In 2017, former Minister of Agriculture Audu Ogbeh sent off a container full of yam for export. As the world’s largest yam producer with over 70 percent of global production, it only made sense for an administration with an almost singular policy focus on agriculture to see the value in promoting its export. a commodity that is plentifully available and easily exportable, is in demand with a large population of Africans in diaspora. There was just one problem with Ogbeh’s genius plan.
If a legislator recommended a law that mandates Nigeria to waste 40 percent of a valuable potential export commodity instead of making money from it and this law cannot be reviewed regularly according to some kind of laid down process, then how exactly do we expect that Nigerian legislators will feel accountable for the laws they introduce?
Almost immediately the ship left the dock with its doomed cargo, a bright spark in the political opposition remembered something in the country’s law archives. Sure enough, he was right. Sitting forgotten in Nigeria’s cavernous legal archives was the Export Prohibition Act of 1989 that – in a very straightforward and unambiguous manner – forbade any export of raw or processed yam from Nigeria. Unsurprisingly the fiasco died a very quick and unceremonious death. Ogbeh’s name was not on the list of new ministers following his boss’s reelection last year.
Amid the drama surrounding Ogbeh’s failed publicity stunt, something that apparently skipped everybody’s attention was the little question of why on earth Nigeria would have a law that reads as follows: “The goods specified in the Schedule to this Act shall be absolutely prohibited from being exported out of Nigeria: Beans, Cassava tuber, Maize, Rice, Yam tuber, All products or derivatives of items 1 to 5, All imported food items.”
Why on earth was such a law ever passed in the first place, and why is it still around causing havoc 31 years later?
The Kenyans have three heads, apparently
Last week, Nigeria’s Q2 economic figures came out and as expected, they were – for lack of a better term – bloody. A 6 percent GDP contraction was actually the least depressing part of the report; the transport sector shrunk by 50% over the period. For reference, in a country of at least 180 million people, 51.16 percent of whom are urban dwellers, the transport sector is among the country’s top three employers of labour. As a result of the COVID-10 lockdown, Nigeria suffered the single worst quarter of contraction I have ever witnessed in my 30 years. Because of a lockdown which I repeatedly called out in this column for being ill-thought and completely ineffective.
Also last week, Kenya’s Q2 economic figures came out, and – unsurprisingly – East Africa’s largest economy recorded a completely different economic result. Many of the most ardent supporters of Nigeria’s COVID-19 lockdown developed a temporary affliction of the eyes, ears and mouth. Unlike Nigeria, Kenya chose to adopt a raft of social distancing regulations, curfews and mask-wearing requirements while allowing life to continue instead of locking down its economy in an unthinking, TV-fuelled knee-jerk manner. The result was that while Nigeria recorded its worst quarter in at least 30 years, Kenya recorded 4.6 percent growth over the same period.
That is not the best part though. The real story is that while Nigeria locked down its economy to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and bravely succeeded in flattening its curve from fewer than 100 confirmed cases to over 53,000 cases and 1,011 deaths as at Friday, Kenya kept its caseload at 33,630 and 567 deaths over the same period, while keeping its economy open and avoiding the sort of mass loss of income that is bedeviling Nigerian workers.
In other words, Nigeria’s COVID-19 lockdown has turned out to be its most disastrous short term economic policy own goal in my entire time on this planet. Kenya’s numbers show that Nigeria’s strategy was a policy failure on a scale that cannot be compared to anything that comes to mind, because national policy generally does not tend to fail this quickly, visibly and spectacularly. How did the Kenyans manage to keep their economy open and outperform Nigeria’s COVID-19 response despite the huge risk that Kibera (Africa’s largest slum) could be a transmission hotspot?
Some would say that the Kenyans did what I advocated here four months ago – examining their own circumstances, taking in available data, examining options, analysing projected outcomes and making a decision based on what they projected would work best for their country. Some would even suggest that such a response strategy is – as I repeatedly made the point – exactly what Nigeria should have done.
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Personally, I simply choose to believe that our Kenyan cousins simply possess three heads. That is the only explanation that can leave everyone happy, especially the policymakers behind Nigeria’s lockdown who continue to insist that they took a sensible and justifiable decision based on what they knew.
Hire a few Kenyans to run Nigeria
If we are to assume that the Kenyan process of carrying out a proactive evaluation of any policy before it is implemented or put into law is still too far outside of Nigeria’s scope of competence due to said Kenyan state of triple-headedness, there is no explanation for why – even with the benefit of hindsight – awful policies and legislative acts are left untouched and unexamined after the fact.
The idea of a policy review to examine what the effect of a policy or law has been after the fact is still very much a foreign one in these parts. Remember, this is the country which records the world’s largest yam harvest (50 million tons) and loses approximately 40 percent (20 million tons) to spoilage annually due to lack of post-harvest storage and consumption – yet any export of said yam is banned!
Even if we can make an excuse for whatever succession of bone-headed policies were enacted under Nigeria’s Bad-Disaster-Calamity trinity of military dictators between 1983 and 1998, what is the excuse for not reviewing these policies after the fact? Why do 20 million tons of Nigeria’s annual yam harvest have to rot in 2020? Why can’t it be exported to earn the country some forex, because of a law enacted under a tinpot dictator who probably does not remember even signing such an abomination into law? Nonsensical as the law sounds, we have to assume that there was some sort of reasoning behind it, and it was meant to achieve a positive goal for the country. That being the case, why then is there no post-mortem review process to answer the basic question “Did this policy work?”
If policies like Nigeria’s crazy anti-export law or the disastrous COVID-19 total lockdown cannot be reviewed after the fact to evaluate their effectiveness, then why on earth would we expect that the next time there is a law or policy to be formulated, the same rigmarole will not happen? If a legislator recommended a law that mandates Nigeria to waste 40 percent of a valuable potential export commodity instead of making money from it and this law cannot be reviewed regularly according to some kind of laid down process, then how exactly do we expect that Nigerian legislators will feel accountable for the laws they introduce?
Why would said legislator not introduce another insane proposal if he cannot be held accountable? If the policymakers who recommended a lockdown as an adequate COVID-19 response for Nigeria are still in a job and their calamitous policy failure is not acknowledged and documented as such, what stops them from being around to recommend another woeful policy the next time Nigeria faces such a situation? We have even heard soundbites from these very individuals over the past few weeks patting themselves on the back and declaring Nigeria’s nonsensical response a ‘success’ – based on what parameters this is, perhaps one of our 3-headed three Kenyan friends can explain to me.
This to me is one of the central systemic problems with Nigerian governance and policymaking – the near-total absence of policy performance reviews. It is the crazy export prohibition bill that also bans export of beans and cowpeas – both of which Nigeria is a world-leading producer of. It is the ill-advised and unnecessary lockdown that flatlined the economy for no reason. It is the CBN’s recent knee-jerk decision to stop issuing Form Ms to third-party entities which most Nigerian manufacturers depend on. It is the headless dancing chicken voodoo that is Nigeria’s border closure. The basic problem is the same. We do not examine policy proposals and make projections proactively, and we do not review said policies after the fact. This is how bad policy is not just tolerated but becomes institutionalised.
How do we fix this? If you ask me, perhaps we should hire a few Kenyans to run Nigeria. It certainly wouldn’t be any worse than what we currently have.
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