Opinion: Motion without movement: How did we get here ? (3)

By Isaac Chii Nwaogwugwu

A modern state is driven by its ideological base.

Ideology is the anchor bolt of policies and it defines the relationship between the state, the people and the market.

It depicts the level and depth of involvement of the three in the economy.

It helps the government to approach development from an ordered sequential perspective. Policies get well-articulated and implemented as predetermined by the philosophical paradigms. That is the meaning of ideology.

We got here because of ideological confusion that made us abandon the mixed economic thought that tended towards welfarism in favour of the other that is inclined towards pure capitalism even when our economy was characterised by infancy of the private sector and lack of standard socioeconomic infrastructure.

We jettisoned the system that birthed the development plans which made a global appraisal of resource availability to the country and the responsibilities to which they would be committed in a schedule of priority.

Those term plans were products of vision that translated into concrete goals and targets.

But we trashed them and thus lost policy focus and underpin ever since.

Today, it is an annual plan and tomorrow it is a rolling plan or such other contemptuous developmental concepts the design of which rattles the brain of policy makers.

That is how we got here. We got here because we relegated the feeder sector, agriculture to the background in spite of the fact that it is the mainstay and foundation of most economies.

Thus, despite that we are endowed with land and manpower that could have been harnessed to the benefit of the nation we looked elsewhere, towards the oil sector where we lacked in technology and capital.

The development of the agricultural sector would have caused an increased income for the subsistence, marginal and large-scale farmers while feeding the industry with raw materials, boosting export and slowing down the tide of rural-urban migration.

Today we are import-dependent for food and raw materials.

That is how we got here. Economies are built on physical, social and economic infrastructure such as educational institutions (basic, tertiary, vocational and professional), hospitals, roads, bridges, dams, refineries, gas and power plants, railways, waterways, airports and airways sea ports .

When these are of standard harmony the economy experiences a boost and boom. We are here because we have either refused to develop our infrastructure or have simply destroyed whatever we had.

How can a country move forward when it does not understand the place of human capital development in growth trajectories?

The inventiveness of the 6-3-3 model of our basic education has been killed. The domains of colleges, polytechnics and universities have been infiltrated and corrupted.

The classrooms, workshops and laboratories are archaic and crowded with disproportionate teacherstudent ratio.

Hospitals of all categories have become killing fields as they get continually starved of doctors and other health workers as well as facilities.

Growth in road networks remains stunted as the available ones have been reconfigured by neglect to death traps.

Our railway lines and operations continue to wallow in medieval state while the mechanism of waterway transport system is probably yet to be understood by us. These are the reasons why we are still here.

What about our refineries and power plants that are always undergoing turnaround maintenance. We cannot refine enough crude for our domestic consumption.

We have to rely on imports to power our engines and industries. After sixty year, we are still struggling to generate a mere 5,000 megawatts of electricity.

Producers spend close to 50 per cent of their budgets on electric power generation through small and industrial generators yet we have GENCOs and DISCOs that were supposed to grant new life to that sector leveraging state powers to remain afloat.

We have numerous airports yet convenient air travel is far from the reach of Nigerians as the sector remains backward.

The airports are in constant state of closure and repairs that more or less serve as programmed revenue leakage strategy.

The sea ports have been allowed to decay while services are restricted to one. How can a country surrounded by deep waters have only one functional seaport at Apapa?

What happened to the Warri, Port Harcourt and Calabar ports? Your guise is as good as mine and that is why we are here.

Yes, we got here consequent on incongruence of policies. Often times than not, our education policies don’t align with developmental strategies which in turn are misplaced against trade, external account management and financing policies.

Our fiscal policy regimes seem to be singing on a tenor syllable whereas the monetary policy echoes in a bass.

We are here because our white papers might be reflective of vision, innovation and commitment while the implementation of the same is either haphazard and uncertain or completely discarded.

We adopt global reform initiatives without adapting and domesticating the same.

We embraced austerity measures, structural adjustment programmes, globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, commercialisation, public sector reform and such other omnibus economic reform prescriptions even when they are not compatible with our economy.

That is why we are here. Greed, self-interest, injustice, inhumanity, insecurity, lawlessness, hypocrisy, extremism and religious bigotry, ethnic rivalry and subjugation have become conspicuous sign posts of our everyday existence.

We seem to have lost it all because of our new values that have been embellished by false sophistry and rearward mentality of power acquisition and wielding.

We have destroyed the three institutions that breed good and patriotic citizens: the family, religious and educational institutions.

The family now constitutes of parents that will deliberately inculcate the wrong values in their children as strategies for survival.

They will teach them how to circumvent rules and regulations and how not to tolerate fellow citizens of different ethnic or religious stocks.

We now have parents who celebrate sudden wealth of their kids even when they have no known capacity, trade or profession to give rise to such income.

That’s why we are here. Religious organisations have equally been contaminated. Many of them have transformed into business houses that preach material prosperity rather than spirituality.

Others are breeding grounds of hate and extremism. Public educational institutions are comatose while the private ones are largely Automated Teller Machines of some bunch of greedy proprietors that are occupying the space vacated by the state. It is mostly about the money.

That is why we are still here. We re hypocrites that chose to live in self-denial. We plot to destroy every fabric of the society and then shift the blame to others.

READ ALSO: Opinion: Motion without movement: How did we get here?

We collude with foreigners to rape our country because of the little gains that eventually spell doom for our value and worth.

We celebrate all standards of mediocrity as we kill merit and initiatives.

We make demands on fellow citizens and organisations yet we condone the arrogance and ineptitude of the government and its agencies.

That is why corruption and corruptible practices reign supreme in our land. That is why public office holders are not accountable to us.

That is why we break the laws and damn the consequences. And that is why we are a conquered people in our own country.

The honour of being a citizen of a country tends to diminish for a Nigerian either at home or abroad because of our own selfinflicted injuries. And we keep asking the question: how did we get here?