Ademola Araoye
The recent decision of the Lagos State government to hike tuition fees out of the reach of the ordinary citizen, among many other suicidal privations being faced by the average citizen of a deconsolidated Nigeria, raises questions around the fundamentals underpinning public policy in the country. This repudiation of one of the core imperatives of people-centered governance in Lagos is more disturbing because the state is unlike many other states notoriously dedicated to careless asphyxiation of life out of citizens. Lagos has acquired the status of the vanguard state navigator to a futuristic vision of governance mobilized by the good of the public in its many investments in public goods. The recent policy is therefore a departure from the normative associated with the state. With its model capacity for deep penetration of society (that means more and more taxes) and an evident concomitant impressive delivery of public good comes with the burden of legitimate rise of higher citizen expectation. It is in this context that the state can neither afford the retrogressive step of the commodification implied in the policy of the absolute privatization of public goods, such as education. Education is the motor driving transformation at all levels: institutional and individual. That is why the assurance of inclusive and quality education is cited as the fourth of the 17 points of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. Education is deservedly regarded as a human right and, thus, an inalienable public good.
A public good is often described as entailing general availability and use by all irrespective of status: non-exclusivity. Public goods are generally open for all to use, and consumption by one party does not deter another party’s ability to use it. The two key characteristics of public goods are non-exclusivity and non-rivalrous. As public goods are not excludable, preventing the use of the good by another should normally not be possible. Except, of course, when policy is contrived to deny to constrain citizens from the enjoyment of a public good. When underpinned by necessary ethical imperatives, public policy is driven by the objective to guarantee access by all to developments or dividends ensuing from membership of the Commonwealth. State-funded education, fresh air, security, both personal and national defense, health institutions, and provision of physical infrastructure all belong to the public good. Underpinning public good is a State-funded ethical obligation inherent in the social contract from which the state itself and, by implication, its sub-units, emanates. In the particular realm of public good is law and order, where ethics enthrone principles that undergird social equity, social justice, and egalitarianism. In politics in sane climate, ethics drives public policy toward the provision of public goods and also the facilitation of an environment fostering the ability of citizens to ultimately acquire, through legitimate means, including education, private goods. Actually, the social process and the shifting ranks of individuals in the social hierarchy is oiled by the acquisition of quality education. It is thus a grave harm to society and criminal to formulate policy that shuts some individuals or groups, ab initio, from the legitimate human aspiration to ascend the rungs of social ladder through enhanced capacity to legitimately acquire private good.
Private good and public good are however not be conflated. Business ethics enjoin business enterprises to do no harm to society. In its more contemporaneous expression is the concept of corporate social responsibility. It is to upgrade the social environment of its operational theater. A responsible business organization should leave the community and its environment better off than it met it. At the opposite end of public goods are private goods that are not shared. Private goods are less likely to experience the free rider problem. The free rider problem is where some users exploit unimpeded access to a jointly or communally shared product without imputing commensurate contributions to assure the continuity of the provision of the desired public good. A free rider is those who benefit from public good but dodge the payment of tax. However, when public policy becomes instrumental to the conversion of the state to an instrument for mainly or solely the advancement of the private interests of a few individuals or groups of persons, the state has gone rogue. A state assuredly goes rogue, first by unmooring society from its ethical anchors. In this ethically unhinged scenario, the pursuit of partisan loot or private gain in state and society becomes the order of the day. That is the scenario in contemporary Nigeria. The republic is mortally endangered. Individuals, for example, live in a moral vacuum and are socialized in Nigeria to cut corners. A cardinal morsel for existential thriving in the circumstances of a deconsolidated state is that mental conditioning is geared toward suppressing moral compunctions that are innate in Man. Socialization in this clime emphasizes goal attainment without commensurate attention to the legitimacy of means to desired ends. In deconsolidated states, the impact of the cavalier attitude to ethics and morality on national life has been catastrophic. It is the prerequisite to corruption and the decadence of national institutions and associated challenges to the paradigms of governance. A hunch, in this context, is that the modal actor in the political space is a third class or even a let-my-people-go pass degree holder, if he attended a standard institution. Or, one with simply a false or manufactured academic credentials. Of course, there are the odd professorial quislings in the mix. The natural order is upended.
The operation of every facet of the life of this deconsolidated entity and its pretend nation is tenuously underpinned by a deviation from universally sanctioned protocols of the natural order. Education is natural and instinctive as an essential element of socialization of the individual to function and equipping the individual to thrive. For the society, and indeed the state, education is critical to its very survival in a competitive universe. Deviations from these expectations constitute high-end and high-order corruption. High-end and high order corruption is beyond mere fiscal thievery as it constitutes an unmovable impediment to the development of a constructive mindset as well as the wholesome sanity and health of the whole system. High end and high-order corruption is holistic in its impact in upending all values in an ethical miasma it has given rise to. It spares absolutely nothing in its way. In fact, corruption has been so institutionalized that a study has scandalously claimed that its research findings concluded that corruption contributes to Nigeria’s economic growth by reducing cumbersome bureaucratic control. Meanwhile, the further the system moves away from the natural order, the more insidious the fabricated reality and the totality of devastation it wreaks on society.
Bad policy on education is reflexive of the moral chasm of state and society. Corruption of the very axioms motorizing the logic and thought process of both institutions and the individual citizen has been going on since Nigeria’s very inception. The institutionalization of corruption was highlighted by a former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, who, while recently addressing the subject of the remuneration of National Assembly members, pointedly highlighted that the legislators had appropriated the responsibility of the institution constitutionally empowered to determine their pay by deciding to fix their remuneration by themselves. The ex-president took a swipe at members of the National Assembly over what he called their outrageous salary package. Obasanjo observed that the legislators’ humongous remuneration was neither constitutional nor moral. The immorality in the modalities of determination and the structure of emoluments of Nigeria’s legislators is better appreciated when compared with the income of the professional class in the country and in a country where a university professor earns less than Naira Five Hundred thousand (N 500,000) as a monthly wage. The irony is that a professor on a monthly 500,000 Naira living in Lagos or wherever state cannot afford decent basic education for his children. Further, a member of the House of Representatives, Simon Karu, refusing to be part of the culture of silence by the legislature, revealed that each member of the House earns N9.3 million monthly. In July 2023, the National Assembly further approved N70 billion to support the “working conditions” of new lawmakers. Imagine that a lot of creativity and ingenuity go into institutionalized corruption. The last immoral act was hidden in an amendment to the N819.5 billion 2022 supplementary budget. The self-help orientation of the governing political syndicate has been manifest in all walks of Nigeria’s national life.
Even with a history of undeniable developmental policy thrusts, Lagos State has had its fair expressions of the sad proclivities that have become second nature to the Nigerian public space. This self-help attitude of operators of the public realm is an element of the stillbirth of the country that was not long in coming after 1 October, 1960. They called it 10 per cent then. Nigeria was literally midwifed into a comatose into the waiting laps of its “wounding” fathers. Admittedly, Western Nigeria, including much of what goes for Lagos State today was spared the agony of the deliberate policy of denial of education to citizens in certain regions of the country. That policy was a part of the feudal and elite contrivances to maintain the status quo. That preserved status quo has remained a troubling albatross with visibly dire consequences for the integrity of the Nigerian state and society. The canon fodders for the Boko Harams and the uncontrollable exodus of the products of this unfortunate elite crimes to the South West must drive home some compelling lessons for those intent on the commodification of education in Lagos state. Access to free education is the emancipatory rallying battle cry of Yoruba South West Nigeria. Indeed, the citizens of what goes for Lagos State today benefitted from the vision of free education as an integral plank of the heroic transformative leadership of Obafemi Awolowo. Futuristic policy on education has become the tell-tale banner of progressivism of the Yoruba South-West. It is codified that notwithstanding attempts at poo-pooing the generosity of the West, non-Yoruba across the federation hitched a ride on the region’s gravy train. Shenanigans on education and other troubling contestations featured prominently in the early hours as the flag was raised in a still air of Tafawa Balewa square. Everything to vitiate solid foundations for a credible state and the future integration of the various communities into a nation was rigged into its foundation. The recent decision of the Lagos state government on the hiking of school fees has to be located in the context of this inconvenient historicity and the acknowledged galloping corruption of the Nigerian state. The Lagos state recent policy pronouncement on education is indefensible. There is no moving the cheese here!
These fallacies constitute the unconventional ethos of the operational principles of Nigerian statehood: the centrality of coercion in national affairs, the constant dissipation of the thoughts and energies of visionaries, repugnant institutional intolerance of such visionary programming in their regional constituencies, the convenient sidetracking of meritocracy, despite the political rhetoric, as a national value, even as inter-communal relations was instantly adversarial. The inter-communal adversarial relationship has been structural and a preeminent motive in unvarnished and decoded narratives of the evolutionary retrogression of the state and the fractious society. Every so often, the reality of intensely bitter inter-communal relations extrudes in unabashed antagonistic public discourses and engagements that are neither so civil nor very pacific. The sad confrontations of the Igbos and the Yoruba in the wake of recent elections are indicative of underlying tensions in the structural configuration of the state space. It is a sad fact that after 110 years of post-amalgamation, education as a tool to promote bridging among diverse constituents of the complex sociological mosaic was barely instituted or failed where attempted. These failures were driven by the competing sectional political partisan agenda to appropriate the totality of the social, economic and political space.
The dearth of values in the educational curriculum is expressed in the political sphere. With a lack of good education, the national process, including practice of democracy, is messy. The political class, constituted by a morally degenerate syndicate, curry favor of the dominant ethno-demographic centers. Politicians outside the dominant political power circuit may defect to join the preeminent faction of the power elite, often as peripheral elements at the expense of the interests of the constituencies they purportedly represent. Consistent with the stiff adversarial contestations that have impelled political interactions, forward-looking social policies in progressive constituents are sabotaged by constant, even if shifting, conspiratorial coalitions of conservative forces of each and all against progressivism of all hues. These anti-progressive confederates are potently aligned with social activists along ethno-regional blocs to validate partisan objectives. In this manner, the social space is also corrupted. Progressivism is compromised as an anathema to the dominant order in the ostensible nation-building process. Conservatism is enshrined as a national hallmark congenial to the emergence of the hegemonic core of the guardians of the retrogressive social, political, and economic order at the center. The national structure, physically and in its dominant ideas, is constructed to assure the continuity of the emerged dystopian order. Accordingly, integral to the functioning of the Nigerian state has been, at the subterranean level, a tension traceable to the permanence of seemingly irreconcilable confrontation of the progressive ferment and forces and the entrenched conservative underpinnings of the Nigerian polity. This confrontation is manifest in numerous realms of national life. They include the ominous rise, through incremental manipulations of policies within the ambit of the contested Constitution, of the murderous religious fanatical terrorist groups seeking to move the entire state to the extreme Islamic ideological and conservative right against the resistance of more centrists and liberals of significant socialist bent in the South. At the heart of the national political process are elements clearly sympathetic to the fanatical Islamic agenda to Islamize the state. The bottom line is the historic failures of a dysfunctional system of the education of the individual to inculcate constructive values and tenets as the organic glue of a transformed and new national society. Every kobo invested in quality education on a permanently inclusive basis is more than worth than a hundred fold dividend on that kobo. In fact, the dividend of solid and inclusive education is incalculable.
*Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).