The biggest challenge we face is to build a nation. That means, #1, managing ethnic and religious diversity by ensuring equity, mutual respect, and separating church/mosque and state. Once our leadership fails in this task we can’t prosper, because/
the economy will fail, security will deteriorate because we prioritize some above others and so the law cannot take its course, and politics and “governance” become simply about contentions for power in order to privilege some above others, not vision or competence./
This is why, our leadership having largely failed in this regard, Nigeria appears - painfully to many of us who believe in its possibilities as a country to become a nation and prosper - to be disintegrating gradually before our eyes. This is death by a thousand cuts./
So, we as citizens must take the matter into our hands and solve the problem at its root. This failure affects us all across ethnic divides. America is far more diverse than Nigeria, yet it has been built into a successful nation because there is a foundational, shared worldview.
Our task as citizens is to band together in our common interest, which is the NATIONAL interest, to elect a leadership that can heal Nigeria and build a nation with vision and competence. It can be done. But we have to educate our fellow citizens on what it takes/
Who should we elect on the basis of vision, character and capacity? Not: who’ll likely win, so we vote to be part of a bandwagon that will produce nothing that helps us in the end. Not: who’ll give us money to vote, but enters office and focuses on recouping his/her “investment”.
If you agree, join us @ #ToBuildaNationtobuildanation.org , our non-partisan citizens movement for a real democracy in which our votes will count because the vote-count is open, we know why we are voting for who, and we begin the real war against poverty. God bless Nigeria!
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There is just one reason why Nigeria has not been able to come close to attaining its potential, let alone attaining it. And it’s not, like many believe, corruption. It’s this: Nigeria is not a nation. It’s a territorial state. It’s a country. Without nationhood, it has no future
It’s the absence of nationhood that feeds the corruption, the focus by the political class on power and primitive accumulation rather than governance and delivering public goods. It’s the absence of nationhood that creates the economic stasis, because there is no real vision.
“The economy” and its “management” is, and has been for a long time, all about access to economic rents by contending, disparate, and vested interests. It’s not about wealth creation for the 220 million people, most of who live in poverty.
Multiparty democracy , to be real and benefit Africa, must mean 7 things that are broadly absent presently:
1. The contest for electoral offices must be for authority to govern, with the legitimacy from the popular vote, not for power for its own sake or for self-enrichment.
2. Electoral contests must be a contest of alternative ideas, visions or philosophies about how society can make progress. Every successful democracy is based on contending IDEAS.
3. The PROCESS of elections must have integrity in order to be legitimate. This means the umpire
must be neutral as between contending parties & must be truly independent, not controlled/influenced by government, ruling or opposition parties.
4. The electorate must be both basically and politically literate. This is necessary to have capacity to assess candidates for votes.
I respectfully disagree with President @officialABAT ‘s response to the visit to him by The Patriots, led by former @commonwealthsec Secretary-General Chief Emeka Anyaoku, during which the group (of which I am a member) pressed for a new Constitution for Nigeria as a matter of
urgency, and recommending specific steps to achieve this. While PBAT received the eminent elder statesman and his colleagues with the appropriate dignity and protocols (“this is a group I cannot ignore”, Tinubu noted), the President asserted that economic reform (and the
crisis that it has created in the country) is his priority right now, but that his government would of course study the recommendations of The Patriots and respond (hopefully with action and not merely words). What Nigeria’s leaders fail to understand is that it will be extremely
The @nnpclimited v @AlikoDangote saga is a sad tale of how successive governments of Nigeria have failed to create a real economy that generates wealth for its citizens. Our economy works only for a very few who get rich while Nigerians continually get poorer. #Rentseeking
The economic failure of Nigeria's leaders because of loyalties to vested interests and unholy ties between "business" and government is deeply unfortunate. @NigeriaGov is, and has been unable, either to stimulate through effect economic policy a set of strategic oligopolies
across sectors under which smaller businesses and supply chains thrive, making up a successful national economy as in South Korea. Neither has the government, on the other hand, been able to create a truly competitive, level playing field for business in Nigeria so that wealth
In the debates on national wage in Nigeria we miss the fundamental point: there is little or no productivity in the economy. If we had a truly productive economy there is no reason we can’t have the kind of minimum wage of 400 or 500K that Labour wants. But we can’t, because the
level of productivity in the economy cannot support it. Remember, minimum wage is not just about government salaries. There are not more than 2, at most 3 million civil servants in Nigeria. It is even more about what is paid in the private sector, to household staff, etc.
All of this is why, all things considered, including avoiding a minimum wage that multiplies already ravaging inflation (assuming such a wage can even be paid), I recommend a minimum wage of between N75,000 and N100,000.
In fact, speaking about productivity, how productive is
The Naira tanking back down to the 1,400s to $1 demonstrates what some of us have been saying. Seeking a falsely “strong” currency when the fundamentals are out of whack is shadow chasing. The focus should be on the STABILITY of the exchange rate, not a populist exchange rate
and premature declarations of “best performing currency”. Reports that there are now multiple exchange rates to BDCs, Customs, and NAFEX are also worrying. It’s not yet uhuru. Let us stabilize the Naira at whatever is its true market value and then pivot to the real issues:
taking Nigeria to 20-25K megawatts of 24 hour electricity in 2-3 years starting with Lagos, Kano, Onitsha and Nnewi (Aba seems promising with Geometric power) so we can create a truly productive economy. Dealing decisively with oil theft and ramping up oil production to bring in