STATUTORY DEVELOPMENTAL INDICES – A PARADIGM SHIFT IN NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT He who fails to plan invariably plans to fail is a popular idiomatic expression, and many people are conversant with this idiom. To some, it is a modus operandi adopted by them as a guiding principle in life. Be that as it may, planning just in itself does not guarantee success; whatever is planned has to go through a well thought out process, without this we can easily end up having bad plans. Suffice it to say that a good plan has to be objective; and when making it, one has to take into consideration how these plans will affect posterity positively and for how long these plans will stay relevant. The objective and longevity test as well as what will be practicable and reasonable is the fulcrum to drawing up a good plan. Often and especially after elections are concluded in Nigeria, you will have transitions committees set up and from this you will have plans, budgets and the focus of the new government outlined, one constant theme of such transition committees is the fact that they are driven by the vision and energy of the elected officials. And in fairness to these elected officials, the do have an agenda which can be can be said to be plausible and impact on the people positively. What we end up with however, are white elephant projects, and loads of paper work without the execution of projects, the interesting thing is that this paper work may be very vital for development, but where there are not implemented, there is no way the developmental framework can be attainable. If this is the case, then something must be wrong with the polity; a polity that can formulate and draft good programmes and still suffer gross implementation of the programmes drafted, must have a structural defect. The template for implementation of development in Nigeria has an inherent fault; this fault is deducible from the fact that they are no guarantees that will protect developmental programmes and plans. Every regime has one constant feature, which is that; development is driven by the principal officer(s) elected within a particular period. What this means is that we can only see as far as they see, as far as their vision, focus, area of interest or strength based on their career discipline allows them to see what developmental path we should follow, this becomes the extent of our developmental indices. And we cannot rule out the fact that they will be some bias, prejudice, nuance and subjectivity to the extent an individual no matter how objective he might be will exhibit. If we continue with the developmental template we have been using so far, we can only succeed in making bad leaders out of good people. What we have as developmental template is a set up that will never succeed. We need to enable our developmental indices with guarantees that are independently structural and statutory. Every society must fashion out a method to solve its challenges and move forward, this is how great nations became great; they inherently changed their polity to tackle the challenges they were facing and it became a model for the world to copy when it succeeded. What we need in Nigeria is an independent structural polity organ backed up with statutory injunctions. For example, when it was time to solve the problem of Niger-Delta restiveness based on the inequitable distribution of wealth in the country, what was done was to give constitutional backing to a 13% derivation formula, this is a guarantee that a 13% statutory allocation was guaranteed for the Niger-Delta people and irrespective of the biases, nuances and feelings of whoever is the principal head of government or where he comes from, the derivation formula must be observed and disbursed. This does not however create a developmental programme for how the disbursements should be used to develop the communities, which is a defect in guaranteeing that the essence of the derived formula was met. However, what we can be certain of is the fact that, because there was a constitutional guaranteed process to disburse the derived formula, it was always disbursed. In the same vein, we should guarantee our developmental plans, as well as its implementation with constitutional stipulations. The grundnorm of every society is the people’s aspirations, inclinations and way of living, that has been codified to enable freedoms and restriction within a society. The constitution of Nigeria starts with the clause “We the people . . .” ‘apparently’ this should mean that it derives its force and authority from the people and is binding on them. If this is the case, then backing our developmental indices together with its implementation by constitutional stipulations will set a guarantee of developmental policy formulation as well as its implementation. The thrusts of this article is to dissuade us from a reliance on a subjective developmental template that is powered by the whims and caprices of principal elected officials and create an independent objective platform empowered and guaranteed by the constitution. As a country, we need to, through the instrument of the constitution create an independent national or state policy and planning body that will be saddled with the responsibility of collecting and collation of information and data from different communities about the natural resources accrued to them, their social cohesiveness, their trade capabilities, industrial capability, commercial agricultural capability etc, and independently formulate policies and plans on how best to develop this communities based on what is accrued to them. A point to note is that the body will be all encompassing with representatives from every state for the national body and every local government for the state, in addition will be various professionals needed to effectively formulate policies that will be people oriented and based on the needs of the people which will be gotten from their representatives and guided professionally by experts in different fields. Interestingly, this body will not implement the policies the formulate, but whatever policies and plans the formulate will form 65% of the policies and plans of the national as well as state government, and since the body is a constitutional body and an independent one at that, and all it does is formulate policies and plans with a representation from every constitutional tier of government, then you can to an extent be confident that majority of the policies and plans formulated for government execution will be unbiased and objective. Also, the will need to be a constitutional directive for all tiers of government to execute at least 60% of the 65% the policies that are formulated. By this, we will curb the incessant issue of abandoned projects, and create a sustainable developmental pace and a continuity of development by every government irrespective of political affiliation. Because a good system will always benefit in more than one way, what this model of development will inadvertently guarantee is a 60% growth and development in every tenure, which means we can only judge our politicians based on 35% of their ingenuity and personal mandate and vision. If the fail in their personal mandate, the nation and state would have still succeeded because they are constitutionally constrained to develop at a 60% rate in every political tenure. Invariably, we will not be making bad leaders out of good people, if at all we will be making good leaders all the time. Equally, because allocation of funds will principally be based on the 65% formulated policies, it will mean that at all times, 65% of our monetary disbursement will be geared towards the development of our nation and at an equal and complimentary basis, there will also be less of unaccountable money in the hands of politicians and people because a constitutionally guaranteed 65% of all funds meant for development would by law be meant to be used fro such development. The logic in all of this is that, in a multitude of counsels, there is safety. Michael Nkwam Llb, Llm Passionate about Nigerias growth
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 23:23:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015