Oby Ezekwesili
Protocols
I am hugely delighted to return to my
alma mater the great and only University of Nigeria to speak at your
42nd convocation. Twenty eight years ago I sat just like you those of
you who are part of the graduating Class of 2013; excited by my
graduation. It was 1985 and I was very privileged to be one of the then
only 3% of our own youthful population that had the opportunity of a
university education. Today, you are still fortunate to be one of the
yet paltry 4.3% of your own youthful generation with an opportunity for
university education. For Nigeria that percentage does not compare
favorably with 37.5% for Chile 33.7% for Singapore 28.2% for Malaysia,
16.5% for Brazil and 14.6%. Our lag in tertiary education enrollment is
quite revealing and could be interpreted as the basis of the
competitiveness gap between the same set of countries and Nigeria. The
reason is that “…. tertiary enrollment rate which is the percentage of
total enrollment, regardless of age, in post-secondary institutions to
the population of people within five years of the age at which students
normally graduate high school…….plays an essential role in society,
creating new knowledge, transferring knowledge to students and fostering
innovation”. The countries with the most highly educated citizens are
also some of the wealthiest in the world in a study by the OECD
published by the Wall Street Journal last year. The United States,
Japan, Canada, South Korea, Finland, Norway, Israel, United Kingdom, New
Zealand and Australia also have among the largest Gross Domestic
Products. All these countries aggressively invest in education.
The same cannot be said of Nigeria. The
crawling progress in tertiary education enrollment since my graduation
more than two and a half decades ago is therefore one key reason former
peer nations left us behind at the lower rungs of global economic
rankings. Economic growth rate and ultimate development of nations are
determined by a number of factors that range from sound policies,
effective and efficient public and private investments and strong
institutions. Economic evidence throughout numerous researches proves
that one key variable that determines how fast nations outgrow others is
the speed of accumulation of human capital especially through science
and technology education. No wonder for these same countries by 2011-
South Korea of fifty million people has a GDP of $1.12trillion, Brazil
of one hundred and ninety six million has $2.48 trillion; Malaysia of
twenty eight million people has $278.6Billion; Chile of seventeen
million people has $248.59Billion; Singapore of five million people has
$318.7 Billion. Meanwhile with our population of 165 million people we
make boasts with a GDP of $235.92 Billion- completely way off the mark
that we could have produced if we made a better set of development
choices.
More dramatic is that this wide gap
between these nations and Nigeria was not always the case as some
relevant data at the time of our independence reveal. In 1960 the GDP
per capita of all these countries were not starkly different from that
of Nigeria- two were below $200, two were a little above $300 and one
was slightly above $500 while that of Nigeria was just about $100. For
citizens, these differentials are not mere economic data. Meanwhile by
2011, the range for all five grew exponentially with Singapore at nearly
$50,000, South Korea at $22,000, Malaysia at $10,000, Brazil at $13,000
and Chile at $14,000. Our own paltry $1500 income per capita helps
drive home the point that we have been left behind many times over by
every one of these other countries. How did these nations steer and stir
their people to achieve such outstanding economic performance over the
last five decades? There is hardly a basis for comparing the larger
population of our citizens clustered within the poverty bracket with the
majority citizens of Singapore fortunate to have upper middle income
standard of living.
Again, how did this happen? What
happened to Nigeria? Why did we get left behind? How did these nations
become productively wealthy over the last fifty years while Nigeria
stagnated? How did majority of the citizens of these nations join the
upper middle class while more Nigerians retrogressed into poverty? There
are usually as many different answers to these sets of questions as
there are respondents on the reasons we fell terribly behind. Some say,
it is our tropical geography, yet economic research shows it has not
prevented other countries with similar conditions from breaking through.
Others say it is size, but China and India are bigger, yet in the last
thirty and twenty years have grown double digit and continue to out-
grow the rest of the world at this time of global economic crisis.
Furthermore, being small has not necessarily conferred any special
advantages to so many other countries with small population yet
similarly battling with the development process like we are. Some others
say it is our culture but like a political economist posited “European
countries with different sorts of cultures, Protestant and Catholic
alike that have grown rich. Secondly, different countries within the
same broad cultures have performed very differently in economic terms,
such as the two Koreas in the post-war era. Moreover, individual
countries have changed their economic trajectories even though “their
cultures didn’t miraculously change.” How about those who plead our
multiethnic nationalities as the constraint but fail to see that the
United States of America happens to be one nation with even more
disparate ethnic nationalities than Nigeria and yet it leads the global
economy! As for those who say it is the adverse impact of colonialism,
were Singapore, Malaysia and even China not similarly conquered and
dominated by colonialists?
That Nigeria is a paradox of the kind of
wealth that breeds penury is as widely known as the fact that the world
considers us a poster nation for poor governance wealth from natural
resources. The trend of Nigeria’s population in poverty since 1980 to
2010 for example suggests that the more we earned from oil, the larger
the population of poor citizens : 17.1 million 1980, 34.5million in
1985, 39.2million in 1992, 67.1million in 1996, 68.7million in 2004 and
112.47 million in 2010! This sadly means that you are children of a
nation blessed with abundance of ironies.
Resource wealth has tragically reduced
your nation- my nation- to a mere parable of prodigality. Nothing
undignifies nations and their citizens like self-inflicted failure. Our
abundance of oil, people and geography should have worked favorably and
placed us on the top echelons of the global economic ladder by now.
After all, basic economic evidence shows that abundance of natural
resources can by itself increase the income levels of citizens even if
it does not increase their productivity. For example, as Professor
Collier a renowned economist who has focused on the sector stated in a
recent academic work countries that have enormously valuable natural
resources are likely to have high living standards on a sustainable
basis by simply replacing some of the extracted resources with financial
assets held abroad. Disappointedly, even that choice eluded our
governing class who through the decades has spent more time quarreling
over their share of the oil “national cake” than they have spent
thinking of how to make it benefit the entire populace.
There are perhaps three broad classes of
resource rich countries. The first are those which like Norway which
have built up all other types of domestic investment from which revenue
is generated and can therefore save their huge revenue from gas in
foreign assets. The second are those mostly of the Middle East countries
like Kuwait which also have saved huge revenue in foreign asset and
generate sufficient revenue from the asset to be better off than other
countries without resources. However, for Kuwait this may be only
because they live well from resource rents rather than becoming
productive. The third category of which our country is a classic example
are countries which though resource rich have neither been able to
build up foreign asset for citizens to live well off of nor evolved new
and alternative sectors of productivity.
The appropriate response to the revenue
extracted from our oil over the period 1959 to date would have been to
use it in accumulating productive investment in the form of globally
competitive human capital and physical asset of all types of
infrastructure and institutions. Such translation from one form of
nonrenewable asset to renewable capital would have been the right
replacement strategy for a wasting asset like oil. Unfortunately
unbridled profligacy has made us spend and continue to spend the free
money from oil like a tragic Rentier state that we are called in
development circles. We spend most of what we generate on mere
consumption with no tangible productive asset to show for our so called
“wealth”.
Due to profligacy we have dismal
human development indicators which are inconsistent with the scale of
our earnings. For example using life expectancy as a proxy measuring how
we score on human development, 51.4years for Nigerians falls far short
of the 80years for citizens of Singapore and South Korea, 78years for
citizens of Chile, 73 years for citizens of Malaysia and 72years for
citizens of Brazil. We may in fact be the world record holder in the
rank of natural resources rich countries that tend to have worse human
development scores when compared to countries without endowments. As our
human development scores have lagged, we continued with our binge on
oil revenue and became trapped in cyclical decline of national
competitiveness. It explains why every other economic sector in Nigeria
has suffered the effect of the oil enclave economy. Oil has unleashed
shocks and volatility of revenues on our economy due to exposure to
global commodity market swing, proliferated “weak, ineffectual, unstable
and systemically corrupt institutions and bureaucracies” that have
helped misappropriate or plunder public resources. Nations with
abundance of natural resources especially in Africa, Latin America and
part of South Asia have experienced the fueling of official corruption
and “violent competition for the resource by the citizens of the
nation” .
While there may not be concurrence on
the causes of Nigeria’s colossal underperformance, most of our citizens
however agree that poor governance and the more visible symptom of
corruption have had virulent impact in arresting the development of
Nigeria. The poor in our land have paid the highest possible price for
being born into the world’s best example of a paradox. The common
wonderment of these poor citizens – whether east, west, north and south-
is “why would more than half the population of a country that earned
nearly one trillion dollars in oil revenue since the Oloibori discovery
of crude oil; continue to wallow in poverty?” Well, economic evidence
shows that the answer which we must all ponder deeply is that oil wealth
entrenched corruption and mismanagement of resources in government and
warped the incentive for value added work, creativity and innovation in
our public, private sectors and wider society. This being the case, the
larger population of our people is deprived of the opportunity to
overcome poverty and this is what economists call the “resource curse”.
The oil revenue induced choices made by our ruling elite over the five
decades of political independence cursed several of our citizens to
intergenerational poverty!
Endowment of oil resulted in an
indulgent elite class – the generations of your great grandparents,
grandparents and parents in leadership- who have made disastrous choices
that have trapped the destiny of Nigeria in oil wells. It is the reason
our economic structure has remained unchanged for more than fifty
years. Fact is that our political elite suffers from delusion of
greatness simply because we sell barrels of crude oil to finance 80% of
our national budget, cover 95% of our foreign exchange and petroleum
sectors represents a larger portion of industry’s contribution to our
GDP. Little wonder that manufacturing is a mere 18% of our Gross
Domestic Products compared to that of all those other nations with which
we set off on the development race. Manufacturing which has its major
driver as education enabled those nations develop a huge base of human
capital with skills and competencies to drive new ideas, creativity and
innovation. They embraced their comparative advantage, mimicked nations
that were ahead of them, perfected some aspects of manufacturing and
became extremely competitive.
While these countries moved up the
manufacturing and economic development ladder in my fifty years of
existence all I can say for Nigeria is that during the same period I
have known at least five cycles of commodity booms that offered us rare
opportunities to use revenues generated from oil to transform our
economy. Sadly, each cycle ended up sliding us farther down the
productivity ladder. The present cycle of boom of the 2010s is however
much more vexing than the other four that happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s
and 2000s. This is because we are still caught up in it even as I speak
today and it is more egregious than the other periods in revealing that
we learned absolutely nothing from the previous massive failures.
Furthermore, it is happening back to back with the squandering of the
significant sum of $45 Billion in foreign reserve account and another
$22Billion in the Excess Crude Account being direct savings from
increased earnings from oil that the Obasanjo administration handed over
to the successor government in 2007. Six years after the administration
I served handed over such humongous national wealth to another one;
most Nigerians but especially the poor continue to suffer the effects of
failing public health and education systems as well as decrepit
infrastructure and battered institutions. One cannot but ask, what
exactly does Nigeria seek to symbolize and convey with this level of
brazen misappropriation of public resources? Where did all that money
go? Where is the accountability for the use of both these resources plus
the additional several billions of dollars realized from oil sale by
the two administrations that have governed our nation in the last six
years? How were these resources applied or more appropriately,
misapplied? Tragic choices! Yes. Our national dignity continues to be
degraded by cycles of stagnation because of the terrible choices my
generation and those before repeatedly make as a result of free oil
money. The wealth and poverty of a nation never found a better Symbol!
There is no better example of the cost
of the imprudent choices than what has happened to Education. The
failures and limitations of the education you have received during your
time here leading to your graduation today will become clearer to you
should you ever seek to do what was very easy for me to do –that is,
gain admission to one of the best schools in the world for my graduate
studies simply on the strength of my University of Nigeria education.
Countries invest in the human skills that can help their citizens use
modern technology and eventually rise to the stage where those same
citizens can develop their countries’ own technology. A country’s
educational system is the key to its long-run development. According to
economic study of the role of education in economic development, “Less
than half of the rise in living standards since 1960 in industrial
countries has been due to savings and investments from its citizens. The
rest of the increase – more than 50% has been due to rising educational
levels and to improvements in technology that raise factor productivity
across the board”. I had known this as a Minister of Education in this
country a few years ago. That knowledge inspired and fueled my zeal to
bring education to the front burners of our national development at that
time. The result of the diagnostics that we produced on the state of
our education system and sector was so heart wrenching that I was filled
with angst at how low we had sunk educationally. Deciding to channel
the angst positively, we built a strong team that articulated some three
hundred and sixty eight ‘root and branch’ reforms measures across the
six levels and aspects of education- early childhood, basic, secondary,
tertiary, special needs and adult/informal education. The response of
resistance by some of the key political elite to the absolutely
necessary reforms when we laid them out before the nation to generate
consensus and implement is made clearer by what one today knows of the
incentives that drive the choices of extractive elites. I will return to
this as I get closer to the conclusion of my speech.
I read an article by David Wraight in
which he posits that there is a globalized generation of youth – often
referred to as the Millennial Generation. “They believe that they can
change the world for the better, but they are unsure what they should
change the world to; so they search for an ideology or system of belief
to use as a foundation for the change they seek. They are actually
searching for something worth living for and dying for.” They are
optimistic and idealistic with a deep desire to make their mark in the
world. They dream of what can be, and follow their dreams with passion
and perseverance. They are no longer prepared to be spectators watching
the world go by, but want to be ‘players’, to get their hands dirty, to
make a difference. They are knowledgeable about the affairs of the world
and very mobile, travelling as much as resources and opportunity
allow.”
As globalization and modern technology
continue to shrink our world people are connecting worldwide as never
before – particularly young people – and overcoming cultural,
geographical, language and ethnic barriers with ease. For the first time
in human history we are seeing the emergence of a global youth culture
with common values, dreams and desires. You are actually not different
from your generational peers in Tunisia, Egypt, the United States and
many other countries that have have questioned and overturned the status
quo and established new norms in the governance of their nations. When
it becomes an imperative for your generation to save Nigeria from its
cycles of disastrous and destructive choices promoted by the older
generations then you can rightly be called the Turning Point Generation.
The turning point is when there begins to emerge a New Nigeria that is
radically different from all that we have known of failure. The turning
point is the point of restoration of Dignity. Yes. That quality or state
of being worthy of esteem or respect; of being regarded as nobility and
having worth!
One of America’s legendary leaders;
President J. F. Kennedy called it the “source of national purpose” when
he said “I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose,
human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the
source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of
our invention and our ideas”. Like individuals, nations have or lack
dignity depending on how well they practice these famous words of John
D. Rockefeller – “I
believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the
world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to
make a living”. Dignity of honest toil and the sweet triumph that
results from such strenuous effort is after all what confers deserving
honor on people and societies. Booker T. Washington expressed this Truth
powerfully when he wrote that “no race can prosper till it learns that
there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem”. We
must take way a lasting message from the profound thoughts of these
historical figures that helped build the still greatest nation in the
world- the United States of America.
The clear message is that Dignity is
conferred on a life of effort and hard work and not on a life of ignoble
ease for the latter can easily become dulled by contemptible wealth.
To be born into inheritance like our nature endowed oil wealth does not
of itself confer any deserving honor on us and our nation. Our oil rich
nation merely makes us a Rentier state. Even worse, the oil wealth has
created not the right kind of Elite class across the length and breadth
of our nation but rather an Extractive Elite class. These political and
business elite have been comfortable with living on rent from oil
revenue without seeing the desperate need to redirect the focus of this
nation to sources of economic growth that are more lasting than the
depleting riches of natural commodities. They fail to realize that a
Rentier economy like Nigeria sows the seed of its implosion if it does
not advance into a productive economy. Had we been of a lesser
population, we may perhaps have been able to all comfortably live off
the income from oil as the revenue will make Nigeria sufficiently rich
to be able to provide all of us high incomes on a sustainable basis like
my friend Paul Collier so scholarly wrote drawing a parallel between
individual bequeathed and inheritance and a nation blessed with natural
resources. Collier wrote “just as a billionaire can ensure that his
descendants need never work. But, just as many billionaires realize that
it is good to earn a living, so all societies sensibly aspire to be
productive. Resource extraction should make a society more productive”.
My dear young friends, all Nigerians but especially our very
prebendalist leadership class must realize that it is good for both
individuals and nations to earn their living!
So I ask you as representatives of your
generation, “Who will restore the Dignity of Nigeria?” As my big
brother, former President of South Africa -Thabo Mbeki- once asked along
the same vein “When
will the day come that our dignity will be fully restored, when the
purpose of our lives will no longer be merely to survive until the sun
rises tomorrow”! Your word of response to my difficult question will
not persuade anyone. It is the follow on action that stands the chance
of being persuasive. The reason is simple. Word is cheap. As was
profoundly observed by Marti Jose, “other famous men, those of much talk and few deeds, soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness”.
So I ask you again, “Who will WALK AND WORK to restore the Dignity of
Nigeria?” Through my probing question, I abide with the challenge of
Shriver Sargent who believed that every new generation must be taught
the dignity of work- “Do we talk about the dignity of work? Do we give
our students any reason for believing it is worthwhile to sacrifice for
their work because such sacrifices improve the psychological and mental
health of the person who makes them?” Do you know that your embrace of a
new mindset – an entrepreneurial mindset that takes pride in problem
solving can change the course of our history and place us on a new
economic development trajectory? Do you know that in order to herald a
New Nigeria we must accept the words of Michelle Obama on learning about
dignity and decency – “that how hard you work matters much more than
how much you make…..that helping others means much more than just
getting ahead yourself” is what we need to herald a New Nigeria?
A New Nigeria would be one where the
citizens and leaders alike converge on a common vision for our nation.
That vision need not be complex. It is in fact extremely important that
because everyone who reads it must desire to run with its ideals that
the Vision must be simple. For me a simple Vision will read- “we believe
in Dignity”. Although it sounds so ordinary but it profoundly conveys
that we believe in the Dignity that lays within ourselves and not the
fleeting sense of wealth that oil money creates. WE are our best
endowment. Our capabilities- nurtured and nourished by a just society-
and not our oil, not our gas not even our thirty four classes of
minerals scattered across the country represent the lasting and
renewable asset of our nation. Whereas as a Madagasy proverb says, oil
induced “poverty won’t allow us lift our heads; dignity which is the
fruit of hard work won’t allow us bow them down.
For Nigeria’s dignity to be restored
your generation must build a coalition of your entrepreneurial minds
that are ready to ask and respond to the question “What does it take for
nations to become rich? Throughout economic history, the factors that
determine which nations became rich and improved the standard of living
of their citizens read like a Dignity treatise in that they all revolve
around the choices that ordinary citizens made in defining the value
constructs of their nation. We learn that it takes a very strong
interplay of political and economic dynamics for nations to climb out
from the rung of poverty and raise the standard of living of citizens.
The political foundation of nations emerges as the principal reason why
some nations grow rich while others remain poor in the field of
development economics. A ground breaking work by Daren Acemoglu, a
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and James Robinson (economist), a Harvard
professor has brought politics to the center stage of economic
development. Although sound policies and access to capital for investing
in development priorities remain very important for economic success no
country can however achieve development without having a strong
political foundation made up of political players, system, processes and
structures that are grounded in inclusivity and accountability. The
active participation of the citizens who seek to restore their
individual and collective dignity in the politics of their nation is
what ensures that THE PEOPLE and not a bunch of power hungry and
extractive elite will set the agenda and determine the quality and
substance of governance.
The simple version of this thesis is
“sort out a nation’s political mess and you improve the chances of
getting a productive economy that grows and delivers the benefits of
growth in the form of jobs and improved incomes to all citizens”.
Although this advice is rooted in empirical evidence from economic
research it does sound very basic. Not being one of those earth
shattering solutions that Nigerians are often enamored of, we may choose
to ignore it. Yet if we are willing to confront our past and present
reality with sincerity and ruminate on our political history, this
thesis may actually be a Turning Point “Aha” moment for us. The Turning
Point is that moment when we all suddenly realized that Politics- a
process that defines the How, Who, Which, Where, When and for What any
individual or group of persons who seek to govern Nigeria- is indeed the
root cause of our repeated failures. Neither our thirty four years of
cumulative military governance nor the nineteen cumulative years thus
far of our democratic governance provided us “inclusive and accountable
governance.” Evidently, it is the undeveloped character of our political
history, inchoate political structure and system and mostly uninspiring
cast of political leadership that threw Nigeria into a hole from which
it must climb out quickly to secure its continuing existence.
Instructively, a person or as in our own case; a nation is counseled to
“stop digging when in a hole”. Lamentably, in our case we have
consistently rebuffed the wisdom behind that counsel. We have instead
dug deeper and the more we have dug, the deeper into the hole we have
sunk and all because of political misadventures.
Trace the political history of our
country since independence in 1960 and you will better understand the
horror of our faulty political foundation. The first democratic
government ushered in an independent Nigeria but was cut short by a
coup in 1966, a counter coup in 1967, civil war from 1967 to 1970,
military rule from 1970 at the end of the war until another coup in
1975, another unsuccessful coup in 1976 the then Head of State was
murdered, continued rule of the military until 1979 when a successful
political transition ushered in the second republic but it became a
democratic process that was known more for its prodigality than for
governance until it was cut short in 1983 by yet another military coup
but this new junta was itself sent packing by a coup in 1985 with a new
military junta ruling from 1985 until 1993 when it thwarted the
political rights of citizens who had elected a democratic president by
annulling the elections. It responded to the public disturbance and
agitation that followed by installing an interim national government
that lasted only three months following yet another military
intervention that was more heinous than ever until 1998 when divine
providence cut short that particular leadership ushering in yet another
military ruler who committed to and successfully conducted a transition
that ushered democratic governance in 1999. That it is now fourteen
years of uninterrupted even if fledgling democratic governance since
1999 is perhaps the very tiny ray of light in what is otherwise a
canvass of political tragedies.
Yet, despite the general consensus
satisfaction with the record number of democratic years since 1999,
darkness still ominously clouds our political landscape. While the
nation continues to experience the paradox of plenty and citizens are
once again provoked by this latest round of prodigality of our political
elite one cannot but sigh in disbelief that these casts of gladiators
seem not to have learned anything from our inglorious political history.
The recklessness and impunity with which public institutions and
resources are being handled; the daily news of systemic and now
democratized corruption by political office holders and their business
elite collaborators has entrenched cynicism and pessimism in the land.
How can our political elite not see that we are all sitting on kegs of
gun powder? How can they not see that whatever peace we may appear to
have at this time is like the peace of the graveyard? How can they not
see that the teeming population of extremely angry and more
interconnected young people cannot be silent for too much longer? How
can they not know that preachments of patience and sacrifice will no
longer placate the two million young people who annually enter the
terribly constrained labor market pushing up the already worrisome 40%
unemployment ratio among our youthful population? How can they not see
the hypocrisy of the platitudes on sacrifice to poor citizens who thanks
to greater access to information are able to closely follow the
lifestyle of delusional grandeur and debauchery that their leaders
finance from the public treasury? Where is the much needed innovative
and entrepreneurial mindset that the public sector must earnestly deploy
in solving the multiple problems of our nation? Why does our own
variant of political elite not even understand the most basic necessity
for change of the status quo methods that have failed to deliver
benefits of governance to citizens? “Elites resist innovation because
they have a vested interest in resisting change — and new technologies
that create growth can alter the balance of economic or political assets
in a country. Technological innovation makes human societies
prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new,
and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of
certain people,” wrote Acemoglu and Robinson. Yet when elites
temporarily preserve power by preventing innovation, they ultimately
impoverish their own states. Sadly, they most often do not care what
happens to the rest of the nation, and that arguably has been the lot of
Nigerian through the years.
In the course of the last six months of
my returning home to Nigeria after five year in international public
service at the World Bank in Washington DC, I have many times come
across the cutting anger of unemployed, disillusioned citizens who are
louder in their disaffection with the condition of the country. The
strident voices of citizens in public debates of national issues are
louder and more penetrating than ever before. We are indeed at a turning
point. How it turns however will be determined by you my dear friends.
Today, you are the generation that holds the ace. You are the generation
for whom the stakes are highest on the issue of how well this nation
turns its governance corner. You are the generation that can define a
new character and quality of politics in Nigeria and inherently the
quality of governance outcomes in the decades and century ahead. You are
the generation that can birth a New Nigeria devoid of all negatives
that have inhibited our greatness and one in which every citizen is
mobilized to construct a “National Integrity System” which is imperative
for the building of every decent society.
You can do so by seeking to understand
and to engage the stunted political context and nation that you have
inherited. You will have to take hold of both and turn them around into a
mature democracy and nation. What you must seek to do is to create a
new political context in which citizens’ demand for good governance and
accountability begins to compel those who govern to persistently make
choices that will more likely improve the outcomes of economic
management for the larger number of Nigerians. You have the tools needed
for massive political and civic education of your illiterate peers on
the importance of political rights and participation in the political
process. By virtue of your university education and experiences you
understand the economics of politics in Nigeria better than your
illiterate peers who ignorantly trade off their political rights and
chances for better governance outcomes for a mere mess of porridge.
Economics teaches us that there are some
basic Smithian conditions (as espoused by Adam Smith in the Wealth of
Nations) for sustainable economic growth. No country has become rich,
and stayed that way, without establishing these conditions. Countries
such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their
citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society
with political rights more broadly distributed and the government
accountable and responsive to citizens. In these countries the great
mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities and so the
entire nation prospered. To the contrary, nations dominated by
self-centered elite fail and they are extremely poor.
Your generation can work as collectives
across this country and set the agenda for lasting positive change in
the political architecture of Nigeria. Only after reading Why Nations
Fail did I finally understand the wise words of Plato that “one of the
penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up
being governed by your inferiors”. Therefore, do not be like me and my
kind who have ignored politics and left it to professional politicians
to determine its character and substance. The incentive that must drive
your own impulses on whether to engage or not is the knowledge that
except the insalubrious political context that has produced a
persistently failing Nigeria changes positively; your individual
talents, opportunities and greatness will not materialize nor be
maximized. In deciding to free Nigeria from its legendary political
failures, you will actually free yourselves to excel like your
contemporaries in the rest of the world. “The positive dimensions of
succeeding at this task democratizing political powers beyond the
minuscule are accountability, property rights and rule of law, which in
combination provide low transactions cost so that markets can work
effectively and efficiently. When these conditions are absent, a society
faces corruption, instability and poor human rights. Investors,
including domestic investors, flee such settings”. Do you now see how
inextricably connected our political and economic fortunes are in
determining the quality of life of the Nigerian? Do you now see what our
Big Problem is?
A recent global survey showed that your
generation around the world stands out as the most connected to the
developments in international affairs. So, most of you will assuredly be
aware that not just in our nation but that everywhere else world over,
people are seeking for those who can solve the Big Problems in their
respective nations. In several other nations the solutions to Big
Problems are coming from your generational peers. Surely, having
established that our own Big Problem is the failure of politics to
deliver the right environment in which a productive economy can thrive
outside of the extraction of natural resources that fuels the
destructive choices of our ruling elite you have the information needed
for driving change. You would have to decide whether you are ready to
play the role a change catalyst or would rather adopt the safer option
which is to “siddon look.” There is no better time to make such life
changing decisions than the day of one’s graduation from College.
I should know about making decisions on
graduation day! On my graduation day in 1985, my fertile mind having
absorbed as much of the eclectic knowledge available on this campus as
possible was budding with curiosity about the challenges of good
governance in Nigeria. I made up my mind at that time to never lose my
VOICE in the society and that for as long as I lived, I would always
speak up on matters of governance, transparency, accountability and
probity. Divine providence followed that decision and the supportive
actions I took to back it and my steps began to be ordered on a
trajectory that had me as one of the leaders of our own generations’
campaign for democracy and good governance- The Concerned Professionals
with the likes of Pat Utomi, Sam Oni, Morin Babalola and many others.
Staying committed to that decision that I made on graduation day was
what provided me the rare privilege of becoming one of the few
co-founders and a founding director of Transparency International the
Berlin based global non-governmental organization that pioneered the
work on anti-corruption and promotion of transparency. That decision
that I made on graduation day informed all my life choices and paved the
path for what you know of my vocational endeavors. So what decisions
are you prepared to make today, dear friends? I assure you that the
greatest gift of God to mankind is the power to choose. You are
therefore empowered to make decisions and choices today that will
ultimately determine what, where and how you will be in the next twenty
eight years and beyond……..
But I warn you to be mindful and not
rush to decide. You will need to fully assess all the possible costs of
your decisions and choices and then determine whether you have the
strength of will to bear them. Whatever choices you make from today for
the purpose of helping build a New Nigeria will most certainly cost you
something. Such is the reality of nation rebuilding. Those who truly
build their societies pay a price. They are not For example you cannot
be one given to the lure of free money, one who cannot defer
gratification and one for whom the path of least resistance holds
abiding fascination; and then say you are part of the Turning Point
Generation. No! The willingness to “enjoy” wealth that is not earned is
not consistent with such Turning Point paradigm. For example, for
anyone of you in the Class of 2013 you cannot having perverted the maxim
“reward for effort” cheating in exams or using forged certificates to
gain your admission and say you are a catalyst for the emergence of the
New Nigeria. If your decisions or choices from today are driven by some
selfish interest of replacing the failed and fading generations so as
to repeat their nation-hobbling pattern then please know that you are
not of the Turning Point Generation.
I have spoken to you today to stir up
your collective effective angst at the indignity of your inheritance. If
I have succeeded in raising your determination to free our nation from
the trap of oil, then my coming is worthy. If I have succeeded in
helping you see how continuous education not more extraction of oil will
help you outperform and take Nigeria up the economic development
ladder, then my coming worthy. If I have succeeded in preparing you to
embrace dignity of labor as your philosophy of life –never shunning
legitimate vocation that helps you earn a living regardless of how lowly
it might seem- then my coming is worthy. If today, I have succeeded in
preparing you for a life of private and public integrity then my coming
is worthy. If I have deposited in you a deep seethed contempt for poor
governance, then my coming is worthy. If I have succeeded in preparing
you for a lifetime of costly choices that invariably ennoble your path
then my coming is worthy. If I have succeeded in helping you realize
that you are not weak- that you are actually very powerful- and have
both the exceptional opportunities and the tools like your peers in
other nations to solve our own Big Problem then my coming is worthy. If I
have moved you to decide that you will be one of those that will
redefine and build a New Nigeria of our dream then is my coming worthy.
If I have succeeded in inspiring a resolve within you to uphold from
today a strong sense of personal responsibility for the political
governance of Nigeria then my coming is worthy. Above all, if I have
succeeded in getting you motivated and empowered enough to walk out of
this hall seeing ready to walk and work as a part of the Turning Point
Generation that courageously dares to restore the dignity of Nigeria
then my BEING is truly worth it!
I salute you, the great lions and
lionesses of the class of 2013! All of you, my dear fellow alumnae of
the University of Nigeria are indeed the true Wealth, the Greatness and
above all the Dignity of Nigeria!!
Thank you for listening.
OBIAGELI KATRYN EZEKWESILI
CLASS OF 1985, UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA
SENIOR ECONOMIC ADVISER, AFRICA ECONOMIC POLICY DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVE
OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION.
Mrs. Ezekwesili delivered this keynote at the 42nd convocation of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka
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