Public policy, shorn of the burdensome garb of pretentious rhetoric of various schools of scholarship appeals to the man in the street as the sum total of the predilections and mindsets of the ruling class. And as the main inheritors and manipulators of the commanding levers of social and political engineering, public policy on all aspects of management of society is severely underlined by the dispositions and world views of the ruling class.
In a functional democracy the ruling class acquires political power through the popular will of the people as expressed by the grace of their vote. When therefore the people have boldly, willingly and freely expressed their preference for a corps of leaders who they have given the mandate to articulate and give life to their many and collective hopes and aspirations they as a people are fully entitled to no less than the complete and unabbreviated realization of those hopes and aspirations.
And therefore when the people begin to experience wholesale and unmitigated short-change of their popular will then the most important plank in the argument for the survival and growth of democracy would not have been well served.
A stable, peaceful and prosperous society is mostly anchored on the following premises, namely:
- A viable ruling class.
- A clear, well-grounded and people-oriented appreciation of political power by the ruling class as an instrument of service only.
- An intellectually liberated, visionary, proactive and highly resourceful ruling class.
- A ruling class which engages and explores the finer points of opposition views and positions and then appropriates them constructively.
- A ruling class which is in touch and empathizes with the people and their anxieties on a daily basis and therefore dialogues with them for the purpose of accommodating and resolving those concerns effectively.
- A ruling class which does not arrogate total wisdom to itself alone but it is transparent, humble, realistic and ever willing to lay down its life in the service of national and people’s interests.
- A ruling class which has accessed political power by fair, free and transparent means.
And therefore when a people are out of sync with their political leadership it would be safe to assume that the ruling class lacks most of the essential leadership characteristics enunciated above.
It is against this backdrop that we examine the issue of economic deregulation as public policy for any government. It is generally accepted wisdom that the concept of deregulation makes some sense. And we subscribe to that argument as well. But up to a point and we will part ways with the proponents of that concept of economic engineering.
It is true that the world is now a global village and so we are strongly persuaded by global wisdom to “tear down the walls”. But it is equally true that in spite of the clarion call to subsume our economic sovereignties under a mishmash of commonalities, the peculiar circumstances of the socio-economic environment in our various continents cannot be swept under the carpet.
Our contention here is that just as there exists an optimal environment for a piece of technology to function efficiently there is indeed a mandatory enabling environment for a piece of public policy to operate optimally and without avoidable hardship. And therefore no matter how perfect a domestic economic policy is it is bound to flounder and crash in the absence of a mandatory enabling environment.
The evolution and management of public policy on the domestic front can therefore ill afford the luxury of a ruling class which is ill-prepared, ill-equipped, self-serving and which is assailed by intellectual slothfulness, dishonesty and inertia.
A society superintended over by such a corps of leadership can only end up with a plethora of ill-digested and largely distorted policy packages and which would be prone to inducing energy-sapping hardship on the people.
This is the story of the Nigerian state and people today.
And yet again, we argue that recruitment of The Effective Leader by the people to superintend over the national political space, for instance, of Nigeria in 2023, is certainly the most important step in the productive process of democratizing the sources of wealth creation for the good of all andfor the purpose of staking a place in the comity of global socio-economic leadership and domestic peace, prosperity and desirable progress..
We will continue this expose next week as we continue to update you on knowledge resources you can use.
This is BISIKE SERIES!
SUCCESSIVE deviant and anti-people governments across the globe, especially in Africa, have over the years entrenched the act of inflicting severe Poverty on the people as an instrument absolute control of Political power over the governed.
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia led by LENIN was intended to usher in a Welfarist government for the total benefit of the Proletariat, which may be replicated across the globe, but Comrade Josef Stalin who succeeded Lenin was a perennial deviant and turncoat who betrayed the course and propagated the Policy of inflicting Severe Pain and Poverty on the people to make them amenable to unquestionable submission and control which has been adopted across the globe and Political ideologies by reactionary, hegemonic and bald-head despotic regimes who have destroyed, dehumanized and impoverished their people in the name of governance.
Against this backdrop, I commented your submissions as I am in synch with its postulation. It’s time for the people to Take Back their Government with their PVC.