As the 2023 general elections comes ever closer, Nigeria is getting ready to confront the critical question of which direction it hopes to go in the next four years and crucially, of whom to trust to pull it in the right direction.
If there is one thing an increasingly divided country is agreed on, it is the fact that Nigeria`s experiment with leadership since independence in 1960 has been one marked by failure. Leaders have come and gone in Nigeria but many of them have left nothing but a legacy of failure.
If the country`s return to democracy in 1999 was supposed to bring with it a much-needed improvement on the leadership front, that expectation has been brutally cut short as the culture of leadership failure has simply continued, this time under a different but equally brittle arrangement. In many ways, Nigeria`s ill-luck with leadership has been responsible for many of the problems plaguing the country.
As Nigeria has continued to struggle badly on the leadership front, spawning a country that has known no little struggle in the process, the sheer size of government in Nigeria and the attendant staggering cost of governance have been identified as the chief culprits in Nigeria`s perennial struggles to get off its marks and be at par with other countries.
Over the years, as Nigerians both at home and in the diaspora have pondered on what the immediate future holds for an ailing country, the realization had continued to grow that if the country is to make genuine progress, then it must somehow contrive to cut the cost of government failing which it can expect to continue to be weighed down by its own weight.
A report gathering dust
In 2011, the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, set up the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies, under the chairmanship of Steve Orosanye. The committee was to suggest solutions to what was the unwieldy size of the government in Nigeria. The committee duly did its work an came up with a report that today is commonly known as the Orosanye report.
A key recommendation of the report was that Nigeria would have to cut down the cost of governance if it ever hopes to run a leaner and consequently more efficient country.
Ten years after the report was first minted, it has continued to gather dust as the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari who has been in office for seven years now prepares to leave office by May 2023, when he would have clocked eight years in office.
In Nigeria, about 91 million people currently languish below the poverty line. When this figure is put side by side with Nigeria`s population which is projected to hit 216 million people by November 2023,a grim picture of troubling poverty is well and truly painted.
Over the years, Nigeria`s abundant oil and gas resources and abundant potentials in tourism, agriculture, solid minerals, sports and other revenue-yielding areas have counted for so little because of wanton waste and mind-boggling corruption.
Nigeria has never had in place a president who truly understands how economics work, how the economy should work at both the macro and micro levels, so as to take appropriate steps to engender lasting economic development in the country.
Nigeria needs a president who can identify where the Nigerian economy is bleeding and do something urgently and definitively to fix it.
With the 2023 polls firmly around the corner, Nigeria can either choose to turn a corner or remain in the room where the marriage of square pegs and round holes would continue to yield nothing but abject poverty and abundant frustration.
Kene Obiezu,
Twitter:@kenobiezu
