Between Democracy, Neoliberalism and the Developmental State in Fixing Nigeria

By Tunji Olaopa

My thesis in this piece is that Nigeria urgently needs a developmental state and a renegotiated terms of engagement with development partners (especially with such multilateral institutions like the World Bank and IMF, while deploying economic diplomacy with bilateral institutions) in a measure that significantly enables the government to wade through the binding constraints and developmental limitations obstructing the benefits of democratic governance for Nigerians. To achieve this demand significant dose of political will, ideological focusing, and theoretical as well as conceptual analyses and nuancing to get the discourse right. I hope this piece will further contribute to that attempt at understanding Nigeria’s ideological requirements in making democratic governance work for Nigerians. This for me is a theoretical advisory from a scholar-practitioner who has focused all his theoretical and practical intervention into institutional reform as a critical means by which to remake Nigeria’s democratic and developmental pathways through social and institutional reengineering.

The conceptual nexus between development and democracy has remained one of the most crucial discourses in the political science literature. It is a discourse that investigates and interrogates the perceived relationship between development and democratic governance in all ongoing policy attempts by governments to make the lives of their citizens better and fulfilling. Since the waves and tides of democratic yearning burst on the world’s political imagination, there have been serious expectations that democratic governments will put paid to the aspiration for the transformation of the life prospects of citizens as part of the social contract between the government and the governed. In other words, if the citizens—under the democratic tenet—have the right to determine the kind of government to which they can entrust the commonwealth, then the government itself hold the responsibility of transforming that trust into developmental dividends.

Unfortunately, democracy especially in its procedural liberal form has not always been developmental, it has largely been self-serving to perpetuate the dependency structure of the neo-colonial and imperial global economy and its world order. This is mostly the case for the African continent, and with African states that have embraced liberal, majoritarian and procedural democracy that often privileges political rights over more substantive needs for development in terms of poverty alleviation, quality education and other infrastructural transformations that qualitatively empower the citizens. Indeed, the idea of “bureaucratic-authoritarianism,” developed by Guillermo O’Donnell, signals a long trajectory of political analyses that link authoritarianism—rather than democracy—with positive national development. For political scientists who have had to despair over the failure of democracy to automatically birth development, the prospect of developmental dictatorship to initiate economic progress and infrastructural development is not only historical but also prospective. From the Asian Tigers (Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea) to Rwanda in Africa, we have examples of states that have privileged state intervention in ways that often flout democratic prescriptions and precepts.

The cases of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew and Rwanda under Paul Kagame are very instructive. Both were countries that struggled with unique national circumstances—Singapore was a third world country with national debilitations; Rwanda went through a traumatic national experience of genocide. Today, under strong authoritarian governments, Singapore is now a first world country, and Rwanda survived its genocidal past to emerge as one of the top performing countries on the continent. Singapore and Rwanda cannot be held up as the typical examples of democracies since both possess crucial elements of authoritarianism that kept pushing their development indicators positively. And yet, the world keeps pushing for the expansion of the democratic imagination, and the capacity of democracy to birth and sustain development. Under Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore was a case of authoritarian voluntarism where the state coopted citizens’ participation without allowing full democratic participation in the political process. Indeed, civil society and all forms of political dissent and opposition were muzzled. This political model was responsible for the transformation of Singapore as a development powerhouse. Today, Singapore is considered a “soft authoritarian” state—a hybrid government that cultivates electoral processes but limits political contestation and opposition.

One of the key features of developmental dictatorship is the idea of a very strong and strong-willed state that enforces developmental programmes and national blueprints and roadmaps in ways that pursues government aspirations and objectives. The Asian Tigers once again provide the sample of the strong-willed state that is intent on delivering governance and developmental objectives. And in most cases, such strong intentions often require mechanisms of operations that would hamper democratic positionings. When post-war Japan needed to bulldoze its way back into industrial and developmental reckoning, it needed such a strong and developmental state to articulate governance policies that were urgent and required political will to push through. The same goes for Rwanda that needed to firmly take hold of the reins of an anarchical society that was about to implode after the genocide. But is it possible for such a strong-willed developmental state to be conditioned by democratic aspirations, given that it has become a political tool in the hand of dictatorial and authoritarian governments?

Political scientists have sought an answer to this question through the idea of developmental democracy as a political model that could sustain both a developmental state and democratic ideals. The conception of developmental democracy is a theoretical attempt at having the best of two worlds—a strong and state-led developmental aspirations coupled democratic consolidation. The argument underlying this political model is that democracy must be rethought as a fundamental mechanism that transcends mere procedural protocols and abstract political rights to empowering the citizens and bettering their lives. And that empowerment can only be facilitated by a strong state which puts in place governance policies that enable infrastructural development. In this context, democracy becomes substantive rather than a mere procedural mechanism enabled by the electoral process of voting in new governments.

Developmental democracy, however theoretically and practically possible its tenets are, needs to confront two significant impediments, one structural and the other ideological, if its prospect will enable states like Nigeria searching for a political model of democracy and development. The first structural hindrance has to do with Africa’s institutional impediments. Developmental democracy requires an environment grounded in civic culture tempered with a heavy dose of elite nationalism and a willing readiness of the political class to take a gamble on developing Nigeria which as praxis might be analogous to committing class suicide to function. Unfortunately, Africa’s postcolonial predicaments have drained the continent of fundamental political mechanisms that could facilitate the growth of such an enabling mechanism. Democracy has had to struggle against disabling factors and variables—attitudinal, cultural and structural—in ways that prevent democratic governance from being empowering. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that motivated the search for a better political model in the first place.

The second impediment to the functional possibility of developmental democracy in Africa, and for a country like Nigeria, is the ideological environment of the contemporary world order mediated by the specter of neoliberalism. The neoliberal economic ideology, mediated by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF)—and the Washington Consensus—is founded on a free-market mechanism that demands privatization, liberalization and deregulation within a framework of decreasing state spending and intervention in the economy. The Washington Consensus therefore refers to the standard framework of economic and political reforms determined by the neoliberal ideology for underdeveloped states, especially in Latin America, Asia and Africa. When the structural adjustment programmes ended in the 1990s, Africa had learned a bitter traumatic lesson about the ideological implications of neoliberalism. The decimated institutions made it even more difficult for a developmental democracy to gain any grounds.

While these impediments are crucial and significant, they are definitely not insurmountable. And just like the Asian Tigers and their developmental state model, the case of India provides a further alternative for African states, and Nigeria, to reflect and consider. As a result of its balance of payment crisis in the early 1990s, India was subjected to the classic conditionalities of the Bretton Woods institutions: liberalization of import and industrial policy, the devaluation of the Indian rupee, privatization of the economy. The Indian economy was forced into the neoliberal economic order as a subsidiary economy through the opening up of her economy to global capital. And like Nigeria and many African states forced into similar arrangement, the SAP mechanism sapped the Indian economy off its vitality. The first and second generations of economic and governance reforms in India were mediated by neoliberal capitalist and transnational financial institutions in ways that kept undermining the capacity of the Indian economy to achieve global competitiveness.

The lesson derivable from India’s relationship with the Bretton Woods institution is one of negotiated relationship. India did not go the radical left way of cutting off the support of the IMF and the World Bank. And neither did it allow these institutions to apply a shock therapy to its economy. On the contrary, India adopted a gradualist approach. India has since paid off all debts, and disengaged from all Bretton Woods assisted lending.

What does a country like Nigeria, that shares all similarities with India and other third world countries, have to learn from all these analyses and its embedded ideological perspective? The first key insight for me is that any nation-state that ever hopes to make developmental progress must be willing to do something a bit crazy (requiring a mix of out-of-the-box and without-a-box strategic intelligence in a manner of speaking) at the level of national change management, and one at that with a heavy dosage of political pragmatism. This pragmatism derives from Deng Xiaoping’s transformation of a Chinese proverb into a pragmatic economic philosophy. According to the former vice premier of China, “it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or yellow as long as it catches mice.” Thus, whether a planned or market economy—or a pragmatic combination of the two—as long as it achieves an equitable redistribution of resources that empowers the citizens.

The second insight is that all the success stories we have examined, from Japan, India, Rwanda to the Asian Tigers, all pointed at the fundamental significance of a strong and capable developmental state. The concept of a democratic developmental state therefore not only captures the relevance of the democratic imagination but also a developmental ideology that has achieved contemporary relevance, especially for any postcolonial African states intent on making global competitiveness. The conception of the democratic developmental state offers a unique ideological radical point from which Nigeria, and the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration can interrogate the relevance and role of neoliberal ideologies and principles in the Nigerian economy and development planning.

The fundamental key, and this is the third lesson to learn from the foregoing analyses, is leadership sophistication and decision-making quotient. This is what transformed Rwanda, India, Japan and the Asian Tigers—they all had leaders who had not just the political will but also a high decision-making quotient backed by an ideological direction that took them out of the woods (all puns intended!). Leadership sophistication is a fundamental dimension that makes ideological pragmatism possible; or that differentiates between pragmatism and ideological complacence. A democratic developmental state comes with a very strict dose of institutional reform that places the civil and public service at the right hand of the developmental state and its transformation aspiration. This already therefore signals the veritable but right direction for the Tinubu administration in the very urgent decision to start articulating an ideology of national development that will forge a political legacy that endures for all time.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa is the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja