Oby Ezekwesili is a former education minister in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. She is currently a vice-president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the World Bank. She recently published a column in ThisDay newspaper. a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
Enough of the Failing Upward Syndrome!
06 Mar 2011
Oby Ezekwesili
Nigeria ThisDay
The wealth and poverty of nations inexorably depend on their domestic productivity and relative competitiveness. Hence the economic welfare of every citizen can only be guaranteed by nation-states that are governed by people who understand this very basic economic thought. No nation that has developed did so by having leaders who remained complacent in the face of the stark reality of very poor and declining performance of national productivity and competitiveness indices. History is replete with nations that were once great but became complacent or distracted at some point only to be overtaken by nations they previously looked down on.
How many people still remember that Argentina ’s economy was once highly considered during its most vigorous period, from 1880 to 1905, when its expansion resulted in a 7.5-fold growth in GDP, averaging about 8% annually? One important measure of development, GDP per capita, rose from 35% of the United States average to about 80% during that period. Growth then slowed considerably, though throughout the period from 1890 to 1939, the country's per capita income was similar to that of France , Germany and Canada . Compare Argentina ’s economic performance with those of these countries today and you learn a lesson in how nations, like individuals, regress.
Even more instructive is the history of many nations which were several thousands of miles behind others economically but which today are the locomotives that are keeping the global economy from completely running out of steam. No economic discourse is today complete without some perplexed acknowledgement by even the most cynical that China, India and Brazil have indeed come of age and have become the economies most deserving of the respect of all other economies. At another level, many a Nigerian perennially recalls when Singapore , Taiwan ( China ), South Korea , Malaysia and Vietnam were economic contemporaries of our country. Nigerians rue the missed opportunities that made us the laggard nation among these former peers.
For each of these countries, the stage was set for commencement of their economic transformation from Low Income Country (LIC) status to Upper Middle Income Country (MIC), MIC or close to MIC respectively by the advent of quality leadership at both their political and public institutions that in turn resulted in high public sector efficiency. At the epicentre of this efficiency was, and remains, the investment in leadership of the kind that drove a national vision which placed education, intellect, values, reward for only strenuous effort and hard work at the centre of their development strategy. Once the public sector was set aright, it freed up the private sector and the rest of society to aspire to perform at their maximum possibilities. This explains why even for the US which is the bastion of capitalism, it was through the instrumentality of its public sector leadership that it used public policy, public investment, and public institutions to set the stage for the world leading economy we all admire.
Government, business and citizens – through civic engagement – play different but profoundly complementary and collaborative roles to engender economic productivity and competitiveness. Of the three sectors that interact to crystallise the productivity and competitiveness of nations, namely government (public sector), business (private sector) and civil society, it is the political class and the public sector leadership that is ultimately most responsible for how well the country performs. The public sector is made up of these two key layers, the political leaders, who are subject to more frequent turnover based on constitutionally-mandated electoral processes that promote democratic competition on the one hand, and the tenure-track civil service of technocrats, which have a considerably longer term mandate to manage the bureaucracy that helps translate the vision of the former into concrete deliverables in the form of services to citizens.
Hence, whereas the political actors are subject to the electoral test in deriving their legitimacy, the civil or public servants in the wider spectrum that includes not only the ministries and departments of the core civil service but also the agencies or parastatals, derive their legitimacy from a competitive professional process that recruits them on the ground that they are capable of implementing programmes and providing efficient and effective services. Usually, of course, the political leadership can to a very significant extent determine the quality of the leadership of the technocratic leadership of the public service through the appointments they make regarding the heads of public institutions and the civil service.
Seeing that government is the sector among the three that holds the strongest levers and the authority to provide the compelling vision around which all other sectors can construct their effective role playing, should the Nigerian citizens not immediately begin to take more than a passing interest in how entry into both the political and public service leadership space is regulated for quality? Effective public sector emerges at all levels of government where there is strong leadership capacity for it at the highest level of political authority. The criticality of the public sector’s role in national vision and strategy formulation, oversight, and implementation compels every nation aspiring to be productive and competitive to endeavour to have strong dynamic leadership of its public space and all its institutions.
From the outset, the public sector in its vision setting role must have persons at both political and technocratic levels that can provide clear diagnostic of the problems facing the economy and articulate the compelling vision and solutions that appeal to a broad set of actors, who are willing to seek change and implement global standard strategies to keep the nation’s productivity and competitiveness on a never-ending race to the top of the global economic ladder.
The moral of my preamble therefore is that each of those previously contemporaneous economies succeeded while ours failed fundamentally because of the wide variability in the quality of leadership that pursued their nations’ visions compared to ours. Every great performance in life first starts with great ideas. As it is with individuals, so it is with nations. It is in the realm of ideas that leaders espouse the kind of nation they really want to lead their citizens to build and bequeath to future generations. The elite of every successful society always forms the nucleus of citizens with the prerequisite education, ethics and capabilities operating in the political sphere and the public service, providing the great ideas to build the nation and possessing the moral rectitude to always act in the public interest.
Access to quality education ensures that the elite group evolves constantly in every society. For as long as nations have public education systems that function, the poorest of their citizens is guaranteed to move up the ladder and someday emerge as a member of the elite class through academic hard work, strenuous effort and ultimate success at the higher levels of education . For every society that has succeeded therefore, it has taken such progressively evolving elite class to identify the problems, forge the political systems and processes, soundly articulate a rallying vision and use sound public policies and prioritisation of investments and requisite actions to over time build those strong institutions that outlive the best of charismatic and transformative individuals. But it always does start with quality leadership in the public space investing in a sustained manner for lasting institutions to eventually emerge over time. Institutions do not just happen or emerge in fast food style. Period.
Sadly, it is here that the quality of the leadership of our political and public sector levels failed us the most. Truth is that there was no other time resembling now that we have most been faced with the preponderance of such variable quality of leadership of men and women in our political and public service all over the country with hardly the stretch of cognitive or values anchored ideas of what is needed to turn our nation around. We today find in our political and public sector space a “less than elite bunch” that has established a world record in their omnivorous and parasitic attitude to the public treasury. I have always maintained that it smacks of the lowliest vision for anyone, who has an opportunity at the federal level to serve in a way that is beneficial to our over 140 million citizens to obscenely choose to reduce that opportunity to feathering personal interest and serving a paltry collection of at most 3000 direct or indirect relatives and friends that can statistically be traceable to anyone individual. Just imagine the stupendous difference in impact ratios of those two widely different choices!
How else can one explain the spectre of majority poor quality actors at all levels of our national life once again seeking to gain ascendancy into the public space of our nation for local government, state and federal offices?
All this came into sharper focus for me when I was recently home as a Guest Speaker for Pat Utomi’s Centre for Values in Leadership on the role of public policy in educations and the future of the Nigeria. It afforded me the opportunity to interact during the question and comments session with an amazing array of youths from all over the country. The painful mix of hope and despair that came through from their questions and comments, their vein busting angst against a nation-state that they evaluated as having failed them, their restiveness to have silver bullets that can solve the myriad of problems and constraints that hold captive their individual potentials, their trenchant distrust of the public space and most that operated or operate within it, their quest for a new nation where effort, merit, hard work, ethos and values of consistent integrity pierced through my spirit as I listened to them that afternoon. The experience brought back the fiery anger that rose up in me in 2006 upon reading the terrible findings of the various education sector and system diagnostics that I had invested in as a basic fundamental for understanding the problems of the sector when I was asked to lead the reform efforts at the federal ministry.
That anger had fuelled the impatience with which I led the team effort for a comprehensive and analysis anchored restructuring of what had become a perfectly dysfunctional system that was failing our children especially the majority of them from poor homes that could not purchase the best private education. The “reform resistance army” that was used to transacting with the future of our children fought with all their might to misrepresent, to distort and truncate those reforms from the outset but they had not imagined the depth of my angst fuelled resolve to effect change even for the few months I was leading the effort. That same “less then elite” bunch remains in the public space today both within and outside the Sector indifferent to the fact that all of the most important indicators of failure of the education system that we had pointed out to the nation five years ago continue to worsen daily.
But there is hope. As our census data reveal regarding over half of our nation, we are presently one of the incredible nations of the young in an aging world. The generation that I refer to in all of Africa as the Turning Point Generation (TPG) do not carry the liabilities and albatross of their forebears. Their types in Nigeria for example are hardly moved by the spoils of the oil revenue dominant public treasury. They are eclectic in range and diversity of talents and are driven by ideas, creativity and innovativeness that push them to excel beyond the limitations that their own nation seeks to place upon them. The stoic among the Nigerian youths breaks through all constraints and aspires as a citizen of the globe to match or surpass the achievements of their peers in other nations. One thing holds them to a universal standard – the common language and ubiquitous social networking tools.
As I recently posted on my Facebook page to my friends, “when stuck @ a low equilibrium level of performance, the same-same solution will not work. You need a shocker to rupture the stagnation. Find the shocker and go for it”!
•Ezekwesili, a former Education Minister is currently Vice President, Africa, World Bank
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