Nigeria: Lessons from the America experience

Tuesday, 26 June 2012 07:36 RW Johnson

I do hope,” one of our Nigerian friends sighed, “that you haven’t come up here to preach South Africa to us.” My colleague and I, who had come from Johannesburg to Nigeria in order, we hope, to set up a branch of Good Governance Africa, assured her that we thought South Africa was making a disastrous mess of its governance and had absolutely nothing to preach about.

In any case, it seemed clear to us that Nigeria would soon overtake South Africa economically and was, in general, the more important African state.

Our friend was not optimistic. The power of Big Oil had utterly corrupted Nigeria. Political leaders were manipulated by their shadowy business backers behind the scenes. Real power resided with the multi-billionaires spawned by oil and rapid growth. Elections were often rigged.

Misgovernance was everywhere and key government functions – health, education, roads, power supply and much else – were in a state of disarray or collapse. And now the problems of the North, a whole vast area of poverty and backwardness, had bred a terrorist movement, leading some in the South even to wonder whether the civil war had ended in the right way. In all, a hopeless mess.

[b]In fact, we suggested, the situation was uncannily similar to that of the USA in the decades after its civil war. This was the age of the “robber barons”, men like Mellon, Carnegie, Pierpont Morgan and, above all, John D. Rockefeller, a man made so rich by Big Oil that he could openly boast of having bought three-quarters of all the state legislatures. [/b]Corruption was rampant, the 1876 presidential election was clearly crooked, and politicians were often just the puppets of big business and the great political machines which dominated the cities and were by-words for patronage, corruption and political jobbery.

In 1881-1885 this produced the Presidency of Chester Arthur, a mere placeman in Roscoe Conkling’s New York machine, put forward precisely because he would give no trouble to the bosses who pulled the strings behind the scenes. Northerners and Westerners alike stared aghast at the poor and backward South which seemed to breed ignorance, religious extremism and had even spawned its own terrorist movement, the Ku Klux Klan. Some even wondered if the civil war had ended in the right way.

How did America get out of that mess? In the North and West a new middle class arose – small-town teachers, lawyers, journalists and other professionals – that resented the dominance of the great plutocrats, hated the corruption of the big city machines, wanted to see fair elections and a re-assertion of America’s founding values, with a general cleaning-up of the system. As this group grew – the Progressives, they were called – politicians began to emerge who answered to this constituency, men like Robert La Follette, who was elected as the Progressive Governor of Wisconsin, and Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Governor of New York.

Roosevelt showed his mettle by cleaning up New York and vanquishing the most powerful machine of all, Tammany Hall. Soon he was on the presidential ticket, and in 1901-1908 he set about doing on the national level what he had done in New York. He asserted the power of the Presidency and the Constitution over all other forces, quickly became the most popular president since Washington, brought the great plutocrats to heel by breaking up their trusts and brought in reforming legislation at every level.

His example was followed by both his Republican and Democrat successors, Taft and Wilson. By 1920 America had been transformed. Of course there were still powerful corporations and corruption never disappeared, but things could never be the same again – and by 1932 Roosevelt’s nephew, Franklin, had been elected President with a promise to continue much of the Progressive impulse.

My colleague, Robert Rose, and I are hoping to set up branches of Good Governance Africa (GGA) right round the continent because we see improving governance as Africa’s key problem. We already have a branch in Johannesburg, with its own GGA website and its own regular publication, Africa In Fact.

The aim is to monitor governance everywhere and to base ourselves – just as the Progressives did – on the growing new middle class in Africa which is beginning to demand cleaner and more accountable government. We feel tolerably sure that Nigeria will follow America’s path; that first there will be progressive governors in a few of Nigeria’s states and that, as they demonstrate what they can do there, we should see a growing possibility that one of them will become Nigeria’s President and will do for Nigeria something of what Theodore Roosevelt did for America.

For America, the end of that journey was seen by 1945 with the arrival of the US as the world’s most powerful – and tolerably well-governed – country. If only Nigeria can follow that example (and NOT South Africa’s), it seems certain that it will become our continental giant.

After all, if Nigeria’s health, education and road systems could be cleaned up and a proper power system installed, the country’s GDP would rocket. The same would apply if only half of the money which is now stolen were properly invested. Improving governance across Africa won’t be easy, but in the end the benefits for all its people will be so obvious and so overwhelming that it is hard to believe it won’t happen – and nowhere is this truer than in Nigeria.

http://www.businessdayonline.com/NG/index.php/analysis/columnists/40149-nigeria-lessons-from-the-america-experience