What will define who we really are, is not only how we perceive the multiple challenges we are experiencing today and how they affect us as a people, but also how we face and react to them. Indeed, this is not just one or two crises scattered here and there. This is a multifaceted and deep rooted crisis. It is important to realize that we are presently passing through a critical period that could constitute a turning point in our collective history. Interestingly, all of these challenges are connected- suggesting that our present day crisis is fundamentally a structural and systemic one that should not be taken lightly.
Unfortunately most of the solutions we are seeing so far seem to be piecemeal and symptomatic therapies that hardly work. In the best cases, these solutions are simply band aid endeavors, but in most cases they end up creating more problems.
Fortunately for us, more and more people are now realizing that we have hit a point in history that calls for dynamics and orientations that are deeper and broader than any attempts we have seen so far. It requires a radical shift not just in our vision of the world or our mentality and how we think, but in every sphere of our lives – from the way we see ourselves and relate to each other, from our relationship with the environment to our intellectual, scientific, technical and business orientations, from our production systems to the ways we exchange and consume our products and services.
Instead of the shallow and piecemeal solutions we are used to, the seriousness of this crisis obliges us to see the urgent need to embark on the road of doing the hard work of growing up and stop copying ready-made or other peoples’ solutions. Business as usual is no longer acceptable if we are to survive as a people.
It should be new wine in a new wine skin
The disheartening socio-economic situation today, I think, will continue and will definitely get worse if we continue to navigate with the same “old map”. Our compass is not pointing to the “True North”. This “wrong map” developed and adopted slowly since the end of the civil war has brought us very close to a deep cliff.
So today’s function is not your usual award giving ceremony. What we are celebrating today is that our people are beginning to map out new and different pathways to relevance in today’s world and the pillars of this new “EXODUS to ANABIOSIS” are being erected. For me the essence of this ceremony is that we have decided to build a critical mass of a new human resource pool that are equipped with the right values and capacities to help us navigate through this difficult and challenging period in our history.
What is their profile?
The leaders we are celebrating today are convinced that the solutions to our problems can no longer be found in the present day logic of begging for crumps and complaining about marginalization and fighting for their share of the national cake. The solution is not in the “get rich quick mentality”, trading or “contract chasing”. They see their lives as a part of a difficult mission of developing new mental and operational frameworks based on what we now know about how our world works. Modern sciences including a critical look on the geopolitical dynamics from the onset of the first Industrial revolution up to this moment are providing us with a fundamentally different and refreshing framework on our human dynamics and that of our world.
From these sources, a new paradigm is emerging with a completely new and different technological, organizational and socio-economic orientations. This paradigm is challenging us to learn from the basic principles of the workings of our human history. We believe that from seeing our problems from this world view, we will be in a better position to design and re-engineer our way out of these crises. This new paradigm has to be appropriated and deployed by a critical mass of our people, if we are really committed to creating, designing and inventing organizations, industries, economic activities that would solve our present day problems.
There are many pillars and parameters in this new world view, but let us just take one or two of them to highlight the role some of these leaders are playing and also the future developmental trajectory that must be taken seriously if we are to re-engage ourselves in a any relevant and significant manner in the affairs of our nation.
The concept of life and social construction as a network of relationships
How do we harness and develop the dormant interdependent relationships among us and within our nation? How do we create new synergies and alliances to enhance our chances in the emerging distributed and collaborative economy of tomorrow? How do we develop capacities and relationships that will help us to thrive not only in good times but also in bad and difficult times? How can we safely navigate in rough waters?
Energy development and flow as motor of socio-economic development
The harnessing and concentration of energy at nodes (our socio-economic centers like Aba, Onitsha, our Universities, etc.), to create technological capitals, economic and social-political entities.
A British politician Ernest Bevin once quipped that “The Kingdom of Heaven may be run on righteousness, but the Kingdom of Earth is run on oil” -that is on any form of energy. An interesting comment. But our reaction to quip is simple. It should be rather about the Kingdom on Earth and not of the Earth. The running of the HOUSE of Man- “Eco nomos” where humanity and the environment are central should be seen differently. We should build a distributed and collaborative version of this kingdom (Distributed Capitalism or Regenerative Economy) and this will run on both righteousness and “oil” meaning energy.
The big lesson here is that Energy regimes in all its forms, (non- material -intellectual and material) shape the nature of civilisations- how they are organised, how the fruits of commerce and trade are distributed, how political power is execised, and how social relations are constructed and conducted. We must now understand that in this 21st century in Nigeria, the locus of geopolitical power control will be around the production and control of energy. This is going to dramatically change the distribution of economic, political and social power in this 21st century.
But in the emerging third industrial revolution the locus of power control in energy production and distibution is going to tilt from giant fossil fuel-based centralized energy companies to millions of small producers who will generate their own renewable energies in their dwellings and trade surpluses in info-energy commons.
This will have profound implications for how we orchestrate the entirety of the geopolitical realities in Nigeria in the near future.
My advice here is that we must not only be present in today’s Elite Energy regimes even though they require significant and massive investment, technical, managerial and formidable geopolitical, even military powers to secure and run them.
But the organisational challenges in running centralized economic institutions must be fully understood and factored-in to achieve any reasonable results. The centralised energy regimes and similar industries require and favor vertical economies of scale and the formation of giant, centalized enterprises across supply chains, managed by rationalized hierachical organizations competing in adversarial markets. Unlike the chinese, the modern rational business bureaucracy or more specifically the rationally structured, centralized bureacracies that require top-down command and control structure has not been easy for the avarage Igbo man to adopt and master.
Because of this weekness and the fact that the present day centralized energy production and distribution will soon run out of steam,we must equally and as a matter of urgency embark on the non-elitist, distributed energy and business regimes that will require the deployment of information technology to integrate, link and synergize this distributed setup. The strength of our region will reside in our capacity to synergize all possible energy sources around us. I am not just talking about physical energy here.
This will create an enabling environment that would generate the much needed energy for a broad-based and inclusive socio-economic growth in the rural and urban areas
The challenge therefore before us in the energy sector is how to:
Harness all possible sources of Energy, especially the renewable energy, develop and implement an energy system (smart grids) and policies that would integrate a distributed framework to insure at least a 7% annual growth in the production and use of energy in a sustainable manner to enable us to turn around the Rural Sector that is presently characterized by low productivity, poverty and environmental decay to become viable, competitive and sustainable.
There must therefore be a radical change in our energy policies and orientations to align our present socio-economic activities with the third industrial revolution that is already up and running.
This new regime will be different from the present centralized one. It will create completely different business models. This will give rise to thousands of distributed firms coming together in collaborative business relationships embedded in networks.
In the new regime, competitive markets will slowly give way to colaborative networks, and top-down capitalism will be increasingly marginalized by the new forces of distibuted capitalism.
Most of the crisis in the near future will stem from our refusal to be aligned with the framework of the new paradigm.
A recourse to the Igbo social makeup and traditional governance system is in order here. The Igbo nation is a federation of clans. The Igbo politics is locally driven. The Igbo governing regime is mediation. It seeks consensus and promotes collaboration among the entities. This is in our genes and must be harnessed.
Because of its distributed and collaborative nature, the new and emerging third industrial revolution fits the Igbo socio-economic reaity.
The Traditional Igbo Economy is a Distributed Capitalism, It is a “regenerative social economy”-
We must realize that while the Igbo Distributed Capitalism strongly reaffirms and continually reactivates the central position of solidarity and altruism in social constructions, it goes steps further to ensure the sustainability of this human value, giving it a “self-sustaining” base. That is why we progressed in the past and quickly became a force to reckon with, not just in Nigeria but elsewhere.
Our basic inherited socio-economic structure should be implanted in the sustainability drive of our communities.
This new economic initiative will be a commitment to an active and generative use of all resources. These resources must be made to circulate within the social fabric of our communities to make them reproduce themselves. This initiative is therefore designed to have a snowball and not a trickledown effect. It revitalizes work as the basic structure of modern economy – the human centered enterprise. Here the new types of enterprises become the focal points where resources are oriented for the continuous creation of social, environmental, spiritual and economic wealth.
It must be noted however, that solidarity in our traditional Igbo economy is detached from the practice of social welfare that is characterized by perpetual-handouts that is creating serious problems in our society today.
In the emerging third generation economy and the Igbo Distributed Capitalism or Regenerative Economy, the millions of people at the bottom of the pyramid in our communities will be considered an enormous potential socio-economic asset instead of a social burden.
Fr. Nzamujo, Director of Songhai Center of Excellence, delivered this keynote address at the Meritorious Award and Grand Reception Night organized by Ndigbo Lagos for deserving Igbo sons and daughter at the Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos on Saturday May 10, 2014.
