what looks Keynesian. This should not sound strange. I am

abreast of the literature that put job creation largely in the public

sector purview. However, for developing countries at this critical

stage, critical state intervention of this nature is necessary. But

I digress. I must let you know that this intervention reinflated the

economy of the state with immediate impact in every sector.

The policy was so successful that the World Bank commended

us, asked to understudy it and immediately recommended it as

a model of youth engagement and mass employment for other

states.

As part of our education reform, starting from next month, we

are introducing Opon-Imo, an IPad-like computer tablet, which

is a smart electronic teaching aid, to our secondary school

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students. This tablet is pre-loaded with 17 subjects that

students offer during West African Senior Secondary Certificate

Examinations (WASSCE) in the form of lesson notes and

textbooks. It also contains six extra-curricular subjects in sex

education, civic education, Yoruba history, Yoruba traditional

religion, computer education and entrepreneurship education.

Also to be included in it is 10 years past questions and answers

to be provided by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board

(JAMB) and the West African Examinations Council (WAEC).

The tablet has bridged the gap of carrying books in sacks, their

wear and tear and subsequent replacement and also provides

ready learning tools. Opon Imo neither has internet connectivity

nor does it interface with other devices in order not to distract

the students. Knowing that power is still a problem, especially

in rural areas where there is no electricity, a solar charger will

be supplied with it.

Through this initiative, the state government seeks to expose

pupils of its senior secondary schools to information technology

at an early age.

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Our investment in computer for secondary school pupils was

born out of our conviction that the future belongs to the digital

age and it will be disastrous if our youth are not prepared for

this. The computer has become the centre of the universe

whether it is mainframe, desktop, laptop, handheld (as

telephone) or palmtop.

In addition, we have commenced the construction of 100

elementary schools, 50 middle schools and 21 high schools.

We are the only state providing free meals for elementary 1-3

pupils and free uniforms to all pupils in public schools.

Our agriculture development programme is ambitious. We

established Osun Rural Enterprise and Agriculture Programme

(OREAP), a multi-ministerial programme that straddles the

Ministries of Agriculture, Local Government, Youth

Development, Works and Finance. This programme has

provided at the last count about 15,000 direct jobs in crop

farming, fishing, apiary, poultry, beef chain and related

industries. Our target is to capture five per cent of the huge

daily food market in Lagos and the South West.

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In our drive to change the lot of our people we are propelled by

the singular idea that effective leadership is the surest and

quickest path to development. Overcoming our development

challenge is not as impossible as it has seemed over the years;

what has been missing is leadership, and this is what we are

determined to provide for our people. We are convinced that by

giving good leadership to the people, we will inspire them to

rise to the challenge of developing themselves and their

society. We subscribe to the wisdom of late President Ronald

Reagan that ‘[t]he greatest leader is not necessarily the one

who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the

people to do the greatest things’.

I thank you for giving me your valuable time.