I have considered the way Nigeria is going and I thought she needs to grow and develop. But while I was in the public service, I couldn’t make comments on issues concerning leadership in the country but I secretly wrote articles which were published in The Guardian, for instance, “Why the Military Intrude in African Politics”, published in 1978.
I retired voluntarily from the Customs and began thinking of how to write a book that will encapsulate all my ideas about leadership, growth and development. By that, I tried in my book,”Leadership & Developmental Issues in Nigeria: A Search for Development Strategies”, to make a distinction between growth and development. Growth is simply economic expansion where you produce and people consume and it does not translate to development. But development is when Political Leadership begin thinking in terms of how to bridge the gap, that is technological gap between us and developed countries of the world.
This is done by building infrastructures, mass transit fares to move people, building aeroplanes, why can’t we build our own automobiles and automobile parts and couple them in this country and then sell to other countries? We need industrialisation,
technological acquisition, development and adapting, etc , these are ingredients for development.
It is surprising that people say no we can’t develop that way but if you look at developed countries of the world, they are the most advanced in terms of technology, they are the richest, and so, Nigeria cannot continue to depend on only one natural resource; selling of oil and all that, otherwise, why are we always broke? The answer is simply because the profit or whatever money we make from oil sales is not enough to run the affairs of this country.
That is why we run borrowing from time to time. We need to expand our resource base, by industrialisation, manufacturing and exporting, producing food in abundance for everybody then put prices down, develop housing for people and when you give them transportation in addition to low cost housing, you don’t need to pay big money as salary because they have transport and other amenities.
Nigeria’s level of development?
I will limit myself to this present administration. It appears that because President Jonathan is educated and also, a science person, it seems to me that for the first in the history of Nigeria, we have someone who is thinking about development. Jonathan is such a leader, apart from Late Yar’Adua who would have been such a person but death stopped him too early. But Jonathan stepped into his shoes and seems to have gone further than expectation as far as I am concerned. I am speaking for myself. Jonathan is talking about development, launching of satellite, building our own automobiles and all that because he is the kind of president that has development agenda for the nation.
Objective of the book?
My book is to create awareness and arouse in the minds of political leaders the need to bridge development, technological and industrial gap between us and advanced countries of the world. Other countries will not take us serious if we don’t begin to put necessary infrastructure in place, for the nation’s development.
Once again, Nigeria needs to grow and develop and that is why I have in my book, documented all the indices of development which have been lacking in the governance of Nigeria
How can Nigeria win the war against corruption?
First and foremost, the presidential system of Governance should be dropped because it is not conducive for Nigerian polity. Parliamentary system which will keep leaders on their toes is best because there will be no room for corruption. What we have at the moment is a situation whereby the executive, judiciary and legislature are busy chasing their personal agenda because the presidential system does not check them properly. All these are documented in my book for reference purpose.
