NextierPatrick Okigbo III in conversation with Dr Sam Amadi
Dr. Sam Amadi is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Baze University in Abuja and is also the Coordinator of the Abuja School of Political and Social Thought. Until recently, he was the Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission. Before that role, he was a Special Adviser to the President of the Senate of Nigeria, and Director of the Centre for Public Policy and Research in Lagos.
Sam was a Senior Counsel at Gani Fawehinmi Chambers and an Associate with Olisa Agbakoba and Associates. He was a Senior Defense Counsel for Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Sam was a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has a doctoral degree and a Master’s degree from Harvard Law School. He has a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His LLB is from the University of Calabar while his BL is from Nigerian Law School.
Preamble
Nigeria has failed to rise. At her independence in 1960, the country was the “great hope” for many Africans[1] given its size, resource endowment, and people. Six decades later, Nigeria is still struggling to deliver any remarkable results. With a 2018 Gross Domestic Product per capita of $2,028, Nigeria is 32 percent of the value for South Africa, 37 percent of Middle-Income countries, 49 percent of Algeria, 80 percent of Egypt, and 92 percent of Ghana. The story is not much different for the Human Development Indicators. In 2018, Nigeria scored 0.534 (158 out of 189 countries) was a “Low Human Development” country compared to Ghana (Medium Human Development) and South Africa (High Human Development).
The economic story is the same for sub-Saharan Africa. In 1960, countries in sub-Saharan Africa had a GDP per capita ($131) in the same ballpark as Middle-Income Countries ($150). Six decades later, countries in sub-Saharan Africa have a GDP per capita ($1,589) which is 29 percent of the average GDP per capita of Middle-Income Countries ($5,489).
Why has Africa continued to underperform? Many scholars have adduced reasons for this failure. Walter Rodney provided arguments on How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and based his core thesis on the economics of colonialism. He advocated a “radical break with the international capitalist system“[2]. The Singer-Prebisch “dependency” thesis argues that global power imbalance ensures that Africa exports raw materials to the global North where it is processed into value-added products and sold back to Africa at multiples of the original cost. According to Professor Patrick Bond of Wits University,” the North gets richer the more it exchanges with the South, which in turn gets poorer because of a value transfer“.
Some contemporary scholars have looked at geography for answers. Jared Diamond argued in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel,[3] that fertile land and the ability to domesticate animals gave Europe an edge. Indeed, for Diamond, geography may be destiny. Jeffrey Sachs and David Landes are the “champions of the rediscovery of geography“. Jeffrey Sachs focuses more on the economic and social costs of malaria, arguing that “areas with severe malaria are almost all poor and continue to have low economic growth“.
Some other scholars have situated their analysis on the nature of societal interactions. Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan scholar, posits that it is the identity politics accentuated in the late nineteenth century by the colonialist British government that drew permanent lines between ethnic groups in Africa. A century later, many of these Africa societies have not been able to erase the language of pluralism and difference that the colonialists used to “Define and Rule“.[4] Earlier in 1975, Peter Ekeh, a Nigerian scholar, argued that the “experiences of colonialism in Africa have led to the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern post-colonial Africa: the existence of two publics“. Societal morality is shaped by whether the action is in the private realm or the public realm. While a bureaucrat has no issue embezzling government funds (public realm), he or she would not do the same with the funds of the town union (private realm). Prebendalism, which is postulated by Richard Joseph[5], is related to both the theories of identity politics and the “two publics”. It refers to a system where public officials take a share of public funds to benefit their supporters, co-religionists and members of their ethnic group.
Other scholars posit that the challenge is with institutions or the lack thereof. Nobel Laureate, Douglass North, established that it is the broader institutional context that sets the stage for economic interactions and outcomes. He argued in his 1991 book[6] that it is institutions and institutional changes that affect the performance of economies. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson extended this line of reasoning in their 2012 book, “Why Nations Fail“[7]. They argued that economic prosperity depends on the inclusiveness of economic and political institutions. These are institutions that enable society to have a say in decision-making, as opposed to extractive institutions where a small group of people control the levers of political and economic decisions. Acemoglu and Robinson have deepened their thesis with their 2019 book, “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty “, where they argued that it is the active engagement from the society that puts “shackles” on the state and thus guarantees liberty. Liberty is a critical requirement for development, and it originates from a “delicate balance of power between state and society”[8].
Scholars cannot agree on the unifying theory for underdevelopment in Africa. Lots of other scholars have rigorously criticised each of these theories. The conclusion could be that there is no single theory that explains Africa’s underdevelopment; instead, each of them provides insights that policymakers must integrate into their search to understand the challenges and to proffer solutions.
Dr Sam Amadi is evolving a new theory to explain the situation in Nigeria. His research points to a “conceptual incoherence” in the design of the Nigerian State. For instance, an analysis of Sections 10 and 38 of the Nigerian Constitution exposes some contradiction as to whether the country is a secular or a religious state. The fact that Nigeria does not have a central guiding philosophy of development reflects this incoherence. For instance, are Nigeria’s economic decisions guided by free-market or socialist principles? What is to blame: corruption or leadership failure, or are these the same? How has Nigeria’s concept of economic, social, and cultural rights impacted her development?
Dr Sam Amadi was the guest on “Development Discourse with Patrick Okigbo III” on June 14, 2020. The conversation explored a broad range of topics: conceptual incoherence, ethnicity and identity politics, restructuring, quota system and federal character, state police, even the National Association of Seadogs etc. The conversation explored the merits and demerits of the various development theories postulated for Africa, in general, and Nigeria, in particular. A summarised version of the conversation follows.
What do you mean by “conceptual incoherence”?
Every nation state is an imagined community, created from social imagination which could be technical or literal. The quality of the imagination regarding clarity, coherence, and consistency determines where a nation falls. With Nigeria’s amalgamation, the lack of integration created a nation that cannot be called a proper nation state. Most countries evolve into an integrated process, creating a culture, hegemony, and ideology that signifies shared consciousness, identity, and citizenship.
Nigerian leaders were to choose between a proper secular state or multi-religious state but what was contracted was incoherent. It is neither a secular state nor a religious state. The problem of Nigeria is essentially contexture, not just factor productivity. Do you want to be a modern economy built around production and meritocracy or a prerogative neo-feudal state built around dispensation?
Dr Sam Amadi discussed that this incoherence is shown in attempts to create an efficient and productive economy with a constitution speaking more of the values of a neo-feudal state built on prerogative and privilege. The conception of the Nigerian state and not just the failure of implementation is the issue. Until this incoherence is cured, outcomes will be inconsistent.
ETHNICITY AND IDENTITY POLITICS
You wrote a 2019 essay titled, “Three Fundamental Crisis of the Nigerian State”, and in that essay, you identified the productivity crisis. There are two other crises: the crisis of nationality and the crisis of values. Can you succinctly explain what you mean by these crises, especially as it relates to the fundamental reasons why we have not been able to start?
The nationality question asks, who is a Nigerian? The constitution constructs citizenship around ethnic originality. In modern society, the best way to do this would be through civic contract. For instance, while a person born on American soil is a citizen, in Nigeria, citizenship is constituted primarily around ethnic identity, differentiating among citizens. A Nigerian citizen is not a citizen of the entire country but localised to certain places. Instead of being a modern state defined by civic rules and the rule of law, Nigeria constructs citizenship along ethnic lines; an immutable primordial invariable. This is the problem that affects Nigeria.
The nationality crisis flows into the crisis of value, which we observe every day in corruption and lawlessness. The value of accountability is not defined. Nigeria’s corruption crisis relates to this lack of this value and the failure to see “ethical universalism” rather than particularism: rich or poor, ethically privileged or unprivileged. So, the crisis of value relates to the nationality crisis, creating the crisis of productivity, because particularism destroys meritocracy, which entrenches privilege and destroys productivity.
I see the link but let me go back to identity which you can relate to the nationality crisis. Ghana; multi-ethnic. Nyerere’s Tanzania; multi-ethnic as well. How were these leaders able to form new nations out of the same tapestry that Nigeria inherited, but we could not do the same?
People forget Tanzania is multi-ethnic because it appears as one nation. We failed because the struggle to create uniform citizenship in 1959 aided our leaders in ethnic manipulation or entrepreneurship. In the absence of national identity, they manipulated ethnic identity to compete for power. The British’s failure to integrate the country meant Nigerians were not tightly bound and thus, vulnerable to ethnic manipulation.
The first shift is a move away from the “manifest destiny” idea. The second is to understand that a working Nigeria can be constructed, as every nation is a social imagination. The third paradigm shift involves examining the root causes of the country’s problems with rigour. The fourth shift is a move away from imitation and neo-liberal economistic solutions.
