SEMINAR ON RESOURCE GOVERNANCE CRISIS IN NIGERIA SOURCES, CHALLENGES AND TAKEAWAY LESSONS

Abstract

For donkeys of months, there has been a recurrent and sustained argument that the Nigerian states are underperforms due to lack of state capacity to deal with the contemporary complexities of governance. Public Affairs commentators said the absence of a clear cut economic direction of the Buhari administration has aggravated the economic challenges in the country. Crisis in governance has many dimensions. What often come to mind are the many conflicts that threaten Nigeria’s national security and stability, leading to needless destruction and divert valuable resources to the task of maintaining peace and order. Without any doubt, a cessation of such conflicts will contribute significantly to national development. But crisis in governance has other facets. Perhaps the most important is the crisis of economic management. This is because good economic management could make a significant contribution to the quality of governance, in particular by creating a stable macroeconomic environment, and by addressing more aggressively such critical issues as job creation and poverty reduction.

INTRODUCTION

The interplay of leadership, crisis, governance, resource creation and control, nation building and development administration is intricate and inseparable. This is so because the context of leadership, both theoretically and practically, the impacts of governance reflects on national development processes. Warren Bennis, a leading authority on leadership, once stated that ‘leadership is like beauty: it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.’ That could not be further from the truth Abdulsalam (2007). Governance in its widest sense refers to all the processes, systems, and controls that are used to safeguard and grow assets in social organizations. According to Adeyeye (2017), governance refers to the use of politics, economic and administrative authority and resources to manage or exercise control over the politics and resources of a given society. Thus, misgovernance in the context of this paper involves the accumulated issues of misappropriation of resource wealth by government or in some cases the inability of government to ensure that resources accrued for government and people are used appropriately for the good of the populace.  Public Affairs commentators said the absence of a clear cut economic direction of the Buhari administration has aggravated the economic challenges in the country. Local and foreign investors are afraid of investing in the economy they are not sure of government’s policy on doing business; many entrepreneurs have closed shops because of high cost of production and laid off workers. For instance in 2015 World Bank report ranked Nigeria 169 out of 189 countries with ease of doing business. To ordinary Nigerians, the cost of living is unbearable as prices of essential commodities skyrocket on daily basis, yet the government could not provide palliative measures to cushion the effects of the economic hardship. It took the APC-led Federal APC government almost a year to come out with a clear economic policy. Without doubt, the Nigerian state stood in between exhibiting attributes of state collapse and state failure. According to Mimiko (2010), the Nigerian state has degenerated to the point where it is unable to provide minimal social security for its vulnerable population. This explains why the mass of the people continues to regard a low pumping price of oil as a social security and birthright. The article takes a holistic approach to understanding the role of successive political leadership in Nigeria and assesses their responses to the pressures and demands for sustainable democracy. The rest of the article is structured into three main sections.

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