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Victor Ndoma-Egba, a former Senate Leader, says that Nigeria has “lost its way” and has to get back to the ideals and discipline that made it a great country.
On the podcast The Exchange, presented by Femi Soneye, the former politician and lawyer talked about Nigeria’s trajectory from independence to where it is now. He added that the country’s current problems are the result of a “corrosive shift in political culture and the abandonment of foundational plans.”
Ndoma-Egba noted that Nigeria used to have one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, and he remembered how exciting it was in 1960. He added, “The economy was one of the fastest growing in the world, and the problem wasn’t money, it was how to spend it.”
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Ndoma-Egba is now 69 years old. He started working for the government at the age of 24 as a board member and then became a state commissioner at the age of 26. He said that in the 1980s, most states only had seven to nine commissioners to save money. This was different from how things are done now. He noted that while this helped cut costs, it also hurt efficiency.
“I was in charge of what would now be more than a dozen ministries,” he said, wondering if the present focus on slashing government expenditures really strikes the right balance between being frugal and being efficient.
Ndoma-Egba claimed that Nigeria’s weak institutions are caused by cultural issues, especially the fact that people are too respectful of authority and are afraid to hold leaders accountable. He said that Nigeria’s early leaders were simple, whereas modern politicians are flashy. “It’s the milieu, the environment that defines… today,” he added, pointing out that even his mother, who used to be the head of the local government, “walked to work without an official car or home.”
He said that when he was Chairman of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), a master plan for the region’s growth was “abandoned almost immediately” because of political intervention. He added that many people saw the Commission as a piece of the national cake. He also said that there was a “62-step bureaucratic process for payments” that led to inefficiencies and corruption.
He also said that thugs violently stopped him from looking into contractors’ claims, which highlighted how bad the matter had gotten.