Nigeria’s army of 50 million

When the National Leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, said a few weeks ago that the Federal Government of Nigeria should recruit 50 million youths into the armed forces to tackle insecurity in the country, he was roundly mocked in both mainstream and social media. However, I personally thought that this is one of the most brilliant policy ideas I have heard in Nigeria for a long time, and one that can reinvent the whole idea of governance in the country.

It is unfortunate that rather than reflection and debate, Tinubu’s statement was met with such widespread dismissal and mockery. But it is even more unfortunate that someone as highly placed as the national leader of a ruling party in Nigeria, himself a presidential hopeful, would speak about policy initiatives in so off-handedly a manner that they would be forced to ‘deny’ or ‘clarify’ what everyone had heard. The whole episode illustrates one of the biggest problems with our politics, which is that it is almost always empty of policy.

Politicians and political parties are a major engine for generating public policy, and the only ones for enacting them into concrete laws. This is why political parties are also research institutions. But because serious consideration of policy tends to be absent from our politics, our political parties, in government or opposition, seldom feel the need to turn themselves into proper organs for doing research, fact-finding and consultation needed to generate and implement policies for solving problems beyond slogans and talking points during or in-between elections.

Perhaps the point is belaboured, but the only way democratic politics can become a vehicle for progressive development is to frame politics around policies that are grounded in facts and data, and by all actors within and outside of government. Without this, our politics will continue to be shallow and centred on personalities, rather than issues, while the problems will remain or compound, even as we recycle politicians, parties or governments.

Otherwise, I should think that there is much to be gained from the idea that the federal government should recruit 50 million youths to tackle insecurity in Nigeria. First of all, the very idea of recruiting 50 million youths into the security agencies or wherever, whether achievable or not, says something new about the nature of governance in Nigeria in terms of matching the scale of solutions to problems.

All too frequently, when governments approach problems in education, unemployment, health, or insecurity, the scale of the solution tends to fall far too short of the problem, and often no more than tokenistic, to the extent that what little is achieved is quickly overran by the weight of the actual problem on the ground. It is good to have a rail line connecting Kaduna to Abuja, for example, but if roads and air networks also don’t work optimally, your rail line will soon collapse.

So the very idea that we need as many as 50 million people in jobs to approach the problem of insecurity in Nigeria expands our imaginative horizon of what is possible, even if, in the end, you can only achieve just 20 per cent of that. The whole politics of 2023 elections, and this is clearly about that, will look much different, if instead laughing Tinubu off and the issue fizzling out in the media as quickly as it had appeared, we challenge him to produce a serious policy document on how even the five million he later said can work out, particularly with regard to funding the scheme.

Tinubu may or may not have thought through his ideas clearly before airing them, but if the reaction had been more constructively engaging, this would perhaps challenge him and his team to rethink things out more seriously, or conversely expose them for not being serious about solving problems. Moreover, it could compel other presidential hopefuls to also take policy more seriously in the area of insecurity or others, and thus enrich our politics and democracy more broadly.

Second, Tinubu’s idea addresses the thorniest ideological problem of governance in Nigeria, that is, what roles should the government play and to what extent? The idea that government has only a limited role in the economy and society has been so widely accepted in Nigeria you would think it is a divine revelation in the Bible or Qur’an. But it isn’t. It is a human idea, and not the only one nor necessarily the best one in all contexts and at all times. In a ‘virgin’ economic setting such as ours, where there are far more people outside of the formal economy than within it, the government can do much more than is often widely assumed.

So stripped to the bones, Tinubu is simply saying that the federal government can in fact create five, ten, twenty or more million jobs directly. Let us start with recruiting 10 million youths, or just 20 per cent of the original 50 million. If we split that into two and recruit the first half equally among the 36 states and the FCT, and the other half according population size, we will have a minimum of 135,000 new jobs per state, with states like Lagos or Kano having considerably more. That alone will take off the streets not only the sources from which militants, bandits, kidnappers and Boko Haram terrorists recruit, as Tinubu rightly said, but also from organisations and movements like #EndSARS, IPOB, OPC and Arewa whatever. And a whole new idea and experience of Nigeria emerges.

But what would they do? A major criticism against this idea is that Nigeria will then have an over-bloated armed forces, larger than China, India or the United States. This is true. But it is also part of what makes this idea brilliant. A nation’s army can be deployed in any capacity the government deems fit. It is as simple as that. They can wear uniforms, can have some rudimentary military drills, but the most important thing is the discipline and patriotism that comes with being part of the uniformed services.

They don’t need to be armed or engage in any security operations. They just need to work and be paid reasonably well and offered opportunities for a better future at the end of service, which itself can be fixed for say five to 10 years, various terms and conditions applying. So they can be deployed to build roads, houses, dams, bridges, rail tracks, schools and hospitals, parks, theatres, or plant trees, work in factories, forests, farms, offices, and homes. It is possible that the multiplier effects resulting from injecting such a massive amount of labour into the formal economy across all sectors could double or ripple Nigeria’s gross domestic product within a few years.

That leaves the most important question of how to pay the new recruits and to fund the projects they would work on. If we looked hard enough, this too is not impossible and might be the easiest of all. And yes, it is all too theoretical. But all human practice has an underlying theory, whether the practitioner is aware or not. More than that, this idea has worked elsewhere before and can work here too.