By Victor-Bandele Dada
For more than six decades, Nigeria has debated its problems without ever adequately identifying the problem beneath the problems.
Economists have diagnosed fiscal instability. Political scientists have examined institutional weakness. Sociologists have studied ethnic and religious fragmentation. Development specialists have focused on poverty, unemployment, food insecurity and human capital. Security analysts have examined insurgency, banditry and communal conflict.
All these observations are valid. But they remain, substantially, descriptions of consequences. The more fundamental question is this: Why has Nigeria remained unable to convert its vast human, territorial and material potential into a continuously self-renewing system of prosperity?
This question takes us beyond the familiar language of corruption, bad leadership and inadequate policy. The central proposition of Prosperity Governance & Management is that Nigeria has suffered from a scientific and institutional knowledge deficit in community self-renewal.
