Osinbajo says Nigeria’s economic management needs a re-think

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo who has been designated to oversee the Nigerian economy says the current economic strategy needs a rethink, which explains a new paradigm shift by the  President Buhari-led administration in adopting ‘a home grown’ strategy to fix burgeoning local challenges as against the past.

Those new strategies include investing in social security programmes for the poor and vulnerable in the Nigerian society that would ensure an inclusive growth, the Vice President said, while also assuring that government understands the huge challenges at hand, as well as the urgency needed to run with solutions to tackle them.

He was speaking at the ongoing Nigerian Economic Summit, holding in Abuja.

There are widely-held views that the present administration is running quite slow and President Buhari was recently nicknamed ‘Baba Go Slow’

because of the long time he was taking to announce needed economic policies and set up the cabinet to run the economy, four months after assuming office.

“There is no question at all, the government has tenure as you can imagine. We are not in this business forever, no matter how optimistic we are. I think that there is definitively a sense of urgency but coupled with that, is a great sense of optimism and we think that the nation itself, in some sense has found its resolve to fight through

the economic downturn and to make a real difference for ourselves and our generation to come,” responded the Vice President to a  question by BusinessDay Publisher, Frank Aigbogun and a co-anchor of the presidential dialogue, on whether the present government understands the sense of urgency that Nigeria feels.

“I am personally, and the president has said this repeatedly that Nigerians, not only have shown resilience over the past few years but have shown a new optimism and a new desire to actually work with the government to make things happen. Whether that is on an account of the fact that they think that the government will do well or on account of our innate optimism, whichever it is, is working very well indeed.

“And I think that in the next few years, we will see the country that we want to see. I am absolutely optimistic that in the near future, we will see a turn around in this country,” he told participants at the summit titled, “Tough Choices: Achieving Competitiveness, Inclusive Growth and Sustainability’.

Experts who spoke at the annual event that gathers the highest level of government sector representatives and those from the private sector, agreed that Nigeria needs to make real tough decisions, particularly in the midst of significant anxiety arising from a slowing down in the economy, compounded by the toll on revenues due to soft oil prices; slowing growth, the lowest seen in years, rising inflation and unemployment and poverty numbers.

Taking questions during the presidential dialogue, Osinbajo admitted that there were indeed tough choices to be made, but that the good thing is that there is the will to make those choices. But he noted that some of those choices involve fundamental reform and change, even in the way that we think through economic policies.

On whether there were conditions attached to the bail-out funds given to states that would hold the governors to account, first he explained  that the funding crisis in states was not just a matter of state

governors not behaving well, losing money and then the federal government needed to bail them out.He attributed to the poor cash flow of the states to the fact that dwindling government revenues on account of drop in oil revenues substantially cut down monthly allocations to them.

“So government was responding to circumstances which in the first instance were literally  beyond the control of the states, even though he was careful not to absolve any of the governors from any kind of fiscal indiscipline.

He explained that the way that the bail out was structured was in three aspects such that some aspects focused on N680 billion viable commercial loans, taken by the states.

He explained that government thinking is that with these loans, the states will be paying from their federal allocation which of course, reduced even what they were getting.

Onyinye Nwachukwu