The past few days have seen the media go awash with fire and brimstone falling from all directions towards a single entity – the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), over its bizarre act of shifting the elections billed to hold on Saturday, February 16, 2019.The elections were shifted by one week. Simple as that may look; the socio-economic consequences are so extensive and pervasive that we will continue to pay the price over the near future. And for once, both the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC), the two leading political parties running in the elections, appeared to be united on a national issue and against a common enemy. While the fireworks fly and guns boom at Mahmood Yakubu, the poor professor of History now battling with the storm created by his poor Operations Research and Project Management capacity, and while the call for his head continues to defy all political and religious divides, we see a need for caution, lest we miss a tread while rushing through the staircase. We shall provide a kind of diversion away from the furry and look at the welfare implications of what now appears like an unwarranted disruption of the polls by the electoral umpire.
For an unbroken period of over five years, I have consistently written a piece every week in this column. It is my free contribution to our search for a lasting solution to the challenge of endemic poverty, and also to promote Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) development in Nigeria. I do not write politics. My focus is on poverty alleviation and entrepreneurship development. I am going to try to stay on that beat, despite the temptation to add one’s voice to an obvious national embarrassment of gargantuan financial and economic implications. The temptation to veer off is even more daunting as INEC continues to aggravate citizens by sending to the media, all manner of people to repeat the same lame excuses that fell flat on Saturday. However, we need to take time off the noise of recriminations to look at the welfare implications of the election postponement, and seek ways to ameliorate the pains the ordinary citizens of Nigeria are invariably going to face as a result of this disaster.
The Nigerian economy is largely informal and the operating environment in the informal sector is worse than hostile. There is hardly any legal framework for proper operation and the decayed infrastructure, for which Nigeria is famous, has its headquarters in the informal sector. Public support is minimal and survival of the fittest is the order of the day. This means that many of the people work for themselves in micro and small enterprises. So many others just mill around in market playing self-appointed agents and middlemen for a commission. The tenacity with which these “middlemen” accost potential customers on entry to any market in Nigeria gives an indication of how seriously their lives depend on what they earn by running around in the market every day. Most of them have no shops. Their enterprise serves many purposes, including the provision of employment, first to family members and then income to them. The micro and small enterprises are the only means of income generation available to the owner and his staff. They work and live one day at a time. This is why they go to market on public holidays. There is no holiday in the stomach.
Operators of microenterprises, which dominate the informal sector do not have multiple investments. There is hardly any investment or other income-generating funds put away for speculation as the richer members of the society do. They therefore do not have multiple streams of income, which the richer members of society use to tide themselves over difficult times like the present election season. The revenue of these individuals is not only irregular in the most part, it is also insufficient. This is why I often refer to the private economy of the average Nigerian as a hand-to-mouth economy. In hand-to-mouth economies, income is earned daily from daily activities and is equally spent daily. When you operate a hand-to-mouth economy, you almost always spend all the day’s earning on the same day. In fact, much of their so-called profit of the day comes in the form of unsold items of the trade, which the owner takes home to feed the family. Profit is actually mostly the left-overs of the vegetables, yams, rice or beans that were brought to the market for sale each day. They just keep a portion of their goods, even if their capital has not been fully recovered. This is why such businesses often suddenly find that their capital has disappeared. In a hand-to-mouth economy hunger and starvation are your next door neighbours. They can knock on the door anytime.
Given this scenario, which shows the precarious economic condition of most Nigerian families, it becomes somewhat unreasonable for anyone to call off the election at commencement and reschedule it so soon after. This action seems to be oblivious of the fact that the election had stalled business activities for a while, before finally shutting it down completely on the 16th of February, 2019.
On the face of it, all government action is well-intended and aims to promote the welfare of its citizens. Even the worst government does not start as a war against its people. Sometimes they begin with a common enemy, as Hitler did, before turning and crushing the citizens. Nigerian politics is taking much toll on the citizens. They are being starved from loss of economic opportunities, dehumanized, impoverished or outrightly killed. This cannot be the intension of the government of Nigeria, Therefore, we need to think a little deeper through public policy action before we unleash economic terror on the people we serve. And we have thinking people in and out of government.
The essence of government is to make life less Hobbesian – less brutish, to generate prosperity and ensure it is equitably distributed. Governments all over the world seek welfare improvement for their people and avoid actions that induce social welfare loss or promote poverty. Policies that do otherwise are anti-people. I call them poverty generators. The recent rescheduling of the February 16, 2019 elections is a poverty generator, however we look at it. It is so,not merely because the elections were shifted but because of the timing of both the announcement of the suspension and the choice of the next scheduled date. The shortness of the time to the new date compounds the difficulty of the masses. Those of them that travelled would hardly complete their return trip before they are expected to travel again. They neither have the money nor the time to heal over such a short time. This may even impact the voter turnout.
There have been several estimates of the likely financial loss created by the action of INEC. Some estimates put it at over $1.5b. But that is only in terms of naira and dollars. The distortions that have been introduced will have both production and consumption effects. It’s like a tax has been imposed on the people. We can estimate the production effects and get naira and dollars numbers but the loss of social welfare, occasioned by consumption distortions cannot easily be quantified. Indeed, the impact on the GDP is only a part of the big damage.
In all, we must curb the way public officials think in Nigeria as though they are either dumb or infallible. Government may be supreme but it is set up for the benefit of the people. It is wrong for public officers, either out of economic ignorance or brazen arrogance, take actions that have pervasive impact on the people at a whim. Sadly there is still no effective sanction for non-performance in public offices in Nigeria.
Emeka Osuji
