Mr. Charles Onunaiju, author, Scholar and Director, Centre for Chinese Studies, Abuja in this interview with NewsSpecng spoke on the issues of reforms. He said the reforms are not grounded on lived realities, expressing fears that they would only lead to turning Nigeria into a financial hub and not industrial hub.
Excerpt by Mercy Peter
Question: Look at Nigeria, we are not short of policies, yet we are still far from developments. What is the challenge?
Ans: Yes, first and foremost, let me be very clear about policy. Because policies are not in a vacuum. There are raw materials, a critical framework from which policies should derive. Sometimes, if policy does not reflect reality, if it does not originate from the facts on the ground, it may not work. Even if you have the best technocratic elite, policy derives from, that is not rooted in the reality of the people.
Like you could see, we’ve had our government most of the time offshoring policy decisions to international organisations, World Bank, IMF. Most times, they are distant from the reality we live. Policy must be derived from the lived reality and experience of the people.
It must be derived from the totality of the history, the historical process, not only engaging the time, but the flow of this time. Without having a complete understanding about the flow of realities, the nature of it, the structure of it, the policy may not actually be responsive to the issues at stake, because its trajectory did not derive from the reality people lived in. In that case, you have a policy that is wrong-headed, that even with the best technocratic elite, it will not work.
On the other hand, you might have the best of policy issued from the facts of your reality, reflecting your existential fact, but with incompetent technocratic elite, it falls by the wayside. So, whichever way, unfortunately, Nigeria has been caught in between the two.
From a policy that is not derived from our reality, a policy that does not speak to the lived experience of Nigerians, a policy that is not an aggregate of the critical challenges that Nigerians confront on a daily basis, they are wrong-placed.
And every policy is always going to face challenges from vested interests. How do you derive a policy? Because every policy, inasmuch as it aims to generate the highest good for the highest number, objectively antagonises a special interest group. How influential, how powerful, are they capable of initiating such a policy? Are they capable of arresting its trajectory? Are they capable of distorting it? These are challenges that arise from policy.
So, while making it in the first place is a challenge, having it flow is a challenge. It is vulnerable to being ambushed, to being kidnapped, to being arrested, to being distorted by various shades of vested interests. Do you have the political muscle, the political will to confront such vicious vested interests? Who may wish to ambush it, who may wish to distort it, who may wish to arrest it? Do you come to terms with them?
There are so many issues relating to policy flow before it can mature into outcomes that generate the public good, that deliver the public good. From the time of its formulation, from engaging the audience, from engaging the critical stakeholders, and engaging your reality, you now define policy in the broadest style. Then you begin the question of competence about the elites, about implementation. How competent are these elites? How are they in tune? Are they in sync with the nature of your policy outcome? How familiar are they with the terrain? How competent are they? How dispassionate are they? This also becomes another question.
Then you think of, like I said, those who may want to distract it. How powerful, how influential are they? Is there the political will to bring them to order? So all these things amount to issues. So policy is not a joke.
It’s a whole lot of… it has to deal with the nature of the state, the competence of the state, for the state to hold on to its own. And without all this, you could just be joking. You could see we have… now you have, let’s say, reforms. These reforms, how are they going without pandering to the vested interest? Because like I said, the greatest challenge to policy implementation is the hidden vested interest. They are powerful, they are vicious, they are selfish, they are self-centred, and they are desperate.
Q: A school of thought had argued that some of the push back against the tax reforms was as a result of inadequate communication from the side of the government. What is your take on this ?
Ans: Now let me tell you something very clearly. I think the nature of the tax reforms, or what I call the financialization of the Nigerian economy, is a dangerous trend. I am looking at the broader issue of financialization. An economy of over 200 million people, hugely resourced with natural endowment, cannot be a financial hub. Nigeria cannot be a financial hub. Nigeria should rather be a hub of new industrial frontier. The tax, the economic reforms, is pushing Nigeria to, in my view, a financial hub for international capital. It’s dangerous, it’s not sustainable, it does not reflect our endowment, both material and human. It has implications for greater disarticulation, greater distortion, greater disaggregation of the Nigerian economy. We are undermining the structural framework.
The Nigerian structural framework will have to be based on engaging the new industrial prospects. In the fourth industrial revolution, like you know, the Chinese took advantage of their population, of their low wage, to become the so-called global workshop. What did they take advantage of? Relative cheap labour. Companies were offshoring to China. It’s cheaper to produce in China because of the relatively cheap labour. It’s cheaper because of the emerging infrastructure. So what did China become? China became a global industrial hub, creating values. China was not shuffling money. China was creating new values, not recirculating the existing value, because that’s what the tax reform does. It takes money from the pocket of one group into the pocket of another. You are not creating new values, rather you are recirculating the existing values. In that case, you are not making any progress. It’s a very dangerous distortion with long-term disarticulation of the Nigerian economy. I feel so sad with what the government is doing. Financialization of the Nigerian economy, financializing a country with our human resource base, our material base, our resource base. We should be inheriting what China is trying to get out of. China is transiting from a heavily industrial economy to a knowledge innovation based economy. With our population, with our material endowment, we should become the next workshop of the world. We should be hosting, we should be the next industrial frontier, not a financial hub. So this reform is dangerous, it’s leading us on the cul-de-sac. It will get us nowhere, the people implementing it have no idea where they’re taking us to. They have absolutely no idea. Their understanding of the challenge is very shallow. Their understanding of our trajectory is very shallow. They are playing to the gallery.
Reform is not a tea party. It’s a structural change. It’s a structural transformation. So I am absolutely, I am so concerned about the trajectory of these economic reforms and where it’s taking Nigeria to.
Let me finally say a few things. In thinking about this reform, the idea and the thinking, or what the public needs to understand is that the reform brings about industrialisation to attract investors. Well, you have seen that the taste of the pudding is in the eating. So you cannot talk of industrialisation. There are things that are very germane to industrialisation. Critical infrastructure, energy, logistics. This is industrialisation… Except you are looking for portfolio investors, those who gamble, those who buy stock and sell. And that’s one idea I’ve been getting since the past two years. Check your investment.
We are talking about physical investment, people moving in their factories. If you are talking about that, you have to talk about logistics, you have to talk about critical infrastructure, you have to talk about manpower, you have to talk about security. And they are doable.
But people are going the easy way. If you want to solve a structural problem of Nigerian type, you have to move from your comfort zone. It’s not a piece of cake. It’s not escort riding. It’s not yachts. It’s not big motorcades. It’s not sleeping deep in the night. When others are sleeping, you’re up with your papers, checking figures, checking data. To reform and structurally transform Nigeria is not a tea party.
Q: While the government is saying that the tax reforms are pro-poor, critics say reforms will further impoverish the poor. Where do you stand here ?
Ans: Well, you see this whole thing about poverty, you know, every time, let me tell you one thing that amuses me. Every time I hear people saying political parties in Nigeria have no ideology. Look, they don’t have to sit down to begin to formulate in abstract. Ideology is not an abstraction. People discuss ideology as an abstraction. People just have to formulate something that exists from somewhere. Ideology is aggregating the challenges we face into a policy and progressing a pragmatic roadmap. Poverty eradication in itself is ideology. Rehumanising Nigerians, for whom many have been impoverished, for whom many have been dehumanised by poverty, is an ideology. So we can rally around the ideology of anti-poverty. We can rally around the flag of anti-poverty. Defining processes, defining roadmaps, generating ideas on how to deal with this most consequential scourge of our time. Because it will undermine democracy, it will undermine the competitive electoral process. It is at the root of our electoral misnomer. No matter how you ask people not to take money, look at what just happened in Lagos. A truck fell, despite what everybody knows. That is usually a mass grave. People still went there to scoop because a poor man is a desperate man.
You can sit here and call them idiots. Because you have the luxury of being rational. You have the luxury of rational thinking and rational judgement. If you ever wake up every morning without knowing where your food is coming from. If you ever wake up every morning without being sure of where you are going to lay your head when it starts getting dark. I tell you very frankly, that sound judgement of deciding that this is harmful and this is not harmful will be a luxury you cannot afford.
It is easy from your comfort to denounce people for acting irrationally. Hey, why do you need to sell your vote for N2,000 ? You know that problem? Because you have the luxury of rational judgement. So poverty, the essential, the most terrible characteristics of poverty is depriving you of the sense of rational judgement.
So when you cannot rationally judge, you can hardly decide how to choose. So there is no greater danger to democracy than poverty. Because democracy is about choice. And choice must be made on a rational judgement.
So if you have rational judgement out of the window, democratic choice becomes a luxury the poor cannot afford. So for me, there is no greater threat to democracy than poverty.
Yet, the leadership, the elite pay lip service to poverty alleviation. They pay lip service, so it is politics all the way. Nothing serious. Poverty cannot be eradicated by handouts. Get to work. Open up the rural communities. Begin to build rural infrastructure then people will trade themselves out of poverty. People will produce themselves out of poverty.
Question: You talked about Nigeria taking over from China as a global workforce, what do we need to do to assume that position ?
Ans: Now, let me tell you. I always say one thing. No two realities are the same. No matter how similar they appear. No two realities are the same. Even twins who are born of the same mother. Who have all the attributes of similarity. If you probe further, you begin to see. That’s why a Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, you do not step on the same water twice. You step in this water, you put your leg again. It’s certainly not the same water. So, it’s just that way. So, you see, that notwithstanding, experience sharing is part of learning. You cannot build your own in isolation with the experience of others. And for me, I tell people, if you want to look at experiences, do not worry so much about those who may have succeeded. Look at those who failed. Why did they fail? If you understand why they failed, it will be easy to know how to succeed. Don’t worry so much about those who succeeded. Those who succeeded, pay attention. Pay attention.
There’s one leading African theoretician, Kabra, I always quote him. Kabra said, if you want to begin to understand your challenges, begin first to appreciate your weakness. What are your weaknesses? Why have we not done well? Why has our journey been one step forward, ten steps backward? What is the reason? We can find the reason why we failed from within. Of course, the example of countries like China, who struggled through several failures, who struggled through, but first of all, understanding their weakness. China started by interrogating its own weakness. Interrogating why it failed. That’s why it made great success. Because it did not gloss over why it failed. It did not gloss over why it did not make much progress. But began to interrogate why it did not make much progress. And from there, it began to define the existential obstacles that constrained it. And when you begin to appreciate the obstacle that constrained you, that is one step in the direction of making progress. Nigeria has great prospects, but the challenge is false starts. We have always started falsely, just like this current government is doing. That’s starting from a very wrong premise. The premise is of bookmarking Nigeria as a financial hub. A country with our resource, both material and human, cannot definitely be a financial hub. That is a mismatch of our status. It is a mismatch of our ambition. It is a mismatch of the reality we are surrendering to. So, if we want to really get going, speak to the challenge, speak to the reality of Nigeria. And do not, like Kabra would say, do not claim easy victory. This tump-chesting, for whatever political purpose, is not good for us. When China started, one of their major themes was, hide your capability and be modest. That was why, by the time the West got to know, the train had left the station. If they had no idea that China was preparing to leapfrog, to catch up with them, to overcome them. If they had an idea of what China was going to do in a single generation, what it took them two centuries to do, they would have done everything to constrain China. China hid its ability, and proved very modest. And before you know it, it bust. And by the time the detractors get to know, the train is already off the station. The horse has bolted. So, there is no way. So, the West is grudgingly living with China. Grudgingly. Recently, some of them have been accepting reality. You can see the long queue in Beijing. Almost every week. Every week. There is no one week that passes without a Western leader going for pilgrimage. Beijing has become the new Vatican and the new Mecca. If you want to get anything done, go to Beijing. Except if you want to talk, you can go to Washington. If you want to get things done, go to where? Beijing.
And everybody now is asking how the Chinese did it? They hid their ability. Showed little of what they are doing. But here, everyone turns.We are megaphone. So, let’s, for a while, walk in modesty. Let the result show. Let the world come to see how. It’s not out of place. Let the world come to see what New Nigeria is all about.
So that our detractors will not consider us. Look, the world is still, despite the trend of cooperation, still a jungle. Where the big will always swallow the small to survive. It’s still the survival of the fittest. Nobody wants to enable you. Because they believe that what will take you to grow is what will take them to lean. And nobody wants to get leaner. So, being modest is part of the contemporary state path. That is one of the things we should learn from the Chinese. They kept modest. Bid their time. And before their detractors get to know what is happening, the force has bolted. So, we can do a lot.
There is so much we can learn from the Chinese. This cohesive, multi-party challenge. How do we bring everybody to the table? We should be talking about an inclusive political process. A consultative process. Structurally consultative process. In which everybody is a stakeholder. Nobody is an opposition. Because opposition in Africa is not the same thing as opposition in the UK. The leader of the opposition in the UK earns as much as the Prime Minister. So, he is a partner in Europe. In Africa, opposition is an enemy. You understand? In Europe, in the West, opposition is what? A partner. Whom you only defile in views and strategy. In Africa and in Nigeria, opposition is what? An enemy. And what do you do with an enemy? You hunt him, drown him in the ocean. And that’s what we see happen. So, let’s redefine our political life. Let’s give our process a more inclusive consultative one. So that nobody is an enemy. When you are consulting, you are consulting partners. You are finding a way out. There is so much that unites us than this fractured participial competition that tears us apart. We can define a framework that is inclusive, consultative, yet competitive. It is inclusive, consultative, yet competitive.
Competition is not necessarily bad in itself. After all, in the West, political parties compete. But they are not enemies. They are partners. So, we can find a way to compete as partners and not as enemies.
Q: So, will you now ascribe to the current political alignment in the country, where decamping to the ruling party has become the order of the day?
Ans: No, no, no. You can institute a framework of consultation. What I call consultative engagement. Structural consultation, not at the mercy of the party. It must be constitutionally agreed that the Nigerian political process will be consultative. In the sense that whoever emerges as a winner in the electoral competition does not simply walk out on his own. He is mandated constitutionally to consult with the rest. They don’t need to lose their identity. They don’t need to join the ruling party. But they will become partners through consultation. Key policy issues, they can be consulted. And this mechanism of consultation will not be at the pleasure of any one group. But it should be constitutionally guaranteed that our process is constitutionally consultative. So, you don’t need to lose your identity to become APC or to become PDP. As far as you have measured, you have won a certain level of public acclaim, you are entitled to be consulted on key policy matters through a framework of inclusion and consultation. And this could be instituted constitutionally. It doesn’t have to be at the pleasure of anybody. So that if you like, you do, if you like, you don’t. No, it should be constitutionally guaranteed that we have a consultative, competitive electoral democracy.
