“Nigeria is different!”. This is how our mavens explain the arduous circumstances that have been the country’s lot over the years. For this reason, policymakers cannot just go across the pond and copy successful policies elsewhere for implementation here. At a point in any conversation, this excuse could pass for an argument for customising what works elsewhere. Not just picking it up and slapping it on. But adjusting for myriad local constraints. It is rarely introduced as an argument for adaptation though. It is always instead a subtle rejection of everything non-Nigerian. Cultural, behavioural, economic exceptionalism? Whatever you call it, its many outcomes are perverse.
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Introduce markets across all sectors of the economy? A big “No”. The Nigerian, prone to speculation, hoarding, and mercilessly greedy just would not allow this concept to work well. Forget that all of these handicaps drive the workings of the “invisible hand” in market economies. In their stead, we erect a babysitter state, one that seeks to determine how much each should consume, who should produce (and how much of) what, and at what price.
Reminded that in those places where markets “work”, the state is a strong regulator (and rarely a services or goods provider), and that the principles of regulation (at least three providers of a good/service in any market, prevention of the concentration of suppliers in any industry, etc. all for the protection of consumer welfare) are established conduct norms, the riposte is that, again, this mechanism might not work here. “Why?”, you ask. “Because the Nigerian is too venal to aspire to, or ever reach the heights of the objective assessments that are required of a competent regulator”.
This leaves you giddy? Understandably. For how do you deny the possibility of markets and an efficient regulatory environment on the back of mass venality, yet are prepared to invest all of these roles in a government comprising the same quality of people? In the end, the answer is a lot simpler. Nigerian essentialism is a seductive-looking plant with make-believe roots. For once you back out ethnic and religious considerations, the tiles out of which the national mosaic is constructed are some of the ugliest anywhere in the world.
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This mosaic is as much about an inability to show up to any event or agreed place on time, as it is made up of a reluctance, especially amongst highly-placed members of society to speak anything that comes near the truth. It includes levels of impatience that the average farmhand struggles to come to terms with. It is a corrupting expression of base wants.
There are those who would argue that we are, in this sense, not more so than other societies. With this difference: here, whole communities own the corrupt in a macabre play on the title of Nkem Nwankwo’s 1975 novel, “My Mercedes Is Bigger Than Yours”. Is it also an unthinking space? How, for instance, does one community benefit from the fact that its thief (a recent public office holder) is more ostentatious in the spending of his (the lead actors are nearly always male) ill-gotten lucre than the last person who held the same office from the neighbouring village? Vicarious conspicuous consumption, then?
Unable to understand the mechanics of this process, is it possible to ask, “Why does it persist?” It is so evidently not in anybody’s interest. Except for the deprecatory activity of a shrinking coterie of folks with access to a shallowing public coffer. Still, you would have thought that the principle of a community’s interest in its own survival ought to have significantly eroded much of this practice and the ethos behind it. Except that Nigeria might not yet be a self-aware community (barring when it is in a football competition with Ghana). Nor is it a self-interested one.
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At heart, this is the argument of those who argue that what the country needs on the road to its maturity are independent institutions and better structures. Over the last eight years, though, this structuralist argument has been tested to breaking point. Key institutions in the macroeconomic space have had their legal and administrative independence shorted by administrators who have deployed these institutions’ considerable heft in pursuit of their whimsies.
Leaving us with the question “How may we fix the patently warped Nigerian mind?”
