The Nigerian Economic Society recently held its annual conference in Abuja. It was the 60th edition of that conference, meaning it is older than the country itself, counting from independence. The theme of the conference was “Economic policies and quality of life in Africa.” Well, some critics were asking why the society was focusing on Africa when Nigeria is the worst performer in the area of poverty reduction.
Hosting the largest population of poor people in the world, one would have expected Nigerians to remove the log in their eyes before helping others to remove the little specks in theirs, some argued. However, most people agreed that the problems of African economies are largely the same, and prescribing a solution of general application to them may not be out of place. Besides, wrong policy choices and failure to effectively implements sound economic policies is a general problem in the continent.
Africa is currently chairing the world conference of non-performing economies, despite the efforts of Rwanda and some small but well-run spots in the continent. Nigeria, which comes in and out of the hope of transformation, is hosting the world headquarters of the poorest – a manifestation of the failure of national planning and economic management.
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With a government that has vowed to take so many people out of poverty in the near future, it is probably an appropriate time to question our strategies, if we are to avoid doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Given that quality of life is hard to define to say nothing of its measurement, there are some accepted approaches to understand the concept.
The World Bank and other leading world agencies have defined what constitutes good quality of life in the Human Development Index (HDI). So, this topic is not just appropriate but vital, especially now that we have a new government that has promised to do some outlandish things in lifting people out of poverty. It may be too early in the day to comment on this promise but one thing is certain, failure to work with the right data is a guarantee for failure.
Nigeria should be in a hurry to develop, both economically and socially because statistics in those areas is shameful. Our present travails are nothing but an aggregation of the symptoms of a stunted development effort that have been left to fester.
Nigeria should be in a hurry to develop, both economically and socially because statistics in those areas is shameful. Our present travails are nothing but an aggregation of the symptoms of a stunted development effort that have been left to fester. We do not know how many we are. We invest in the wrong places and shamelessly promote the consumption of foreign goods we can avoid. The result is low productive capacity, low income, both at national and individual levels, and poverty of the kind, which the technocrats at the leading multilateral institutions call abject poverty.
Abject poverty is the kind of poverty that robs a man of everything that makes him a man. Abject poverty is the reason why many homes are rocking today – the man has long since ceased to be a man by function, however defined, but clings on what he thinks is his right. It is the condition that disposes an erstwhile strong man to be lectured by his wife on the subject of family headship, and be informed that it is, like Nigeria’s presidency, rotatory. He gets to learn that that family headship is no longer a permanent appointment in this 21st century, especially for those who are not so religious as the people of this century.
The conclusion that Nigeria’s problems are a result of her failure to plan properly is not the outcome of very deep thinking on my part, because I did not have to do any of those. Even a casual observation will reveal it. We stopped consist planning soon after the civil war, and then we replaced informed, data-driven planning with planning by hunch, this highlights Nigeria’s stunted development planning process.
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What may be a discovery that requires very deep thinking to understand is that everybody knows the facts, and the problems holding Nigeria down, but nobody wants to confront them. In a manner akin to letting the sleeping dog lie, and not rocking the boat, every administration sings this song of the urgency of development in our country but none has had the courage to stir the hornet’s nest by doing something different; like insisting that no government agency should buy a car not made in Nigeria – we make cars in Nigeria no matter the current level of local content. Besides, we recently launched a national automotive industry policy.
I shudder when I see some governors from openly bankrupt states driving Cadillac Escalades to Aso Rock and Baba sees nothing wrong in shaking hands and holding meetings with them. Although he is not to decide how they spend their state revenues, which have become their patrimony, he is supposed to give some direction, even if through mere words. Peugeot Nigeria and Innoson make cars and SUVs but they are not good for those paid with tax payers’ money. Instead what we do is pursue rice smugglers. How many bags of rice can you smuggle to cover the dollar equivalent of a Lexus 570 or Landcruiser VX; to say nothing about an Escalade, which Donald Trump and all his predecessors have been using?
A shameful battle is currently raging between the citizens and their representative in the National Assembly over the mindless cost of SUVs to be bought for legislators and nobody is asking why they cannot buy Nigerian-made cars. And to democratise such good thought and not to single out the representatives, they are in a position to make a law banning everyone in government, including the Executive they always refer to from buying big foreign made cars.
No. They won’t do it because of self-interest. And the beat goes on.
