Sweet Talk and Democracy

An under-explored crossover between Nigerian politics and the economy

Nothing happens voluntarily in an economy, or a society, unless someone changes her mind. Behaviour can be changed by compulsion, but minds cannot

Professor Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World

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I love that quote from perhaps my favourite chapter in that book titled ‘Sweet talk rules the economy’. Professor McCloskey is talking in general about the economy and how so much of it is driven by persuasion and how “we economists might have to stop ignoring the fact” in her words. It’s one of those ideas when once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.

But I think it applies to democracy as well in an interesting way. A point I made very often when we were promoting Formation was that Nigeria had effectively been under military rule for perhaps 500 years until 1999. That is to say, the current unbroken run of 24 years of Nigerians being asked to choose their own leaders is the first time it has happened in the history of the geographical space we now know as Nigeria as far back as we have records.

The longer a country or society has a tradition of democracy - or asking the citizens to decide who governs them - then the more you should see certain human skills having high(er) status. The most obvious one is of course ‘sweet talk’ as an observable skill in politicians and the elite in general. The way this manifests is that you should expect the average politician to be able to talk to a crowd or group of people competently without notes or, if using notes, to deliver a coherent speech in front of people. At the minimum, you should get clarity and have no particular difficulty staying awake. Politicians who slur their words or are generally incoherent should stick out like a sore thumb in an established democracy.

MidJourney Prompt: A Nigerian politician practicing sweet talk outdoors in front a crowd of voters

Depending on how long or how short you think 24 years of unbroken democracy is, it is interesting (or not) that sweet talk still has a very low status among Nigerian politicians. It is very difficult to find frontline Nigerian politicians who have good speaking delivery or can even read a speech in a manner that does not put you to sleep. (To be clear, I’m referring to delivery in English -formal or pidgin- here as that is the language that cuts across Nigerians). You can make a case for former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo as someone who could read a teleprompter with skill or speak to Nigerians in a way that made it look like he was trying to convince them to change their minds about something. But who else? His boss President Buhari?

All of this was prompted by a circulating video of President Bola Tinubu speaking as part of a panel at COP28 in Dubai a couple of days ago. There are several versions but you can find one here. It is hard to make sense of what he is trying to say but what is interesting is that the really incoherent part came at the end of his written speech where he was trying to speak ex tempore. He is bad enough at reading a written speech but considerably worse when he has to speak off the cuff. And he is perhaps the most influential politician of his generation in Nigeria and certainly since the return of democracy in 1999. You really can rise to the top of Nigerian politics without being able to speak to people in a persuasive manner.

There are a number of ways one can interpret this. As mentioned previously, one might say that 24 years is simply not enough time for centuries-old habits to be superseded by the democratic culture of persuading people to change their minds. A military culture of leadership by definition does not require sweet talk - you do as you’re told or have force applied on you. In that sense, Nigerian politicians are still operating on hangover skills from that not-too-distant era.

Another interpretation is that 24 years is more than enough time but Nigerian politics and the brand of democracy it practices has found ways to short-circuit what should have been the transition to sweet talk. For example, instead of using sweet talk to convince people to vote for you in Nigeria today, you can simply bribe them or even use violence. Shortcuts like that are guaranteed to keep the status of sweet talk low in a democracy.

This second interpretation is the more alarming one as it means that the transition to sweet talk may not happen for a very long time (or even not at all as politicians may find something else even after bribery and violence have lost their power). The country is thus guaranteed a succession of wooden leaders who don’t know how to talk to Nigerians to change their mind about anything and don’t care to develop it as a skill - remember that success is a good signal so if you can make it to the top of politics without knowing how to sweet talk, more people will take the hint that it’s not a needed skill.

And to Professor McCloskey’s point: all of this has an impact on the kind of economy Nigeria can hope to have. If politics does not require sweet talk, businesses will prefer to use government backing to force their products on consumers instead of producing stuff people willingly buy.

Here’s a further quote from the book:

In future we will be left mainly in sweet-talking occupations. The question of what is to be done will bulk larger and larger as actual doing fees from our busyness. Deciding what to do cannot in the end be mechanised - the dream of social engineering to the contrary - because the argument about what to do is never ended. If one side gains an advantage from a new persuasive device, the other side realises the problem and adopts the device itself. Look at the technologies of electing a president in the United States, which grow in sophistication without end. Good. We decide on the height of road crowns to properly drain roads in rainy Scotland. Then we have to decide whether similar crowns are needed in Saudi Arabia. Then we need to change people’s minds about how many roads to build. Then we have to persuade them to adopt road pricing. And on and on.

The work we do will be more and more about decisions and persuading others to agree, changing minds, and less and less about implementation by hand. The reason so many intelligent economists have feared technological unemployment is that they do not put persuasion in the national product.

But the economy does.

As I said, it’s not difficult to extend this point to politics. A political class that treats sweet talk as a low status skill will struggle to persuade Nigerians of the structural reforms badly needed for the economy especially because the shortcuts applied in politics cannot translate to the economy: it will be difficult, for instance, to attempt to bribe Nigerians to accept the removal of fuel subsidies. They simply have to be persuaded of the idea. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. A lot of bad ideas about the economy circulate freely among Nigerians and the political class does not have the sweet talk skills to sell them better ideas.

On and on it goes. And in the worst case scenario, Nigeria is led by wooden and unpersuasive politicians overseeing a backward economy where hardly anyone is getting what they want out of it.

Only sweet talk can save Nigeria from this dystopia. Turn to your neighbour and say….