Leadership Fatalism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria: Imaginative Policymaking for Human Development

A group of Western scholars in the 1950s and 1960s set out to study the characteristics of individuals in developing countries that predisposed them to promote or prevent change. This group of scholars—known as the modernity school of development—contrasted the traditional with the modern personality on a set of attitudes and behaviors, the long list of which need not be repeated in this paper. Based on their empirical findings, modernity scholars concluded that development required the transformation of the traditional man into modern man. There are weaknesses in the studies and findings of the modernity school, but not all characteristics identified by it constitute obstacles to, or facilitators of, development. One of the contrasting characteristics of the two personality types is that the traditional personality is passive and fatalistic, while its modern counterpart is autonomous and commands a sense of self-efficacy. Marxist scholarship, epitomized by dependency theory, heavily criticized and discredited the claims of the modernity school. One of the strongest attacks on modernity thinkers involved their ethnocentric view that non-Western societies must absorb Western culture before they can achieve development. But as Wei-Ming Tu points out, the success of Confucian East Asia in becoming fully modernized without being thoroughly westernized indicates that modernization may assume different cultural forms.1 When one examines more closely the development policies of Nigerian governments, there is evidence that Nigerian leaders, both past and present, exhibit a fatalistic orientation, have a highly dependent mentality, and lack a sense of personal or group self-efficacy. Consequently, their collective leadership style continues to stall the country’s development. In the present paper, I define “fatalism” as the tendency of Nigerian leaders to feel hopeless and act helpless when confronted Leadership Fatalism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria: Imaginative Policymaking for Human Development