Governance, apologies, and the Road Not Taken

shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

– From The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost, 1874-1963

In Nigeria, this is a season of reflections and appraisals, including self-appraisals, as one political dispensation comes to an end for another to begin. In just about a month from today, political power will change hands at the centre and in most states of the federation.

This transition period has also become, quite interestingly, a season of apologies for shortcomings, missed targets and opportunities, less-than-expected performances and, perhaps, for outright failures in some areas by those who have held the reins of power in the past four or eight years.

But beyond what could easily pass for just the normal end-of-tenure speeches, these apologies and praises offer the Nigerian people an opportunity to step back and reflect. Now that we have come to our destination on the road we chose, we should ponder over where the road not taken would possibly have taken us.

What difference has the road we took made, versus what the one not taken could have potentially done for the overall welfare of the Nigerian people?

Retiring politicians are apologising for their inabilities or failures to fulfill their campaign promises to the Nigerian people, or what has become known in political parlance, as the social contract they entered into with the people. Yes, there was a social contract with the people, initiated and sold to the electorate by the political actors, both as parties and individuals. 

In the language of game theory, these apologies, whether well-intended or not, are the payoffs or benefits to us as the players in the game. A game here in the language of an economist is any strategic situation in which decision-makers take actions in response to or anticipation of the other’s moves.

And who are better strategists than politicians? At any point in time and place their actions are strategic, even when they seem to be doing charity work. They want to capture power at the expense of their opponents. This is what the discipline of political communication is devoted to. Its purpose is to equip the political class with strategic moves that give one actor an advantage over the other.

Indeed, the electoral process that produced these men and women whose tenures are now ending was simply the game tree, with the ballot boxes and papers constituting the nodes, those points at which decisions are taken. Each vote cast for a particular candidate meant invariably a “No” vote for the others.

On the part of the politicians, their strategies take various forms: campaigns and promises, an exaltation of their qualities and capabilities for the job head. They sold their abilities to us as the electorate. On our part, every vote we cast for any of the contenders then was a strategic move, hopefully, to take us closer to the road we had chosen, and further away from the road not taken.

We may never know where exactly the road not taken could have led us. But we now know where the road taken has finally led us, and part of our rewards is the apologies we are getting left and right. Therefore, we are in a good position to appraise its benefits or the payoffs, which are the good things that should accrue to us as a result of the choices we made. The wider the discrepancy between where we are now and where we had hoped to be, based on those promises, the greater the feeling for the road not taken.

For the retiring political class, the payoff for their moves was ultimately to capture power at whatever level each was contesting. So, as far as they and their careers are concerned, they are fulfilled. They won the elections. They occupied the positions they fought for. And they are leaving office.

For the voters, every vote we cast in the electoral process was supposed to take us to a set of payoffs in the form of good roads, railways, stable power supply, functional hospitals at all levels, etc. On the economy, our votes were expected to translate to a more stable macro-economy, reduced volatility, and less fragility. We looked forward to improved quality of life, less unemployment, better rural life, and other noble goals.

When we cast our votes, we were doing so in anticipation of public goods for which the state exists. We voted for better security at all levels. So, if the payoffs that we are getting now are not in consonance with those hopes and aspirations, then we begin to remember and idealise the road we could have taken, but did not.

As Frost said in the quote from his poem, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

My problem with these apologies is that they could just have been written at the very beginning, reserved for this point in time. They could have been the product of an information asymmetry, where some of the politicians knew their limitations as far as the offices for which they were gunning were concerned. They knew that they lacked the ability to fit into those positions, but they also knew that we the voters, or a majority of us, did not know, or would be made to not believe that. Or that we knew and pretended not to know.

Think about it. There is something fundamentally wrong with a polity or governance that produces such a large number of leaders whose handover notes are filled with apologies signifying what they could have done but was not done.

Leadership is about solving problems to advance the general welfare of society. It is the work of the entrepreneurial spirit that enables a man or woman to use a public office to deploy the resources of the state to transform lives, and impact communities. Leadership should be about making more people better off the leader met them, without necessarily increasing the number of those who are worse off.