BAMIDELE JOHNSON
“Governance is not rocket science,” Nigerians love to claim. And those Nigerians include people who failed any intimation of science at junior secondary school level as well as men and women without the foggiest idea of what rocket science is. It is absolute bullcrap, a claim that sounds wise only because it is repeated often and examined rarely.
“Governance is not rocket science” mistakes familiarity for simplicity and confidence for understanding. In the narrow, literal sense, yes, governance is not rocket science. No one is calculating orbital trajectories at the Ministry of Information, say. But the comparison is lazy. Deliberately so. It reduces governance to the mechanical act of issuing orders or signing documents. In reality, governance is one of the most complex human endeavours imaginable, precisely because its raw material is not metal or fuel but people, who happen to be contradictory, emotional, unequal and historically- yoked creatures.
Good governance requires the management of competing interests without ripping society apart. It requires the ability to design institutions that outlive individuals, policies that survive electoral seasons and systems that function even when those running them are no saints. Beneficial governance demands deep understanding of economics, law, history, public finance, security, psychology and social dynamics. Rocket science deals with predictable laws of physics. Governance deals with human beings, who obey no such laws.
The claim also betrays a dangerous contempt for expertise. When we say governance is not rocket science, what I think we mean is that anyone can govern, that preparation is optional and that experience, training or intellectual rigour are elitist distractions. This thinking has consequences. It produces leaders who confuse noise with action, slogans with policy and personal will with institutional capacity. It rewards bravado and punishes thought.
In functioning societies, governance is treated as a serious discipline. Civil servants are trained for years. Policy is debated, tested, revised and measured. Mistakes are analysed, not excused. Even then, outcomes are imperfect.
Yet in Nigeria, we persist in the fantasy that governing a country of over 200 million people (allegedly), with mind-bending diversity, poverty, insecurity and historical trauma, should be a cakewalk. When it fails, we blame sabotage, enemies or fate, never our oversimplified perception of governance.
The irony is that Nigerians do not apply this logic to other fields. No one says surgery is not rocket science and hands a scalpel to the loudest person in the room. No one says aviation is not rocket science and appoints a pilot on the basis of confidence and connections. But governance, which affects millions of lives at once, is treated as something that can be improvised.
The slogan masks a deeper problem, which is the refusal to accept complexity. Complexity is uncomfortable. It demands patience, data, trade offs and humility. It forces leaders to admit that there are no quick fixes, that every decision throws up winners as well as losers and that slogans are no substitute for systems. Declaring that governance is not rocket science is a way of suppressing this discomfort. It is an assertion that things are simple, so failure must be due to bad intentions rather than bad thinking.
Nigeria’s challenges are not mysterious, but they are not simple. Fixing power supply involves technical, regulatory, financial and political layers. Security is entangled with economics, geography, demography and trust in the state. Education reform touches culture, funding, teacher quality and social inequality. Each requires sustained competence, not just goodwill. To insist otherwise is not optimism but mumuism or mugulity (apologies to Indaboski). It is the belief that seriousness is optional and that complexity is an excuse invented by people who think too much; people whose fried yam has too much spice, as the Yoruba say. Countries that progress do not think this way. They treat governance as hard because it effing is. They invest in knowledge, institutions and capacity accordingly.
Governance is not rocket science. It is harder. And until we are cured of this delusion and prefab notion that governance is easy like Sunday morning, we will continue to elect simplicity and wonder why it keeps failing us.