Imperatives For Successful Sub-National Governance

IMPERATIVES FOR SUCCESSFUL SUB-NATIONAL GOVERNANCE
Being the paper presented by
His Excellency Dr. Kayode FAYEMI
Governor, Ekiti State, Nigeria
At the INTERNATIONAL REPUBLICAN INSTITUTE’S (IRI)
AFRICA REGIONAL GOVERNANCE BEST PRACTICES CONFERENCE,
MOMBASSA, KENYA
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Preamble
I bring you warm greetings from the land of honour, Ekiti State, Nigeria.
Nigeria is a federation of states led by governors. In 1967, the old federal
structure of regions led by premiers was dissolved to make way for states led
by governors. Over the decades, for reasons of political expediency, we have
grown from the initial number of 12 states to the present number of 36 states.
I am privileged to be the governor of Ekiti State located in the Southwest
of Nigeria with a population of about 2.5 million people. It is one of the 36
states that make up the second tier of government in the Federal Republic of
Nigeria. Our state is further divided into 16 Local Government Councils that
make up the third tier of government in the state. We have a largely agrarian
economy and some of the most spectacular landscapes and tourist sites in
Africa.
I assumed office on October 16, 2010 after a 3 and ½ years battle to
judicially reclaim my mandate that was denied me by electoral robbers and
their collaborators in the April 2007 gubernatorial elections.
So in a sense, we are a lot further along on the path that your country
has recently chosen. But I have not come here to lecture; I have come to
partake in a conversation with peers confronted by similar challenges, and I
am convinced that there is much that we have to learn from each other.
Let me at this juncture congratulate you on your emergence as Kenya’s
pioneer set of governors of the 47 newly created counties and as critical actors
in an exciting new chapter in efforts to deepen democracy in Kenya and by
extension, the continent of Africa. Your emergence is coming at an auspicious
moment. At a time when there is a lot of talk about an African recovery, and
the continent is being hailed as the next frontier in the world’s geostrategic
order; your leadership is crucial to realizing Africa’s immense promise,
beginning of course, with Kenya. One of the most significant signs of our times

is the noticeable shift in tone and emphasis in the global narrative regarding
Africa, from one of afro-pessimism to that of afro-optimism. Where reputed
international media once carried stories titled “Laggardly Africa” or “The
Hopeless Continent,” there are refreshingly sunny headlines like “Africa Rising”
and reference to the 21st century as the “African Century”.
It is for this reason that I am happy to participate in this historic
conference with men and women of like passions, to reflect on a few of the
themes that are germane to the success of your tenures.
A New Era – Distinguishing Between The Macro and The Micro
The creation of gubernatorial offices at county level was clearly meant to bring
governance closer to the people; to reduce the sense of alienation that people
feel regarding their representatives and to widen the opportunities for civic
engagement at the grassroots. One of the criticisms of the process of
democratization in Africa has been that in our attempt to clone western-style
liberal democracy, we have ended up importing some of its less salutary
aspects that do not transplant well and so cannot thrive in our socio-cultural
soil. It has been argued that the bipolar of the party in government ranged
against an opposition party seeded an unnecessarily adversarial dynamic into
African politics. Such polarization worked marvelously well in developed
countries where class conflict had matured into a socio-political culture of
ideological contest between rightists and leftists. In Africa, this polarization was
introduced into a different political economy; one defined not mainly by class
but by an array of micro-national identities still jostling for their places in the
new colonially-engineered nation-states.
The adversarial nature of disputation in partisan politics tended to
correspond with ethnic, religious and sub-national fault lines in these young
societies. The result was an almost visceral distrust for multi-party politics
which in turn became the justification for one-party states. Multi-party
electoral democracy was seen as an incubator of destructive and distracting
strife. It polarized nations and compounded sectarian animosities. Kenya, like
my country Nigeria, has known all too well and sadly so, the insidious nature
of this malaise. Today, one-party states have been discredited. By the early
1990s, they had outlived their usefulness. The end of the cold war hastened
their demise by eliminating the superpower rivalry that was the impetus for
their existence.
However, the complexion of many African nations remains heterogeneous
and fault lines remain highly flammable in democratic conditions especially in

seasons of electoral competition. The first thing to note is that democracy is not
alien to Africa. Many polemicists and scholars have proposed this thesis to
explain the apparent crisis of democracy on the continent. In fact, what is alien
is not democracy but the mode of operation by which it has become identified.
Many pre-colonial African societies were democratic in the sense that their
political cultures were based on consultation and consensus. Typically, every
member and every household of the community had a say in the matters of
collective interest. Governance was therefore based on widespread consultation
that broadened the pool of opinion and also the building of consensus. In the
end, the decision, though delivered by a chief or a king, had to be a collective
one of which he was the instrument of execution. Absolutist monarchies
existed only in very few places.
The setting that best portrayed the dynamics of governance in pre-
colonial Africa was the village square where the community gathered to thrash
out issues of common concern. The challenge of democratization in Africa is
that in adopting western style democracy, we have forgotten the village square
setting that characterized pre-colonial governance. Our formal democratic
institutions are exclusive in nature, often depicting politics and governance as
a winner-takes-all craft for an exclusive specialist class of politicians. The effect
of this is that ordinary people feel alienated from government and their
governments feel alienated from the people they claim to represent. The people
rarely have any input in the policy-making and implementation processes. This
distance between government and the governed is highly inimical to
democracy. It creates a lack of trust which simply sabotages ab initio any good
faith efforts to govern effectively for the benefit of our people.
Reclaiming the Trust
Upon my assumption of office, we discovered that our biggest challenge was
gaining the people’s trust. Their previous gloomy experiences with our
predecessors had calcified considerable cynicism in and about government.
Generally, a trust deficit between the government and the governed plagues
public life all over Nigeria. People simply do not believe what their politicians
say. Indeed, the prevalent notion is that politicians come into office to simply
line their pockets. While this is an understandable sentiment, it holds adverse
implications for the deepening of our democracy.

Cynicism leads inevitably to apathy. If people cease to believe in their
elected leadership, they will also shortly lose interest in public affairs.
Democracies are never more vulnerable to hijack or collapse than when citizens
lose interest in their political leaders and cease to hold them accountable. The
quality of democratic governance depends on the vitality of the intercourse
between citizens and their elected officials.
It was immediately clear to us that our first task was to rebuild trust in
public governance as a service delivery mechanism through practical and
symbolic ways. For our administration, this has meant modeling an ideal of
public service worthy of the people’s trust. This has not been easy in a climate
in which citizens had become accustomed to official non-performance, but we
have made considerable progress. By pragmatically instilling the ethos of
competence, reliability and transparency, we have gone some way towards
earning the trust of our people.
But the most important measure that we have taken in this regard is to
close the gap between state and civil society. We have done this by trying to
restore a communal sense of ownership of governance. The conventional lens
through which we, and by we, I mean we, the political elites of Africa, view
public affairs is that of mutual antagonism between the state and civil society.
We tend to see the state and society as implacably opposed. That is why
when I am asked by people who are familiar with my antecedents as a frontline
civil society actor, why I decided to “join them”; I patiently explain that in my
view, this proposition is a false dichotomy. My foray into politics is an
extension of my activism. The government and civil society share the same
goals. We want a sustainable collective prosperity in an environment that
promotes human dignity. I see the relationship between the state and civil
society not in terms of conflict but in terms of harmony and synergy. Of course,
the fact that we share the same goals does not mean that there are no
differences of opinion. But these are debates over means not ends.
We can have heated contestations of priorities, ways and means, and
instruments even though we share a broad consensus as to where we want our
community to be. These differences exist and they must be entertained because
they enrich the relationship between the state and civil society and make it
more authentic. We must therefore discard an adversarial perspective that
revels in a tension based on chronic disputation for the sake of it. This is not a
productive tension that generates solutions but a needless rancour that stalls
progress.

When it is seen and articulated in this light, the mutual estrangement of
government and civil society will end. The civil society will continue to express
the communal instinct to regulate power and the chronic antagonism that
poisons relations between the state and civil society will be replaced by mutual
respect and positive tension. Civic engagement means that the state can access
a much larger pool of wisdom and knowledge made available by a new rapport
with civil society. In return, the sanctums of governance will become much
more accessible to the people. The idea at the heart of this discourse is that
governance is a burden shared by the community.
To be truly effective, the design of policies has to emanate from the
people’s perception of their own needs. In this sense, the limitation of African
democracy is our emphasis on the conduct of elections often at the expense of
the democratic relationship between the government and the governed. We
have not yet come to see that democracy means participatory governance
which in effect means that policies are generated from the bottom up not
imposed from the top down. There is a hubris which leads us to presume to
know far more about ordinary people about their problems than they
themselves do. This paternalistic attitude causes us to prescribe solutions that
often have no relation to the challenges on ground and devise strategies that
are consequently unworkable.
Despite the tonnage of well-intentioned and even altruistic efforts to fight
poverty in Africa, these programmes fail because they are largely imposed on
the people by political elites. They have no buy-in at the grassroots level. For
development plans to work, the people have to take ownership of their
conception and drive their execution. For this to be the case, the development
goals have to be generated by citizens and tally with their own needs and
aspirations. A more meaningful approach to policy conception and execution
calls for us to adopt a posture of listening and attentiveness attuned to the
pulse of the communities on the receiving end of our initiatives. This means a
return to the ethos of consultation and consensus that our forefathers used to
good effect. In our times, this can be interpreted as the forging of strategic
partnerships between political leaders and civil society organizations and non-
state actors.
The foregoing ethos has informed my administration’s mainstreaming of
grassroots participation in our policy and programme development and
implementation. We do this through regular town hall meetings across the
state during which we share details of our milestone achievements as well as

challenges. We also consult broadly in the development of our annual budget
and have become a model for participatory budgeting in Nigeria.
In addition, my administration has also pioneered veritable community
participation in projects’ implementation through our “Community Self-Help
Programme”. Through this initiative, stakeholders in the various communities
decide amongst themselves the projects that are of priority to them; our
government then provides the funds for the implementation of the projects
under the supervision of the community leaders, while government acts as
overall monitor. We have come to find out that with this model, contractors are
extra cautious in delivering projects to time and specifications so as not to
attract the ire of a whole community. The culture of maintenance of public
property is also greatly leveraged because the people have taken ownership. We
are in touch with our people and work with them, not just for them.
Freedom of Information and Responsible Statecraft
One of the ways in which we can enhance participatory governance and
engineer high stakeholder involvement in public affairs is by entrenching a
culture of freedom of information. This begins with the freedom of information
act but extends beyond this to creating a climate in which our administrations
are truly open to the people. Too often, the affairs of government is classified,
veiled in secrecy and kept away from the people. This culture offends the
democratic spirit which is all about openness and transparency, and is one of
the ways in which governors alienate the governed. By entrenching a culture of
transparency, we create an atmosphere in which people feel truly closer to their
governments; thus, we as political leaders benefit from the intellect and the
energy of our people that we can tap into.
This is why the Government of Ekiti State, Nigeria is the first state to
have domesticated the Freedom of Information act at the sub-national level in
the country. We have gone further by developing robust communication
channels through which everyone can know about government’s activities. It is
noteworthy that our website has been named the best state government
website and the most visited public sector website in Nigeria.
Indeed, information and communication management is crucial to the
deepening of a democratic culture. The responsibility of ensuring the content of
our communications is within the confines of civility is as important as the
rigours of information dissemination. This is particularly relevant considering
the fact that we all as holders of elective political offices are products of

adversarial elections that have the tendency to be divisive. We therefore have to
be magnanimous in our victories and strive to elevate the art of statecraft
above crass and uncouth communications aimed at undermining opposition.
We hold very sensitive positions and our words have to heal and not hurt; bind
together and not tear apart; build consensus and not dissension.
African nations have suffered much loss of life from needless strife and
political bickering. Often these costly conflicts have been rooted in ego, in the
inability of politicians to play fairly and to regard each other with courtesy.
Given your recent history, you do not need any lectures on the destructive
nature of hate-mongering, sectarian intolerance and tribal prejudice. I come
from a country familiar with these plagues and which has paid a high price in
human life to tame these demons. However, as an expert in conflict and
security issues, what is clear to me is that political elites set the tone for the
rest of society to follow.
If our political debates are poisoned with demagogic rhetoric, hate-
speech and incitement, then our streets, farms and towns will burn. Most
conflicts begin from the realm of political communication, from how elites
mobilize their supporters and along what line they seek to obtain support. If we
do so by demonizing others, then the potential of conflict will be magnified.
Once we make political contests between individuals synonymous with a
communal contests for survival in which the prosperity of one community
depends on the extinction of another, then we are setting the stage for violence.
There is a great responsibility on all of us who lead to see that we do not
encourage the worst instincts of our people; that we turn their hearts and
strengths towards constructive rather than destructive ends. This burden is
even greater on you as governors because you are closer to the grassroots. You
have your fingers on the pulse of the people and you are much more cognizant
of the emotions and the sentiments that run so deep that they cannot be
readily spotted by the national government. By virtue of your strategic location
closer to the people, you are the chief architects of the political culture. You are
the first, the nearest and the most readily visible examples of leadership that
the people can see. Therefore much depends on how you treat them and how
you treat each other.
In the same vein, a spirit of cooperation is necessary if you are to
succeed. Many of the challenges you face are cut from the same cloth and
transcend county lines. They will require concerted effort. That is why I was
happy to hear that you have quickly put in place the “Council of Governors”.

Such a forum where you can gather as peers to pool ideas and learn from each
other is highly commended, and is a great platform by which you can all access
the collective wisdom of the group. The Council of Governors can evolve a peer
review mechanism that serves both as an instrument of collective development
and learning, as well as a tool of self-regulation. There is much that you can
accomplish together. I am a great believer in the spirit of cooperation beyond
political party lines, especially in the service of national development. Moreover,
such a spirit once operative here will flow inevitable downwards to inseminate
our communities with the means to collectively tackle their problems.
In this regard, I recommend that you understudy the workings of the
Nigeria Governors Forum founded in 1999. The NGF consists of all governors of
the 36 states in Nigeria irrespective of political party. The widely publicised
leadership crisis currently facing the forum is a passing phase that would
further strengthen our role as a frontline pressure group and unifying entity in
my country. The good work done over the past 14 years cannot be discounted
on account of the current crisis; neither can it undermine our prospects for the
future.
Entrenching a spirit of cooperation also extends to the tenor of executive-
legislative relations. Given the differing mandates of both sets of political
actors, the relationship between them is bound to be marked by a certain
degree of tension. This residual tension will be compounded by party
differences. What is important however is that we do not let that tension
degenerate into outright conflict that paralyzes governance. Rather we should
aim to make it a creative tension that gets the best out of all of us.
In my state, 24 out of the 26 members of the State House of Assembly
belong to my party. On one level, this makes things relatively easier because we
all subscribe to the same party’s manifesto. But even so, I still have a duty to
manage the relationship between my administration and the legislators. As
part of my efforts in this regard, we instituted a periodic executive-legislative
retreat to enable us all bond, rub minds, share ideas and just generally create
a relational context within which we can disagree with civility. It is in the
overall interest of our democratic projects to create a strong executive-
legislative regime.
Another point to note is the need to maintain a healthy relationship
between the governments at the Counties level and the Central Government. It
is understandable the current agitation by the Council of Governors to see the
expeditious full implementation of devolved functions as provided for under the

fourth schedule of your country’s new constitution. I assure you that there
would be several other contentious issues within the coming months and years
as the new political arrangement matures. What should however guide such
engagements is the patriotic zeal to better the lives of the people of your
counties. In the spirit of robust Cooperative Federalism, all tiers of government
in Kenya have to interact cooperatively and collectively towards solving
common problems and avoiding waste by the duplication of efforts. You have to
ensure consultations between the Counties’ Governments and the Central
Government are deep and enduring with a view to driving development faster to
the people you are called to serve.
Ultimately, democracy is about the accommodation of various shades of
opinion. The ability to disagree without being disagreeable is a vital political
skill. We do ourselves no credit if every political dispute or difference of opinion
leads to a loss of life. This is why it is absolutely imperative that you instill a
culture of civility in your interactions with each other as peers and with the
higher authorities in the Central Government. It is quite alright to have
differences. Indeed, being seasoned political actors it would be most unusual if
there were no differences of opinions among you. But it is necessary that
whatever your disagreements, you retain the belief that you are all working in
the greater interest of Kenya. The people are watching and will take their cue
from your conduct.
The Necessity of Service Delivery and Meritocracy
Considering the central reason for creating your positions is to shift governance
closer to the people, it is natural that you would bear the greater burden of the
people’s expectations for a better life. Devolution of governance is effectively
devolution of service delivery. But you can also devolve corruption, lack of
transparency and other negatives. How meaningful democracy is to the people
depends to a large extent on how honourably you carry out your duties.
Democracy, in the final analysis, is not just the right to vote and be voted for, it
is the equalization of access to public goods – education, healthcare, basic
infrastructure and jobs. It is expanding the range of opportunities available to
the people to live creative lives and achieve upward mobility. The question of
service delivery therefore is inescapable and it is the plumb line by which you
will be measured and judged.
Naturally, because you are the nearest representation of governance to
the people, you will feel the brunt of the anger and their disappointment should

you fall short of their hopes. But you will also know the joy of their affection
and affirmation when you make their dreams come true. It is such joys that
make a political career so rewarding – the notion that your leadership is
tangibly affecting lives for the better. In addition to our policies of free and
compulsory education up to senior secondary school, as well as free and
qualitative healthcare for vulnerable segments of the society, we have also
developed a Social Security Scheme through which we cater for qualifying
elderly citizens above the age of 65. We give these senior citizens a token
amount for their upkeep every month, in a bid to ensure members of this
vulnerable segment of the society are not left behind in indigence. There is
immense elation that comes with keeping up with the tradition of caring for our
elderly, even with the complexities of governance in these modern times. One of
the accomplishments that I am proud we have achieved through our social
service delivery efforts is that Ekiti now ranks number one in Nigeria in terms
of life expectancy.
Improving service delivery means changing the dominant paradigm of
public service in Africa. Our onerous development challenges are not for want
of brilliant policies and programmes or even dedicated leadership. The fact is
that most African countries simply lack the institutional capacity to execute
and pursue their developmental goals. This deficiency is readily discernible in
the condition of civil services across the continent. The dilemma therefore for
political leaders is that it is not even enough to have great ideas and
programmes that will help the people. We must develop the delivery capacity
that takes a proposal and translates from a bright idea into a truly tangibly
transformative policy with material consequences.
The task of creating an efficient public service is inseparable from the
calling of political leadership to motivate, inspire and rally a corps of public
servants with whom they will jointly seek to actualize the people’s aspirations
for a better quality of life. It is only in this way that the quest for the better life
can be properly institutionalised and thereby go beyond the politician’s tenure.
No matter how gifted a politician may be, his ultimate success lies in his
ability to strengthen institutions so that they can function optimally
independent of his own exertions. The public service is the designated site of
this success. The reforms that we need call for political leaders to set the right
tone in terms of professional and public conduct, in their approach to the task
of governance and the sanctity they accord to the people’s mandate. Political
leadership which is itself an instrument of public service is a sacred trust. The

challenges of the hour call for politicians and civil servants – all public servants
– to plumb new depths in fulfilling the ideal of leadership as service.
Conclusion: Leading with Legacy in Mind; Success and Succession
It may seem strange and even premature to be talking about succession
planning when you only just got here but this is a critical and much neglected
facet of leadership in Africa. And it dovetails neatly with the theme of
institutionalising our successes and building durable institutions. However
noble our motives for going into politics, however accomplished we may be as
administrators, one truth stands unimpeachable: No man is indispensable. We
serve by the grace of God and at the pleasure of the electorate who put us in
office and have the right to remove us as well. We must lead with one eye on
today and the other on the future. As political leaders, this involves mentoring
a corps of young leaders to carry on from where we stop. This has not
particularly been a strong point of African leadership. Too often we are
suspicious of the young. We marginalize talented youth that we should be
grooming, seeing them as threats instead of nurturing them as successors.
Archaic Paternalistic attitudes still dominate African leadership models and
have aborted countless opportunities for positive change and innovation to
move the continent forward. As a new generation of leaders in Kenya, you have
an opportunity to change this negative dynamic which is impeding progress in
our societies.
As James Freeman Clark said, “A politician thinks of the next election, a
statesman, of the next generation”. Leadership is a continuum and for our
leadership to truly stand the test of time it must be driven by a trans-
generational perspective. We must build up those who will take our exertions
for a better society to higher levels. We absolutely must begin to mentor young
people. The litmus test for our success as leaders is not how many people we
are leading but how many people we are transforming into leaders. In other
words, how many people are we empowering to realize their own potential as
leaders?
Each generation of leaders must stand on the shoulders of the giants
who have come before them. We have a responsibility to boost the next
generation up on our shoulders. Whatever our successes as individual leaders,
they are incomplete until we have prepared the grounds for succession. This is
how positive leadership cultures are perpetuated. Too many promising
movements and organizations have died out with their charismatic founders
because they failed to mentor the next generation to carry the baton of
leadership into new frontiers.

Consider Singapore – a story of development success much admired in
Africa. Many of us are familiar with the tale of how the sterling leadership of
Lee Kwan Yew steered the small island from a pacific backwater to a first world
city-state and one of the best run nations in the world today. But Singapore’s
success story also owes much to adequate succession planning in which
leadership has been taken up by a corps of younger leaders that were initiated
into the governing party very early. They now constitute the second generation
of leaders charged with consolidating the success story of Singapore.
What we can learn from this and other examples of national success is
that nation-building is a trans-generational task. It is not about gifted
individuals; it is about leadership traditions based on ideas and values shared
across generations. This is what ensures that leadership is continuously
refreshed and society is continually renewed. This is how we can create a
national success story that endures for the ages.
I very warmly welcome you on board and wish you success in actualising
the mandate of your people.
Thank you.
Dr. Kayode Fayemi
Governor, Ekiti State, Nigeria
Thursday, August 1, 2013, Mombasa, Kenya

Imperatives For Successful Sub-National Governance

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