CRITIQUE OF THE NIGERIAN STATE.

 



 ✍🏿✍🏿 *Yusuf Nasir Ahmad.*✍🏿✍🏿
📧 *Naseeryusuf07@gmail.com* 📞 *+2348145598212.* *Twitter:@Yusufnasir_ahmd*
🏫 *Ahmadu Bello University Zaria.* 🏫

   
 



     *CRITIQUE OF THE NIGERIAN STATE.*

  _"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility._

- *Sigmund Freud*

     It is high time we start interrogating ourselves inwardly by feeling absolutely free to ask ourselves some philosophical questions such as  "what a state is? What are the features of a state? What are the fundamental duties of a state? And lastly, and the most important of them 'can a state fail? How do we know if a state has failed? What are the social ramifications of a state that failed?  What are the possible remedies of a state failure? "

   These are important questions citizens shy away from. They do this out of perpetual condition of constant fear of the state.
    A state defined in a very simple term is "a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory especially one that is sovereign, with a population and government charged with the primary responsibility of protecting the lives and properties of its inhabitants or in other words citizens."

 That's the political defination of a state. In my own opinion another significant component of a state that is missing in the conventional defination is the "market" as well. For a state to function efficiently, it also has to welcome the importance of market with warm hands. Thus, our own defination of state integrate the fundamental component of market that is left out. Whether the market should be monopolized by the state or private sector is a matter the existing status-quo of that state. It is also a matter of debate that has been on since time a memorial.

   The fundamental objectives of a state, (as it has always pretended in the liberal society is that the state is stationery as far as the question of market is being asked! Meanwhile, it is not), the fundamentals  objective is to protect lives and properties of her citizens.
In our own defination of state, it has gone beyond that, is has gone beyond protecting lives and properties of people, is also must make sure there is no market falirue as a result of disequilibrium in the markets. We said so because, the state is never stationary in managing the affairs of the market. It it playing the role of regulation. It also buy and sell.

   In the first world countries, the states and markets are perfectly correlated: the nexus between them positive. The problem we are facing in  the third world countries is that the relationship between the states and the markets are inversely related. Lacking harmony between the two has always led to both state and market failures.
  In the context of Nigeria, a developing economy, both the state and the markets are inversely related. There is no harmony between the two.
   We will start our critique of the state from the market component.
A market is the area of economic activity in which buyers and sellers come together & the forces of supply and demand aff-ect prices producing goods for market rather than for consumption.
  Our assumption is that we are defining the capitalist state, and what that means is that only those with income have a role to play in such markets. Those whose income is less than the market price, or whose income is zero have no share in the outputs of the market. The clearing points are strictly for those who can afford to clear the output supplied at the prevailing market price.
It does not matter whether the outputs are for food, clothing, health, education and shelter! The fundamental transcript upon which either of this can be transferred to the potential buyer is on the fact that he or she must be able and willing to exchange it for the monetary value he or she wants posses it.
  It is important to inform the attentive reader that the market has subsets: market for inputs and market for output. And this assumption holds true to both markets. In the market for inputs, the conditions will be very severe if the labourers cannot exchange their  service for wages or income. The ramification of that is the fact that they will not have income to participate in the market. And what that means is that if they don't have a means to survive they either depend on the benevolence of others or the state to provide basic life amenities for them.

 According to the Integrated Human Development Index (IHDI), Nigeria is the poorest country in the world! It is a paradox, despite the enormous amount of human and natural resources we posses, with a GDP of $1.221 trillion and a population of about 190.9 million, yet per capita income is extremely low; people are living on less than one dollar a day! The rate of illiteracy is alarming, we have the highest statistics of out of school children. High unemployment, lack of effective health care, malnutrition among many.  The gap of inequality in our state is alarming. All these are nothing but an obvious data that our market had failed to allocate resources efficiently. Hence, there is a market failure.
  As far as we are concern, market failure is a symptom that the state will fail or has actually failed. Because it is market failure that that gives birth to various social menace such as terrorism, insecurity, kidnapping, cyber crime, drug trafficking, human trafficking, sex slavery and all sorts of crimes. Such is market failure!

  Now, we asked a question that can a state fail? Surely it can. And the Nigerian state is failing. It is failing to protect lives and properties. It has failed to offer a profound solution to the gap of inequality and poverty. It has failed to protect her population both domestically and internationally.
Everyone in the state is living is a perpetual state of paranoia. We only have vacuum for basic infrastructure, no education nothing.

    to be continue...


  *In my subsequent write-up, I shall offer a solution and theories surrounding state failure and what is required of  citizens.*