Feyi Fawehinmi: Limiting the powers of the Nigerian State

by Feyi Fawehinmi

For the past couple of days, I’ve been involved a seemingly interminable debate with Dr. Joe Abah — the Director-General of Nigeria’s Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR). The good news is that we have not been arguing about Kim Kardashian or Lionel Messi. The bad news is that neither of us about to change our minds — he’s as entrenched in his position as I am. Of course I’m right and he’s wrong. Why do you ask?

More seriously, the debate has been about the proper size of government — I think government in Nigeria is too big, he thinks it’s not even big enough for what needs to be done. He also thinks government is based on a model that should be implemented. I think that government should evolve naturally as a nation does (I gave an example in this thread). Ultimately, my conclusion is that Nigeria has too much government for its level of development i.e there is so much government-ing going on with little corresponding activity. The natural consequence is that government then becomes a parasite or nuisance on whatever little economic activity there is.
The Story of IDPs

Today, The Cable published an undercover investigation by the journalist, Fisayo Soyombo (God bless him) on the state of things in one of the IDP camps in Borno. He spent 8 days there disguised as a relief donor. I think that this sad story illustrates the knots we have tied ourselves into as a country.
The first thing we can agree is that there is no food scarcity. The challenge that needs to be solved is getting food from where it is to where it is desperately needed. There is plenty of food in the world if you want it. If you want wheat, there was a bumper harvest in Russia this year. Bumper corn harvest crashed prices in America this year. And in Nigeria, there have been plenty of reports about a bumper harvest this year.

There is food.
To Fisayo’s report:

Camp and Borno state government officials have invented an ingenuous way of keeping journalists off IDP camps. No journalist is allowed entry upon arrival at the camp. Instead, he is first directed to SEMA to submit an application letter that finds eternal abode in one of the dusty files at the relief agency. The practice is to direct the journalist from one office to another, on and on until frustration sets in and he is forced to abandon the mission.

But after five days of relentless failing and retrying, I finally make my way into Bakassi IDP camp, located on Damboa Road — not as a journalist but as a potential donor of relief materials to the displaced population. I explain to the camp officials that I need to first see the camp to be able to assess the needs of IDPs, and then return at a later date with a reinforcement of relief items. I expect them to immediately facilitate my movement into the camp, but surprisingly four of them ease me out of the general office into a ramshackle, deserted room where all sorts of irrelevant questions are asked.

How much exactly is the worth of the donation you’re planning?” one asks. I ignore him the first time but he doesn’t give up. Instead, he adds: “I ask so that I can tell you the kind of materials that you should go for.”

When I mention some figure in the region of thousands of US dollars, his face brightens. He dips his hand into his pocket but I notice he doesn’t immediately withdraw it. “I think we should allow him enter,” he tells his colleagues.
And just as the trio face the door to take their exit, he quickly slips his complimentary card into my hands. We all leave, the other three oblivious of what had just transpired.

This is sad and sobering stuff. The reason why the SEMA officials behave in this way is pretty obvious:

Let me tell you what SEMA does. They divert food meant for IDPs to private quarters. They actually re-bag grains meant for IDPs and re-sell at the open-air market. These bags of grains that are diverted, they claim that they are giving them to IDPs in host communities.
“It’s very smart move from these SEMA officials because they know that there’s no documentation for IDPs resident in host communities. Of course, this particular IDP population exists, but you can’t track their number. It is this loophole that SEMA exploits to divert aid meant for IDPs

This is the part that illustrates that we have come full circle — if you remove SEMA from the IDP camp, the people will have more food to eat. This is in danger of becoming another permanent problem in Nigeria — stories of officials stealing food meant for IDPs have been going on for years now.
What Money Can Do

Which brings me to the point of this post. The reporter posed as someone who wanted to donate materials and he was let in. In another part of the report he wrote that:

Two, it isn’t once — not even twice — in 2016 that IDPs in Borno had received the donation of sewing machines from public-spirited individuals and organisations.

And:
There are IDP camp officials who have bad character; when some donors bring relief materials, these officials pass them on to their families rather than the IDPs who need them,
And and:

Let me tell you, they gave SEMA about 3,000 bags of sugar during the Ramadan period. We brought it and they didn’t make use of it; they just kept it till after the Ramadan period and the sugar became solid,” he says.

“Then they started to break the sugar and change the sacks. Then they loaded it in the cars at night, and took it to the flour mill to sell.
“Then they brought people to come and sew the new sacks. When we all left to go home in the evening, they went back to load the trucks at night and head to the flour mill.

“It also includes groundnuts. There’s one that Dangote brought, supplies for the fasting period. They called him [the SEMA chairman] and gave him but he didn’t share it to the people.

It is part of the natural evolution of a people to care for other members of their society without government getting involved. It is a part of what makes us civilised. As people go along, they learn to do this in many different ways to the point that it becomes reflex or cultural.
If I wanted to raise money for a cause here in the UK, the modes of doing are established. I can do a run and put it up on a website, inviting donations from people. I can do a car-boot sale or get my wife to bake cupcakes and invite people over. Next March, there will be Red Nose Day where you can raise money while making a fool of yourself. The last Children In Need raised £46m. They start teaching kids how to raise money for things that don’t directly benefit them from a very young age.

 

I don’t know what it’s like in America at the ground level, but higher up, I know that Americans give a whole lot. A visit to any university will convince you of this or indeed the various public libraries, art galleries, museums and so on established and sustained by philantrophy.

Back in the day when word started to spread about John D. Rockefeller’s wealth, people would write him all sorts of letters asking for money. Some of them were clearly trying their luck but many were people who genuinely needed help. He used to go through the letters himself and respond to the ones he felt were genuine. Word of his generosity naturally spread which meant he got more and more letters. One month, after getting 50,000 letters asking for help, he decided he had had enough. So he set up an office and hired staff solely to go through the letters and send money to people.

John D. Rockefeller

Today, every billionaire from Bill Gates to Carlos Slim has a foundation handling their charitable giving. What began with Rockefeller has now been institutionalised and even expanded beyond America.

Charity Flowering

Charitable giving is a lot easier in rich countries but it happens in small countries too. And what that report shows, in subtle ways, is that Nigerians are giving what they can to IDPs. In my experience, I have seen a couple of people I know do fundraising drives to get supplies out to people in the North East. It’s a tough time in the country right now and even when things weren’t so bad, majority of Nigerians were poor so giving was less popular than receiving. Nigerians certainly give a lot to family and friends. But the next stage of that process is pooling resources together to give to people far removed from themselves who need it (It’s starting to happen with requests for donations to help someone with a medical bill usually on social media). If people do it for the North East and it works, in future it gets easier and easier to respond to such crisis even before government can get out of bed.
It is not that any reasonable government cannot handle these things. Certainly, £46m is not something the UK government can’t give to Children In Need. But allowing people to organise themselves in this way does something good for a society. Government, no matter how effective, will almost never be able to cover all the gaps in a society. People step in and they are allowed to do so. And over time, this private effort gets institutionalised into all kinds of different expressions. You can’t plot this on a graph but it is part of the wealth of any decent society.

But look what’s happening in this case. Government, via a couple of its agencies, is making it impossible for that natural interaction to happen. The camp officials, by virture of the uniform they wear or whatever law empowers them, are blocking that private effort from flowering. The feedback that should spur more people to contribute to the effort is not forthcoming. The dominant narrative that people hear is that whatever is given will probably be stolen. And those stories are true. From the report, the officials go as far as physically constituting a road block stopping people from entering the place. They want all donations to come through them so they can split it in half.

The more private effort is discouraged, the more of the burden is carried by a government that is weakened by corruption in its own ranks. The vicious cycle is complete. And this being Nigeria, we know how these things go. Given that this thing has been going on for a while now, it is safe to say the corruption is being institutionalised. Right now, the officials are applying a 50% tax on supplies but it will only get worse. The evolution of the corruption is that a posting to head an IDP camp will then become so valuable that people will start bribing to get it. This will raise the cost and the returns required for it to make sense. So at some point you can expect the officials to start keeping 60%, then 70%, then 80% of the supplies for themselves.

What Role Should Government Play?

So what should we do where government is clearly a stumbling block to progress? I am not an anarchist so there is definitely a role for government to play in my world view. But beyond the size of government, there are other questions about where government should position itself.

In a country like America where every random millionaire or billionaire is setting up a charitable foundation, does this mean that government has no role to play in that kind of arrangement? For sure, we want as many rich people giving money to charity. For that reason they get tax deductions for such giving. But there is a role for government to play — ensuring that rich people are not using such foundations simply to dodge taxes. Without naming names, a rich guy might set up a foundation and find a way to make himself the biggest beneficiary of the foundation’s spending after getting the tax deductions.

So to avoid such a problem, where should government insert itself in the process? Should it be screening and determining who can set up a foundation? Or should it just let people set up a foundation and then audit them later when they file their accounts?

We can explain this sort of  with the work of Jean Tirole — the genius French economist who won the Noble Prize in Economics in 2014. His insight into platform markets and industrial organisation underpins a lot of what we know in those areas in our world today. A good example I read recently and like is nightclubs. If you’re a guy, you’ve probably been to a nightclub where girls were allowed to enter for free until midnight or something like that. The club’s logic is simple — they know that men spend a lot more money when they are surrounded by plenty of (beautiful) women. So given the choice to charge men and women in the same way at the gate, they make the decision to let women in free (to ensure they get as many in) and maybe raise the price of drinks slightly.

Jean Tirole

Or Google. You don’t get charged for searching for something on Google even though Google could do so. But advertisers pay a lot of money to have access to you and your data. Just like the nightclub, Google has made the decision to let you use the site for free because it knows that the more of you it can get on its site, the more it can get advertisers to spend to reach you.

Once you think of it in this way, you start to see a pattern where the Nigerian government chooses to place itself in the chain of interactions in society. I once drove past the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) building in Abuja and saw a large crowd outside. The government has decided to put itself at the very front of the chain of interactions required to register a company. And it has turned the process into hell. Over here you can register a company in about 30 minutes online. But you start to feel the responsibility after about a year or 18 months when the letters asking you to file this paper or that start arriving in the post. It is not that you just register a company and forget about it — it is that the very first set of interactions are allowed to happen with as little friction as possible.

If people are allowed access to the IDP camps without SEMA officials quite literally standing in their way, not only will they go a long way in solving the hunger problem but the country as a whole will benefit from that something that enriches society when people help each other out. This stuff may sound trivial but it isn’t once you start looking around to see how this question of where government chooses to place itself plays out.

Limiting The State

If I had my way, I’d definitely cut a lot of stuff from government. If you check the ministry of science and technology’s budget, there are 100 different agencies/bodies drawing from the public purse. Most of them serve no useful purpose. You can literally delete them and the only effect will be to save money. The heavens won’t fall.

But we cannot delete the entire government. Even if you cut government down to just one department, that department must still do the work you need it to do. We must place limits on what government can do. Every day now, you hear of one government agency testing the limits of outrage. A couple of days ago, NAFDAC went to markets in Lagos to raid people selling the abomination that is imported foreign juice. They had the nerve to openly say they were doing it because they were not allowed to operate inside the ports. Your business can be destroyed today because two competing agencies are trying to make a point over who gets to control some turf.

CBN is fighting with NAICOM so the bancassurance model is under threat. Customs is fighting with DSS and God only knows who will be the casualty. NCC started fighting with NBC last year over the sale of a spectrum and MTN suffered for it until the war ended this year. God help you if you need to export anything through the airports in Lagos. The place is swarming with different government agencies claiming the turf:

At the cargo terminal of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos, for instance, there are representatives of almost all the security agencies in the country, who supervise the import and export of commodities. Among them are the Department of Quarantine Services, the Nigerian Immigration Services, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Customs, Police, Department of State Services (SSS), Anti-Bomb squad, Air Force, Skyways Aviation Handling Company (SAHCOL)/National Aviation Handling Company (NAHCO) and Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN).

A yam farmer in Nasarrawa State, who identified himself as Abdullahi Sanni, said the “road blocks” at the airport and attendant extortions by some officials had over the years remained the bane of the country’s export drive.
Abdullahi said: “Go and find out. A Nigerian yam that manages to get to Canada or United States, because they love our yam so much, ends up being between 60c and $1 more expensive than others coming from places like Ghana. And more often, they turn out to be the same type of yam but in different labels.

There is no limit to government in Nigeria because, partly due to our military past, the question has never even been considered. There surely must be limits. It is not possible to deliver effective governance through this kind of pipeline. It is not just that it adds to costs (remember the recent real life graphic example on this blog). The cost that is difficult to quantify is how it stops the development of society by making necessary interactions difficult or impossible.

All the countries that our people go to holiday in or emigrate to for a better life have at one time or the other done the needful work of placing limits on the power of the state — from the Magna Carta to The Federalist Papers.

These things have gone on for so long that people have come to almost accept them as normal. But it need not be so. It is to your benefit as a Nigerian that the government has clear limits to its powers. It will allow you the liberty to take charge of your destiny as a citizen of your own country and not be at the mercy of the whims and caprice of an all powerful state that can make it impossible for you to carry out even the most simple interactions.

No one is guaranteed any number of days on this earth. But if you are 40 years old, you have a reasonable expectation of sticking around much longer than someone who is 80 years old. With that expectation comes the responsibility to take charge of shaping the future.

 

 

This post is not really a call to action or a requirement for you to take any particular step. It is a discussion on the kind of country we now find itself with and what we can do to solve the challenges its myriad weaknesses pose to all its citizens.


Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

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