Nigeria: The relative cost of our democracy is unsustainable

This is too dear

I have written many times about the exorbitant and probably prohibitively unsustainable cost of the democratic experiment in Nigeria and there are many reasons to be concerned for how much we pay our lawmakers on average. [Nigeria: Our Exorbitant Government]

The graph below published by the Economist is more than just an eye-opener but it is also revelatory about how political office is a parasitic drain on the national resources since politicians cannot be considered part of the economic engine of a country.

What makes this graph worthy of the most righteous indignation begging for public insurrection is not so much about what the politicians earn, but the gap in earning capacity between the citizen and the representative lawmaker.

The comparisons

Australian lawmakers earn the most at $201,200 followed by Nigeria at $189,500 and then Italy with $182,000 and the United States at $174,000 all compared to the people they represent, we find that Australian and American lawmakers earn less than 4 times the average economic activity of their countries divided by their populations (GDP per capita), Italians just about double that and Nigerian lawmakers earn 116 times that.

The World Bank, the IMF, the CIA and the University of Pennsylvania all put the GDP per capita of Nigeria at between $2,661 ranking 137^th in the world out of 180 countries, $2,720 ranking 143/187, $2,800 ranking 148/194 and $1,716 ranking 152/185 respectively.

By comparison Australia is in the top 10 thrice, Italy in the top 30 twice and then the top 35 and the United States of America 4 times in the top 10, it goes without saying that Nigeria has no business paying its legislators in what is purportedly a representative democracy these atrocious amounts of cash that bilk and milk the country without contributing anything to its economic growth.

The consequences of expensive democracies

Worse still, it creates a competition for political office where the rewards far outweigh the commensurate perspiration leading to many situations where power-grabs by every means possible warps every notion of free and fair elections, talk less of representative democracy – it is utterly bad for Nigeria apart from the fact that it is unsustainable.

Looking at the chart again, you also wonder why Sub-Saharan African nations that hog the bottom third of GDP per capita tables are the ones that take the lead by far in the discrepancies between elected and elector besides the fact that only Ghana has consistently rewarded its electorate with the will of its people, Kenya did not in the penultimate election which has the current leadership indicted for crimes against humanity and Nigeria is a travesty in everything but name.

Nigeria is awash with oil money in the wrong hands which is used in acquisitive, ostentatious, hedonistic and wanton display of power, wealth, influence and mischief, it exacerbates a pressure cooker of ethno-religious and regional tensions, none of which the leadership have had the wherewithal to grapple with or understand that the consequences as it holds together with threadbare allegiances of snouts in trough might well be dire for the 2015 election year.

Enough is just enough

In my humble opinion, this democracy is neither representative nor working if the people we choose to represent us are so far removed from the reality of the citizenry that they literally live in a parallel universe, there ought to be no reason for Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana to be democratic outliers compared to the economic activity within their regions in comparison to their people, it calls for reform and this must be urgent, radical, far-reaching and deeply examining of the culture of corruption and influence-peddling we have allowed to become the raison d'être of political life.

This is the one time when the chorus from the village to the city and from the homes to the marketplaces of the country should ring loud – Enough is just enough.

Other reading

Nigeria: Our politically immature systems

Nigeria: Percentage Allowance Legislators

Nigerians: Ngozi at World Bank, Ibrahim in Burma

Nothing to write about

I have refrained from writing anything about Nigeria until I found seriously uplifting news that makes my very proud of my Nigerian heritage.

It informs the reason why my blog was blank on the 1^st of October which is the anniversary of Nigerian’s independence from British rule because really there was nothing to write about apart from obvious pessimism and unfounded optimism much of which was covered by bloggers and newspapers – Hey! It is just the opinion of one man.

NOI the MD

News reaches me that Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has been appointed the World Bank Managing Director in charge of Africa, South Asia, Europe and Central Asia regions, literally 2 and a half continents with just about half the world’s population.

With Europe in the mix, this means her role straddles developed through emerging to developing economies, this might as well help in the cross-pollination of ideas, expertise, investment and resources betwixt the regions under her remit.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala also known as NOI for short; brings commendable, excellent credentials, experience and expertise to this job as a long-standing employee of the World Bank, a Finance and Foreign Minister of Nigeria in the recent past and advanced qualifications in field of Regional Economics and Development.

At the risk of sounding like a praise-singing parrot, I give the floor to Robert Bruce Zoellick, the 11^th President of the World Bank as his words say it all.

“Ngozi brings a unique set of skills and experience to the World Bank Group. As an outstanding Minister of Finance and Foreign Minister in Nigeria, Ngozi helped lead the country's reform program on issues of fiscal prudence, transparency of government accounts, good governance, and anti-corruption.

She led Nigeria's quest for debt relief and helped her country obtain an unprecedented US$18 billion write-off from the Paris Club. Ngozi was also instrumental in helping Nigeria obtain its first ever Sovereign Credit rating (of BB minus) from Fitch and Standard & Poor's.

She is an internationally respected world leader. In addition, she knows the WBG well from her 21 years of service. Her commitment to the developing world is unparalleled. I am delighted she has accepted to join my senior team.”

Now, that is a lady doing Nigeria proud and I like the way that she is address in first-name terms by the president, it shows they have a friendly working relationship which is necessary for this kinds of problems that World bank needs to address after the acrimonious split and rancour in the resignation of neo-Con Paul Wolfowitz.

Talent wins through always

Beyond this, it is worthy to note that the intemperance and vindictiveness of the erstwhile President of Nigeria stood in the way of according this lady a very senior post in the United Nations; however, I think she would be better served in this role than being subsumed into the international diplomacy of United Nations’ insincerity.

If not for the way the headship of the World Bank and IMF has been sewn up by Europe and the United States, she is a more than qualified candidate to lead that bank.

Then the question of qualified Nigerians who cannot seem to get recognition and scope to bring radical useful change in service of their fatherland; take heart, extremely good talent would get utilised in this world by people who recognise what you can do.

Sorting out Burma

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala stands as a beacon of hope and realisation of that view.

Another person whose nationality has not been mentioned but has been in the news too many times to be ignored is Professor Ibrahim Agboola Gambari the Under Secretary-General for the Department of Political Affairs who recently returned from Burma (Myanmar, I am not convinced the people had any say in having their country renamed, in fact, many dissidents refer to their country as Burma) after meeting the despotic junta leaders and the democratic activist and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

It must be a difficult job having to visit and converse with people who have trampled on their people, trammelled their freedoms and targeted their aspirations with tyranny and violence, whilst these self-appointed demonic clones masquerading as human-beings hunker down in some remote forest enclave living the life of “Solomonic” kings.

Time to end the culture of impunity

Unfortunately, our disgust for the happenings in Burma to the pronouncement that the culture of impunity at an end sounds more like a hysterical affectation for mass protest and rhetoric than effective action, but it shows how irrelevant the military leaders have become.

If after keeping Aung San Suu Kyi under house-arrest for years, they are setting conditions for meeting her asking that she abandon her support for international sanctions and her confrontational attitude, I know who has been hostile and there is every reason for that dear lady to be confrontation and more, if she had the means, this is where the internation community should give more muscle to the aspirations of the Burmese.

Well, Senior General Than Shwe, you can go meet yourself; as if she is responsible for the state that Burma now is in; after 45 years in government, I think the army should return to the barracks and the doors weld shut.

It is time for the Burmese to have self-determination and for all the evil the military have perpetrated on the people and the monks, it is high time they were vacated to meet their maker, it is laughable that North Korea can call itself a democratic republic and the senior General who might not become a Field Marshall heads the State Peace and Development Council – whose democracy and whose peace?.

Burma is a people not an army, they should not be run around and hammered by iron fists like newly conscripted recruits in a boot camp – the culture of impunity in Burma, North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe must come to an end and by the end of this decade if we can all help it.

What exactly is wrong with me?

The scramble on all fours

There was a time in West Africa as Europeans traverse the land exploring, charting and discovering land, people, rivers, resources and trade route that this area was know as the White Man’s Grave – the scourge of malaria and yellow fever decimated who dared visit.

However, the knowledge of the land did help in what eventually became known in history as the Scramble for the Partition of Africa. My vision of scramble makes those conquering tribes look more savage than the natives and the land they were scrambling for.

To paraphrase the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, it involves moving or climbing on all fours to struggle unceremoniously for a possession – Africa’s land, people and resources.

Dragons be there in the unknown

However, know the lay of the land is very useful, but that common knowledge is hardly available to the Chinese whose government considers topological maps classified and even edits out certain detail of maps ensuring they are too unreliable for motorists to consider using those directions for journeys to the hinterland.

Dragons be there, begins to make sense.

However, reading the travails of my friendly blogger in Nigeria on NaijaBlog as he tries to shake off the problems with malaria and other diagnosed issues, I do wonder about how health issues in Africa are properly addressed for the main populace.

Trivialising malaria

I do remember in when I lived in Nigeria, every fever was classified as malaria and we almost all self-medicated especially where there was no health insurance with a family doctor service attached.

Fortunately, in my early years, we always had the luxury of a family doctor and treatments that dealt with most ailments that afflicted us.

The treatment for malaria then involved the ingestion of a component of quinine normally as chloroquine sulphate and marketed as nivaquine. My father was always able to use that medication without problems; my mother however could not tolerate that drug.

At that time doctors were aware of the intolerance and contra-indications usually manifesting as itching palms and soles that it was sometimes administered intramuscularly with an antihistamine.

None of which worked for my mother despite the fact that she did tell the doctor who thought he knew better that the drug should be off limits – he eventually learnt as my mother bloated up in reaction to the drug – an emergency ensued and eventually she was fine.

Banking on the inefficient

Then, I never knew malaria was that much of a scourge as we all considered it to be, so it is sad that as we marked the Africa Malaria Day, the World Bank was found wanting in the way they publish results, offer financial assistance and provide effective drugs for the treatment of malaria.

This accusation appeared in the Lancet a very reputation science journal and is corroborated in the flimsy defence that the World bank gives as to the projected spends rather than what they have done.

I would hate to question the competence and vision of the president of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz (neo-con proponent of the Iraq War as US Deputy of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld) in ensuring that the goals of the World Bank are met effectively, efficiently, fully and accountably most especially in public health issues all around the world.

This topic is not one of those where governments have to meet the political, moral or economic pre-requisites of the American sense of good governance but one of urgency in preventing catastrophe in desperately affected areas.

Diagnosing the Brief Illness

The more serious issue pertains to a disease called Brief Illness because a majority of published obituaries in the Nigerian newspapers seems to have people who have succumbed to Brief Illness.

Maybe for reasons of circumspection the real causes of death cannot be published most especially if it is related to AIDS, there is another problem of proper diagnosis on the one hand and the other of useable medical histories.

From the tale of my NaijaBog friend, arriving at a proper diagnosis has been fraught with convention and opinion; the former on the assumption that he has malaria and the latter that it might be typhoid or something else.

It is a shame that there is no proper codification or analysis to pin this issue down, that he has therapeutic amelioration for malaria only to end up with another diagnosis related to some bacterial infection.

Many Nigerians do not have the benefit of a good diagnosis of their ailments for effective treatment to be administered for a guaranteed recovery for diseases and ailments that would not last days in better-equipped and knowledgeable settings.

You are now because of history

Where we have Nigerians of means who can avail themselves of international medical expertise; the lack of a medical history or poor knowledge of genetic issues leave doctors in the West having to deduce problems, which may not be common to their demographic.

For instance, cosmetic surgery works well for Caucasians, but those activities require a different approach with black skin for the fact that scarring is more obvious.

The lack of knowledge of pre-disposed, pre-existing, congenital or even tropical conditions when consulting Western medical personnel means paying for care will not result in an equivalent cure.

Personal miracles lacking verifiable proof

Beyond medicine we have the hold of herbal or traditional medicine where medicine men, witch doctors or even religious soothsayers offer all sorts of cures for every kind of ailment.

There is a possibility and many do get cured from their testimonies, but not many can provide medical proof of a pre-existing condition that has received a touch of the miraculous.

Part of the society is also entranced by superstition that it is possible for some to believe that a serious or chronic medical condition is as a result of some voodoo activity of enemies or detractors.

The witch doctors feed into this mentality milking the victims of all resources, comforting the hapless customer with fear in the hope that some remote coercion can lift the hex off the person leading to a cure.

It makes you wonder which century we are in.

Tackling the bottlenecks

The approach to medicine in Africa needs to change; we have not been able to grapple with healthcare enough to address health properly.

The governments and ministers who thwart every attempt to objectively address health issues with religious and ignorant pronouncements need to be brought to book first then condemned for trying to turn that challenge to their rotten opinions into a race or religious argument.

We cannot continue to sacrifice Africans to ideology and politics when there is much to be done to deal with issues that decimate some of our most productive talent and resources.