Harnessing The Opportunities Inherent In Our Threats And Fears (3)

In May 2017, Nigeria’s then Minister of Defence, Brig-Gen Mansur Dan-Ali (Rtd), answered the DICON question. The minister said that the Federal Government would soon replace the Defence Industry Corporation with a Military Industrial Complex.
Dan-Ali said this in Abuja at the inauguration of a technical committee to work out modalities for cooperation between the ministries of defence and science and technology. He was quoted to have said that DICON had not produced anything tangible in its 30 years of existence; thus, the need to replace it with a Military Industrial Complex.

The minister said the new establishment would have the capacity to produce everything required by the security forces and even to export. He added that the organisation would have five-year, 10-year, and 15-year strategic plans.

Dan-Ali’s statement is typical of problem-solving approach in Nigeria and Africa in general. Government makes a grandiose statement. The new Military Industrial Complex will produce everything the security forces require. That sounds impressive. It even sounds more impressive that the new Military Industrial Complex will produce for exports. Grandiose, indeed!
It is worthy to note that if you take such statements by government officials to bank, you will be bankrupt because most times, there is nothing in it. If there is something in it, you might wait for a long time before it hits your account. When it does, examine it; you will likely be disappointed. However, that is not the main issue. The main issue is that: how will the Military Industrial Complex be different from the Defence Industry Corporation of Nigeria? Could it be just a change of name?

That takes us to a joke that is prevalent in Nigeria. Nigeria had a public utility company known as the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA). Because NEPA would not give you light much of the time you need it, the acronym was turned to Never Expect Power Always. The interesting thing was that as bad as the brand name had been damaged, it still had a positive value. When you heard children shout NEPA, it was a shout of joy. It was a shout that you could hear from a distance. It could be eclectic as electricity that flew through the grid of NEPA. It meant that NEPA had restored light in the neighbourhood. However, whenever people murmured NEPA, it meant that they had struck. The light had been taken. The murmur, however, was never as loud as the shout of joy that trails restoration of light. If you are brand manager, you will be happy that your brand name is shouted so many times in a day. Perhaps, that accounted for why NEPA had to strike so many times in a day so that they could ignite the joy of UP NEPAAAA whenever they restored light. Pity some communities that had to bear the brunt of outage for days, weeks, months and even years! For those ones, the shout of NEPA was only a seasonal thing.

When NEPA started the process of reform, the government came up with the process of commercialisation. That meant that the organisation should charge commercial rates to recover its costs. It should no longer be an utility company. It should operate as a commercial entity so that it could operate efficiently. Therefore, Plc was added to the name to reflect its new status as a public liability company. It now became NEPA Plc. To pessimistic or realistic Nigerians, nothing had changed. The change was only cosmetic, if anything had actually changed. Therefore, NEPA Plc became Never Expect Power Always; Please Light Candle.

Then, during the gale of privatisation, NEPA went through a transition period before the successor companies that were carved out from it were sold to private sector investors. During the transition period, NEPA Plc was renamed Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN). Again, sceptical Nigerians knew that nothing had changed. Many of them must have read William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (after all Nigeria had produced many literary giants including Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka and Africa’s master story teller, Chinua Achebe). In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet had asked, “What is there in a name?” To answer her question, she added, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Therefore, for Nigerians, PHCN became the acronym for Problem Has Changed Name. Indeed, PHCN remained a huge problem.

Thus, by deciding to create a Military Industrial Complex, the Federal Government of Nigeria was keeping to the tradition of solving institutional problems in Africa. If the institution is not working, change the name or create another institution. Thus, rather than solve a problem; another layer of problem is created. Did Nigeria need a Federal Road Safety Corps or a more effective police? Did the country need a Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps or more efficient policing? Poor Peace Corps; some had sworn that they would not benefit from the culture of multiplicity of institutions that multiply the layers of the problem. Perhaps, if they succeed, the Man O War and the WAI Brigade would gear up for parliamentary recognition. After all, jobs are scarce and hard to come by and if you create a new agency or institution, you create jobs whether they are on demands or not and whether we can measure their productivity or not.

We have sought to be as much light-hearted as possible in this section irrespective of the heaviness of the problem of development that confront Africa. However, the truth is that Africa will remain the backwater of the world except the people learn to harness the opportunities inherent in the threats, deprivations and difficulties that dot the continent. America felt threatened by Soviet space mission. They went to work and gave the world the Internet. They landed the first man, Neil Armstrong, in the moon on July 20, 1969, less than 10 years after President John F. Kennedy promised that America would land the first man on the moon by the close of the decade. Kennedy was not alive to witness that national fulfilment but he had spelt the national vision.

Thus, Africa must be able to exploit the environmental and economic threats. Men and women in the continent are ravaged by hunger. Why should the continent not be home to agricultural technologies? Is it because of arable lands in Africa that the continent is not exploiting new technologies in agriculture? Then, what is the purpose of agricultural engineering programmes that various universities in the continent are mounting? What is the purpose of biotechnology programmes and institutions in the continent if men and women should go to bed hungry? One of the best tourist destinations in the world is Bangkok in Thailand. Thailand has similar climatic conditions with Africa. It is noteworthy that Thailand built its nation with income from cultivation and processing of rice, the most staple food in Nigeria. Nigeria was a good patron of Thailand rice. Why should Africa continue to outsource the solutions to its problems to other people? This had not worked in the decades gone by and will never work in the ones to come. Our mercantile approach rather than technological approach to tackling our challenges will always leave us worse off.

Africa is still a dark continent. This is neither in figurative term nor in religious term. Fly across the continent and fly across some other continents and your eyes are open to the reality: simply, we lack electricity. This is a big threat as well as a big opportunity. How can grid electricity production in a Nigeria with a population of about 200 million be hovering between 3000 and 5000 megawatts after a humongous amount of money capable of igniting a vibrant fresh electricity industry had been spent? This is within a period of 20 years that electricity had been declared a national priority and successive governments had lamented over inadequate attention that had been paid to the sector in the past. What does national priority signify in Africa – an opportunity to fritter national resources? With large segment of Africa on the tropics, sunlight is abundant. Why are Africans not exploiting solar energy? Is the technology still remote for the continent? If the acute unmet demand for electricity in Africa cannot inspire profit-seeking private sector organisations to search and provide solutions, it should provide a platform for populist politicians to rewrite the history of their nations through the deployment of known technologies or search for local alternatives. However, this has not been the case and what had happened in a place like Nigeria is that profit seekers and populist government officials had exploited the loaf electricity to satisfy their filthy lucre because that provides the currency of popularity in a society where impunity thrives.

Africans are sick. The healthcare system is in crisis. In places where health insurance exists, it is inefficient and available to only a little proportion of the population. The health crisis in the continent should provide opportunity for the people and the continent to search for relevant solutions. What we see rather is capital and human flight, thereby worsening the case. Doctors that had been trained do not find the environment conducive to ply their trade. They migrate to saner climes. Most drugs have to be imported. Sometimes, what are imported are fake. Thus, capital do not only take flight on the importation of genuine drugs but also on the importation of substandard and fake drugs that kill faster than diseases. If sickness does not provide opportunity for Africa to develop its healthcare system, what would?

Let us get a better picture of the docility of healthcare system in Africa with the case of malaria. According to the United Nations Children and Emergency Fund, malaria is the largest killer of children. The disease kills a child every 30 seconds, resulting in the death of 3000 children per day. According to UNICEF, more than one million people are killed by malaria every year. Most of them are children under the age of five. More than 90 per cent of these cases occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. UNICEF says between 300 and 600 million people suffer from Malaria every year. According to the World Health Organisation, five countries accounted for nearly half of all malaria cases worldwide: Nigeria, 25 per cent; Democratic Republic of Congo, 11 per cent; Mozambique, five per cent; India, four per cent and Uganda, four per cent.

On the social and development implication of malaria, UNICEF said, “Malaria hampers children’s schooling and development. Many children who survive a serious attack of malaria develop physical and mental impairment. Malaria is a major cause of poverty. The cost of malaria control and treatment drains African economies, slowing economic growth by about 1.3 per cent a year. Its prevention is an important part of poverty reduction and economic development. Low cost, commonly used therapies are increasingly ineffective. In many parts of Africa, 70 per cent of malaria cases are resistant to cheap existing antimalarial such as chloroquine and sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine.”

A sick nation and a sick continent should seek and find solution and not outsource its health to foreigners who are motivated by only profit. In a world where sublime goals are often beaten by the quest for profit, no country should take its healthcare to the market and leave it there. Leaders should provide the environment and inspire the people to seek local solutions. Malaria cannot be eliminated from the continent by those who benefit from the endemic crisis. To expect that to happen is to expect a man to voluntarily close his source of subsistence. The health crisis in Africa provides another wonderful opportunity for governments and people of the continent to put themselves to task.

The diseases, the hunger, the deprivations, the paucity of infrastructure, the darkness and the insecurity that had threatened Africa only provide opportunities for the continent to harness the potential of its human resources. They provide opportunities for the continent to explore the technology in the heads of its people. No nation ever bought development in the marketplace. You can contract a satellite development company to develop a satellite that bears your name but except you develop the capacity to build satellite and put it in the orbit, no one will reckon with your prowess in satellite technology. They can buy data from you, especially when they can get it at the fraction of the cost, but they will never reckon with you except you develop the capacity to make things happen, at least for yourself.

Identifying talents and competence

James Killian for US Space Venture

When President Dwight Eisenhower identified the threat posed by the Soviet expedition to the space, he identified and appointed the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, James R. Killian, as Presidential Assistant on Science and Technology. That first step led to the formation of the nucleus that eventually gave the world the Internet.

If Africa must vacate the backwaters of development, the importance of identifying, tapping and harnessing quality human resources cannot be overemphasised. Perhaps, there is no more important function of leadership than recruiting the right personnel and putting them in the right places. Africa continues to fail because primordial considerations rank high in the process of identifying personnel to lead efforts in certain areas. The fact that African countries are fragmented along tribal lines compound the problem as tribal interests rather than competence often define who does what in nations across Africa. When competence is subjected to primordial considerations, it becomes difficult to harness the abundant human resources that Africa has been blessed with. What the continent fails to appreciate is that competence and character have the capacity to reshape the content of the continent in the global arena. Nations hurt their interests by bypassing their first 11. When you chose to play with your second 11 or even third, you have condemned yourself to playing the second fiddle or no fiddle at all. Clannishness reduces nations to a clan of clowns in the committee of nations.

Park Tae-joon for Steel Industry in South Korea

Apart from the pick of Killian by President Eisenhower in 1957, perhaps, the pick of Park Tae-joon by visionary leader, President Park Chung-hee of South Korea to lead the country in an effort to acquire steel power vividly illustrates the importance of picking the right personnel for the right job.

South Korea was a typical agrarian economy when President Park Chung-hee emerged on the scene. However, he was committed to transforming the poverty-stricken nation to an industrial society. He identified the acquisition of steel power as the most important step to be taken in achieving the goal of transforming the agrarian economy to an industrial economy. The government of Park Chung-hee created the Pohang Iron and Steel Company, Limited (POSCO) in 1968. That Tae-joon was asked to lead the effort had been identified as the most important factor that led to success of the steel industry in South Korea.

The World Bank and the West did not give Korea a chance in succeeding in the endeavour. The money was not there and the skills were not there either. However, the will, the patriotism and the transparency were abundant. Tae-joon was said to have demanded from the president to leave the recruitment of personnel for the steel company to him. In other words, the president was not to give anyone note to be hired in the steel company. Tae-joon was to make the recruitment based on competence.

• Excerpt from Technology & Development: An African Perspective by Everest Amaefule, PhD

Disclaimer: This article is entirely the opinion of the writer and does not represent the views of The Whistler.

Harnessing The Opportunities Inherent In Our Threats And Fears (3) is first published on The Whistler Newspaper