Hope Rekindled: A Comprehensive Analysis of Nigeria’s Nationhood Challenges and How to Overcome Them, is a voluminous book of over 800 pages organized into four broad sections – A Nation on His Knees, Reversing Economics of retrogression, The Quest for Justice, Equity and Peace and Rebirth of a Nation – of independent modular chapters that time-pressed readers could flip through as their interest dictates.
The author was unsparing in the first part of the book in which to be precise he described Nigeria in the first chapter as “a sleeping giant,” noting with regret that “the country is still ranked as a developing country with many indices of development abysmally looking downwards and getting lower. To all effects, the education system has collapsed. The hospitals are more harbingers of death than solace due to the lack of equipment and the required resources to run them and the infrastructure are deteriorating. Today, the young men and women are neither barely-educated nor skilled, and as a consequence, embark on crime as a means of survival.
“Aside becoming tools in the hands of mischief-makers, they also constitute a safety and security challenge to the nation. Some external commentators have called Nigeria a failed or failing state. Nigerians know that the public school systems have failed, the transportation system is inadequate and the power supply is unstable, which in itself is indicative of severe challenges faced with development because no nation can develop without constant energy supply.”
Part 2, titled: “Reversing economics of retrogression” is divided into three chapters – Garbage in Garbage out, In a Global Village and Breaking the Cycle. In Chapter 4, the paradox of growth, without development is discussed, with economic freedom highlighted as a panacea for enhancing economic growth, reducing poverty and improving the standard of living. Chapter 5 treated the elements of competition, particularly as global competitiveness is imperative in economic growth of nations. Chapter 6 traced the economic history of Nigeria with one of book’s distinct remarks in this section, declaring: “The Nigerian leadership needs to free itself from the numerous constraints which make people think more of sharing the national cake and less of the baking.”
Part 3 (Quest for Justice, Equity and Peace) comes under four chapters– Grappling with the Structural Defect, Political Misadventure, A Deadly Venom and Please, Help, We Are Drowning. On what it terms the nation’s structural defects, the book argues that the multiplicity of states has only succeeded in increasing the cost of government “with more and more resources of government devoted to recurrent expenditure.” In the author’s opinion, with less and less to spend on the people, the nation’s human development index has dimmed negatively.
Part four of the book with three chapters – A Nation of Contradictions, Do the Right Things and Do Things Right and Return to Go- envisions how to achieve a new Nigeria, capturing it all in these words: “The Phoenix’s ability to be reborn from its ashes implies that it is immortal. Nigeria is the Phoenix of our time. If Nigeria, in the condition where nothing works, can grow economically to have the largest economy in Africa, then, the height to be attained when the country moves positively in the right direction can only be imagined. The trillion-dollar economy is not far away.”
The country’s leadership, the author stressed, must take charge and chart a vision for Nigeria that will liberate all citizens and unleash their innate capabilities and potentials. Then he proffers solutions to the nation’s troubling political and economic challenges, among them he argues strongly for a re-adoption of the parliamentary system to end the high cost of governance, to enhance accountability and reduce corruption, all of which have ballooned negatively under the current presidential system in practice. The country, he went on, has no option but to embrace fiscal federalism, wage total war against corruption by building strong institutions and using systems to enhance transparency just as he would want the elites to move away from their extractive tendencies to support the creation of an inclusive and pluralistic society to allow for socio, economic and political rebirth of the nation. He charged the people to jettison the wide spread political, socio, cultural and religious contradictions that seem to hold them down while calling for a total overhaul of the country’s justice system to strengthen the rule of law and property rights.
Along with these, government would need to urgently embrace the doctrine of economic freedom and ease of doing business to enhance competitiveness, economic growth, employment, poverty reduction and general improvement in the standard of living of the people.