Bright B. Simons is an executive of IMANI-Ghana and inventor of the mPedigree system

According to the ancient talebearers of the Yoruba, God the chainsmith himself had borne Oduduwa down to earth.

Oduduwa, grand ancestor of all the Yoruba, was given power to separate the land from the sea, and his descendants became Masters of the Horse. By the might of Ogun, manifest in iron, they fashioned out an empire from the kernels of 16 kingdoms and so ruled all the caravan passes to the North. But before they could reach the golden peak of their rise, Fulani from the North came in swarms and scattered the Yoruba across the South-West of what became Nigeria.

Indeed, according to the talebearers, Oyo, the glory of the Yoruba, would have disappeared from the face of the earth without remnant had a foreigner, a British adventurer, not come between Oyo and the Fulani. The sons of Oduduwa have not attained the heights of their forebears ever since.

When tales such as the preceding are told, of the mythical glorious past of the ethnic communities of Nigeria, the reference is always to the present.

There is something altogether mystical about the ethnocentrism of Nigeria. There is on the one hand a deep awareness of how corrosive it has and still is to the developmental aspirations of all the communities, and yet, on the other hand, a passionate rejection of any alternative vision of inter-ethnic intercourse in this vast country of 140 million. Unlike in other parts of Africa, the attitude is not one of resignation and/or frustration. It is one of fatalism - mystical fatalism.

I have seen how even the most educated Ibo lad presented with the delightful opportunity of hitting it off with the finest Yoruba damsel would twist and strain and coil his desire into every shape save the one that reflects his true wish to take the leap.

I had to give up trying when in order to make a point I needed to find a successful thriving business started by founders who are not all members of the same ethnic group (particularly where the 4 major ethnic groups – Hausa, Yoruba, Fulani and Ibo – are concerned). Such a phenomenon seems to be as rare as a camel in downtown Ikoyi.

There is an institutionalisation of ethnic segregation at elite level in Nigeria that goes way deeper than the general characteristics of ethnicity in Africa. To the extent, indeed, that until very recently, a notion of “regional rotation” – merely a euphemism for rationing of political power amongst the four key ethnic groups– was considered sacred in the country’s political economy - automatically disqualifying thus the millions of Nigerians who are not members of any of these four rival ethnic communities.

But the intriguing thing about Nigeria to an outsider like this writer, who is still exploring the nuances of this huge and complex amalgamation of a nation, is the slow realisation of there being a more complex structure to the above-mentioned fatalism, of which quasi-institutionalised ethnocentrism is merely a facet.

Nigeria, its latent greatness notwithstanding, suffers from a dysfunction in its elite structure that prevents the emergence of a “manifest destiny”. Every critical thing seems postponed. Everywhere you walk you find the litter of aborted reforms. And clarity seems sorely lacking on the national agenda.

A couple of weeks ago, the World Bank organised a consultative meeting in Abuja to discuss Nigerian perspectives on the Bank’s incoming Africa-wide strategy. The cream of Nigeria’s intelligentsia descended on the Bank’s Asokoro country office to brainstorm on development issues of great relevance to the future of their country, and by extension the continent.

This writer had the opportunity to compare and contrast the proceedings with other meetings he had observed in the preceding weeks elsewhere, and was struck by the fragmentation of vision.
This being Nigeria, much brilliance and colourful oratory were on display, but the intellectual contenders might well have been inhabiting different planets, talk less about countries.

A professor from a university somewhere in the South-East kept hammering on “re-industrialisation”, which at times, but not always, seemed to get him into trouble with an eminent agriculturalist from a prominent research institution in the South-West. This latter grand old man of letters was enamoured of the image of “groundnut pyramids”, a motif that I have come to understand reflects a golden age of plenty in Nigeria’s agrarian history. The source of the periodic conflict was largely located in a misunderstanding about the relative roles of entrepreneurship in large-scale, government driven, manufacturing enterprise as juxtaposed with community-based farming. There was a suspicion across the table, probably not undetected by the two semi-brawling academics, that both models of regenerating Nigeria shared the same lack of rigour with respect to capital accumulation and the balance of incentives amongst private and state actors. That is to say there was much “checklist mentality” on display.

From the sidelines, however, all this was peripheral; the real insight seemed to emanate from the clear absence of a common vocabulary of any sort among the discussants. If this had been South Africa, social justice and skills development would surely have featured strongly as some sort of combined framework for dialogue. And alternative visions of national development would have orbited said framework. There would have been passionate disagreements over every fine point but the stakes would have been much more clearly defined. If this had been Kenya, corruption and infrastructure would undoubtedly have crystallised out of an initial flurry of lamentation to bedrock some kind of fervent correspondence over social imperatives. If this was Sierra Leone, every exchange would have anchored somehow to post-conflict reconstruction.

As Nigeria’s finest minds warred and jousted over the fine detail of the much postponed Nigerian renaissance, not a single broadly resonating theme emerged. Whereas prior to this experience this writer would have boldly asserted ethnocentrism and corruption as the orchestral script of the reform symphony in Nigeria, he is unable to persuade himself that this is the case anymore.

For, as already mentioned, the mystique of the Nigerian variant of ethnic tension precludes any genuine effort of treating it as a national challenge that must be overcome. Nobody has any clue about how to even get started on a cause like that. And though Nigerians frequently lament the negative impact of corruption in their beautiful country, nobody actually believes that it can anchor a truly transformative national agenda. Indeed, at the consultative meeting described above, the subject of corruption rarely featured on the menu of discussions.

What Nigeria needs now is “thought leadership” for the purposes of developing a proper framework for a true national conversation about the country’s total orientation. While some may dismiss this as highfalutin philosophical nonsense, many will recognise that such a process clearly precedes the oft-touted quest for noble socio-political leadership.

For in Nigeria the reformer does indeed confront a philosophical quagmire, which if left unresolved shall render indeterminate the myriad of economic and human development challenges that hog the limelight of debate.

And since, as many people in our part of the world believe, West Africa’s, if not Africa’s, destiny is tied to that of Nigeria, it behoves on all public-minded Africans to engage in whatever minor way that they can in the great exercise of figuring out what makes that great country really tick.

Until that happens, we are all reduced to mystified contemplators of the unfulfilled myths of mystical Nigeria. 

Bright B. Simons is an Executive of IMANI-Ghana (an economic think-tank) and inventor of the mPedigree system