SO, WHAT PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE THEN?

In what and whom do I place my confidence that a New Nigeria will emerge? What is it that engenders my confidence that our five decades of failure is not sustainable: First is the rising crescendo of dissatisfaction with the concept of Failure by the over 50% percent of our population that are young. That daily the young people of Nigeria- educated or not are anxious to path ways with Failure is a source of optimism.

Today, more than 40% of our young people may be unemployed and requiring a major intervention that matches skills with economic structural change but they represent strength for any leadership that "transcends" in the way it allocates public resources to priorities. They insist by the words and action that they know we can do better than we have done since our independence.

The Women who constituting about 50% of our population are by the records of present accomplishment, the most visible secret weapons of our economic, social and political development. The entrepreneurial and "can do" spirit of just these two groups- the spirit that seeks to compete even with the rest in the world by first conquering the uncertain and disabling context in which it operates is emerging as the counter cultural shock to an elite class that entrenched contemptible wealth based on ignoble ease as a national creed.

The return of the values of hard work and the reward of creativity and innovation are the New Normal that Citizens want to engage their governments on. Citizens question the things and values we reward. They question the perverse incentive that rewards abhorrent behaviour while punishing what is right. They are perplexed when they watch the elite class destroy the potency of sanctions regime in every just society by acts that fail to demand the cost of bad behaviour from big offenders . Citizens wish to unleash their talents and be facilitated by a capable and service oriented public service to identify new sources of growth forcing the diversification rhetoric into reality finally. We must think through how to expand the revenue base of the country and manage it efficiently. Nigeria's revenue cannot cater for the size of the population that we have and we seek to exploit other creative and natural endowments of nature which primarily is our huge population of people with diverse capabilities.
The generation of human capital through education- access to quality basic, tertiary education expanded and well costed with access for the poor and entrepreneurship education relevant to the needs of the economy is priority agenda for a country that has grown over more then a decade now without significant structural change. The structural transformation that focuses on growing indigenous enterprise and deliberatively removing obstacles on the path to economic growth for the women and the young with ideas is what a results oriented government owes Citizens. According to data from the World Bank, it is clear that 74% of our revenue comes from non-oil (mainly agricultural exports) as at 1970. We have sadly reversed that suffering the pernicious effect of oil, as currently oil account for 74% of gross national revenue reversing the trend. While Nigeria exported 502 Metric tons of groundnut in 1961 which was 42% of global production as at that time, we currently export almost nothing with the pyramids now invented in stories told to our children.
Citizens are redefining what true attributes of leadership are by demanding that those who shall lead must be all possessing of - competency, character, and capacity. Neither of the three can substitute for the other. The political and technocratic class have no choice but to commit to redeeming our public institutions and the human resources that run them.
The redemption starts with a true commitment to addressing today's egregious cost of governance. Citizens want to see real commitment to addressing cost of governance because it constitutes massive opportunity cost for equitable economic development that benefits the larger number of citizens who are presently excluded from the benefits of economic growth of the last fourteen years of return to democracy. Citizens associate our meagre revenue which pales when compared to our prospective peers known as MINT, with wastes, gross inefficiency and corruption. Currently, we have N1.7tn paid out of salaries, N721bn for debt servicing and other recurrent items which puts our capital expenditure around N1.1tn. How then do we expand the economy, build the modern infrastructure if for every N100 that we spend in actual terms, over N80 goes to recurrent items. Those are the issues they wish to engage leadership on resolving.
Citizens can now better link public resources and results in their outcry for value-for-money and in the exercise of their right to demand for accountability. They know that our power problem all these years is not merely technical- it is the result of governance failure. Our transportation problem is not technical, it is the result of governance failure. Our poor production and productivity in agriculture are not merely technical, they are governance failure. They know that our health and education and over all underperformance in humans development score are not merely technical, they are due to governance failure.
It cost $148bn dollars in todays value to rebuild Europe after the World War II. This is less than half of the funds that was attributed to have been stolen from Nigeria since independence. The expense of such funds transformed the manufacturing, service industry and competitive factors of Europe. It cost $2bn ($349bn in todays value) to rebuild Japan after the nuclear attack. By conservative estimate, our country has earned more than $600billion in the last five decades and yet can only boast of a United Nations Human Development Index score of .4 out of 1 proximate to that of Chad and maternal mortality rate similar to that of Afghanistan! Nothing reveals the depth of our failures than such performance indicators considering the vastly greater possibilities that we have been bestowed.
Above all, and finally, Citizens now seek to fully participate and make demands for democratic accountability- they are not afraid to scrutinise all public institutions and to demand better results of governance.

The unwillingness of any group of political elite to understand this emerging power of the Office of the Citizen can only be a loss to the former and yet another missed opportunity added to our canvass of political tragedies....... But God forbid!

Obiageli (Oby) Ezekwesili
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN