By Tunji Olaopa
The root meaning of the word “utopia” is very interesting. And its trajectory from ordinary language to intellectual construct has defied the dismissive bent of its origin. From the Greek, utopia (ou-topos) means no place or nowhere. This understanding has led to the dismissal of the concept as being too idealistic—an imagination of a community that is far from reality, and far from being possible. The word came into the English lexicon in 1516 when Sir Thomas More, the English lawyer and social philosopher, published his famous book, Utopia.It is one significant piece of literary reimagination which depicts a communist city-state whose policymaking architecture is governed by reason. In his Utopia, there is little or no crime and violence, no poverty or class hierarchy, communal property is the norm, and productivity is encouraged. And reason is the sole framework for ordering the society.
Contrary to the original etymology of the word, More’s Utopia is a pun on “eu”—eutopia, or a good or perfect place. So, when John Malkovich, the American actor, said “utopia is elsewhere,” he gave us an insight into how we can begin to rethink the etymological understanding of the concept. The idea of utopia redirects our focus away from where we are to where we should be, especially in terms of how we need to reorder the human society. In other words, in ordering human political communities, we are always motivated to look from dystopia (bad place) to eutopia (good place). The idea of utopia speaks to the predilection by humans to constantly seek for means by which the human condition, and human societies, can be improved.
The Nigerian state has transited from being a eutopia to an emerging dystopia in the space of sixty-three years. And there are many elements of dysfunctionality that have steadily encroached on the governance framework of the Nigerian state to prove its dystopic status. The scariest so far is the increasing lawlessness and insecurity that pervades everywhere. From banditry to kidnapping, nonstate actors seem to have effectively disarmed the law enforcement agencies in Nigeria. The most fundamentalboundary of any utopia is law and order. And that is why More’s Utopia has little or no crime and no violence. Industry, development and progress depend on political stability and social order. This is what Nehemiah immediately grasped when he was told that the walls of Jerusalem lay in ruins. There was nothing to think about again than to just get going and repair the walls! The cracks in the walls drain economic and development initiatives. Since capital flight is inversely proportional to economic growth, it is therefore no surprise that capital flight away from Nigeria has been one of the major factors affecting the development profile of the Nigerian state. Indeed, capital flight in Nigeria exerts a really negative effect on domestic investments. The discerning reader will immediately see how such capital flight could be explained through dysfunctional institutional and infrastructural deficit.
The backbone of any eutopia is its institutional dynamics and functionality. Oscar Wilde, the Irish poet and playwright, hits it straight: “progress is the realization of utopias.” Development progress is a function of the willingness of the leadership to facilitate governance and institutional reforms that keeps the policymaking architecture of the state on the cutting-edge of governance and development while also fully pre-emptive of any challenges. The ideological challenge for the incoming administration is to commence the task of making Nigeria a good place. That goodness is measured in terms of good governance; in terms of the capacity readiness of the leadership to facilitate governance and institutional reforms backed by focused political will. This is what distinguished Margret Thatcher’s institutional reform praxis withthe strength to facilitate the emergence of a value-based public service fashioned on the efficiency of the private sector. It is also what post-war Japan capitalized on to transform its productivity objective through the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Confucian tradition.
The first issue that requires re-engineering is governance and the policy architecture that will necessarily carry the weight of the good governance and development. The first two lessons from the Japan example are: (a) the prioritization of good policies that grounds economic growth, and (b) the ideological location of the policymaking framework withinan institution that, like the MITI, can consciously screen global interventions and meddling that would short-circuit the design-and-implementation trajectory of a good policy the citizens need. For instance, not wisely dealing with the petroleum subsidy regime in a way that undercut Nigeria’s fixation with the Washington Consensus has lots of implications for Nigeria’s capacity to diversify her economy away from the stranglehold of crude oil. There is even also an immediate effect on the management of the sovereign wealth fund.
This requires, among many other imperatives, a land reform that links governance to the need to restructure the Nigerian constitution in ways that free up the grassroots and its developmental potentials. The landreform enables the Nigerian economy to benefit from the mystery of capital, according to Hernando de Soto. And this is tapping into capitalism’s capacity to generate wealth that could be transferred to infrastructural development for the citizens. This immediately recommends interrogating the policy and development implications of the Land Use Act of 1978. This also raises the fundamental significance of an education reform that unleashes the potentials for human capital development from both the traditional apprenticeship and artisanal vocations (through the technical and vocational education and training (TVET), as well as the formal (higher) educational certification. Nigeria cannot afford to allow the significance of the youth bulge to pass over without deploying it for her economic growth. No visionary administration can overlook the role of youths and their capacities for national development. The drift of the brain drain has to be stopped in a dynamic that at once harness it as gain!
This leads straightway to the need for institutional reforms. It will be far-fetched, and really a presentist fallacy, to read the Thomas More’s Utopia, or Plato’s Republic as a developmental state.And yet, there is no denying the ideological imperative of making Nigeria a eutopia outside of the challenge of transforming her into a developmental state. A developmental state rides on the capacity readiness and efficient functionality of her public service system. However, the state of the public service system in Nigeria is the very opposite of what can sustain good governance. It is circumscribed by a bureaucratic culture that undermines performance and productivity.One of the effects of that culture is the nepotisticloosening of the gatekeeping capability and theunmitigated increase in the cost of governance as well as wastage. Plugging the loopholes for waste demands a comprehensive unbundling of the entire government expenditure structure through productivity audit.
It also demands the restructuring of the gatekeeping mechanism through an equally reformed civil service commission. This gatekeeping reform facilitates the restoration of meritocracy and professionalism into the public service. It also makes results-based and competency-rooted HR managementimperative, as a complement to the productivity audits, performance contracts and a performance management system that track outputs and outcomes. As a necessary corollary, the new administration must also insert reform energy into dealing with the adversarial orientation of labour relations so that trade unions can become strategic partners, change champions and therefore developmental, especially through moving to a productivity-indexed wage structure, and a humane downsizing program that free up the public service for high-end professionals who are inserted into the core functions of the service while the non-core are outsourced and corporatized.
Making Nigeria, post-2023, a eutopia—a good place for good governance—requires that the incoming leadership transit into a development mode. No society will even deserve the characterization of utopia if its leadership is ensconced within an elite bargain that accentuate primitive accumulation and prebendal politics over the well-being of the citizens. A utopia becomes eutopia when the leadership takes a risk on behalf of development and transformation. The new leadership, through the activation of a change space, is then confronted with an ideological responsibility of deploying policy intelligence towards deciding on a development model through which national development can become a reality. As it is, the fixation with western models, mediated by the World Bank and IMF, has been leading Nigeria around on a leash for many years. The budgetary process is so compromised as to facilitate unbridled suffering for Nigerians. However, and as a matter of governance imperative, an ideological frame allows the new leaders to make a choice between neoliberal capitalismor other model of economic development. Or, in the spirit of decisional pragmatism, to even jumpstart development through an eclectic development model. Did not Deng Xiaoping, former leader of China, once said that it does not matter whether a cat is white or black as long as it catches mice? Such pragmatism suffices as a strategic mechanism through which the leadership facilitate policymaking that engenders development.
Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia decades ago because of an unflinching belief in the possibility of a community where equality and social justice would be the determining factor for human relations. I have been a governance and institutional reform expert-insider of the scholar-practitioner genre for far too long not to be able to share in More’s optimism about the possibility of giving birth to a good place. But first, we have to rebuild the broken walls. May the coming election produce a Nehemiah.
*Tunji Olaopa, a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, is a Professor at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, Plateau State.