Nigeria’s Sobering Competitiveness Rankings

By Olu Akanmu

 

The debate about whether the recent World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness  Index (GCI) rankings is fair to Nigeria, whether our 120^th position out of the 144 countries rated reflect our true reality is too critical to ignore. There are real dangers that rather than reflect deeply and inwardly on the lessons of the GCI , on its ranking pillars such as institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health and education among others, we may end up living in a denial of our true reality. We tell ourselves that the world does not really know us, that our realities are better than the ranking. We then begin to act like the proverbial ostrich that buries its head in the sand.

While we must acknowledge the  positive rankings of 42^nd  on macroeconomic environment and 32^nd  on market size, it is important to be sober on our 129^th  ranking in institutions, 135^th  in infrastructure, 146^th  in health and primary education,  120^th  in higher education, 108^th in technological readiness  and 100^th  in innovation. Why should we argue with such relative obvious rating of our economy?  Perception is reality if containers take seven hours to do a maximum five kilometer journey from our busiest sea-ports in Apapa to Mile 2. Perception is reality if the three km road from our busiest international airport in Lagos to Isolo junction remains sub-motorable, un-repaired in years with several pot holes welcoming international visitors. 

Perception is reality if the Nigeria state continues to fail its citizens by not guaranteeing them security of life and property as its core social contract with the people. Perception is even more reality when it’s military takes a tactical detour under enemy fire to another country in its counter-insurgency operations.  The state and its institutions have failed to protect the people to pursue their economic activities in peace. Impunity and corruption remains pervasive as our judicial and law enforcement institutions remain weak, unable to bring high profile economic crimes to justice. The rule of law applies only to those who are weak, who cannot work around the law. Even the state does not respect its own contracts as we saw in the near imbroglio concerning the Transmission Company of Nigeria in the power sector.  On the political front, our weak democratic and electoral institutions continue to throw –up our worst, or at best our averages for leadership. While there are semblances of democratic elections, weak internal political party democracy and its capture by narrow elite ensures that our political parties do not sufficiently reflect the wider will of the Nigerian people. We are also seeing the potential capture of our regulatory institutions by a narrow elite that may not see our regulatory institutions balance properly the interest of powerful elites with the wider interests of the people with implied potential policy flip-flops.

Given that most of us who are having this competitiveness debate send our wards to private schools locally and overseas, it is difficult to appreciate the real crisis of primary and secondary education, another pillar of the competitive index. We are what we are today because of the foundation of great public primary and secondary education that we received. Today, our dysfunctional primary and secondary education system has become a mass factory for producing young illiterates. 1.2 million of the 1.7 million students that sat for WAEC in June 2014 failed Maths and English. Yet we are quarrelling with World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness ranking. President Goodluck Jonathan should have declared a national emergency! It should have been a core agenda issue for the National Council of States.  The mass failure trend in secondary education has been there for some time. Only 38% of students passed Maths and English with Credits in 2012, it declined to 37% in 2013 and now to 30% in 2014. Higher education is even in a bigger crisis with poor infrastructure and sub-standard academic faculties in many universities and polytechnics. There is no Nigerian university among the top 1600 in the world. Yet, we argue with our competitiveness rankings! We need to be sober and reflect deeply on how low our great citadels of learning previously known globally for their scholarly work have sunk.  Formal vocational education until recent efforts to revive it has nearly become history as we keep producing graduates without relevant employability skills for the needs of industry and the larger society. Hotels in different sizes are springing up everywhere as result of our economic growth, yet there are very few employable formally trained chefs and hoteliers among our young people. Our factories and constructions sites lack technical people who can fix our machines. We have to import tonnes of Indians, Chinese and Israelis to do jobs that should have employed our people.  A poorly educated workforce can definitely not make its industries and economy competitive.  If our GGI ranking is a perception, it needs to also be a sober reality. Rebased economy or not, a key lesson of the GCI ranking is that just because an economy is big, does not guarantee its competitiveness, or competitive return on investments relative to other economies.

The other side to the crisis of our dysfunctional education system is that it will breed and reinforce greater inequality in our society as the typical social mobility that education provides to move up the social ladder disappears for the majority of people. Our social inequality is rising very fast further compounded by massive unemployment and underemployment. This can only lead one direction; greater social crises and misery that become an even more fertile ground for extremism, crime and insecurity that could spread far beyond North Eastern Nigeria.  National competitiveness can definitely not get better under the context of such leading indicators.

What needs to be done? The first thing is to accept our sober reality and not to fight it as a perception. Of all the twelve pillars of the GCI ranking, the foundation issue of our national competitiveness seems to be largely a problem of failed governance and democratic institutions. It is on top of this that all other issues of the other eleven pillars sit. We need to fix our broken and dysfunctional electoral process that throws up the worst or at best our averages for electoral offices. Political parties as critical electoral institutions need to reflect the true plurality of the will and aspiration of the people. This has not happened largely because of their weak internal party democracy and their capture by very narrow elites in both the ruling and opposition parties with largely similar self-interests. Our elections are therefore largely becoming a choice between blue-black and black-blue. Fixing this limited plurality problem in our electoral process and ensuring free and fair elections that drive true accountability and real consequences for poor performance will create genuine incentives for good governance. Civil society and the free press must push for necessary electoral reforms to achieve this. We need to revisit the Uwais Electoral Reform Commission report that addresses these issues. We must ask President Jonathan or whoever the next President is to reopen discussions on electoral reforms.

Olu Akanmu publishes a blog on Strategy and Public Policy on http://olusfile.blogspot.com

Nigeria's Presidential Elections and Potential Democractic Farce

By Olu Akanmu

If President Jonathan contests election against himself, without an opposition, essentially a national referendum on his performance, it is doubtful given his approval rating that he would win more than 50% of the votes.  Public confidence in the government has been eroded by the perception of a weak commitment to fight corruption occasioned by series of corruption allegations and scandals. Whatever is left of public confidence in the administration was further damaged by Chibok, the view that is held by many Nigerians that the administration failed to rise above politics at critical times to provide decisive, rallying and confident-building leadership in the war against terror. Positive directional policy reforms of government in agriculture and the economy have been obliterated by corruption and Chibok.  Social contract of the state with the citizen, that the Nigerian state would guarantee security of life and property for its citizens in exchange for their submission to the state, has virtually collapsed under the current administration. Nigeria is now officially rated the 15^th most failed state in the world, in the same peer group with Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Somalia.  It is not a descent that we would have imagined ten years back.  Watching Afghanistan and Iraq and their bombings on CNN a decade ago used to look so remote, so far away until the bombing of St Theresa’s Church in Abuja on Christmas day, 2011. Whatever political issues are around Boko Haram, the buck stops with the President as the leader of the country to fix them with the right combination of toughness and political dexterity, ensuring that no Nigerian citizen would be murdered in cold blood or kidnapped from fulfilling their life dream.  

As we ascended on the failed state index to fifteenth  position, we continued to descend to the bottom among the least transparent and most corrupt countries in the world. Nigeria was 37^th from bottom among about 180 countries in the Transparency International Index in 2011, 35^th from bottom 2012 and 33^rd from bottom 2013. At the current non-linear growth rate of corruption in Nigeria, it will only take us some few more years to sit firmly among the top ten most corrupt countries in the world.  The twin combination of corruption and the failure of the state to guarantee security of life and property for citizens could further accelerate the descent of the Nigerian state into a de-facto failed state like Somali or South-Sudan. While this may sound alarming, we only need to ponder whether we could have imagined this current state of the nation some years back. Anything is possible if the citizens do nothing about it or if they are constrained by the weakness of our political institutions from doing nothing about the current situation.

Given that currently, President Jonathan is not likely to win more than 50%  approval for his Presidency in a national referendum if he was contesting against himself, ( assuming that there is full and high voter turn-out, for such referendum),  one would have expected that the opposition would be guaranteed a victory at the next Presidential elections. This is not so especially with the state of the opposition.  While there is a significant and large disenchantment with the current administration, the opposition is failing to harness this disenchantment into a rallying movement beyond its members and its traditional loyal base.  A key feature evolving in the next Presidential election is the emergence of a clear large independent swing political voting base, disenchanted with the ruling party but unconvinced by the opposition that it is any different from the ruling party by policy and character to win its votes. This is the base depending on how it votes or its apathy to the election that will swing the Presidential elections assuming the elections next year are truly free and fair.

The opposition seem to be suffering from two major critical problems that stand between it and electoral victory. First is the lack of a rallying clear and articulated governance value that stands clearly above any perception of politics of political exigency and opportunism.  While it is true, that there is no permanent friend in politics but permanent interests, it is also true that those who take this political principle too far cannot stand for any political value, as their politics become a cocktail of political self-interests and exigencies. How come those who were in the vanguard of NADECO in the days of Abacha, with the highest of democratic values are in the same boat with those who will lay a red carpet to welcome from prison those who tormented and maimed members of the same NADECO democratic opposition  as field commanders of the Abacha junta? How frightful it is that those who lay this red carpet are even contemplating picking up the opposition’s Presidential ticket and will expect the old NADECO base to vote for it? The second problem of the opposition is the critical fault-line in its party between the Conservative North and its South Western wing. The Northern Conservative wing of the opposition seem to be in the politics of political exigency of returning power to the North by any  convenient political alliance after learning in three election failures that the North is no longer politically homogenous.  Its conservative governance and right wing values seem to be anathema to the centre-left political origin and the values of its South Western wing. These two related internal contradictions seem to be the bane of the opposition, affecting its homogeneity and delaying the emergence of a rallying Presidential ticket to challenge the ruling party.  How the opposition resolves these internal contradictions will largely determine the outcome of the Presidential elections next year assuming that it will be free and fair.

There are two scenarios that could play out in the political opposition. They are the emergence of sectionally popular but nationally unelectable Presidential ticket, or the emergence of nationally electable Presidential ticket but with the widening and probable cracks in the fault-lines between its conservative North and South West wing which works to weaken its nationally electable Presidential ticket. In the first scenario, the independent swing voters feeling disenchanted and seeing no real alternative to the PDP may be apathetic towards the election. A Presidential victory on a narrow electoral base, below 50% of registered voting base becomes a possibility, assuming a free and fair election.  In the real sense, such victory will be unpopular and genuinely undemocratic as the large majority that became apathetic to the elections would be really expressing a clear lack of choice among the Presidential candidates. The institutional weakness of our electoral system with regards to party financing and its capture by a narrow elite, and weak internal party democracy would have conspired not to offer real choices to the people. With regards to the two scenarios, a potential opposition victory is possible only if its internal democracy is strong enough to resolve its internal contradictions democratically and heal its fault lines.  In the absence of this, the kind of fault-lines that has emerged in its Ogun and Oyo state wings and how it could be potentially exploited by the ruling party at the centre might play out. History beckons.

The challenge of nation building that we face today with regards to national security, healing our ethnic fault lines and building a strong economy that creates wider prosperity for the majority of our people demands a strong and credible President that can rally the nation together.  The emerging scenarios however seem to be leading us to the opposite of this. We seem to be approaching a lame-duck Presidential scenario in which the critical problems of our nation building will become even more magnified to our own embarrassment and that of the international community.  The institutional weakness of our electoral system that does not throw our best men and women forward for national leadership has never been this obvious.  Beyond the Presidential elections, civil society must push for serious and urgent reforms of internal party democracy that ensures stronger and more democratic political parties that reflect the broader will of its members rather than the will of a narrow elite that has captured these critical democratic institutions.  Stronger and more democratic political parties will also attract wider citizen participation as the people begin to see political parties as true institutional mechanisms to influence society and put their democratic aspirations forward.

 It will not matter whether we have a pluralist democracy of many political parties. As long as all these parties lack internal democracy, our democracy will be tantamount to a farce, a government of a narrow elite (that have captured our political parties) for the narrow elite by a narrow elite. What we have today is a near optical illusion of the real democratic aspirations of our people. We have a selectoracy rather than a real democracy. Yet we must not give up on our democratic aspirations. Civil society must push actively for electoral reforms, an agenda that transcends the coming Presidential elections. We must push without compromise for the adoption of the Uwais electoral reform report for laws and regulations that ensure internal party democracy with heavy sanctions for breach of those regulations.  Truly, democracy is a journey but we have today in our emerging presidential elections context shows that we are very far from our democratic destination.

Olu Akanmu publishes a blog on Strategy and Public Policy on http://olusfile.blogspot.com

 

Life After School: Learning, Adaptation and Employability

Life after university is continuous learning, adapting to circumstances and new context of life opportunities that may be unforeseen, developing skills to continuously make oneself employable. This learning was shared with students of the Faculty of Pharmacy, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife at the 50th Anniversary of the Faculty.

http://www.slideshare.net/OluAkanmu/life-after-school-a-35099312

Some Marketing and Business Lessons from my Oddyseey

Some snippets of Marketing and Business Lessons shared with some entrepreneurs over the weekend.

 http://www.slideshare.net/OluAkanmu/marketing-and-business-lessons-from-my-oddysey-a-eo

Building Business and Consumer Insight in a Pervasive World of Internal and External Data

How does the Marketing or Business Segment Manager make sense of the pervasiveness or the tsunami of data to find market insight? The presentation with link below was given to the Nigeria Marketing Research Association last week. Please, share

http://www.slideshare.net/OluAkanmu/building-business-and-consumer-insights-in-a-pervasive-34821858

Let’s talk about INEC, not the letters.

By Olu Akanmu

So much has been said about the letters between former President Obasanjo and President Jonathan. While Chief Obasanjo raised very weighty issues on the affairs of the Nigerian state, President Jonathan’s response seemed to sound like “ whatever you have accused me of doing, I am reading from your playbook”.  Essentially, the Presidency’s response which worked and moderated the caustic nature of the former President’s letter, at least among its sympathizers was “why should the pot call the kettle black?”. It was a good political communication strategy to reframe the issue and the people’s paradigm. It was no longer about the fact that the kettle should not be black but why should it be the black pot that should say it or call attention to it.  We should give a strong pass mark to the Presidential Communication team. They have been well educated in the Republican Karl Rove political communication school perfected in the days of American President George Bush.  It is about reframing the issues to divert attention from relevant substance, move early to create and frame a negative image for a potential opposition, virulently destroy the opposition image such that it will battle and focus on its image and credibility rather than the real substance or the issues of governance. In the Karl Rove political communication school, anything is worth attacking to damage a potential opposition source, and divert attention from the substance of governance in a political campaign; personal life, family, character, personal weakness, family history etc. The Republicans not being able to fault the very successful performance of President Clinton in office, went virulently after his private life to destroy the good governance ideals that Clinton represented.  In the Karl Rove school, if you can’t win on content, make the form the content, reframe the form negatively and make it the content so that the original content no longer becomes the issue.  There is no doubt that the next one year will be interesting. We expect to see more and more of the Karl Rove tactic in play in the political space.

There is an implied impunity in the Karl Rove style of political communication as it has recently been applied here in Nigeria. It sounded like “yes ke, if as a kettle, I am black, so what?”. A related event which manifests this impunity even more profoundly in the public space showing how low,  morality and accountability has descended in our polity is the NNPC missing billion or accounting reconciliation saga. Government communication sounded as follows. It is not true that forty-five billion dollars is missing from NNPC account. It is just ten billion dollars that we could not reconcile or account for. Just ten billion dollars, so there is really no issue.  Again note the substitution of “form” for “content” in the communication strategy. It is not about whether there are huge amount of money that could not be clearly accounted for (content and substance); it is that it is not as big as it was made to look, just ten billion dollars! (form), so the hues and cries were not justifiable.

The Presidential letters and the NNPC missing billion or accounting reconciliation saga should be telling us something bigger than both issues.  That the people of Nigeria do not seem to matter. The political elites seem to be able to do anything and get away with it.  The law enforcement institutions are weak, therefore there is pervasive impunity as the Presidential letters and the NNPC saga showed. The only and last recourse for the people in such circumstance, to ensure that governments govern well is electoral system, their right to vote out governments that betray the wishes of the people. If all institutions of the state fail, the electoral institution must not.  The judiciary at least as we see in Nigeria may not necessarily be the last hope of the common man.  The last hope of the common man has to be INEC or our electoral institution where our votes will count and “we the people” will exercise our right to vote and vote –out governments that betray our will and trust. The only reason that politicians govern well is the fear of losing elections. If our electoral institution cannot guarantee that our votes will count, we can say goodbye to good governance permanently and expect more of the current situation in the many years to come.

There are strong reasons to be concerned about our electoral institution and INEC in particular. The Anambra governorship election was a national embarrassment. INEC has not told the Nigeria people clearly what it will do differently to ensure Anambra does not repeat itself.  In our previous essay titled “The Credibility Nosedive of INEC”, we called for the wholesale adoption of the recommendation of the Uwais panel of electoral reforms which includes, the setting up of independent Electoral Offences Tribunal, the prescribing of severe jail terms for election rigging and a long ban from politics of those found guilty of electoral crimes. There should also be strong sanctions for breach of internal party democracy, the promotion of active citizen participation in policy and politics through a strong civil society, a strong and free press and genuine commitment to public transparency by the government and our courts through the enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act.  We must also reform political party financing, make it transparent with the necessary controls to ensure that political parties as critical electoral institutions remain democratic and are not hijacked by corrupt political elites.  INEC has an opportunity to redress its ignominable performance in the Anambra elections with the coming elections in Ekiti and Osun states as precursor to what must be a free and fair Presidential elections. It does not matter who wins the elections as long as they are free and fair and the will of the people manifestly prevails.  At least we know that we can vote out any elected underperforming government in another four years.  That is the most important check and balance that the people have to moderate the excesses of the political elites.  If it does not work as such, the current level of decadence will continue and our political debates may become permanently framed as which is better between the black kettle and the black pot. It is therefore critical that we shift focus back again to INEC and the necessary electoral reforms that will ensure free and fair elections and good governance.  Therefore, compatriots, beyond the Presidential letters, it should really be about INEC.

Olu Akanmu, a company executive publishes a blog on Strategy and Public Policy on www.olusfile.blogspot.com

 

Nigeria's Further Failing Electoral Institution

By Olu Akanmu

It is an understatement that the inconclusive Anambra gubernatorial election is a big national embarrassment.  It could not have been imagined before the election, with the overwhelming concentration of electoral resources and security on the said election that we would come this low. INEC could not conduct a controversy-free election in one state, yet it plans to do a presidential election in thirty-six states. Anambra might be the sad prelude to the coming presidential elections in the unfortunate shape of things to come. Free and fair election is the bedrock of a democratic system, where the people as the ultimate sovereign, express their will in the choice of candidates who will govern them. The people do not do this every day but every four years. The election therefore is the only instrument of people’s sovereignty in a democratic state. When elections are compromised, or when they are neither free nor fair, we cannot have “the true government of the people by the people for the people”. The only reason politicians perform and govern well is the fear of being voted out by the people if they misgovern in the next election. If we can therefore not conduct a free and fair election where the people can genuinely express their will, we can say a permanent goodbye to good governance.

While we believe that the controversial election and its outcome would be tested in the law courts, the court of public opinion is already passing its judgment on INEC. The freeness and fairness of an election is a question of justice in which reality and perception must ally. A famous legal maxim based on the principles of natural justice says that “justice must on only be done but it must be seen to have been done”. In the case of Anambra elections, no matter what Jega and INEC say, we say that elections must not only be free and fair, they must be seen to have been fair. If elections did not take place in the stronghold of certain candidates,  and even a key candidate in the elections was disenfranchised from voting because his name could not be found on the voters register, that election cannot be said to be just, free and fair.  It does not matter whether INEC wants to conduct a supplementary election. The mere inconclusiveness of the election as admitted by INEC taints the election fundamentally and no supplementary exercise would adequately make up for it.

A cornerstone of a free and fair election is the freedom to choose a candidate without any form of pressure on the polling day. I should be making my choice of the electoral candidate largely from my own freewill. Hence, the polling station is designed to give voters the privacy to make their choice without any influence. It is also the reason why elections are conducted on the same day, at the same time. It is recognized as an electoral fairness principle that the choice of candidate should not in any way be influenced by the momentum of results of the same election from somewhere else. For the voters in the areas where INEC would want to conduct a supplementary election, it is certain that their choice would be significantly influenced by the electoral momentum from the areas where INEC has announced its inconclusive results. Whatever happens at the supplementary elections on November 30, its outcome cannot therefore be said to be just, free and fair.

We should not be impressed by the attempt of INEC to speak with both sides of the mouth. On one hand, it says that “it regrets shattering the expectations of Nigerians” and that the election was far below the people’s expectations, yet at the same time it argues that a substantial part of the elections comply with the electoral act. What an ambiguity! It is like saying an election is not fair on one hand, yet fair on the other hand. INEC has substantially lost credibility and the confidence of the Nigerian people in its ability to conduct a free and fair election.

A key player in this unfolding sad saga of INEC is its Chairman, Atahiru Jega, whose strong patriotic credentials is being eroded by the day. We all know Professor Jega’s antecedents in civil society and academia. His story might however be confirming very strongly that patriotic individuals without strong institutional support for the implementation of their patriotic objectives might be consumed by the corrupt and decadent institutions they lead. Jega as an individual cannot guarantee us a free and fair election without a strong electoral institution and a system of laws and enforcement institutions that genuinely and uncompromisingly promote free and fair election.  President Jonathan and the National Assembly had chosen largely to ignore the good recommendations of the Uwais panel on electoral reforms.  These include the criminalization of electoral offences and a strong independent electoral offences commission to prosecute electoral crimes and a long ban from politics of those found guilty of election rigging. The sheer impunity with which Nigerian politicians conduct electoral crimes is because the institutional mechanisms to sanction and punish their criminal behavior are virtually non-existent. Other recommendations of the Uwais report include limits and transparency of political party funding to reduce the corrupt influence of moneybags in elections. Had we have implemented the recommendations of the Uwais electoral reform commission; we would not be having the debacle in Anambra state today. In a way, the problem in Anambra state is also due to the lack of genuine will of the part of the President Jonathan and the National Assembly to strengthen our electoral institutions and guarantee for our people the right to a free and fair election.  

The Anambra electoral debacle has exposed the institutional weakness of INEC to the core.  Its public credibility and confidence have significantly nosedived. The expectations of a free and fair election in 2015 might have been put in abeyance. Yet, we must not give up the pressure to reform. We are a nation that has many times pulled back from the falling edge of a cliff. We can still do it now if we all cry out.

Olu Akanmu is a company executive. He publishes a blog on Strategy and Public Policy on http://olusfile.blogspot.com