The third implication of the government’s anti-intellectual posture is simply that rather than depending on local research capacities to design and formulate policies that align with local interests and needs, the consecutive governments have significantly outsourced the design of policy initiatives to external donor organisations and foreign development agencies, chiefly the Bretton Wood institutions like the World Bank and IMF. And it is not surprising that some of these policy designs are somewhat disconnected from local realities.
Thus, when crucial economic and development data are funded and generated by external bodies, not much is left to the imagination as to the capacities of these statistics to backstop national development.This is a strange condition of research given that Nigeria is the largest producer of social science research in Africa.
A recent 2020 study by the National Centre for Technology Management and The Global Development Network articulates significant and revealing findings: (a) there is a general and unfounded bias in favour of the pure and natural sciences against social science research in Nigeria, (b) local researchers are compelled to follow the agenda of foreign funding agencies since their grants emanate from them, (c) poor coordination undermine the level of interaction within Nigeria’s social science research system, (d) research capacity-building is not designed to meet the need of researchers, (e) there is an extremely weak communication between policymakers and researchers in terms of conceptualising and designing research.
The policy-research dynamics in Nigeria are often constrained by different time frames that separate political and research considerations. Most research uptakes are grounded on the long-term implications of policy ideas, paradigms and programmes of action. In other words, an evidence-based policy research project might reveal that an item of policy design will not mature in the lifetime of two administrations.
On the contrary, politicians derive political capital from a quick turnaround time on policy implementation that enable them consolidate their hold on, or the possibility of gaining, power. Even this temporal consideration is further undermined by the bad politics that derives from aligning policies to clientelist interests and patronages, rather than the governance interests of the populace.
The research space in Nigeria is therefore left in a critical state of dysfunction as a result of lack of government attention to the funding and sustenance of the research culture that enable the public policy process in terms of empirical and evidence-based action research and policy intelligence. Several studies have been conducted on the state of Nigeria’s higher education dynamics, as well as the knowledge production dysfunction.
Inadequate knowledge production has been taken to be the result of the following factors: “inadequate and inconsistent funding, weak linkages between research and industry, poor extension services and technology transfer, bureaucratic bottlenecks and administrative inefficiencies, brain drain and low research motivation, poor research commercialisation and patent culture, infrastructure decay, weak policy implementation, lack of monitoring, evaluation and accountability.”
Since Nigeria constitutes one of the countries with the lowest research funding in the world—Nigeria allocates less than one percent of its GDP to research—then we should not be surprised that its productivity profile is defined by significant deficiencies like low labor productivity, weak manufacturing base, high youth unemployment, etc.
Quite inevitably, governments in Nigeria have failed to catalyse both human capital development and deepen research and development (R&D) in their attempt to strengthen Nigeria’s national innovation culture. Nigeria’s research infrastructure therefore does not amount to much in terms of Nigeria’s capacity to transform its policy architecture through innovative action research. And on the other hand, higher education keeps flooding the market with human capital that does not have the capacity to innovate.
We can therefore conclude, as I have argued previously, that Nigeria has been beating about the development bush since we have failed so far to deduce how development emerges from the crucial partnership between the government, researchers and Nigeria’s higher education system and research space.
We see poignantly how the strengthening of the planning, research and statistics department in the MDAs, as a structural means of institutionalising the policy-research collaboration, has remained unattainable. This is one of the most immediate motivations for the establishment of the Ibadan School of Public Policy after my retirement in 2015.
We therefore see the critical link between Nigeria’s low productivity profile and its lack of interest in domestic research capacity. The anti-intellectual orientation of consecutive Nigerian governments facilitates the inability of its research space to generate the scientific, empirical and evidence-based research culture that ought to stimulate effective policymaking efforts for grounding good governance.
To reverse this unfortunate state of affairs requires that we first admit that both the government and the policy research (and the entire research space) in Nigeria are complicit in this policy-research deficit. Both have failed to see each other as critical actors in the co-creation of fundamental policy research for national development. On the one hand, government requires a policy management framework that is consciously organised around the collaborative relationship between policymakers, policy researchers and research institutes and tertiary institutions. This demands a blueprint that significantly situate research institutes within an administration’s research focus and objectives in ways that articulate what the government specifically demand, in terms of its research aspirations, from specific universities, polytechnics, research institutes and think tanks.
On the other hand, the research space made up of these institutes and institutions must also reframe their mandates and objectives around the significance of interdisciplinary research that helps them to balance between their traditional research focus and the urgent need of government for development designs and planning.
Concluded.
Prof. Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission.
