Reflections on the philosophy of development

Ihave become a regular reader of the Economist Digest, an online publication of DAWN. The acronym stands for Development Agenda of Western Nigeria. It is, to quote from its website, “managers of Southwest Nigeria integration agenda.” It makes me jealous.

I will tell you why I find both the publication and DAWN itself fascinating.

Firstly, the mission statement of DAWN. And it is this: “the overall objective of the Development Agenda is to build our Region on stable foundations for sustainable growth and development anchored on good governance and social harmony.”

Secondly, DAWN promotes the South-West as a law and order region. This was the region once described as the wild, wild west by the late prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in those heady days of our first republic politics characterised by violence, of which the Western Region held the near monopoly. To see the region wearing its new toga of peace is to appreciate how far the people have come in owning themselves and taking responsibilities for what they do to or for their region. They prefer to pull their resources and energy to do what they ought to do for the region. I am sure the words of the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who told his people they must be good Yoruba before they could be good Nigerians, must be ringing in their ears.

The online publication contains a digest of important weekly happenings in the six states carved out of the Western Region, now renamed in our endless attempt to promote progress and development on the basis of name changes, as South-West geo-political zone. You have to read the publication to appreciate the thinking of the state governors and see the steady movement of the region along the weary and tortuous path of social and economic development in a country that refuses to take advantage of its enormous human and natural resource endowments to make its potential greatness great in fact.

I find it fascinating because there are lessons for the rest of the country. The first and the most important lesson is that development is essentially local. It seems to me that this is what the state governors are promoting. The leaders of the region duly appreciate this, and have, therefore, taken or are taking steps to begin the process of national development by developing their region, and thus, offering themselves as examples to follow as thinkers and promoters of an inclusive development agenda that moves the region from point A to point B with the states in the zone cuing into it. The governors of the six states recognise the importance of pulling together towards a determined common agenda. They should have no apologies for doing this while their counterparts in some of the states seem pathetically bereft of ideas of how to approach the development of their states.

Come to think of it, we often speak glibly of something vaguely called comprehensive national development by which we mean that Nigeria must have and implement one objective development agenda in which all the states wear the same happy faces of modern states. It is a fallacy that has no basis in the history of human development. There is really no such thing as national development. National development is but an aggregation of local developments.

Sadly, we have been led to believe that in a federal system of government, the responsibility for national development rests squarely on the Federal Government. It is, we verily believe, the only agency of national development; hence our clamour for federal presence in all the states. It is based on the belief, a wrong one at that, that the federal presence in a particular state with the construction of roads or hospitals, is part of the comprehensive national development. This is a warped philosophy borne out of the belief that in a federal system the constituent units are entitled to the same federal largesse and that only this would make for an even or uneven national development. It is all wrong.

The rest of the states or geo-political zones must wake up. The development of each state or geo-political zone is not the business of the Federal Government. It is the business of each state and each region. States waiting for the federal might to magically transform them into an Asian Tiger nation in the time it takes to spell tiger, are bound to wait for Godot. Godot would never come. I am happy to see that the governors of the South-West are not sold on the unproductive indulgence of waiting for a man they know only too well would not come. Today, each state in the region is an inviting picture of thinkers, not of political jobbers – the latter being men who sought power because political power is sweet but have no idea how it should be used for the greater good of the greater number of the people.

It seems to me that it should be possible for us to change the picture and pace of our national development if we subscribe to state creation as a philosophy of local development, not as pockets of fiefdoms, and the philosophy of geo-political co-operation as the basis for developing each state in the context of the overall development of each geo-political zone.

I know this is easier said than done. It feels almost foolish to argue for the infusion of intellectualism in a political system that is forever suspicious of such philosophy. But I fear that what is happening in the South-West suggests that unless the rest of the states wake up, Nigeria would become a much more divided nation than it is now, in terms of development. Some of the states would, for a long time, remain arid deserts left behind by development and others would deliver on the promises of modern development. Part of the reason for the demand for restructuring is to free states that want to develop from being held down by states waiting for Godot.