Nigeria - the Giant of Africa?

I’ve just returned from a short trip to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. It’s an interesting time to visit, given that Nigeria has just been identified as one of the ‘MINT’ countries, (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) hailed as the next ‘powerhouses’ after the BRICs and CIVETs, as economies to watch. Although I was familiar with Nigeria’s south west, around Ibadan, the political capital of Abuja is somewhere I hadn’t previously visited – so it was indeed a treat to see it at last. The hospitality given to us was, as ever, as warm as the west African sunshine and we were treated like VIPs.  Thanks to everyone involved for such a wonderful visit.

That Nigeria is joining a coterie of countries with emerging strong economies was greeted with headlines such as: “Where millionaires live on potholed streets that flood”, in The Guardian.  The article continues by suggesting that Nigeria’s growth has failed to radiate: “Tucked behind high walls, there are more millionaires living in this part of Lagos (Ikoyi) than anywhere in Africa, and most cities of the world. But the potholes are some of the city’s worst and flooding caused by blocked drains quickly turns roads into rivers, where sometimes barefooted fruit-sellers can be seen wading through with baskets on their heads”.  Certainly Nigeria is a country of contrasts and contradictions: although it’s coming to rival South Africa as Africa’s largest economy, two thirds of Nigerians live in what has been described as ‘crushing poverty’.  In the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index of 2014, Nigeria fell nine places to 147^th out of 189 countries due to corruption and lack of transparency and Nigerians themselves say that getting on in the economy is all about ‘knowing someone’.

Ruchir Sharma of the Morgan Stanley Bank, in his  new book “The Breakout Nations” argues that Nigeria has ‘turned a corner’, yet Obadiah Mailafia, an economist writing in the Nigerian newspaper BusinessDay (3/2/14)  says that “Our public institutions remain weak while the political elites remain fractious. Our infrastructures are shambolic. The role of law remains weak”.

Many of our Leeds Met PhD students are wading in bravely to address key issues such as these affecting Nigeria’s economic and social wellbeing. I was invited to Nigeria as the University’s Director of Postgraduate Research Students, along with the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, (Prof. Andrew Slade), Dr. Martin Samy, the instigator of the Nigerian PhD programme, and eight other colleagues, to attend Leeds Metropolitan University Faculty of Business and Law’s conference for their Nigerian PhD students. The aim was for these PhD students to present their work to date.  The conference was made possible by the generous support of the Niger Delta Development Commission and we were privileged to have the attendance of the Managing Director of the NDDC, Sir Bassey Dan Abia, as well as Dr. Itotenaan Henry Ogiri, one of its executive directors, who recently completed his PhD at Leeds Met. As well as the PhD students, the conference was attended by their Nigerian supervisors, and a range of other esteemed guests, including Senator Emmanuel Edesiri Aguariawoda, who represents part of the Delta Region.

One of my pleasant though nerve wracking tasks was to judge the best PhD student presentation, along with Professor Bankole Sodipo and Professor Sheriffdean Tella. We all agreed on the winners out of the twenty presenters – though we had to award two prizes rather than one. These were to Heineken Lokpobiri, a Senator in his day job, who was looking at Environmental Rights in the Niger Delta, and Williams Makinde, an executive director with Daar Communications, looking at the supply/demand gap challenge facing small and medium enterprises in agribusiness.

Senator Lokpobiri is taking on one of the most serious issues to affect Nigeria over the last 60 years – the effect on the peoples of the Delta of oil and gas exploration. The government has responded harshly in the past to the protesters. It led to the death of the writer and environmental activist, Ken Saro Wiwa who was hanged by the government in 1995 along with eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. This act led to international outrage, and Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth for three years. The fact that it is now permissible to question the enforceability of environmental rights shows how much Nigeria has changed politically. Indeed, the Niger Delta Development Commission seems determined to further address the social and environmental agenda of the region.  Heineken Lokpobiri spoke in his presentation of the “unimaginable environmental damage” and of the need to reform environmental laws which were “obsolete, inadequate and unenforceable”. His contribution will be to develop a legal framework to guarantee the efficient practice of environmental rights and enforcement.

Williams Makinde’s PhD addresses another key aspect of poverty alleviation - the lack of access to financing for small farmers, which affects the ability of agribusiness SMEs to develop and thus to fill the ‘missing middle’ in Nigeria’s agro-industry value chain.  Small-scale farmers play a vital role in contributing to Nigeria’s GDP yet only 18% have access to financial services such as credit schemes.  This study will look at what kinds of financial products should be designed and how small farmers can qualify for credit schemes, along with redefining farm land titles from a legal point of view so that land can be used as collateral.

It’s not possible here to mention all the other PhD projects, but they address essential aspects of Nigeria’s continuing development, such as citizen participation in constitution making, land rights, entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, environmental accounting, reform of the banking sector, the role of privatization, urban growth, and the socio-political determinants of terrorism. What they have in common is making Nigeria a more secure, prosperous country, and as we know, this is what builds the social determinants of health.

I had the opportunity to give a conference address and as so many PhD students had shared their experience, I started by briefly sharing mine. My PhD work was on the delivery of the universal primary education policy in Botswana, where I was living in the 1970s. PhD study has changed greatly  in the intervening years: then it was very much about individual interests, there wasn’t much emphasis on dissemination and it was a rather academic exercise.  Doing a PhD belonged to an exclusive club. Now, I argued, PhDs need to be positioned at “the points where education, training, research, work and career development intersect.” (Cumming, 2010). There’s much more focus on application and on meeting policy objectives, of feeding in recommendations made by in the dissertation to enable action to be taken. It’s no longer merely an academic exercise and no longer available only to the few. It was great to see so many Nigerian senior employees undertaking their studies, people with many years of experience, as well as those at relatively junior stages of their career.

It's important to stress that, as the former ‘colonial masters’ of  Nigeria and many other African countries,  that we were coming as equal partners. The writer Binyavanga Wainana, says in ‘How not to write about Africa in 2012—a guide’, says that Africa will engage with those who address Africans as equals. Clearly there are power and privilege differentials, much of it attached to ‘whiteness’ but we hope that Leeds Met’s involvement is in the spirit of support rather than of being neo-colonialist. We are responding to the clear needs of Nigeria and of Africa generally, which bears the majority of the world’s disease burden and has not made the developmental gains expected by the Millennium Development Goals. To quote Archbishop Desmond Tutu: ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you are on the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.’ Nigeria is not a mouse, but I hope you get the point.

As a University with strong moral concerns, we cannot be neutral, and with our existing links to many African countries, it seems a natural continent on which to support the development of PhD scholars who can address their country’s concerns. This development is necessary to challenge the Eurocentricity of much theory and philosophy; Bryceson (2012:300) speaking of ‘development’ generally, argues that, “the most effective way of challenging external donors agencies’ misguided influence, Western or indeed also eastern in the near future, is for theoretical agency to be grounded in Africa”. It was good to see our PhD scholars questioning the applicability of western theories to the African situation. Thus Dr. Henry Ogiri, who was recently awarded his PhD by Leeds Met, talked about rejecting stakeholder theory in his examination of corporate social responsibility formulation and implementation, and developing legitimacy theory instead. His work is concerned, essentially, with the ethical behavior of Nigerians firms, and argues that these should conform to international standards. Indeed, it is only in this way that Nigeria will be taken seriously by the international community, thus attracting the investment that Nigeria needs to increase the economic and social health and wellbeing of its people.  Henry is following in the line of other Nigerians and Africans who have questioned the value of western theory and instead are developing ‘theoretical agency grounded in Africa’. One Nigerian who massively affected my thinking on this issue is the Nigerian feminist and social anthropologist Ifi Amadiume, who said that it was for Nigerians to write about and analyze Nigerian culture, not outsiders who possibly would never understand that culture. She continues to write and discuss and I’d recommend her work if you haven’t come across it yet.

Having theoretical agency and keeping Nigerian talent at home means that Nigeria stands more chance of developing in the way that it wants rather than mimicking development in the global North or neglecting its people in the emphasis on economic development. The great Ghanaian leader, the first President of the first African country to break free from British colonialism, said “We shall measure our progress by the improvement in the health of our people. The welfare of our people is our chief pride, and it is by this that we ask to be judged.”

Another great Ghanaian, Kofi Annan, when he was UN Secretary General, said something similar: “A healthy and prosperous society is not just about attainment of numerical benchmarks, but it also requires investment in people - their health, their education and their security. It takes care of all and allows all of its members to participate in decision making.”

Thus perhaps in the way that our PhD students are questioning how to bring about ‘development’, there is room for discussion of ‘development’ actually means.

The PhD programme, I suggested, means that brain gain doesn’t lead to brain drain, which is an accompanying risk of  higher education undertaken overseas. Although students can be exposed to all sorts useful ideas abroad, many do not return.  (The diaspora can and does, play an important role. See for example, http://www.meetup.com/Nigerianthinkers/). I raised the question of whether the same outcomes can be achieved by studying locally, and I think they can. (See Dixey 2012).  Moreover, having groups of students working on related areas can lead to the critical mass needed to tackle these ‘wicked’ problems. Examples could be women’s roles in business, trading and access to credit; the skills-gap that is fuelling unemployment, especially among young people; the digital divide and how poorer communities can access new technologies; examining household expenditure at different income levels to understand how poorer households budget; monitoring the effect of electrification and “Light-Up Nigeria”; the list is endless. But if say, ten to twenty PhD students were all working on different aspects of the same problem, real advances could be made.

One example of a serious problem affecting Nigeria is that of road safety. It’s an issue that no one seems to be addressing, and the way that new roads are being built might only be adding to the carnage. Nigeria has the third highest rate of road fatalities in the world. In 2012, there were 4,260 road deaths, and with the number of cars set to rise from 8 million (most of them seem to be in Abuja!) to 40 million by 2020, the situation will only get worse. I did a very small piece of research around Ibadan between 1992 and 1994, where I was intrigued by seeing so many motorcyclists not bothering to wear cycle helmets. My line of enquiry led me to interview babalawo (Ifa priests) and a whole range of other people, and led to an fascinating (at least to me) exploration of cultural beliefs, fatalism and religion, leading to a single paper (Dixey 1999). How much powerful it would be to have up to a dozen PhD students all working on Nigeria’s road safety problem, with road engineers, urban designers, psychologists, education specialists, safety experts, car designers, sociologists, policy analysts, all taking their separate aspects but coming together to add to a holistic analysis and solution-finding. We saw incidents even in the few days that we spent in Abuja of near-collisions and one actual one with a four wheeled drive vehicle in the storm ditch and two cars parked nearby on the highway. These incidents can be more off-putting to foreign investors risking the lives of their staff on Nigeria’s roads than the activities of the Boko Haram Islamists in the northeast.

Nigeria is viewed by many Africans as the “Giant of Africa”, the senior brother. It has given the world an impressive list of Nigerian writers, thinkers, social scientists, and artists – see for example http://www.ranker.com/list/famous-authors-from-nigeria/reference

Nigeria is the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of population (170 million). It has the seventh (some people say sixth) largest population in the world. It deserves to have the highest number of PhD holders in Africa.

References

Bryceson, D.F. (2012) Discovery and denial: Social science theory and interdisciplinarity in African Studies. African Affairs, 111, 443, April, 281-302

Cumming, J. (2010) Doctoral enterprise: A holistic conception of evolving practices and arrangements. Studies in Higher Education, 35, 25-39

Dixey, R. (1999) Fatalism, accident causation and prevention: Lessons for health promotion from a study in a Yoruba town, Nigeria. Health Education Research, 14,2, 197-208

Dixey, R. (2012) Delivering Creative Education for Health Promoters in Africa—Towards Critical Mass by “Going Global and Staying Local”. Creative Education 2012. Vol.3, Special Issue, 749-754