Citizens developing at an evolutionary organic rate yet demand radical and revolutionary leadership 

By Ayo Akinfe 

(1) Whenever I agonise over how under-developed Nigeria is and how developed it should be, I always ask myself whether we as a people are not responsible for our own plight. There is a popular school of thought that the masses are fine but the problem is just bad leadership. However, does this theory stand up to scrutiny?

(2) When I look at the history of Europe and North America, what I find is that nations like Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, USA, Canada, etc, tended to have developed organically. It was only really in the 20th century that we saw dynamic and radical leadership used to speed up the process of national development 

(3) Very few industrialised countries were developed by the kind of dynamic leadership we are demanding in Nigeria today. If we look back historically, this idea of radical leadership forcing the pace of development only began in 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and introduced an unprecedented industrialisation programme to convert the country from a rural and peasant backwater into an industrial and military global super power. It led to a 28% year-on-year growth in GDP for about a decade. This concept of leadership forcing the pace of development was later adopted by the madman Adolf Hitler, who made Germany the world’s most industrialised nation by 1940, with unprecedented innovations. He just kept building Panzer tanks that got quicker and were stronger by the day. Everything he built was bigger, faster, stronger, quicker, talker, wider, etc than what had previously existed 

(4) If we want to be honest with ourselves, the principle of dynamic leadership developing a nation is actually very Asiatic. After World War Two, we saw nations like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and now China and Vietnam fast-track their development with unprecedented speed thanks to the actions of their governments. Today, India, Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand, etc have all entered the fray 

(5) Now, if you look across the African continent, it is only really in Rwanda and Ethiopia that you are seeing governments leading from the front. Elsewhere, development is more evolutionary, with nations by and large developing at the rate of the citizenry 

(6) Our unique problem in Nigeria is that our citizenry demands that the country develops at a faster rate than natural evolution. We have a populace of about 200m and a population growth rate of about 3%. Our economy is projected to grow by about 2% in 2019, meaning we already have a shortfall. By my calculations, the citizen-led evolutionary growth of the economy stands at no more than 1%, yet we want 10% GDP growth rates to meet our challenges. This is why we are so desperate for a messiah to take us to the Promised Land 

(7) Since 1999, presidents Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan and Buhari have been a genuine reflection of the average Nigerian. None of them have been radical, visionary or done anything out of the ordinary as say Muhammad Mahathir did in Malaysia or Lee Kuan Yew did in Singapore. Our problem is we want Asian Tiger levels of economic growth but want it provided “from above” by a messiah. As a result, we will always be disappointed with our leaders because they are genuine mirror reflections of who we are as a people. Our leaders are a mirror image is the average Nigerian

(8) Do you know that Singapore has never had a dominant culture to which immigrants could assimilate even though Malay was the dominant language. They were a diverse nation like Nigeria but Prime Minister Lee fast-tracked matters and created a unique Singaporean identity in the 1970s and 1980s, which heavily recognised racial consciousness within the umbrella of multiculturalism. He then set about working to establish Singapore as an international financial centre and then invited US companies like Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard and General Electric into the economy. One other radical measure he introduced was public caning for 42 offences

(9) Nigerians need to ask themselves what they really want. Are they prepared to elect a radical leader to introduce aggressive and unpopular measures that will deliver double digit economic growth including public flogging, converting churches and mosques into libraries, taxing owambes, etc or do they just want to bubble along organically?

(10) In this picture for instance are boats built out of concrete during World War One. They were built in Canada and the US Navy bought 24 of them in 1918 because they needed ships but because there was a shortage of steel, concrete was used instead. These boats worked perfectly well and were re-introduced during World War Two. They performed a massive role during the D-Day Normandy landings. Now, ask yourselves if we are that innovative as a people. Has anyone in the Niger Delta ever come up with the idea of manufacturing concrete ships to radically change the economy of the area. If we are not that dynamic in our thinking, do we really have the moral right to demand that our leaders are?