The great British Rock Band, ‘The Beatles’, eulogized ‘Yesterday’ in one of its most memorable hit songs. In the lyrics of the song, the past is framed by the line, ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,’ culminating in a definitive ‘longing for yesterday.’ This is the melancholic interpretation of that great band who defined an era which was a combination of tumult and hope – quite a bizarre cocktail! On the contrary, in Nigeria, only those into self-abnegation, interpreted as a craving for punishment, long for yesterday.
Yesterday was not very edifying in the Nigerian experience, and the statistics are frightening. On the day of independence, October 1, 1960, Nigeria was the 27th largest economy in the world. Fast forward 65 years, and the country is the world’s 30th largest economy. This must be one of the greatest examples of retrogression in the economic history of mankind.
For all manner of reasons, yesterday was a catastrophe for Nigeria, and there can be no longing for it, because it was an era of underachievement, the ‘development of underdevelopment’, as well as ‘growth without development’. Yesterday for Nigeria was a nightmare scenario that has turned into an existential crisis.
Observing a similar era in Italy, as Benito Mussolini marched on Rome to seize and then consolidate power, the brilliant Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, noted in his prison notes that ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Unfortunately, Gramsci died in Mussolini’s prison due to poor health, as he was indeed opposed to the dictator.
As in Italy in that era, Nigeria went through an interregnum in which morbid symptoms of decay and self-immolation appeared alongside the demons that had to be slain. Warts and all, the Bola Tinubu government must be given acknowledgement for understanding that the monsters released in decades of underachievement had to be contained, then slain. In an existential crisis, there’s no alternative!
Actually, there’s an alternative, and that is, the government could, British-style, attempt to muddle through. The critical difference here is that Britain has very strong institutions to act as a backbone as well as a shock-absorber. Disturbingly, Nigeria is bereft of strong institutions, which means that the very concept of a shock-absorber is fragile.
The Tinubu government has shown great political skills in its attempt to break decisively – and, hopefully, irreversibly – away from a dismal past. One key element here is to go back to Gramsci again! Apart from being renowned for introducing the concept of ‘Cultural Hegemony’ into political philosophy, he also derived from Cultural Hegemony a position that political discourse and parties must define the territory of thoughts and actions in favour of one’s own position.
In this vein, the Tinubu administration has altered Nigeria’s political hegemony, supportive of the position that an emphasis on production-inducing taxation must replace revenue sharing as the operating grundnorm and the engine room of the political economy of the state. This is a breakthrough as well as a breakaway from the root causes of Nigeria’s underdevelopment. We do not need a crystal ball to forecast that fifty years down the road, economic historians would give this administration massive credit for this change in perception, theory and action.
To put things in context, it can also be interpreted as a throwback to a more edifying past. In the 1950s and the 1960s, the economic forward thrust, which, for example, made the Eastern Region of Nigeria the fastest growing subnational entity in the entire British Commonwealth, was predicated on this. A moment that can now be seen as defining and a justification for Tinubu’s intervention in the political economy can be taken from the Western Region of Nigeria in 1961.