The one thing that rumours of a planned restriction by the Tinubu government on the Nigerian public’s access to and use of domiciliary accounts (as part of the government’s faltering bid to stanch the naira’s haemorrhage against other currencies)points to, is that prohibition-as-statecraft is a device of convenience and not of principle — cheap, easy to deploy, and its effects readily demonstrated. “Ghana-must-go” (1983)? Not only were the undocumented immigrants from Ghana turfed out by the Shehu Shagari government supportive of stronger domestic output growth (by taking jobs Nigerians considered infra dignitatem).
The economic crisis that the influx of Ghanaians was also ostensibly a cause of was largely the consequence of the incompetence of the then federal government. Indian hemp’s illegality? Turns out a ban on coffee and tobacco might have even better from a health perspective. Yet, the vast number of persons (youthful most of them) awaiting trial and in detention in the country are being held for possessing varying quantities of it. The 43 items not valid for foreign exchange? This did not stop the gratuitous confiscation of the balance on the nation’s gross external reserves by the Buhari government. Ban on rice imports? Turns out the joke was on us if the subsequent numbers for imports of rice across neighbouring countries mean anything. The ban on spraying and or “matching” (as the CBN Act 2007 inimitably describes it) the naira? A waste of comment, that one.
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Look, however, at any item that it has seized our government’s fancy to proscribe over the years, and one cannot escape this contradiction between intent, eventual outcome, continued usefulness, and out–of–whack benefit versus cost profiles. It is tempting to then suggest that no ban of any activity, process, event or even person must be enacted ahead of a full discussion of these different dimensions of the conversation. In the case of Indian hemp, to take but the most obvious example, the world had to wait on the broadening and deepening of science to remove the many prejudices around the herb. In this light, the point of a detailed discussion ahead of any act of prohibition is to try as much as possible to take in all the evidence without which most such bans are but dog whistles to narrow political constituencies.
Yet confronted by tough economic conditions, and desperate to flag to its base that it is acting to ameliorate some of these, the tendency for policymakers to lash out at make-believe piñatas is irresistible. Are these bans populist totems, then? Whatever they may be, one fact is beyond dispute. The more strident the feedback, the more exaggerated the sense of the losing sector’s pain, the likelier the course of action would be welcomed by large swathes of the populace. Vested interests, on the other hand, are noticeably less voluble. Arguably, this trait might explain why this cohort is more effective in safeguarding its self-interests. But by far the more poignant argument is that the numbers of the upper classes that might be distressed by a ban are never enough to meet the average citizen’s requirements for schadenfreude: that those suffering from the new restrictions must be plentiful and their pain visibly more than mine.
If bans lean for their effects on approbation from the streets, they are, in this restricted reading, both a driver of responses in and the result of the many outcomes of the electoral cycle. It is not just that the data with which evidence-based policy-making trickle in over several such cycles. Nor that because of this, proper policy reviews may span electoral cycles. In a democracy with its regular return to the polls, politicians are not engineered to think through processes both mentally exerting and long-tailed. The “people” on the other hand would rather have soundbites than the recondite ruminations of subject-matter experts. Is it any wonder then, that across the world, the new populism loathes experts? These grouping do not just lack political legitimacy. They also tend to muddy matters —especially many that appeared binary until the experts intervene.
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If the discussions that go with evidence-based policymaking add layers of costs to policy options, we need remind ourselves that few policies are more difficult to walk back than those reached impulsively. And since, invariably, most such policymaking cost more eventually than the benefits against which they were advertised, the argument against bans as a policymaking mechanism is a compelling one. Unfortunately, to eschew bans is to have a government thoroughly understand the dynamics of worrisome processes, and to choose solutions that strengthen individual liberty of thought and action across the many dimensions of the polity. Nigeria has never had such a government.
