Editorial
Part 2: America, The Free + The Complex
U.S. President Barack Obama with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan
‘The people you see in Nigeria today,’ China Achebe once said, ‘have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it’s a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.’
For all intents and purposes, if you replaced the word ‘Nigeria‘ with ‘America’ where Mr. Achebe currently lives (in the small state of Rhode Island) or even changed authors from a Nigerian to an American like Toni Morrison, one would quickly find that Nigeria and the United States of America are actually quite fundamentally the same.
Like America, Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states. America has Washington, D.C. and Nigeria has the Federal Capital Territory, in Abuja. Each of Nigeria’s 36 states has a governor who pretty much, controls the entire political superstructure and machinery of state government – political party, local government councils; delegates from national to state. The governor formulates policy, appoints and approves all office holders, controls a huge annual budget, and according to the Daily Independent, a Nigerian paper, a Nigerian state governor ‘pays the piper and consequently, dictates the tune.’
How different is this from any state in the U.S. – from the Utah to Wyoming and Massachusetts? Of course, Nigeria’s issues are much graver than those in the U.S., and the U.S. is the world’s most progressive democracy while Nigeria has major issues with management and resource allocation. Besides, while almost all of America is securely under the effective management of law enforcement, some states in Northern Nigeria are embroiled in the drama that is Boko Haram.
But when we talk about how serrated Nigeria is – how divided the country is – and how all this prevents the country from achieving its true destiny, we might as well be speaking about the U.S. That the U.S. is divided is not in dispute. In fact, from its founding, the U.S. is the ultimate experiment in divided government. And this is where Nigeria and the U.S. are different. As a former British colony, Nigeria took on the fundamentals of the United Kingdom’s political system where one party can practically get things done.
The U.S. does not have such luck. And the world’s largest economy is additionally unfortunate in how its class system operates. Since the 1970s, the divide between the rich and the poor has grown in such alarming proportions. The top 1 percent has much more wealth than over 40 percent of the country’s 330 million people, and one would actually find that in what is supposed to be a more representative democracy, the U.S. may actually be ‘ruled’ by an influential ‘aristocracy’ of less than 1 percent, most with direct access to the powers that be in Washington, D.C.
Nonetheless, this inverted model is not what exacerbates the American quandary. In fact, countries like China have been able to effectively harness inversion to their benefit. What afflicts the U.S. is the very same notion authors Acemoglu & Robinson put in their Why Nations Fail. Simply, any change in America’s political system can be detrimental to the few oligarchs – industry incumbents – that benefiting from things like the country’s status-quo around illegal immigration, health care, financial regulation, and the military or defense complex. During the 8 years of the Bush II presidency, many old money complexes made bank. Defense complexes supplied the war, pharmaceutical companies supplied Medicare Part B, and if it had succeeded, George W. Bush’s reform of Social Security would have given the financial industry a cash infusion of more than 10 trillion dollars.
