I consider it great privilege to be asked to give this lecture as part of activities celebrating a remarkable man on a remarkable occasion of this landmark birthday, the 95th. The impactful life of service that he has led deserves our toast and our joining him in expressing gratitude to God who has gifted us with the example of his integrity, intellect, sagacity and patriotism.
In some sense the loaded ways in which his blessings have manifested in his pursuits manages to compound the assignment of drawing from the rich tapestry of his canvas to frame a lecture on the challenge of nation building in Nigeria. His pathways could lead me down the track of speaking to the political economy of state performance in post-colonial Nigeria, just as it could point me more specifically to the rise and fall of manufacturing in Nigeria, given his MAN antecedents. I could, in fact choose, from his writings, to turn to leadership which one of his books laments as having failed Nigeria. Again I would be in relevant territory if I concentrate on constitution making or Think Tank building because he also gave generously of himself in those areas.
I have, however, chosen to explore the territory of purpose and performance for people in public life and how that has affected the promise of Nigeria, as framed by the dream of the founding fathers. As some of you may know my 2024 book, Power, Policy, Politics and Performance, was on that track, and the book I am just finishing work on, Why African Nations are Still Poor, continues to explore that theme.
The achievement deficit and looming despair
The personal effectiveness guru of blessed memory, Stephen R Covey, in his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People urges that we begin with the end in mind. So what was the end the founding fathers had in mind and how close are we to that end?
Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank, until earlier this month, brings this home in his recent remarks that indicate GDP per capita in Nigeria, has dropped to $824 which is below what it was at Independence in 1960. To put that in proper perspective; consider how much economic growth Vietnam, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Qatar and Thailand have experienced in the last 65 years during which we have been handing the baton to leaders running so fast in the opposite direction in this global relay race, that we have gone back past the starting block from which we took off, at Independence.
Dr. Adesina’s comments were met with a shower insults from the establishment and their apologists.
That unsurprising reaction, showcasing incivility in the public sphere in Nigeria, is symptomatic of the crisis of elite in Nigeria that I have been commenting about for a while. The triumph of politics in which government by propaganda is so intolerant of anything not cheerleading that a major value of Democracy, a market place of ideas, has been lost to our contemporary experience, now defines us.
The philosopher of the public sphere, Jurgen Habermas, reminds us that the meeting point of modernity and Democracy is rational public conversation. But that marketplace of ideas from rational public conversation cannot take place in the atmosphere of propaganda as governance and intolerance of different views, as the norm.
Many who lack the liver for the insults of the cyber praetorian guards either shut up or leave town. The Adesina example tells the story. As people are bullied into silence, the Eze Onyeagwanam phenomenon comes to play. That metaphor of the King no one could talk to heading off to the market place not realizing his garment had collected feases when he visited the toilet. None from his household could tell him because he listened to no one. But in the market place the embarrassing and humiliating consequence manifested.
How can we realize the urgency of the moral equivalence of war that looks us in the face with insecurity writ large, food insecurity, galloping inflation, de-industrialization and brain drain that faces us, if we cannot engage in rational public conversation, respect for alternative points of view and civility in democratic engagement.
As a business teacher, one of my mantras is attention in teams to dissenting perspectives. Quite often I illustrate this with evidence from the space shuttle challenger mission which ignored the concerns of some often troublesome engineers with the booster rockets. NASA would regret their intolerance of those dissenting voices. As we recall the PR issues in delaying the launch a few days paled into insignificance compared to the global tragedy of a female teacher and other crew incinerated in full glare of a planet glued to their TV sets as Challenger blew up during the launch.
If we are even to begin to evaluate where we are and why we are there, with a view to finding solutions, we have to restore freedom of expression and effective opposition. The Big Tent shadow team was precisely designed to create this desirable atmosphere to start afresh the journey towards progress.
Caveat of critique
It may be useful, at this point to issue a caveat regarding my critique of the extant order. My points are essentially a reflection on elite. In the noisiness of extreme partisanship and divisive emotional anchors on ethnicity and faith it is so easy for deafness to what is being said to derive from incumbents taking it personally. The crisis of Nigeria is a crisis of elite and the failure of the country’s elite to construct a vision of the state and its ethos which then flow into citizen consciousness.
Where the failings are domiciled
So where are the performance deficits?
From national development strategy, to political culture, to leadership style and substance we have experienced crises that almost calls for the Exorcist to carry out a needed job.
The trouble with Nigeria is, sadly, that the catalog of betrayal is almost such that is numbing and requiring deliverance as is common in some religious practices.
The template around the world is that every generation desires for the next generation to be better off. My generation enjoyed better life than our parents and are leaving our children a worse one. You express your sense of shame at this obvious failing, as Adesina did, and those who have lost their sense of shame shout crucify him, crucify him. What a treacherous betrayal of our own children that conduct is. But many are cowed.
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And you consider some of the messengers they send to insult and assault and you cannot but feel like Jesus felt for the rich young man who went away forlorn, deeply sad, when he could not embrace the ultimate truth. As inferior as I am to Jesus I could not but feel like Jesus when one such was deployed to take me on because he was given a party position. It made me think of the promise he once harbored which seems to have evaporated into emptiness that allows the barrel which makes the loudest noise. I felt so much love, pity and sadness for him. But they are coached to see the universe of truth in public life as politics and that in politics all is fair game; be it truth, falsehood, half-truth, bullying or deception. Sadly they seem not to realize how much that poisons culture and retards progress.
I will quickly visit a few of these sources of decline in the hope we can glean a few truths that can result in reversals of extant trends.
How production went south
Poverty which was hard to find in precolonial Africa has become the call sign of our ship of state. Whether it be from the Brookings study that proclaimed us the poverty capital of the world or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation study of poverty in our time we have become poor to the point of being the poster child of the phenomenon.
We have become so because we do not produce enough for our consumption and exchange to attain a quality of life that does not diminish the dignity of the human person.
Nigeria, where manufacturing went from near zero to 20% of GDP in the four years from self-government to Independence forgot how to produce. Four ailment that caused this seems identifiable. The first was the dangerous alchemy of soldiers and oil, the mix of the centralizing tendency military organization and oil producing revenues that made government neglect taxation, the great umbilical cord that provokes accountability. This brought Dutch disease that moved people from farms to being construction workers that soon became unemployed when oil price volatility made government unable to pay due bills to those construction firms.
The second was widespread corruption which spread a culture of distrust.
The third was a weakening of our institutions. The result was higher uncertainty as boundaries of acceptable conduct got eroded.
Fourthly, the development paradigms we embraced and reforms we implemented all lacked concrete, practical and motivating frameworks for facilitating entrepreneurship.
The McKinsey consultant, Irene Sun, in her book about how Africa could be the Worlds next great factory points to ample illustration of how poor management of trade policy damaged gains in manufacturing in Nigeria, from the first wave.
With these challenges many who should never have come near public life, given their values and goals found politics the path to material wellbeing. The damage was now sealed. As Robert Klitgaard and Robert Calderisi point out in their books, Tropical Gangsters and The trouble with Africa, the public domain in Africa is now largely manned by thugs and scoundrels. I dared to join that league of Development Economist writers with my 2019 book; Why Not: Citizenship, Creeping Fascism, State Capture and the Criminal Hijack of Politics in Nigeria.
How character counts
Once the wrong kind of people held sway in politics, the possibilities for Nigeria narrowed.
Character matters. A US evangelist is said to have gifted Government Secondary School Owerri with their noted motto: When wealth is lost, nothing is lost, when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.
The collapse of culture which has been so costly for progress has produced election rigging so widespread elections still hardly confer legitimacy on the elected.
In a veritable loss of decorum that has come with elite treachery, the poor are mocked openly in chambers of the National Assembly while legislators (someone called them legislooters) award obscene portions of the commonwealth to themselves as compensation for their work. The distortions in how politicians reward themselves has distorted the country’s structure of incentives.
Many are genuinely unable to understand the consequence obtuse incentives for production, economic growth and social harmony.
There is so much more that can be said but I have said enough to make the point about the urgency of reprogramming. It is time to begin again.
We need to purge ourselves of the unseriousness of public life and lack of rigor in public choice. We need a new modus vivendi as we need a modus operandi. Restructuring in a new constitution and new systems of accountability are imperatives.
Conclusion
The burden of purpose is ‘litmus’ test of public life. People unable to find clarity with purpose and cannot identify their essence as sacrificial service aimed at advance of the common good constitute a threat to Democracy. Sadly they dominate our current reality. We need citizen education to get voters to flush them out if the democratic and demographic dividends are to embrace and redeem Nigeria from its recent history.
- Keynote remarks by Prof. Pat Utomi at the 95th birthday celebrations of Elder Dr. Umar Eleazu on June 14, 2025