Kingsley Moghalu
The reason Nigeria is distressed and divided is not because it is impossible for Nigeria to prosper as one country because we have different religions/tribes. It’s because there is no leadership with a vision that can unite us around a common purpose. Differences can be managed.
Plural societies like India and USA and many others exist, but the key is to create, as in America at its founding, some overarching sense of purpose and “manifest destiny” that keeps citizens focused on something higher than themselves and can help moderate divisions. In my book “Emerging Africa: How the Global Economy’s ‘Last Frontier’ Can Prosper and Matter,” I laid out the secrets of nation building based on a worldview that creates prosperity for citizens, which is key. This process is called “manufacturing consent”. You can call it “stakeholder management” or, more crassly as is our wont in Nigeria, “carry us along (!)” That takes good governance based on transformation strategy.
And it requires a commitment to inclusion— justice and equity on the one hand, and a consultative approach to governance that includes citizens and manages diversity effectively.
I know that many have given up on our country and its possibilities, and have come to believe there is an ingrained incompatibility among its component ethnic nationalities. We can accept this as destiny, or we can create a different future. It’s a choice, and every choice has consequences.
If we choose the latter, the two paths to that future lie in (a) a constitutional restructuring of the Nigerian State, the possibilities of which are hobbled by the current Constitution and unitary governance in practice, and (b) we must revisit our leadership selection dynamics, understanding that “politics” or “democracy” as we know it in our backward political culture, may not be able to produce the best national leaders, and that other forms of consensus are required in addition to politics.
Democracy is not the same everywhere. The Swiss have the most direct democracy. Many Americans argue that the system of Electoral College “electors” with weighted votes based on the population of individual states (in which a candidate, as happened to Hilary Clinton, can win the popular vote and yet lose the election) is undemocratic. But that is their system. We can build ours, with our own circumstances in mind.
. Moghalu, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, is a political economist, lawyer, former United Nations official, and professor of International Business and public policy at the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy