The Tragedy of our Human Development

 

Poverty is a curse. It generates all manner of social evils. Poor housing and slums breed dislocated youths that become vulnerable to extreme ideologies. There is a direct correlation between hunger, unemployment and destitution on the one hand, and drugs and violent crime, on the other. There was the tragic case of the mother who sold her nursing infant to strangers for N70,000. Poverty destroys families, rips communities apart, strips people of dignity and corrodes the moral fabric of society.

With a population of 198.5 million and a GDP of US$397.5 billion, Nigeria has a per capita income of US$2,050. Growth over the last couple of years has been negative in real terms. The projection for 2019 is 2.3%, even as our demographic growth is an annual 3.2 percent. Life-expectancy is 54 years, as contrasted to Japan’s 84 years. The average Japanese lives 19 more years than the average Nigerian.

At the annual World Bank/IMF meetings in Bali, Indonesia in December last year, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim revealed that Nigeria ranks 152nd out of 157 countries in its maiden Human Development Index (HDI). We recently overtook India as the world capital of poverty. An estimated 88 million Nigerians (45%)  fall within the category of absolute poor as compared to 70 million out of 1.2 billion Indians (21%).  There is hunger and despair in the land. Unemployed young graduates are taking to crime and the seedy streets. Thousands every year hazard the Great Trek across the Sahara, hundreds perishing in the treacherous Mediterranean Sea. Kidnapping is the order of the day – suicide, murder and death. There is also the ominous culture of silence, as people withdraw from civic spaces into the cocoons of tribalism and religion. Lawlessness has become the order of things. There is a foul smell of evil and death across the land. In the North East, thousands have been killed and millions traumatised by the Boko Haram insurgents. In the Middle Belt, random genocidal herdsmen militias have been on a rampage against an unarmed and defenceless people. Some 3 million of our people live in derelict IDP camps.  The forces of economic recession, oppressive rulerships and rapacious elites have conspired to destroy the life-chances of millions of people.

According to some economists, there is a “culture of poverty theory” in some societies that leads to a poverty mindset that regenerates itself over time, leading to a permanent condition of destitution.  There is also what is termed “structural theory”, in which poverty arises out of the social and economic structure of society. A rentier oil state like ours, with its extractive political economy, destroys the productive capacity of the economy, leaving the majority in penury. Another explanation that is popular among economists is “Vicious Circle Theory”, propounded by Swedish economist Ragnar Nurkse and expanded by his compatriot Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal. A low-income country creates conditions leading to low-savings and low consumption; this in turn leads to low investments; low investments on its part leads to low productive capacity, which then reinforces low income. And so the vicious circle continues. What is then required is an extra “push” by way of massive investments that will trigger a “virtuous circle” of economic growth.

Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, through his studies of the infamous Bihar famine of 1873-74, maintains that hunger and extreme poverty derive from disempowerment and lack of access to economic assets and to basic social services.  The tragedy of human development is worsened by inadequate access for those living at the margins -- inadequate access to employment opportunities and to markets -- and failure to mainstream the poor into the development process and destruction of natural resources capita leading to environmental degradation and reduced productivity.

An important element in the poverty equation is vulnerability. The poor by definition are more exposed to the vagaries of nature and man. Vulnerability entails ability or inability to cope with adversity. Factors that make the poor more vulnerable include: living in poor neighbourhoods, lack of education, erosion of assets, lack of access to information, and lack of voice.

There is also the original sin of corruption. For example, out of the of US$1 trillion earnings from oil since the eighties, a staggering US$400 billion was haemorrhaged from Nigeria. We lost an average US$1 billion monthly from oil theft during 2010-2014. Corruption undermines moral capital while discouraging honest entrepreneurship and diverting resources away from public expenditures that could improve livelihoods. Climate Change is also a factor -- soil erosion in the South East, desertification in the North, oil pollution in the Niger Delta, flooding/changing water levels in the coastal cities, and the drying up of Lake Chad and wetlands in the North and central savannah.

When it comes to the tackling poverty, the role of the state is paramount. Contrary to popular belief, the state is not synonymous with government. Governments come and go, but the state remains. The state refers the civil association in which people transfer their loyalty to a central sovereign in exchange for protection from the vagaries of nature and violence from other human beings. The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes contrasts between the “state of nature” in which life is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short, with the political state in which the sovereign secures the peace by monopolising the use of violence and ensuring a stable and rule-based political order. From Aristotle to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Rawls, a putative social contract defines the relationship between the state and citizens. People submit to government only because it provides them a minimum of public goods, including security, welfare and social services.

There are good and bad states. Bad states are governed by fear and arbitrary power, while good ones are underpinned by the precepts of good governance, the rule of law and ever-expanding possibility frontiers of welfare, liberty and human happiness. The good state governs as the servant of the people, not their master; superintended by enlightened servant leaders who govern with righteousness and justice.  

The 1999 Constitution states that “The security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”. Section 16 (1) requires government to: (i) utilize the resources of the country to advance the collective prosperity; (ii) Secure the economy such that the welfare, freedom and happiness of every citizen will be maximized while ensuring social justice and equal opportunities; and (iii) Provide shelter, food and other amenities for all citizens.

We in Nigeria have not been short of ambitious social intervention programmes. They range from Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), Green Revolution, Low Cost Housing, and River Basin Development Authorities(RBDA) programmes in the seventies; to the Directorate for Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructures (DFFRI), and Community Banks Programs of the eighties.  Since 1999 we have had such schemes as the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) and National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS). The Muhammadu Buhari administration has come up with such intervention programmes as the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP), the Anchor-Borrower’s Programme, the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) and the N-Power Initiative.

We have clearly not been short of ideas. The challenge has been that of implementation. Overcoming the tragedy of human development in Nigeria entails enhancing good governance, particularly in terms popular participation, the rule of law, equity and inclusiveness  and institutional effectiveness and accountability of the state. Some of the critical binding constraints that must be overcome include: insecurity, exponential demographics, perennially high cost of governance, weak infrastructures, corruption, and poor leadership. It is evident that, to succeed, we need to evolve new leadership traditions based on the developmental state model that was so successful in Asia. We must strengthen the capacity of relevant institutions to respond to citizen needs while fostering civic engagement and ensuring effective delivery of social services.  

Ultimately, we must reinvent the state as a servant of the people and not as a Leviathan that drinks their blood and saps their energy. In the words of the eminent Turkish-American economist Daron Acemoglu, in the coming decades the most successful governments “will be those that serve the people rather than a political elites (in which) guarding against the potential to backslide requires constant vigilance”.

(Being the Text of a Lecture Delivered at the National Institute for Policy & Strategic Studies, Kuru, Tuesday 26 February 2019)