Systemic Reform: A path to real and believable change Leaders come, leaders go, while Nigeria’s challenges remain, and continue to multiply. Only those leaders will leave indelible footprints and lasting legacies, who work assiduously to change the country’s governance and public administration culture. The alternative is to bequeath when they leave office what they inherit at the beginning of their tenure, notably a culture that persistently frustrates public will and dampens private … [Read more...]
Archives for November 2018
Pushing for change in Nigeria IV: Neo-feudal culture and widening public administration deficits
November 25, 2018 by 4 Comments
"You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself, that values itself, that understands itself."-- Wangari Maathai We have thus far examined the foundation on which the apparatus of the Nigerian state was super-imposed when power changed hands at independence. The new set of rulers not only inherited the esoteric and intimidating technology of modern administration, but also came with the attitude of mind unique to their indigenous environments. The dual influences explain the contradictions which … [Read more...]
Pushing for change in Nigeria III: why real change proves elusive
November 24, 2018 by 4 Comments
Understanding Nigeria’s enduring challenges: a focus on the governance culture The picture emerging so far is of a country wobbling from one pile of challenges to another since independence. Curiously, the country, Nigeria, has not buckled under, but has yet to record any significant breakthroughs. While the challenges keep multiplying and mutating, substantive change has proved largely elusive. This raises at least three questions: if the country’s hardships have persisted for so long, is it … [Read more...]
Pushing for change in Nigeria II: the catalysts
November 22, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Nigerians disagree on so many things. The need for change, howsoever defined, is not one of them. Everyone—or almost everyone—wants change, probably because the status quo is either not working for them or is perceived as not working at all for anybody. The driving force is the pace of social change which has outstripped the economy’s capacity to meet individual or aggregate demand. The high rate and the unique pattern of population growth, for instance, are asymmetrical to the economy’s … [Read more...]
Pushing for change in Nigeria I: First, the theoretical underbrush
November 21, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Introduction Change was the mantra that galvanized Nigeria's All Progressives Congress/APC in the run up to the 2015 elections and enabled it to terminate the People’s Democratic Party’s/PDP’s sixteen-year grip on power. Alas, the party of change has, by its opponents’ reckoning, yet to make good its promise. The question is whether the PDP has what it takes to change, within four years, what it could not throughout its sixteen-year uninterrupted rule. Still, and regardless of whether it might … [Read more...]
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