When Government Governs: A Private Note
From Onyeka Onwenu’s 1983 Nigeria: The Squandering of Riches to the present day, this reflection examines four decades of corruption, gofment pikin, squander-mania and organised extraction dressed up as governance.
Nigeria may need restructuring, but structure alone cannot cure a culture of entitlement, impunity and incompetence. Good government begins with something more fundamental: a culture committed to making life work for ordinary people.
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This piece of news from the BBC got me thinking: #BBCNews: London restricted highly polluting cars. Now, a new study suggests that children's lungs are getting healthier....
I wrote a private note which stated, "This is what GOVERNMENT does. It sets out policies for the good of the people.
Government should exist to make life work better for ordinary citizens, not to rob them in broad daylight. And in Nigeria, I mean that almost literally.
Successive generations of governments in Nigeria have robbed the people blind. It is almost guaranteed that the next government will be worse than this one, and the one after that, worse still.
Flashback: 1983
In 1983, Onyeka Onwenu, the Bryn Mawr graduate, socialite, journalist and musician, put out a documentary, Nigeria: The Squandering of Riches.
You may watch Nigeria: The Squandering of Riches here:
The documentary made my blood boil, I recall. Four decades later, it is still boiling.
There was Minister Uba Ahmed, I believe, who came to work each morning in Lagos from Kano, a distance of some 520 miles, in a private jet.
Scandalous at the time!
There was corruption on a scale that, back then, we imagined was off the charts. Election rigging was brazen, and the then-ruling party, like most ruling parties, was supremely confident in its invincibility, its staying power.
A certain politician from Ibadan was said to have celebrated his attainment of millionairehood by having champagne bottles specially printed with his name on them.
He had no factories. He produced nothing. He had created no great enterprise that anyone could point to.
EssenCo: Essential Commodities
Sugar. Salt. Milk. Soap. Toothpaste. Rice. Garri. Beans....
You could not get them anywhere.
Import licences were issued for their importation, but to government agents, who sold them to those who sold them to those who sold them, and so on. By the time those essential commodities eventually landed on our shores, they were just as expensive as the hoarded ones.
A Quick Word About the EssenCos
The EssenCos for which import licences were issued in 1983 were always available.
They were simply hoarded.
Please watch Nigeria: The Squandering of Riches. It is worth watching again more than four decades later, if only to understand how depressingly little has changed.
Click: https://youtu.be/y-OzTxlstw8?si=64TLMfRiGTLDzpIk
Enter the Government Pikin
Clearly, this egregious period in our economic history left a lasting impression on me. Here’s how I described the import-licence and gofment pikin phenomenon some 30 years ago in my book, Of Gods and Negroes:
Import licences for everything had to be bought from middlemen who bought them from the lowly government officials who fronted for people who fronted for the leaders of the country!
The leaders!
Hindsight, they say, is telescopic vision.
Sitting in the here, dissociated from the past, you just wondered what the purpose of all that greed and avarice was.
The aboriginal thieves who had a chance to build a virile nation were now mostly aged and mostly impoverished.... like every true order, these thieves recruit their sons into the realm, the order of the gofment pikin, to continue from the point where they, on account of their creaking bones, arthritis or possibly dementia, had had to call it a day!!
Today, the successors of those who helped destroy the nation, properly groomed parasites, gofment pikins, now managing the family business of extracting from the masses, gently explain to us that the problem with Nigeria is the structure.
Sadly, many amongst the suffering masses, find this spurious, nonsensical argument perfectly logical and nod their heads solemnly in agreement.
Declaring with fervour: "Yes.... Nigeria needs restructuring!"
Me: Of course Nigeria needs restructuring. Every nation probably does. Every organisation does. Even factory shop floors are continually being restructured in pursuit of greater efficiency.
Entire disciplines are devoted to studying how work is organised and how processes can be improved. One of the best-known philosophies is Kaizen, the pursuit of continuous improvement.
But Kaizen does not take a factory where nothing works and magically transform it into a unicorn.
Kaizen begins with something far more fundamental:
Personal and professional integrity exist.
Machines are maintained. Procedures are followed.
And then it proposes changes - often small, incremental changes that, accumulated over time, make an already functioning organisation considerably better.
And that brings me back to Nigeria.
Before we prescribe restructuring as the cure for everything that ails us, perhaps we should ask the more uncomfortable question:
What exactly are the strengths of the Nigerian system upon which this new structure is supposed to build?
If we carry the same culture of:
...into a beautifully redesigned political structure, then what exactly have we restructured?
We have simply redesigned the architecture through which the same people continue doing the same things.
The Nation That Gave Us Everything
Cry, my beloved, beautiful Motherland, Nigeria!
You who did all you could for us when you were strong and virile.
You gave us free education.
You nurtured us. You opened doors for children whose parents could never have afforded the opportunities you placed before them.
And now, in your old age, you suffer destitution at the hands of those to whom you were once Alma Mater, a kind and generous Mother.
You raised us - I speak for my generation.
And we repaid you by devouring you....
And we repaid you by devouring you....
When I consider the fact that squander-mania has continued virtually unabated in the 40-plus years since that documentary was made....
...that Nigeria still stands in any recognisable shape or form is as great a miracle as any nation in history can boast of, and a testament to the seemingly inexhaustible riches bequeathed to us.
A British Prime Minister is said to have once quipped that the amount of public money routinely stolen in Nigeria in a single year, if similarly extracted from the British system, would be enough to bring the country to its knees.
Whether or not the remark is authentic, the point it makes is difficult to dismiss: few nations could withstand, year after year and generation after generation, the scale of organised corruption that Nigeria has endured and still remain standing.
Back to 2026
And so we return to where this note began:
#BBCNews: London restricted highly polluting cars. Now, a new study suggests that children's lungs are getting healthier.
This is what GOVERNMENT does. This is why government exists: to set out policies for the good of the people. Government exists to make life work better for ordinary citizens, not to rob them.
Look at Nigeria:
What the taxman misses, the FRSC checkpoint on Falomo Bridge, or elsewhere, and their many other law-enforcement partners in crime will somehow ferret out of your bony, clutching fingers, leaving you and your family to go "without"one more day, yet again.
Pleased with the ingenious ways they have devised to feed on the struggling masses, they retire for the weekend and may be found at the most extravagant parties and nightclubs, congratulating themselves over caviar, fine wines and cigars....
Sunday comes.
They are ushered into reserved seats in church, celebrated as distinguished guests and generous benefactors, often because they are among the heaviest tithers.
Do You See the Vicious Cycle?
A system that impoverishes the people while feeding itself.
Public office extracts from the citizen.
Privilege rewards the extractor.
Society confers status upon him.
Religion supplies respectability.
And on Monday morning, the extraction begins again.
What we have perfected is organised extraction....
And dressed it up as governance.
André Gide: "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."
I rest my case.
Obi Akaraiwe | Don Kenobi
#BigAgendaAfrica
#ReCultureNotReStructure
#CultureNotStructure
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