Conquest. Complete conquest. This is about the only way left to understand and explain the relationship between the Federal Government of Nigeria on the one hand, and the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF), on the other. The analogy is fitting too because today and in recent years, the political behaviour of the Nigerian state in relation to these Bretton Woods Institutions (BWI) effectively approximates that of a conquered nation, a colony, or a country that has lost its sovereignty.
Hardly any other analogy fits better because right before our eyes, the federal government has outsourced its policy and decision-making powers as a sovereign nation to the World Bank and IMF in ways that are effectively a recolonisation of Nigeria.
As the history books tell us, the colonial system of government which held sway in Nigeria for about a hundred years from 1861 to 1960 had many political, economic, and socio-cultural features that were designed to produce very particular outcomes for both the colony and the metropole.
But perhaps the most important of those features was rolled into the very idea and practice of “Indirect Rule”, in which local Nigerian leaders—Emir, Oba, Obi, Chief, etc—were effectively middlemen sandwiched between the foreign coloniser—District Administrator, Regional Governor, Governor-General—and the colonised Nigerian peoples in several twisted versions of the age-old “traditional institutions” such as the Native Authority system or similar varieties throughout the country. Nigerian leaders were, therefore, in charge of the government, but without really being in charge of it.
This particular form of colonial system had three profound outcomes for both the governors and the governed, as far as the idea of government, properly understood, was concerned. First, this system was designed for subjects, not citizens—two very different concepts of personhood that 64 years after independence, we in Nigeria must re-interrogate and relearn anew. That is, the colonial system was primarily designed for a subjugated and conquered people, a people with limited rights; and not for citizens who have full rights which even the state must not only respect but must be seen to respect at all times. This was the reality of the colonial government in Nigeria, certainly in the 60 or so years between 1900 and 1960.
In the colonial system, moreover, the priorities of the government—either overall or in terms of specific policies—were by and large externally driven and determined by the colonisers in faraway metropolitan Britain and their agents stationed here in Nigeria to keep the system running perpetually. The decision to build a primary school in Azare, or clinic in Ijebu-Ode, or yet a road in Abakaliki was not always up to the local Nigerian leaders, but to the colonisers and their agents because the entire system was designed to extract as much material benefit—at the least possible cost—to the coloniser.
As for the welfare and well-being of Nigerians, who carried out much of this resource extraction with their bare hands and backbones, this was a priority only to the extent that it would enable them to continue extracting on behalf of the metropolitan government and people.
Perhaps the road in Abakaliki was needed less than a clinic or a school for the Nigerians there, but it was built nonetheless because it was needed more for the priorities of metropolitan Britain. Indeed, all roads and all rail lines in the country led, not always to the farms where goods were produced, but the ports where they would be exported.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the legitimacy of governmental action flowed not inwards from the Nigerian leaders to their people, or from the people to the leaders, as would normally be expected in any democratic system, but outwards to the foreign colonisers. If a particular decision or action of government at any level was deemed right by the District Administrator, Regional Governor, or the Governor-General of Nigeria under this system, then alright it was because everyone, as subjects, laboured only at the pleasure of the King or Queen, and no more. It mattered little what the Nigerian leaders thought or not, and much less what the people thought or not because the legitimacy of government flowed from and to Britain, not Nigeria or Nigerians.
This brief recount was the reality of colonial government in Nigeria, much of Africa, and elsewhere. It was also what the Independence Movement stood against, and fought against, often at the pain of death for many. Indeed, the whole point of political independence for Nigeria, and the rest of Africa, was to transform a subject nation and people into citizens who govern themselves, a people who decide their destiny by controlling their resources and using the same to advance the welfare and well-being of their people. But if all of these seem distant in the past to you, then, you have not been paying much attention, certainly not to the increasingly incestuous relationship between our federal government and the World Bank/IMF. I am arguing that we are back right there again with this current government, and to lesser extents, the previous few.
The Tinubu government has effectively handed over policy and decision-making to the BWI and their officials in Nigeria. What Tinubu calls “bold decisions”, for which Nigerians call him President T-Pain, are not his original ideas but the priorities of the World Bank and IMF for Nigeria.
However, the priorities of these institutions cannot and should not be the same as those of an elected Nigerian government because neither the World Bank nor the IMF is a disinterested or neutral party in Nigeria. They are creditors whose first and most important mission—however else they frame it—is to make sure they recover their loans with a profit, so that, they too can remain in business.
Their policies, which the government has adopted and called “bold decisions” are, therefore, primarily designed to enable the government to pay those loans, even if, as they know, most of the loans have disappeared into private pockets. As the old saying in economics goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
But it does not end there. As things stand now, only the World Bank and IMF are happy with the government’s policies over the past year and a half. The overwhelming majority of Nigerians are decidedly against them. This does not appear to worry the government much because the only stamp of approval it craves is that of the World Bank and IMF, not of Nigerians.
Indeed, other than the rather tiresome statements like “bold decisions” the federal government could not even make a systematic and evidence-based case for itself that its economic policies are working and will deliver the desired dividends in the long run. Instead, it has left that task for the World Bank to do, in the form of the Bank’s latest edition of the Nigeria Development Update (NDU) published last week.
If all this sounds more like externally driven and externally determined legitimacy to you, it sure is. I have read the World Bank’s 66-page NDU report, which, thankfully, is quite easy to read for the trained eye, and will analyse it more closely next week. For now, it is sufficient to say that if this is evidence of “progress”, as the World Bank calls it, and the government will be happy to hear, then we might as well be back in 1924 as a proper colony of foreign interests.
Suleiman A. Suleiman is a columnist with Daily Trust
