Amid the celebratory mood and clinking of glasses in government quarters over perceived gains from President Muhammadu Buhari’s numerous foreign trips, observers say the hype may have been more than the benefits.
The analysts believe that nothing much seemed to have accrued from most of the President’s engagements at international summits and conferences.
A few days ago, the President led another delegation to the Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi, Russia.
Presidency sources claimed that through the Sochi Summit, Russia would assist Nigeria rehabilitate its moribund oil refineries through the establishment of a framework for a joint venture between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Russia-based leading oil company, Lukoil.
The sources further said that as part of the gains of the Sochi summit, Nigeria and Russia also agreed to revive and solidify the venture between the NNPC and Russia’s gas giant, Gazprom, in order to develop Nigeria’s enormous gas potential and infrastructure especially the Ajaokuta Steel complex in Kogi state.
However, while these appear enticing on paper, proper implementation could be cumbersome and may be detrimental to the nation when the chips are down. And this has been the recurring decimal as similar promises and several memoranda of understanding (MoU) signed in such engagements seem not to have materialised.
Justifying President’s recent visit to Sochi, Buhari Media Organisation (BMO), said Russia will invest huge sums of money in different sectors of the Nigerian economy, and that the investment attracted has the potentials to lift the economy substantially.
However, Gaius Nathaniel, an information technology expert, told BDSUNDAY that too many MoUs have been signed that are yet to move beyond the paper on which the agreements were penned.
“If all that we hear about countless MoUs signed during such engagements were anything to go by; if all the promises made by the Western countries redeemed, Nigeria would have been like Dubai in terms of development and beauty. But the problem is that most times, it appears there were no intentions to implement the agreements even from the point of signing. Just a fulfillment of righteousness sort of,” Nathaniel said.
According to him, “I recall that President Buhari’s foreign trip began immediately after his election; months before his inauguration in 2015. Some Western countries told him to bring his wish list. He visited several countries at that time, but the fruit of the so-called wish list is yet to be seen by Nigerians. I think these things are more apparent than real. They are mere politics. We have heard so much about the willingness of the Western world to help Nigeria end the Boko Haram insurgency; with the quantum of technology available to them, they have not been able to end the Boko Haram insurgency. I wonder what we have gained in relation to what we have lost in all these president’s trips.”
He further lamented that Nigeria still plays at mediocre level where even smaller countries in Africa are ashamed to play.
“It is shameful that Nigeria is always at the front row on the beggar list when it comes to such international summits. Always attending as receiver and not giving anything. I consider that too humiliating,” he said.
Nigeria also participated in the 2018 Forum for China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) where the much touted “Belt and Roads Initiative” dominated discourse. Through this forum Nigeria has opened up to Chinese investments in varied fields. The nation’s railway infrastructure had gotten a boost from the Chinese companies. Roads construction and rehabilitation in Nigeria including the massive Lekki Deep Sea water Project in Lagos estimated to gulp $1billion are being handled by Chinese companies. However, most of the projects are on concessional loans with areas that leave room for some questions.
In August 2019, President Buhari led a large Nigerian entourage to the 7th edition of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD7) in Yokohama, Japan. Despite Nigeria’s large entourage, the country got the pledge of $300,000 from the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in what the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) described as a ‘disgraceful outing’.
The PDP in a statement issued by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, said: “It is lamentable that while President Buhari and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), are reducing our nation by celebrating a mere pledge of $300,000 (N108 million) from the Japanese Prime Minister and a promissory note for 50 million euros from an EU Commissioner, his Ghanaian counterpart, Nana Akufo-Ado had sealed a deal with automobile giant, Toyota, to immediately establish a Toyota and Suzuki manufacturing plant in Ghana with a determined timeline of August 2020 for production.”
But Femi Adesina, spokesman of the President, said that through TICAD, Nigeria specifically gained as Japan has provided counterterrorism measures and humanitarian assistance, particularly for internally displaced persons, adding that “the help is worth its weight in gold.”
The President has however, come under criticism for embarking on those trips with politicians instead of core businessmen and business-oriented private sector organisations, which increasingly makes attendance to such serious events to look like mere jamborees.
BDSUNDAY gathered that the decision to always travel with state governors and not core economy-minded/private sector players has continued to agitate the minds of many.
Why would the President not travel with his economic team? It could be argued that the essence of travelling with governors is to give them the opportunity to strike some business deals, it is however, difficult to quantify how beneficial this has been to the states.
But Nigeria and indeed the entire Africa has been warned about such summits and their detrimental impacts on the continent.
Speaking to BDSUNDAY on Friday, a public affairs analyst and columnist, MajeedDahiru, said there is not much to celebrate from such summits as they are meant to scramble for African resources.
“What is going on with all the different summits in the world from FOCAC to TICAD and now what is going on in Sochi, Russia is a renewed scramble for Africa. This can be aptly described as the ‘third scramble for Africa.’ Russia is the newest entrant into the scramble for Africa,’’ Dahiru said.
He noted that there is a realisation that has eluded Nigeria and most African countries for so long and that is the fact that no nation is truly blessed by abundant human and natural recourses. Therefore, nations always struggle and strive to shore up their economic needs by looking for external sources of revenue through competitive exports or what is now called Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), which is the most sustainable way to grow the wealth of any nation.
“China, Japan, Singapore, India have been very active in Africa in contemporary times, they have taken over this venture from Europe and the US and they have significantly grown their own economy through massive export into the African continent as well as a shrewd form of FDI that targets our own kind of meagre revenue from rentals from exploitation of our natural resources. So, what they do here is to invest in the production of consumer goods and services that we will patronise with our own meagre resources accruing to us from the exploitation of our mineral resources. So, this now weighs the balance of trade heavily in favour of the so-called investor nations,” Dahirusaid.
He further explained that, “It is expected that Nigeria having gone through colonialism and neo-colonialism during the Cold War era, should have learnt this vital lesson from those who colonised us the way China, Japan and India have learnt. That to be able to grow the demand of any nation, it is to first unite your nation around a pan-nationalist economic agenda that allows you to launch into the league of well-managed and competing nations for global resources.
“Therefore, by now Nigeria should have been an oversea investor nation in less-developed economies than ours. But we are still at the receiving end of all forms of exploitative mechanisms under the guise of development partnership. That is why we have been going from Sochi to FOCAC, from Tokyo to New Delhi and it has not brought the necessary economic succor for us and it cannot bring because the conferences in Sochi, the conferences in New Delhi, in Beijing, China and Tokyo in Japan are to the benefit of the host countries. It is not for the benefit of Nigeria.
“No country helps another therefore you must position yourself strategically to attract a fairer share of global resources through active participation in world trade and investments. This is the conversation we should be having now because as you can see none of these conferences has helped Nigeria’s economy in any fundamental way,” he said.
Dahiru blamed the Nigerian leaders for their lack of foresight adding that they do not have the thinking because there is a low quality leadership system in Nigeria. He lamented that the political leadership has willingly abdicated its responsibility of governance and outsourced it to the so called foreign investors and private sector development partners.
He alleged that the Nigerian leaders are only willing to go to these conferences and sign off the economic sovereignty of the nation in exchange for aids and loans and the impact is that Nigeria keeps sinking deeper into debts, rising poverty and a shrinking economy in real terms.
“These investments and these partnerships are predatory. They are doing it for their own national economic interest not for yours. No country will spend so much amount of money to host a conference in its own country and invite you just to help you. Nigeria should have joined the league of countries in looking for economic opportunities off shore.
“Nigeria is supposed to be the giant of Africa but what is the investment portfolio of Nigeria or Nigerian businesses in countries on the West coast of Africa? How is Nigeria playing in the oil and gas industry of south Sudan for instance? How is Nigeria participating actively in the tourism industry in The Gambia? How about the services sector in Ghana, what is Nigeria’s presence there? How is Nigeria dominating trade along the west coast of Africa? This is the way you grow an economy, you don’t grow an economy by excessive taxation that will come to the federation account and then be shared by the three tiers of government and then spent on frivolous activities that have no bearing on the life of the common man,” he added.
On the possible solution to this challenge, he tasked the leaders to put on their thinking cap, saying “Nigeria is being scrambled for the third time not even by developed countries but by developing countries such as China, India, Singapore and now Russia. Nigeria is too big for this but because we have an acute failure of leadership we are not able to launch into the league of major players in the economy of the world today.
“We are at the receiving end of globalisation, we are the dumping ground of manufactured goods; we are not able to unite our disparate country into a nation that is well-managed and competitive enough to extract a larger chunk of global resources back home.
“This is the challenge and we must begin to have conversation along this direction. We talk about Foreign Direct Investment, why are we not talking about oversea investment and how Nigeria can invest in other countries economies and reap benefit for us back home by way of capital flight? We must start thinking in this direction,” he advised.
Buhari’s Russia trip beneficial
In a statement signed by its Chairman,NiyiAkinsiju and Secretary, Cassidy Madueke, BMO claimed that the largesse from Buhari’s recent trip includes a $10 billion coastal rail line which will traverse Lagos, Benin Onitsha to Calabar in Cross River state. “Another is eighty billion dollars in nuclear energy, with four nuclear plants to be built in four regions of the nation.
“Other phenomenal gains of President Muhammadu Buhari’s trip to Russia is the investment of about 1.5 billion dollars in the revival of the long-abandoned Ajaokuta steel project, and two billion dollars for military equipment; Two billion dollars will be invested in wheat production.”
BMO believes that President Muhammadu Buhari is leading from the front as he promised, and the results are manifesting with the huge inflow of foreign direct investments.
It is on record that the global investments analysis company, Ernst and Young, had rated Nigeria third in Africa in the inflow of foreign direct investments in 2018. What this shows is that under Buhari there is a renewed confidence in Nigeria’s economy and the future is bright.
“We therefore, commend the tireless efforts of Mr. President to reposition the country in all facets of life and enjoin Nigerians to continue to lend their support.”
Innocent Odoh, Abuja
