 |
| |
By C.
Don Adinuba
BAYELSA
State is a quintessence of how crisis of social values is at the root of the
economic underperformance of societies and nations. Speaking on television
networks in the first week of this month, Governor Serieka Dickson ascribed his
inability to pay the workforce in almost half a year to humongous debts
accumulated by his predecessors. Many governors borrow massively from banks and
issue to the accountant general of the federation an irrevocable standing
payment order (ISPO) to deduct the loans from source and pay creditors. “I did
not see what they did with all the monies they borrowed”, Dickson bemoaned.
Though he did not reveal his predecessors who put Bayelsa in peonage, the list
may include Diepreye Alamieyeseigha...
If
the list does indeed include Alamieyeseigha, then Dickson must accept
responsibility for the state’s economic mess. Only last April, he organized a
high profile state executive council meeting in honour of Alamieyeseigha,
attended by former President Goodluck Jonathan and Alamieyesiegha’s widow,
where he proudly announced the renaming of the state’s banquet hall and the
road linking the state capital of Yenagoa and Alamieyeseigha’s hometown of
Amassoma in Southern Ijaw Local Government Area for the late former governor.
He also announced that a mausoleum would be built for Alamieyesiegha in ijaw
Heroes Park. At the requiem service on April 19 for the former
governor on April 19 who was jailed for plundering the state (not
Nigeria), Dickson called him repeatedly “a true hero”.
The
governor general of the Ijaw nation, as Alamieyeseigha was fondly called, was
one Nigerian public officer whose looting is fairly well documented. In 2010,
seven years after he was impeached, the British government returned to Bayelsa
State a whopping five million pounds stashed away in the United Kingdom by Alamieyesiegha
who had been arrested in September, 2012, at Heathrow Airport for money
laundering. Alamieyeseigha had purchased five properties in London, kept one
million pounds in raw cash in his London home and left $2.7m in an account with
the Royal Bank of Scotland. He also had houses in the United States and South
Africa—all acquired while he was governor of one of Nigeria’s poorest states.
While being tried in London in 2005, he escaped to Nigeria where he hoped that
the constitutional immunity conferred on him as a governor would save him.
Many
Africans do not seem to appreciate the correlation between high ethical
standards and economic development. A society which allows its people to
indulge in massive corruption cannot develop economically. In 1958, the
distinguished American sociologist, Edward Banfied, called attention to this
reality through his seminal book, The Moral Basis of a Backward
Society. Banfield did a study of southern Italy which is called the
Third World of Western Europe because of its economic backwardness,
unlike northern Italy which is as developed as any other part of the First
World. The cultural values in southern Italy enable criminal organisations like
the Mafia to reign supreme in cities like Sicily and Naples.
This
great work by Banfield practically faded from the radar screen of many western
scholars until in 1997 when Francis Fukuyama published his second book
entitled Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity in
which the polyvalent intellectual argues that the difference between poor and
rich societies is the difference in the levels of social capital. By social
capital, Fukuyama means the stock of values like honesty, loyalty, integrity
and trust. He calls societies with a substantial stock of these values
high-trust ones and societies where the reverse is the case low-trust. The
examples Fukuyama cites for explaining why many nations in the Third World
cannot build big businesses which outlive the founders and their families and
consequently contribute significantly to national economic well being are
arresting, but beyond the scope of this essay.
As
a new millennium was about to dawn, Harvard University organized in 1999 a
symposium to interrogate the powerful place of cultural values in societal and national
development. Papers delivered at the symposium were published the following
year in a book edited by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington entitled Culture
Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. In a penetrating
introduction, Huntington, author of the magnus opus,The Clash of
Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, provides a glimpse into why
Southeast Asian nations like South Korea and Singapore have recorded fantastic
progress, despite the absence of natural resources, but not African countries
like Ghana, in spite of the superabundance of resources like cocoa and gold.
Writes Huntington: “South Koreans valued thrift, education, organisation, and
discipline. Ghanaians had different values. In short, cultures count”.
Despite
its low population and relatively sparse population, Bayelsa receives one of
the largest allocations from the federation account every month because it is a
leading oil-producing state. Still, it owes workers for several months. In
contrast, a state like Anambra which receives almost an infinitesimal amount
from the federation account and has a large population and a huge workforce,
not only pays workers before month end but even increases salaries, employs
more workers and continues with the construction of a large number of roads and
state of the art aesthetic bridges. Why wouldn’t Bayelsa be in financial
doldrums when Gov Dickson insists on holding up Alamieyeseighe as a role model
in a state with personages like Larry Koinyan, Gabriel Okara and Mrs T. K.
Agari, among numerous others who can hold their ground anywhere in the world
intellectually and morally? It should come to no one as a surprise that the
incidences of contract padding and ghost workers in Bayelsa have been proved to
be the worst in the whole country since Dickson, compelled by the ongoing
economic crunch, began to check several leakages in the state’s treasury.
The
terrible crisis of values is not peculiar to Bayelsa. A major public housing
estate in Abuja is named for Ibrahim Abacha for dying on a presidential jet on
January 17, 1996, while frolicking with his girlfriend. The Kano State stadium
is named for Sani Abacha, a pathological buccaneer, with the millions of
dollars he looted still being returned to Nigeria, 18 years after his death. In
Anambra, the military regime changed Achalla Road in the capital to Prince
Arthur Eze Avenue, after Eze had received $110m and a huge naira component from
the African development Bank for rural water supply and rural electrification
in old Anambra State and the building of an industrial development centre in
Awka but did practically nothing. Eze took over the chairmanship of Premier
Breweries, the biggest industry in Anambra State and third largest brewery in
Nigeria, and ran it aground. He became chairman of Orient Bank and as he was
about to ground it, Paul Ogwuma, as the Central Bank of Nigeria governor, not
only removed him but banned him from ever being on the board of any bank. In
typical Nigerian fashion, President Jonathan awarded him a high national honour. About
two months ago, the University of Nigeria at Nsukka bestowed an honorary
doctorate on him.
It
is a shame that most Nigerian public officers do not know the close
relationship between values and economic development. Worse, our universities
are steeped in a profound moral cesspool.
Adinuba is head of
Discovery Public Affairs Consulting.
No comments:
Post a Comment