Governance and Development in the COVID-19 Era

perspective

COVID-19 pandemic presents Nigeria with an opportunity to exit the malaises of fire brigade and lottery syndromes, and retool governance to achieve development, writes Hon. Toby Okechukwu

Beyond the high mortality and human suffering, pandemics greatly shaped human history. As aptly captured by Stanley Johny, pandemics have triggered the collapse of empires, weakened pre-eminent powers and institutions, created social upheaval and brought down wars. Walter Scheidel also lists pandemics, wars, revolutions, and state failures as the “four horsemen”, which have flattened inequality. I couldn’t agree more.

In the 6th century, the Justinian Plague irreversibly weakened the Byzantine Empire. Between 1347 and 1353, the Black Death, which killed between 75 and 200 million people had enormous effect on the berthing of industrial revolution. The Spanish Flu (1918 to 1920) contributed substantially to Germany’s loss of the World War I. It was also detected in Onitsha, Nigeria, on October 14, 1918 and the ensuing food scarcity was responsible for the introduction of cassava as a staple food (and a good substitute for yam).

COVID-19 was first reported to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on December 31, 2019 and characterised as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. In Nigeria, the index case was reported on February 27, 2020.

Even though the real impact of the pandemic and its attendant lockdown is still being articulated, it is evident that it has been far-reaching and devastating on Nigeria. The immediate shocks caused by COVID-19 have drastically reduced our oil revenues, pushing Nigeria to massive borrowing that has returned us to the debt trap exited in 2005.

The pandemic has also induced a free fall of the Naira. Inflow of foreign exchange was halted as foreign investors queued for dollars to exit their investments.

The pandemic also had a devastating impact on households and businesses. Governments were compelled to reorder their expenditures in favour of the social sector, while the already decaying socio-economic infrastructure in Nigeria remains underfunded.

But it is not all gloom and doom. The pandemic lockdown unlocked an unprecedented digital revolution as many of us, especially the privileged ones, relied on digital transformation in areas like remote work, telemedicine, e-learning and much more. This in turn created an armada of digital entrepreneurs from among our young people. It led to a renewed focus on research and development.

The nexus of governance and development

In the broadest sense, the challenge of development is to improve the quality of life – higher incomes, better education, higher standards of health and nutrition, less poverty, cleaner environment, equal opportunities, a more secure society and greater individual freedom. Therefore, when crises such as a pandemic directly impact them, as was the case with COVID-19, we must know that development is in peril and governance must come to its rescue.

Therefore, if we want to deliver sustained growth, create more jobs and economic opportunities, expand social inclusion and social safety nets to Nigerians in times like this, then we must turn to good governance and strong institutions. Therein lies the nexus of governance and development.

Our repeated failure to activate governance to save development each time it is threatened by a crisis is the jinx we must break, and public administration is an effective tool we need to do it.

Strategies for breaking the jinx

During the darkest days of the World War II, Winston Churchill famously said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. While we debate the nature of good and bad crisis, I urge us to internalise the context of that statement, look for the silver lining in the cloud and retool governance to achieve development. I will now advise on various strategic approaches we can adopt.

Introduce smart legislations: The US economy was in tatters during the Great Depression that lasted from 1929 to 1933, but a raft of smart legislations under the New Deal agenda rebooted the economy and today.

At the outset of COVID-19, the UK Parliament was virtually enacting laws in real time to respond to the challenges brought about by the pandemic. In Nigeria, the House of Representatives also rose to the challenge, but their efforts, such as the Hon. Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila’s Infectious Disease Control were caught in the throes of political headwinds and conspiracy theories. That nobody has cared again to find out what “sicknesses” it sought to cure or proffered any alternatives exposes our proclivity for fire brigade arrangements. Also, despite a House resolution upon my motion calling for the mobilisation our local resources in the fight against coronavirus, Nigeria is yet to manufacture a dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

But we cannot sidestep smart legislations if we truly want to respond to the challenges of the moment, build institutional frameworks that restructure our nation, enable the growth of our economy, improve the business environment, achieve competitiveness, but above all, strengthen governance to deliver development.

Invest in the future: As I mentioned earlier, crisis can become a driver of societal change. As stated by Raghuram Rajan in his book, “The Third Pillar”, “after the Black Death, technological progress took over”. He notes that the 17th century philosopher, Francis Bacon, saw gunpowder, printing and the compass as the three greatest inventions known to man. Their arrival in the West played a part in the expansion of markets and heralded the rise of the nation-state.

During the Nigerian-Biafra Civil War, Biafran engineers and scientists developed several breakthrough inventions, innovations and technologies. Most of them could have provided the technological underpinnings of industrial development and advancement after the war. But we failed to invest in that future.

Today, we are at the cusp of another societal change as COVID-19 has provided an opportunity for us to innovate and go digital. We must invest in the future by scaling up investments in the expansion of digital infrastructure, promoting digital transformation and encourage investments in ICT and innovation. We must break the jinx of inaction and realise that access to digital technologies will create jobs, increase incomes, enhance learning, close the digital divide, and very importantly, improve governance to unlock development.

Strengthen institutions: In the wake of the Asia Financial Crisis in July 1997, a combination of economic, financial and corporate problems led to the collapse of the emerging market economies of East Asia that had earned the sobriquet of Asian Tigers. In response, they undertook fundamental reforms that strengthened their economic and financial institutions. Today, they are in a much stronger position as drivers of the global economy.

When we witnessed a sharp decline in crude oil prices in 2016, our economy slipped into a recession. The fallouts of the pandemic has again exposed our vulnerabilities to external shocks such as the fall in crude oil prices. Evidently, Nigeria is plagued by the ‘Dutch Disease’ or what Prof. Charles Soludo calls the Lottery Syndrome whereby a nation spends recklessly in the spirit of the boom of today without planning for tomorrow. Although the oil prices are going up today, we are unable to reap its benefits due to our inability to meet our OPEC production quota. And since we are spending 98% of our entire revenue on debt servicing, we are left with little option but to keep borrowing.

This is the time to reform our petroleum industry and strengthen the institutions that will drive the diversification of our revenues to protect us from external shocks. A groundswell of institutional reforms also yearn for urgent attention in terms of inter-agency, inter-organs of government checks and balances as well as synergy in providing social services and delivering on development expectations of the citizens.

Reposition the educational system: No nation can grow beyond its knowledge power. The capacity deficit that was on display at the pandemic peak in Nigeria underscored the knowledge gap, which our economy and the social service sector, grapple with.

The current embarrassing rate of unemployment put at 33% of the population reflects the preponderance of educational curricular and administrative structure that may not be in sync with global best practices and our realities. We need to re-visit our educational system as a matter of urgent national and public importance.

Reform the Security Sector: All the foregoing strategies would make little impact without a comprehensive reform of the security sector. How can we make progress in a situation where school children are being abducted en masse, schools are shutting down, farmers cannot go to farm, livelihoods are destroyed, where businesses either pay huge sums of money to various criminal cartels or fold up, and where Nigerians cannot commute safely between towns?

Police duties are quintessentially street-based. It should logically pitch its base at the grassroots. So, the debate over the creation of state police is needless because it has been long overdue. Ours is perhaps the only federal system in which police functions are centralized and we are paying dearly for it.

Since the agents of insecurity emanate from society, a critical strategy of reforming security governance is to focus on non-kinetic measures. In this regard, the question of human security, which addresses the crucial, questions of freedom from vita social wants, is critical.

Leadership: Although the leadership question appears to be an overbeaten scapegoat of development failures in underdeveloped climes, we are at a loss what else to redirect our accusing fingers to. In her seminal book, “Leadership: In Turbulent Times”, Doris Goodwin identifies four different leadership types: transformational leadership, crisis leadership, turnaround leadership, and visionary leadership. We need all these types of leadership in Nigeria to break the jinx.

The founding leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, writes in his memoirs: “We had been asked to leave Malaysia and go our own way with no signposts to our next destination. We faced tremendous odds with an improbable chance of survival. On that 9th day of August 1965, I started out with great trepidation on a journey along an unmarked road to an unknown destination.” We see that destination today; a tiny island in Asia has leaped from Third World to First World.

However, we must realise that we need a transparent and functional electoral process, including electronic transmission of results from polling units, to produce good public leaders and reap the benefits of governance and development.

A corollary to leadership is visionary plan for social services and development.

The choice we must make

It is my earnest desire that we realise the rare opportunity before us and ensure that we do not relapse to our signature malaise. Instead, let us emulate Malaysia and Singapore, which utilised their own crises as springboards to launch forward. We must also seek to maximise the opportunities presented by the oil and energy crisis, infrastructural crisis, employment crisis, and farmers/herders clashes, among others.

The choice is ours to either find solutions or weaponise them against one another. But my stand is that we should see the present challenges as a takeoff moment.

Hon. Okechukwu, Deputy Minority Leader, House of Representatives, presented this at the 2021 international conference organised by the Department of Public Administration, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, recently.