Dr. Sam Amadi, Abuja, Nigeria
I was invited to the Kuramo Conference but could not attend because of tight schedule. From newspaper reports the conference was a huge success. The speakers at the conference are leaders of great influence and competence in various fields. As I watched the report of the conference on television I was agitated at the meaning of it all.

One can easily commend the Lagos State Government for organizing the conference- and providing opportunity to learn from internationals whose experience in public and private leadership can enrich the corpus of leadership practice in Nigeria. My first impression was to salute the intellectual orientation of the Lagos State Government and wished all other state governments could emulate its example.

But I had another thought: how much help is this actually? Do conferences of this nature help in any sustainable manner? Are we better because we assemble four or five internationals to deliver annual lectures and make presentations to gathering of professionals and leaders? Now, these reflections have nothing to do with the specific details of the conference itself.

No, it has to do with the utility of conferences of this nature. The problem is that whether after the dusts of the intellectual fireworks have settled, enough substance remains to be mainstreamed into the workings of society.

It is obvious that we need knowledge-technical and normative- to lift Africa out of its quagmire. We need knowledge to begin to reset those problematic institutions whose dysfunction is responsible for the crisis of state in Africa.

Our problem is not just leadership as we are wont to think. Our problem as a people also relates to critical intellectual deficiency syndrome which means that we lack the expertise to fix some of our critical problems.

We are latecomers to the knowledge society. We are far behind the advanced Indo-European group in crafting solutions to complex social and organizational problems.

The importance of knowledge to development was reinforced to me during an encounter with Professor Calestous Juma of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Professor Juma visited Nigeria to stimulate discussion on what he terms how to ‘reboot’ African economies. At dinner, he reinforced the need to focus on problem-solving instead of the fashionable deliberative mode of public leadership.

Instead of politicking why don’t we just solve problems? Well, you may say, ‘but we need to find identify the problem’. The problem solving mode relies on technical expertise rather than normative skills. It relies on engineers rather than political scientists. He have examples of cabinets in Taiwan where every minister is an engineer and executive council meetings consists of engineering drawings and not hot debates to show us what it means to be a problem-solving society. So, said Professor Juma.

The problem-solving approach to governance is very important. The problem is that we don’t have domesticated knowledge base to launch problem-solving leadership. Africa’s real problem is not that it has no access to the critical knowledge it needs to rebuild its economies and transform its societies. The real problem is that such knowledge is not locally produced. Just as we import our cars and dresses, even our engineering hardware so we also import completely knocked-down (CKD) knowledge.

When five World Bank experts storm Nigeria with charts and theories and sit in meetings with Governors and ministers we may be deceived into thinking that knowledge is being generated and we are in a problem-solving mode.

When we organize international conference and get Mr. President to declare it open with Governors and Ministers in attendance we may run away with the false impression that we are bridging the knowledge gap. But we are not. We are moonlighting and not getting the real thing.

Tell me how many Governors and Ministers with their intellectual challenges and the pressure of political offices are able to internalize the knowledge retailed by the experts who are brought from abroad for a two-day intellectual picnic.

There is a huge difference when Governors and Ministers show up for photo
opportunities and when passionate academics and intellectuals hunker together and broad over ideas. The first is a show. The second is real business.

The same goes for all the waste of foreign exchange in the name of oversea training for public officials. Of course, some overseas training is important, even indispensable, for efficient public service. But most of such training could be done at home by home institutions in collaboration with few experts abroad. The spills-over of such domesticated knowledge production are innumerable. At least, you help to enhance the capacity of local knowledge producers.

In this wise, I commend the initiative of President Yaradua in banning the civil service from attending overseas courses except there are no similar courses in Nigeria or the capacity for such training is totally absent in Nigeria.

It is important to underline that no nation develops except to the extent it can domestically produce the knowledge it requires. The devastating effect of the Structural Adjustment Program implemented by military rulers in Nigeria (especially IBB) is that it destroyed the infrastructure for domestic knowledge production. Our public institutions are now mendicants running abroad begging for crumbs from the master’s table.

How did China develop? How did Taiwan become a decent technology country? They did just one thing. They domesticated knowledge production. China committed massively to public education and research. It borrowed or stole prototypes from the advanced west and inside its suffocating research centers and laboratories it produced a third grade technology that is bound to become first grade soon.

Taiwan plagiarized the West, not by asking some western professors to come on intellectual tourism, but by establishing government-annexed research and technological institutions that produced the Taiwan brand of technology.

We must borrow and re-fabricate at home, on the Nigerian soil if we want to move away from failure and stagnation. Hundreds of Kuramo conferences are just picnic, nothing more. If we like we can invite Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Desoto for annual conferences. We will not be on step close a knowledge economy except we have strong research centers where people with disposition and capacity in problem-solving intellectualism sit together and fabricate solutions to our problems.

These centers must be strongly annexed to public institutions, even if they are privately owned, to be useful.
Knowledge must be directly mainstreamed into public governance in other to make public leadership problem-solving.

We should obviously have an open society. We can invite experts from abroad. But if these foreign experts attend fanfare-like conferences where politicians and socialites who have no skills or disposition for knowledge production constitute the audience of such conferences and workshops then we are reinforcing our stagnation.

If we want to transfer knowledge we should establish research and innovation centers where foreign experts spend weeks downloading into the minds of domestic experts who will reshape that knowledge to solve domestic problems.

We should end intellectual tourism and begin the hard work of putting together a knowledge society. Unless we produce the knowledge for solving our problems locally then we are.