Ekiti State - Strategy And Leadership – Panacea To Our National Malaise

[EkitiState]

Keynote Remarks By

His Excellency Dr. Kayode FAYEMI

Governor, Ekiti State, Nigeria

at the 10^th Anniversary of the

Institute of Strategic Management Nigeria

Theme: Strategy and Leadership – Panacea to our National Malaise

Thursday, July 11, 2013

  

Protocols

 

I thank the governing council, advisory board and members of the Institute of Strategic Management Nigeria for inviting me to give this keynote during such an epochal event in the life of the institute. I am humbled that such a distinguished assemblage of patriotic Nigerians would honour me with your podium to share some of my thoughts with you on an issue that is particularly germane to our great country Nigeria.

I also recognise our revered elder statesman from the land of honour, Ekiti State, Nigeria, Chief Afe Babalola, the Founder/President-Emeritus of Afe Babalola University Ado-Ekiti, who is the Chairman of the opening session of today's programme. I also salute my brother and comrade-in-arms in the struggle for a peaceful, prosperous and functional society, His Excellency Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola, the Governor of Lagos State, Nigeria who is the special guest of honour at this event. Gentlemen of the press; distinguished ladies and gentlemen.

 

On Strategy and Leadership

 

The themes of strategy and leadership that we have been invited to explore at this gathering are particularly compelling, arising at a time when the burden of development is weighing heavily on our country. All around us, we see the strain of a fast-growing population that is outpacing our efforts to create opportunities, build critical infrastructure and provide the social goods that they need to fully maximize their human potential. For all of us in public office and for all who are concerned about the future of Nigeria, the question that haunts us daily is that of how to create opportunities and spaces for our teeming population to live full and creative lives. This is the challenge popularly referred to as the development question. What strategy do we need to deploy to place Nigeria in the top bracket of nations that can guarantee a high quality of life for her citizens?

In defining development strategy, we are discussing an overarching conceptual framework that unites development theory and praxis, with civic aspiration, national values, resource management, policy architecture, political consensus and performance monitoring. There are a number of fundamental questions to be answered by this framework. What sort of country do we want to be? How do we perceive our place in the world and our mission in the comity of nations? What kind of future do we want for our children? What do we want to achieve and within what time frame? All these elements constitute development strategy.

To be sure, there have been several development strategies marshaled by successive regimes to address the development question. Between the 1960s and 1970s, a series of national development plans were conceived and executed aimed at bringing Nigeria into the arena of industrialisation. At the core of these development plans was the notion of the state as the principal economic actor. State-directed economic activism was the order of the day. From the mid 1980s, the structural adjustment programme introduced by the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida emphasized liberalization and deregulation. In the last decade, two major strategies have emerged to dominate political thinking namely the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) and Vision 20; 2020.

Between 2003 and 2007, the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration articulated NEEDS as a strategy for poverty reduction, employment generation, wealth creation and value re-orientation in Nigeria. NEEDS is based on three pillars; empowering people, promoting private enterprise and transforming the way government works. The NEEDS document anchored the achievement of its goals to four key strategic elements namely governmental and institutional reform, the promotion of private sector growth, the implementation of a social charter and reorientation of societal values.

Concurrently, the Vision 20; 2020 policy was articulated during the President Obasanjo era with the aim of making Nigeria one of the twenty largest economies in the world by the year 2020. This policy was inherited by the administration of President Umar Musa Yar'Adua which then authored a strategic and economic transformation blueprint for Vision 20; 2020, a document outlining the federal government's plan for stimulating Nigeria's economic growth and launching the country onto a path of sustained and rapid development. The vision envisages a social reality of peace, equity and justice; a resilient, diversified and industrialized economy and a stable, functional democracy thriving in a market friendly and globally competitive environment.

The most obvious critique of the efforts of successive governments is that there has been no lack of conceptual rigour; nor have administrations been found wanting in crafting sensible programmes. The problem, say the critics, is what they characterize as a gross lack of capacity for real strategic thinking and policy execution that have left these laudable documents at the level of mere aspiration. Scholars also point out that while the golden age of planning in Africa was during the 1960s and the 1970s, the momentum could not be sustained into the 1980s because of two main factors. Firstly, these development plans failed to meet the high expectations of rapid growth and development and the needs of the fast-growing population. Secondly, international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well as western creditor nations were aggressively pushing neoliberal policies at African nations. These policies which were implemented as structural adjustment programmes turned out to be catastrophic. Consequently, some scholars would dub the 1980s and the 1990s as Africa's "lost decades."

Various theories have been supplied to explain the failure of past development strategies. These range from the classical variety which lay the blame for developmental failure on rapid population growth, lack of comparative advantage and low savings & investment. A school of thought attributes underdevelopment to exploitation by external forces aided by internal collaborators coupled with the negative impact of colonialism, imperialism and overbearing international financial institutions. There is merit to both of these arguments, but they do not sufficiently explain the magnitude of our challenges. Our purpose today is to add to and hopefully enrich the discourse on development and produce new perspectives and insights with which to walk the road ahead.

 

 

Participatory Development Planning

 

The need for knowledge-based governance, development planning and policy formulation based on empirical data have never been greater. One of our problems on these shores is the tendency to unhinge policy-making from empirical data. To take one example, the Universal Primary Education programme of the 1970s was a well-intentioned scheme with laudable objectives, but it failed to take cognizance of the number of teachers needed to cater for the explosion in demand for primary education that the programme itself unleashed. Thus, the UPE was seriously hamstrung by a lack of teaching staff.

Another challenge is that central development planning competes for the focus of policy drivers by another type of planning based on development goals imposed by foreign governments and international aid agencies. Both are manifestations of a top-down approach that conceives policy as the projection or imposition of developmental objectives on hapless recipients by remote well-meaning bureaucracies. These efforts fail because they have no buy-in at the grassroots level. For development plans to work, the people have to take ownership of them and drive their execution. For this to be the case, the development goals have to be generated by citizens and tally with their own needs and aspirations. Imagine, for instance, a situation in which the government and foreign aid groups prioritize combating HIV-Aids in a given community where the major cause of high adult and infant mortality is actually Malaria. The intentions on the part of the interveners are good but misplaced.

This brings us to a crucial point. Policy-making has to emanate from the people's perception of their own needs. In this sense, our democracy has been limited to the conduct of elections and a few other quadrennial rituals. We have not yet come to see that democracy means participatory governance which in effect means that policies are generated from the bottom-up not imposed from the top-down. There is a hubris which leads us to presume to know far more about ordinary people and their problems than they themselves do. This paternalistic attitude causes us to prescribe solutions that often have no relation to the challenges on ground and thereafter devise strategies that are consequently unworkable.

A more meaningful approach to strategic policy conception and execution calls for us to adopt a posture of listening and attentiveness attuned to the pulse of the communities on the receiving end of our initiatives. In my experience, the indifference with which many Nigerians regard their governments is not so much the result of a fundamental apathy but their own response to governments that they perceive to be too remote from their own lives and struggles. Nigerians deem public functionaries too aloof to be able to identify with their situation much less prescribe useful remedies.

It is a conceit of policy makers that we can simply draft great policies and implement them in society while at the same time insulating them from the vagaries of politics and the peculiarities of our socio-cultural environments. We assume our theoretical assumptions to be almost infallible or at the very least impervious to the moderating constraints of our socio-political reality. We are mistaken. Consider, for example, the location of federal projects nationwide which while embedded in various policies were in reality conducted as a means of distributing political patronage and establishing ethno-regional parity of access to the "national cake". This occurred frequently even when the locations of such projects made no economic sense.

 

 

Re-Orientation of Political Ethos

 

It is difficult to conceive and execute policy in a clime where good sense is frequently sacrificed on the altar of political considerations. In the same vein, we have seen how needless political bickering distorts all our efforts to execute a population census. This is because the census is not seen as a tool of economic planning but as a means of allocating pork. Intelligent and competent policy-making clearly requires a change in our political culture. To the avid student of development policy in Nigeria, it is also evident that the political environment impacted these policies and led to their failure. It made no difference whether a regime was market friendly or chose a state-directed approach if the underlying logic of political engagement was the distribution of patronage.

Another challenge that needs to be highlighted is the poverty of ideology and values that characterizes our politics. Ideological affinity, shared perceptions and convictions which foster unity and continuity of purpose are absolutely essential to institutionalizing policy. The absence of ideological content has not always been the way our politics was run. During the First Republic and the Second Republic, it was possible to identify the Northern Elements Progressive Union and its successor the Peoples Redemption Party as belonging to the far left of the political spectrum while their respective rivals, the Northern Peoples' Congress and the National Party of Nigeria were broadly right of centre.

The diminishing role of ideology in our political life is due to the long years of military dictatorship during which totalitarian constraints eliminated spaces for the formulation of ideological convictions. The use of pecuniary inducement to buy favours and allegiances which became popular in late 1980s is also a contributory factor. It was during this time that terms like 'settlement', a euphemism for bribery entered the national lexicon. It is fair to say that money, self-gratification and self-interest are the dominant principles of our politics, determining all too often which way political allegiances will flow.

This absence of ideology means that governance and policy are never approached as a continuum but almost as a whim. Each administration sets out to reinvent the wheel. The fact that successive administrations are produced by the same party is no guarantee of continuity. To cite one example, the One Laptop per Child scheme initiated by the Federal Ministry of Education under the Chief Olusegun Obasanjo administration was promptly discontinued by the new minister of education who took office under President Yar'Adua.

The point is not whether or not it was a sound or unsound policy. It is that its termination by a successor administration of the same political party was not depicted as the triumph of superior data, logic or alternative strategy but simply as the raw exercise of power by today's reigning official after yesterday's official had had her day in the sun. The crux of the problem is that there is no thread of thought that connects the establishment yesterday, today and tomorrow. Policy inconsistency and incoherence are the order of the day.

The restoration of ideology in our political life is something that we must pursue in the domain of politics. But as leaders of thought in the society, our duty is also to elevate the dismal level of public debate and force it unto the terrain of ideas. The question of what sort of country we want to be speaks to our ideology and values. As politicians we must reflect upon the laissez faire orientation of public policy over the last two decades and take stock. It is surely time to review our strategy. Is it possible to aspire to join the league of industrialized nations while at the same time heedlessly dismantling trade barriers and allowing manufactured goods from elsewhere to be dumped on our shores thus undermining local industries? This approach seems inherently self-contradictory to say the least.

After the end of the Cold War, it became fashionable for some scholars to suggest that we now live in a post-ideological age. But ideology still matters. And what we have seen in the last twenty years has been the expansion of free market ideology and the diminution of the state's role in development elevated to the pinnacle of economic development orthodoxy worldwide. It took the global financial crisis of 2007 – 2008 to bring the triumphant neo-liberal ideology into disrepute. A capitalism which is centered solely on profit and perceives no role for the state as a guarantor of social justice, a provider of public goods and a regulator of market excesses has proven to be disastrous. Even in the sanctums of the West, there is an ongoing search for new strategic approaches to growth that do not imperil the global economy or the environment. We should be in the vanguard of seeking alternative strategies to freewheeling capitalism especially in Africa where imported solutions have failed.

Strategic intelligence involves asking questions that many are often too complacent to consider and probing probabilities that are both imminent and unlikely. For example, how will Nigeria function in a world in which oil is no longer necessarily an economic advantage? Imagine a scenario in which the United States is no longer dependent on energy imports and the resource-hungry emerging economies of China and India are experiencing a slow down which in turn forces them to curb their appetite for our oil. What would be our strategic response to these trends? In the event that world oil prices fall below our current benchmarks over a sustained period, how shall we run our economy? More pertinently, how shall we keep the peace given the high proportion of unemployed working age youths? How do we leverage the youth bulge we are currently experiencing vis-`a-vis the aging population of a labour-hungry Europe? Singapore devised an intelligent Island strategy luring back its brightest citizens abroad back home to power growth. Might we similarly be able to leverage our diaspora population to propel a leap forward?  These are the kinds of questions that we must brood over in the crafting of development strategy.

 

 

Rome Was Not Built In A Day

 

Embracing strategic thinking also means jettisoning our institutional and cultural predilection for short-termism. Development planning is a long term endeavour. The economic miracle of Southeast-Asian nations was built on the back of long term planning. China's emergence which is perhaps the most talked about and analyzed development story in recent times was nurtured over the course of thirty years. These are the countries we want to emulate.  There is a real debate over the possibilities of long term strategic planning in a democracy. It is said that the problem with democratic environments is that cycles of regular electioneering impose short-term timelines which are not really conducive to long-term strategising. Electorates tend to want immediate and tangible dividends to validate their confidence in their elected governments. Politicians, especially in our clime, are prone to crude populism often making wild promises to perform immediate miracles once they are voted into office. The result is often mutual disappointment. I should know; with gubernatorial elections about a year away in Ekiti State, Nigeria, the frenzied distraction from governance that politicking in our climes can be is gathering momentum.

Adherents of the Asian way notably propounded by the great Singaporean elder statesman Lee Kwan Yew insist that long term strategic planning requires stability – something that electoral populism simply does not permit. Some others take it further and argue that democracy is incompatible with development given the erratic temper of electorates. They propose instead a technocratic regime backed by enlightened autocracy or soft authoritarianism as the way forward. Given our own tragic history of military dictatorship, we simply must regard any flirtation with authoritarianism, whether of the soft or hard variety, as an indulgence we can ill-afford.

I would contend that the solution is to transform our political parties into ideological institutions which can guarantee policy continuity and long term strategy regardless of changes in political personnel. Term limits and regular elections may indeed impose short term timelines. But I see this as a test of our credentials as communicators and leaders. Sometimes we give voters too little credit. The Nigerian people have enough electoral savvy to know who is living up to expectations and who is not. They can recognize competence and performance when they see them. Our own challenge as politicians and public servants is to win hearts and minds. This is something that we have not been very adept at doing and which has often crippled policy execution. It is certainly a component of strategy-crafting that we should be more aware of.

As I have stressed earlier, it seems to me that we must make a shift from the current orientation of representative government which posits a political class that represents the people and knows more than them. This posture has fostered an alienation of the people from their representatives. Participatory governance and a citizen-generated policy-making process are the keys to closing the rift between the state and society. Many Nigerians cannot take ownership of policies, even those which are manifestly beneficial to them, because they are alienated from the policy making process. For all the grandeur and fanfare with which they are launched, development plans often lack buy-in or legitimacy at the grassroots. We must expand our intercourse with civil society in the policy development process enabling two-way communications on conception and execution as well as establishing feedback mechanisms that facilitate the assessment of the policies' impact. The reason why policies are changed so frequently and cavalierly is that they often lack public support. As such, there are not enough people who feel passionately enough about the policies to defend them. One trustworthy indicator of success is when development strategies move from being government policies to being "owned" by the people.

Ultimately, creating a strategic mindset in governance is the key to constructing a sustainable future. Strategic leadership therefore is not just designed to answer questions in the present but to anticipate and answer the developmental questions posed by the future. A developmental state is anchored on strategic thinking. In this sense, the pursuit of development in a world in which nations are competing for advantage calls for the adoption of strategic intelligence.

Precisely, how we shall achieve this and navigate our future as a nation is what we are gathered here to discuss.

 

 

The Ekiti State Nigeria Experience

 

        Let me close by sharing some relevant experiences from the land of honour, Ekiti State, Nigeria.

Long before the assumption of office in October 2010, we had developed a strategic roadmap for the development of our state, which took into cognizance our strategic advantages as a sub-national entity and the priority areas requiring interventions. This strategy document known as the 8-Point Agenda cuts across Governance; Infrastructure Development, Mondernising Agriculture, Education and Human Capacity Development, Healthcare Services, Industrial Development, Gender Equality & Empowerment and Tourism Development.

Since assumption of office, my administration has not only depended on our development strategy alone. We have also taken participatory governance to a whole new level, unparalleled in Sub-Saharan Africa, by embarking on a participatory budgeting initiative. Every year, about the time that the annual budget for the following year is being developed, I tour the nooks and cranies of our state soliciting the input of grassroots stakeholders in our budget planning. This has resulted in a budget developed with a high degree of consensus and which in our experience has a greater chance of success. We also allocate a certain amount which is given directly to the stakeholders at the grassroots for them to implement priority projects in their various localities. This initiative known as the Community Self-Help Programme is unprecedented in our part of the world and I encourage other states and even the Federal Government to come and understudy our governance patterns, and see how a bottom-top approach to planning stimulates greater participation of every single member of the society in accelerating development.

Gone are the days in Ekiti State, Nigeria where projects are abandoned or policies are randomly discontinued. Before government initiates legal proceedings to enforce the obligations of contractors, the entire community would rise up and demand value for every single kobo of our common wealth. My administration has also made necessary efforts to address gaps in our legal and regulatory environment in order to ensure continuity and stability in our socio-economic space long after we have left office. The only option that subsequent administrations have is to build upon our achievements; there is absolutely no more room for incoherence in policy formulation and implementation by brigands who get into office through the backdoor.

For example, my administration pioneered a social security programme that gives stipends of N5,000.00 (Five Thousand Naira) every month to qualifying elderly citizens. We have not only sustained and increased the coverage of this initiative over the last two years; we have also established a law making it mandatory for government to sustain the payment every single month! In fact, we are now looking at expanding the scope of the provisions of the law, so that the payment would be indexed to the inflation rate in the overall long term interest of our people.

Ladies and gentlemen, with these few words, I welcome us all to this august occasion and wish us successful deliberations.

Thank you for listening.

 

Dr. Kayode Fayemi

Governor

Lagos, Thursday, July 11, 2013

 

 

Via: Ekiti State Government - Official Press Release