By Tunji Olaopa
The leadership conundrum on the African continent tells a story about why the continent has remained behind especially in terms of global development, and especially the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions. A very good indicator of this leadership failure is the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) that measures governance performance in Africa. Governance, for this Index, is simply “the provision of political, social, economic and environmental goods that a citizen has the right to expect from their state, and that a state has the responsibility to deliver to its citizens.” In the 2022 report, the ten best scoring states in overall governance are, in decreasing order, Mauritius, Seychelles, Tunisia, Cape Verde, Botswana, South Africa, Ghana, Namibia, Senegal, and Morocco. Nigeria occupies the thirtieth position and is classified under “increasing deterioration.”
There are so many factors that have kept African states and their leadership essentially under- performing since the African year of independence in 1960. We can talk about the global political economy and the structural dependence it engenders for African countries; neo-patrimonial and rentier culture that occasions corruption, patronage and the politics of mediocrity; insecurity and lawlessness; the inverted rule of law, constitutional disorder and the impunity of the political class; and low elite nationalism that fails to instigate a sense of unity and progress in the citizens. In 2007, Lee Iacocca’s bestselling book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone? captures the crucial perplexity about leadership around the world, and specifically in Africa. This generic question reverberates loudly as Nigeria looks for a credible pathway that will take the country into 2023 and beyond, especially with the election of a new administration headed by President-elect Tinubu.
Let me instantiate this generic question into a few substantive ones.
One: Why has governance performance been difficult to achieve for successive Nigerian leaders?
This question is at the heart of the famous diagnosis of the Nigerian predicament as that of leadership. This question provides the ground for understanding the broken social contract that ensures that Nigerians are disconnected from the governance dynamics the leadership enact. One can actually point at a collusion of several variables, as we just did. But then, always excusing one’s failure on variables is the height of self-delusion. There are those facing the same sets of limiting variables and making genuine efforts to become developmental.
The second question concerns Nigeria’s perpetual socioeconomic transitions, since independence. What is responsible for such a protracted transition that had failed to add up to a transformative experience in governance and development? To concede, consecutive governments in Nigeria, from independence to date, have tried within the limits of their development vision to enhance the quality of life of Nigerians. And yet, sixty-three years after, we still have not arrived at any significant point at which Nigerians would declare that they have had a good government. And this is where the president-elect is confronted with the instances of real governance performances by leaders who took charge of their political stewardship and raised their governance vision to the level of infrastructural development that undermine all sorts of excuses.
What lessons can the new administration learn from these examples of leadership performances?
First, there is the legendary example of Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew who almost single-handedly transformed Singapore into a first world country from a third world. Singapore has now become a shining example of the singularity of vision and the doggedness of ideological persuasion. What
did Lee Kwan Yew do right? The same question can be asked of the other Asian Tigers—Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. The leadership of these states were clear, at the level of elite nationalism, with what they wanted to do, especially with regard to the ideological tyranny of the neoliberal economic agenda and hegemony. This then gave them the economic autonomy to interrogate every conditionality, aid or grant in terms of what is beneficial what is harmful and so in a position to independently craft their own agenda of development.
In the United Arab Emirate, the Al-Maktoum family was not tempted by the lure of enormous crude oil under the hot desert. They saw the crude oil and envisioned, through its strategic deployment, a future of an industrialized and tourist-driven creative hub arising out of a total wasteland. The same focused, strategic and intelligent policymaking that transformed the UAE is what post-WWII Japan targeted to offset its war deficits. And like the Asian Tigers, Japan deliberately, through the Ministry for International Trade and Industry (MITI), managed prudently the intrusion of external economic factors and interventions. On the continent, we can mention Botswana and Rwanda and the deliberate political will that push through governance agenda facilitated by strategic policy intelligence and disciplined implementation.
These leaders achieved the successes they did because of their focused elite nationalism. In other words, they damned elite consequences and gambled on development. Gambling on development, within Nigeria, requires that the new administration pay close and urgent attention to three
fundamental issues. First, there is the paramount issue of what administrative model the running of government business is going to be hinged on. A bureaucratic system will undermine any vision of a functional and efficient administrative system. On the other hand, democratic service delivery to Nigerians demands, as a matter of imperative, a rethinking of the way MDAs conduct government business so that they will be de-bureaucratized sufficiently, to become strategic in the discharge of their service delivery function.
The Tinubu administration, in other words, must pursue the reengineering of the MDAs management system, the kernel machinery for government business, into a performance-oriented, technology-enabled and social compact or accountable business model that will ensure that (a) the public service and its MDAs are working at optimal level to achieve the desired objectives; (b) obtain feedback from the system and the employees on progress made; (c) identify competency gaps and training needs of departments and individual staff required to meet current and future responsibilities; (d) generate a plan of action to achieve desired business objectives and individual competency development; (e) involve staff and other stakeholders and promote good communication, amongst them.
To service the objective of achieving the emergence of a democratic and developmental state, the new administration cannot compromise the goal of a performance-oriented public service that could become functional around a new national service delivery model. This is where a total overhaul and modernizing of the policy architecture becomes critical. We now live in a VUCA— vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—environment, where the normal idea of policymaking will no longer make any sense. Strategic policy intelligence must even be reengineered to become pre-emptive in its capacity to anticipate—through an early warning mechanism—policy challenges from fluctuation in oil prices to global economic meltdown.
Second, we cannot overemphasize the critical need to unbundle the entire cost-of-governance structure, so as to be able to deepen controls over, and enhance the capacity to better deploy, scarce resources which require to be freed up to jumpstart real development. Nigeria’s governance system is one of the most expensive in the world. And the simple implication of this is that by the time recurrent expenditure has eaten a large chunk of the budget, there is barely little left for capital and infrastructural projects that are required to make life easy for Nigerians. Third, the new administration needs to crucially determine the kind of institution and institutional frameworks and dynamics that need to be targeted and reconfigured to enable the administration deliver a maximum and most efficient quanta of governance impacts that could be game-changing within the period of four short years. Or, on the contrary, what kind of processes and procedures could hamper the delivery of government objectives within the same time space? The administration would want to think in terms of three categories of such institutions and governance frameworks.
The three that I consider to be most critical are: institutions that are concerned with the implementation of national priority projects; those that are in charge of regulating rules-based market players like the SMEs; and those that grounds the functionality of the rule of law.
The endgame of the new administration is nothing short of launching a new national productivity paradigm through a productivity audit of the MDAs and the expenditure structure of government.
This is with the objective of enabling the business model of the MDAs and each sector of the economy to set and implement productivity targets. Here, performance accountability becomes cogent. And this can be triggered through the activation of the full complement of a revised M&E system that the Ministry for National Planning must of necessity give full attention to.
In closing, in transforming into the transformational leader all Nigerians are hoping for, President- elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu has a lot to do that can really be done with sufficient focus and determination—the political will to put together a credible team that can be driven to get the work done, backed by the foundational concern, critical to all good governments, for those who have reposed the political power in the government in the first place to do what should be done to improve the quality of life of the people.
Olaopa a retired federal permanent secretary and professor of Public Administration sent this through [email protected]
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