By Ladipo Adamolekun

The countries are: Botswana, Brazil,  China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Malta, Oman, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand (see, Commission on Growth and Development, 2008).

4.     Rule of Law
Rule of law, underpinned by an independent court system, implies a predictable legal framework that helps to ensure settlement of conflicts between the state and individuals on the one hand and among individuals or groups on the other.

 It also helps to ensure respect for property rights and contracts. In a law-based state, the government will not act capriciously – a point put cogently by Friedrich Hayek,  an Economics Nobel laureate, as follows: “[A country under the rule of law] means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand” (In The road to serfdom, 1944).
Although the decades of the precedence of military diktats over court judgments and orders are mercifully behind us, the country does not yet function fully as a “country under the rule of law” (or a law-based state). 

There is still derogation to the independence of the judiciary, caused partly by political interference, and partly by the acts of omission and commission of the judges themselves.  The appointments to the bench, especially the Appeal Court and the Supreme Court are not consistently based on merit, competence and integrity. 

 The opaque manner in which the “federal character” clause in the constitution is invoked to justify some appointments to the Supreme Court – condemned openly a few times during the 2000s by some justices of the court who barely stopped short of labeling them patronage appointments –  tends to undermine both the independence and efficiency of the judiciary. Without question, it is the deep penetration of corrupt practices into the judiciary at all levels – documented extensively in newspaper reports throughout the 2000s – that is eroding public confidence in it and undermining its efficiency and reliability.

There is abundant evidence that countries that nurture their judiciaries and assure their independence and efficiency (for example, Botswana, Mauritius and South Africa) benefit from the contributions they make to national development.  Independent and efficient judiciaries help to:
“enforce and protect legal rights (especially property and contractual rights) whose absence seriously undermines economic growth while effective enforcement tends to attract foreign direct investment (FDI)

“ensure respect for individual rights. (An economy in which people have rights is more sustainable than one in which individual rights are denied. It is also worth repeating Mancur Olson’s correct assertion that it is the same legal system that enforces property rights and contracts that also helps to ensure respect for individual rights).
“facilitate exchanges between private individuals 
“enforce accountability of governors to the governed.

For Nigeria to succeed in drawing on the contributions of the judiciary to accelerating national development in the next four years, it would be necessary for the president to tackle the constraints to its independence and efficiency.

 Two obvious areas of interventions are: (i) basing all appointments to the Appeal Court and Supreme Court primarily on merit, competence and integrity, with consideration for “federal character” as a secondary consideration, and (ii) naming and shaming judges that are found to have abused their offices for private gains and ensuring their prompt removal.

5.     Anti-corruption
Nigeria is widely cited in the development literature as an example of a country where institutionalised and systemic corruption has continuously undermined socio-economic development over several decades.  Evidence of the incidence of corruption in the country is provided in Table 2.
“Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) is the world’s most credible measure of domestic, public sector corruption” – Guardian.co.uk (accessed October 26th 2010).

Illustrations of almost every one of the consequences of corruption summarised in Box 1 below can be found in the country.  In the circumstance, the anti-corruption agenda introduced by the Obasanjo administration in 1999 was a necessary response to tackling the problem of corruption.

The two key institutions created to lead the fight against corruption – the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), created in 2000, and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), created in 2002 and strengthened in 2004 – made valiant efforts to lead the fight against corruption and by 2007, the EFCC in particular was widely regarded as having made some progress in helping to reduce corruption in the country  (see the huge improvement in the CPI ranking of the country in 2008).

Then, there was backsliding in the anti-corruption effort with the incumbent Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice involved in actions that many observers considered as undermining the anti-corruption agenda. Notwithstanding the additional contribution of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) to the fight against corruption, the country’s CPI rankings in 2009 and 2010 were worse than in 2008. 

Box1:
Consequences of Corruption
A.  Economic Growth: public spending and revenue collection
– Distorts the composition of government expenditure
– Reduces expenditure on operations and maintenance
– Lowers the quality of public infrastructure and services
– Reduces government revenues
– Lowers incentives to private investment

B.   Other Consequences
– Undermines legitimacy and credibility of the state
– Influences outcomes of the legal and regulatory processes
– Violates the social and economic rights of the poor and the vulnerable
– Erodes the moral fabric of society

Source: Author (summarized from the literature on the subject).

To accelerate the reversal of the negative impact of the above consequences of corruption on socio-economic development in the country, the president can lead by example through the following actions: (i) declare and make public his assets and those of his wife within three months after his inauguration; (ii) mandate all ministers to do the same; and (iii) commission an immediate performance audit of the ICPC and the EFCC, to be followed by a revamping of the two institutions with a view to making them more transparent, efficient, and effective in leading the fight against corruption.
 
Part Two: Three Transformation result Areas

1.     Rehabilitating Education
The decline and decay in the country’s education sector at the inception of civilian rule in 1999 has sadly persisted.  A bold effort was made in 2006/2007 to examine the root causes of the problem with particular reference to the secondary and tertiary education levels through some analytic work and modest consultations with stakeholders.  Earlier on in July 2004, a Universities Autonomy Act was signed into law but before it was implemented the executive sent some amendments to the National Assembly which promptly put the matter on the back burner and the matter is yet to be finalized. 

Given the strong evidence on the centrality of education for development at the levels of individuals, communities, sub-national groups, and entire nations, the persistent decline and decay in the sector needs to be reversed; this must not continue. President Jonathan might wish to champion the rehabilitation and transformation of the sector during the next four years.  The following are some suggestions for his consideration – one relates to the entire sector while the three others are focused on universities because of my long involvement in this apex of the education sector.

(i) The rapid turnover at the level of both ministers and permanent secretaries in the ministry since 1999 (an average of about 15-18 months for each of these key leaders) is the opposite of what a rehabilitation effort requires.  Certainly, no private sector organisation that seeks to rehabilitate parts of its business will rotate the responsible top leaders in that manner. 

 In appointing the key top leaders of the ministry in the coming weeks, president Jonathan would send a signal of commitment to rehabilitating the sector if he were to enter into four-year performance contracts with two carefully selected leaders for the sector – contracts that would only be terminated for poor performance.   

(ii)  A participant observer of the Nigerian university system for several decades recently made the following cogent point: “If the government wants the Nigerian universities to make needed and desirable contribution to national sustainable development effort and to be globally competitive, priority must be given to the finalization of the autonomy bill”. 

 And he quotes with approval the following observation made in the early 2000s by the World Bank: “Institutional autonomy is a critical success factor for any genuine effort aimed at transforming university education” (Adeniyi, 2011).  I share Professor Adeniyi’s viewpoint. A University Act that is ready for implementation by the end of the president’s first 12 months would be an impactful rehabilitation measure.

(iii) There is abundant evidence that if the existing policy stance against levying fees in federal universities is maintained, together with the grossly inadequate budget allocations for recurrent, capital and research expenditures, efforts aimed at rehabilitating the universities are unlikely to gain traction.

It is surprising that the country is yet to consider the desirability of adopting aspects of recent innovative approaches to financing universities in some African countries (for example East African countries) and overseas (for example, the United Kingdom). 

 However, policy reform in this direction would need to be accompanied with an appropriate mix of scholarships, bursaries  and loans that would ensure that no Nigerian who is qualified for university education is denied the opportunity because of his/her inability to pay prescribed fees. 

(iv) The buffer role assigned to the National Universities Commission at its establishment in 1962 (that is, to function as a neutral body managing the relationship between the government and the universities) was transformed beyond recognition under military rule: the Commission became an over-powerful government parastatal with very extensive powers that were more consistent with the centralism and uniformity of military culture than with the autonomous mind-set of academic culture.

 Beyond what would pass as appropriate statutory and regulatory functions such as the administration of government subventions and grants to universities, quality assurance and accreditation of courses, and gathering and collation of quality data sets and statistics on all Nigerian universities the NUC is today involved in a wide range of activities for which it has no comparative advantage whatsoever. 

 Examples include the following: project implementation for universities; organization of annual research fairs; and administration of a central research fund scheme; and annual rating of University Pro-Chancellors and Vice-Chancellors. There is strong evidence that its centralized and unified approach stifles experimentation and initiative at the level of individual universities.  In my opinion, re-focusing the NUC (that is, a return to its initial buffer role) as soon as possible will enhance the autonomy of public universities and contribute to their rehabilitation (for more details, see Adamolekun, 2007)

I would like to end by stressing that just as the fish gets rotten from the head, it would be correct to assert that the rot in the Nigerian education sector is most severe at the apex.  As soon as rehabilitation efforts at that level begin to yield positive results, they are very likely to cascade down to polytechnics, secondary schools and primary schools. 

Being text of a an inaugural lecture  delivered by Professor Ladipo Adamolekun at an event organised by the Office of the Head of the Civil Servi ce of the Federation.