Review And Outlook: Thoughts On Economic History, Minimum Wage, And Nigeria’s Development Paradigm

• A discourse with Prof. Adetunji Ogunyemi

The foundations for the study of economic history as a distinct academic pursuit was first laid in Africa by Prof. Kenneth Onwuka Dike, who, at the onset of the second half of the 20th century, and for the first time in African academic discourses pioneered a new dimension to the understanding of African History by exploring the fundamentals of how people produced goods and services for their peculiar needs, their consumption pattern and the factors which influenced this, distribution of goods and services in a pre-industrial economy and the vehicles and instruments associated with these enterprises and, the exchange system amongst African merchants as they transferred value among themselves.

Before Dike, the profession of history delved only into the political affairs of Europe, and virtually all historians in Africa learnt and practiced this. However, Dike opened a new epistemological perspective to the study of Africa’s past by insisting that people can be better understood when scholars dig into how they produced, exchanged, and consumed goods and services rather than by how they governed themselves. To Dike, economics was key to the understanding of politics and power relations.

• Why Economic History Is Important To Nat’l Devt

Dike’s writings, unlike those of his contemporaries, were based on data derived entirely from African sources. Whereas, Ibn Kaldun, Ibn Battuta, Leo Frobenius had laboured to use extensive Arabic and European sources of data, Dike, in his monumental work, Trade, and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885 reconstructed Nigeria’s past, especially its political economy which affected the coastal communities of Nigeria’s Delta in the 19th century by relying on oral sources, artifacts, and close observations of the ways and manners that Indigenous Africans produced all different kinds of agricultural products, mainly palm oil, fish, canoes, nets, fish traps and shea butter and how they sold, gifted and exported some of these products, overseas.

Hence, he helped to re-direct the study of history from a purely European point of view in the absolute deconstruction of the thesis of the British Historian, Prof. Hugh Trevor-Roper that Africa had no history worthy of study. Dike’s pioneering work has also helped to illuminate the history of the countless web of inter-community relations in the southern part of Nigeria with respect to documentation of indigenous technologies that were adapted to the struggle for survival, production, wealth accumulation and redistribution in the now defunct Protectorate of the Oil Rivers.

Economic Historians of today of which we are a humble part, have continued on the legacies of Prof Dike by studying the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of production, distribution, consumption, public finance, and exchange within an economy. We have taken the notch even higher than the Dikean legacies to apply new and varying degrees of modern skills in data gathering, advanced analytical methods in chronology and correlational studies including advanced statistical and mathematical models to reconstruct modern production enterprises, consumption patterns, money and the uses of money and capital formation to help in the formulation of economic planning and the giving of critical advice to political leaders who might desire and call for our institutional memories in government’s quest for development. In other words, historical studies today have added to itself new capacities for policy formulation, implementation, and projections such that it will be sheer self-immolation to neglect to consult historians, especially economic and military historians who are imbued with the skills to help direct or redirect public policy for attaining the objectives of economic planning in any liberal democratic society.

• Economic History and the Minimum Wage Conundrum

Historical studies and the application of skills arising therefrom offer to the public and their leaders, institutional memory which forms the template for economic planning. It also offers the guiding principles (‘the invisible hand’) for policy implementation, especially in perilous times when a nation is confronted with dire economic challenges. Because politicians will always be more concerned with gaining and retaining power than they are with the details of public leadership and economic progress, Economic Historians come into the mix to help provide the guiding principles to civil servants and the judiciary so that the course of a nation’s development trajectory may not be derailed by inordinate ambition for power and its toys.

At present, Nigeria is confronted with the dire problems of poverty, unemployment, unemployability of many of its youth, and insecurity. These same problems confronted Nigeria in the pre-colonial period and even immediately after the civil war. The lessons of the Pax Britannica signed in Ibadan, in 1897, when the British, together with the Yoruba indigenous elite agreed on terms of an armistice and later, complete cessation of hostilities arising from the Kiriji wars, will come in handy. The details of the diplomatic and astute management of violence during that time, are in the hands of Military Historians and experts in War Studies, whose clans are in large supply amongst us. Let the present leaders call for them to help guide policy formulation and implementation on the issues of IPOB, MASSOB, and Bandits problems, in different parts of Nigeria. 

In respect to poverty and unemployment, Economic Historians have cried themselves hoarse on the right methods to approach these two debilitating problems. They have insisted that recourse to how similar problems were overcome in the past is a better alternative than mere experimentation with foreign-inspired methodologies that do not and cannot work in our own clime today. These problems are not insurmountable, because of evidence from history particularly in the ways similar problems were managed and overcome by Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s government (1952-1959) in Western Nigeria and again by Chief Obafemi Awolowo as Federal Commissioner for Finance (1967-71), are still relevant and extant. Why are we neglecting our historical resources in confronting and overcoming our challenges? Let today’s political leaders call upon the Historical Society of Nigeria and the Nigerian Economic Society for help.    

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The Best Development Paradigm For Nigeria

Let the people, the ordinary citizens at the grassroots, not the blue-collar or white-collar jobbers in the cities, buy in and own the economy. This can only happen when development efforts and the implementation of public policies in job creation are localized and integrated into the curriculum of technical and higher education, which should be compulsory for all. Now, permitting the people to own the economy is not doable if the current over-centralised federation is not restructured to transfer a significant portion of constitutional powers to the States and the Local Governments in the Federation. 

I, therefore, advise that we tinker significantly with the distribution of powers in the First and the Second Parts to the Second Schedule to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, to devolve the following to the States as their area of exclusive competencies rather than make it an exclusive power for the federal government: power over land and the uses of land (including mineral lands) but excluding “federal lands” in Abuja and in all other areas where there are federal roads and railways, consumption and sales taxes, local or state transportation, including all licences pertaining thereto and Personal Income Tax. 

We should also make the following a concurrent power over which the federal and the states can legislate and manage labour matters, railway, construction of dams, the management of lakes and rivers, licensing of beers and spirits production,  weights and measurement, drugs and poisons, the police and policing. This way, the states and local authorities will have significant levels of authority to engineer development in their respective jurisdictions. The effect is that people will look up to their governors and local council chairs for the development of their areas and not go cap-in-hand to the centre for fiscal support. 

No better engine of growth and development can be greater than this since it will instigate and promote competitive federalism and every part of the country will cease blaming the other for its lack of development but rather take its destiny in its own hands and grow at its own pace. Competitive Federalism is my suggested antidote for Nigeria’s social and economic malaise. We have done it before; we can do it again.