What Nigeria’s Next President Can Learn From China

When Nigeria elected Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as president in 2007, many of the country’s citizens briefly imagined their nation might be about to embark on a higher trajectory.

Naturally, in a democracy, not everyone can be pleased with an electoral outcome, but Yar’Adua came from a distinguished family. As one of Nigeria’s highest uniformed officers, his older brother had called for an end to military dictatorship in the 1980s and paid the price for it, being sentenced to life in prison, where he died.

As a candidate for the presidency, Yar’Adua burnished his reputation for probity by becoming the first Nigerian leader to declare his assets, and after he was elected, he appeared to continue following the ascetic lifestyle for which he was known.

Unfortunately, Yar’Adua also spent most of his nearly three years in office consumed by serious health problems, often seeking treatment abroad. And for the last six months of his time in office, he never appeared in public, dying in the presidential palace after having been returned to the country from Britain under a cloak of darkness.

When Yar’Adua was succeeded in 2010 by his vice president, a previously obscure former state governor named Goodluck Jonathan, many Nigerians found new reasons to hope. Still in his 50s, the quick-to-smile Jonathan was the picture of good health, and he clearly enjoyed the public side of being president. More than that, Jonathan was well educated, with a doctorate in zoology, and had taught at the university level. He soon announced grand ambitions for his presidency, including a makeover of the country’s poor transportation infrastructure and the provision of reliable electricity for the country’s long-suffering masses.

But instead of robust nation-building, as he attended to the ceremonial functions of his office— including plentiful ribbon-cuttings—the reputation that clung persistently to Jonathan and his administration was one of wanton corruption. As the Economist wrote in 2016, he “let politicians and their cronies fill their pockets with impunity.” Breathtakingly large quantities of public funds reportedly went missing, allegedly funneled into Jonathan’s own reelection campaign or simply doled out to high-ranking officials. To be fair to Jonathan, who has repeatedly denied claims of corruption, this was hardly a new phenomenon in Nigerian politics. In fact, the country’s irresponsible elites have long blandly referred to this kind of high-end looting as getting a piece of the “national cake,” as if that were the most normal thing.

Nigeria deserves much credit for the peaceful transition it carried out after the people voted Jonathan out of power in 2015. Admirably, Jonathan did what too few African heads of state have been willing to do, gracefully conceding defeat and vacating the office he had so enjoyed. In doing so, he made way for current President Muhammadu Buhari, a former military dictator whose previous brief stint in power in Nigeria I covered as a young reporter in the early 1980s.

Like Yar’Adua, Buhari seemed, at least on the surface, like yet another austere character—a near ascetic. But there were other reasons for many Nigerians to cheer his election. Even though he was on the older side (entering his mid-70s when he took office) in a country whose young population is ballooning, he seemed to exude a serene authority and had a record of demanding discipline from others. The most famous initiative of his first time in power in the 1980s was his so-called War Against Indiscipline, which demanded that people show up on time to work, curb petty corruption, and obey rules. And although none of this looked pretty to me close up back then, in a country of tremendous, roiling, and unruly energy the idea of firmer direction and accountability held a real appeal for many Nigerians.

As a non-Nigerian, I don’t have a vote in the matter, but as a journalist who has known the country for a long time, it is hard for me not to conclude that as he leaves office, Buhari will be joining this long string of failures. Like Yar’Adua, he has spent much of his time seeking treatment for various ailments overseas. The sources of disappointment that stem from this are multiple. Not only has the outgoing president seemed to lack the vigor needed to run Africa’s most populous country, but he has also lacked vision. For starters, he could have treated his own health woes as a way of keeping faith with his people. This would have meant seeking treatment at home and working to lift the standards of care in Nigeria’s ragged health sector, boosting its morale.

Like Jonathan, Buhari has cut plenty of ribbons for new roads and railways, but as a former military commander he has been strangely detached and ineffectual in fighting religious extremist violence and other forms of lawlessness that are rampant and spreading in the country. Impressive new train services now reach from Nigeria’s south and center far into the north, but people are fearful of riding them because of frequent bomb attacks and kidnappings.

With a presidential election this weekend that I’ve called the most important in the world this year, Nigeria is on the cusp of what one hopes will be another peaceful transition—which I must stress again is no small matter in contemporary Africa. But as this recent history should show, the mere conduct of elections is far from enough. Nigeria is on course to become the world’s third-most populous nation, after India and China, within the lifespan of many of this column’s readers, but for a nation with this kind of profile, its rulers and elites have woefully underserved their citizens. In the life of a developing country, going 15 years without a strongly performing government comes at enormous generational cost to its people, its region, and the world.

Though a major oil exporter, Nigeria implausibly imports gasoline, while leading politicians, their friends, and members of the military enjoy lavish revenues from shady contracts to “lift” petroleum (in local parlance) from the country’s fields. Nigerian elites live comfortably behind high walls in opulent villas, using generators to power their air conditioners, refrigerators, Wi-Fi routers, and computers, while millions of other people live at the mercy of constant power outages and candlelight.

Nigerian schools and universities are understaffed and underequipped, and their faculty are badly underpaid. Nigeria’s agricultural sector, still the source of employment for most of the population, underperforms that of most of its neighbors due to lack of investment and modernization. Too many Nigerian police officers take their uniforms as a license to hold people up and steal from them. And the example comes from on high, as people in far higher positions and with far bigger appetites eat cake.

Nigeria, like much of Africa, does not have the time or luxury to use conventional recipes for trying to narrow the gap with the developed world. Broad industrialization is a distant prospect. The country’s hope lies instead in the example of a rapidly reforming China at the turn of the 1980s.

In 1978, some 95 percent of China’s population was poor, according to Bert Hofman, an economist with long experience in China. It was the fifth-poorest country in the world, after Burma, Nepal, Somalia, Burundi, and Guinea-Bissau. Like Nigeria, huge and with a bulging youth population, China at the time saw its national challenge as one of skipping “some of the stage[s] of traditional industrial development” and thereby leapfrogging some of the country’s worst problems—and the slow route out of them offered by more conventional strategies—according to then-Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang.

As the economic historian Julian Gewirtz writes in his book Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s, the Chinese leadership considered the problem of creating a crash program for national development to be a “matter of the life and death of the nation.”

Because of the size and speed of growth of the country’s population, Nigeria will also have to achieve big, even surprising things to meet its needs in the coming decades—things that have never been attempted there before.

Some of this will necessarily involve vastly greater knowledge production, which is why China rightly saw making huge investments in increasing its university sector in the 1980s as a top priority. Some of this will also involve technological innovation, which means invention for sure but also finding new applications for things already invented. Other sources of advancement will have to be found in unexpected places. Mistakes will inevitably be made, but the cost of business as usual should be too terrifying to contemplate.

Polling is still a very inexact art in Nigeria, and this column won’t venture a prediction about who will win on Saturday. Huge numbers of young people are said to support a quasi-insurgent candidate named Peter Obi, the youngest of the three main seekers of the presidency, and I think I can understand why. The last several presidents of Nigeria have been the product of a spoils system, where two mainstream parties balance out equities among the country’s major ethnic groups and essentially take turns in power. That has produced far too much cake-eating, rent-seeking, and wheel-spinning and not nearly enough dynamism, initiative, or risk-taking.

Many young Nigerians, who can hear the clock ticking on their prospects—both individually and as a nation—see the relatively young Obi, whose Labour Party does not fit neatly within this system, as a kind of last best hope. I fear they may be a little too trusting, but I sympathize. Will the powerful agents of the old spoils system allow Obi to win the election? If he does, will they allow him to govern? And if all of this were somehow to happen, will Obi keep faith with the masses of young people who put him in power and lead Nigeria boldly toward a new and more prosperous dispensation? Or will we merely see another group of people feast on cake?