Olisa Agbakoba, a former president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and maritime lawyer, has said that the newly inaugurated administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was capable of generating N100 trillion if the right steps were taken immediately.
Agbakoba made the observation during an exclusive interview with BusinessDaySUNDAY in Lagos.
“I expect to see President Tinubu generate a lot of critical bills that will convert to revenue and money. Without that it will just be business as usual,” he said.
According to Agbakoba, “Nigeria is in need of money and we need to therefore, make a couple of calculations and analyses; exactly how much do we owe? What is our revenue profile? What do we have in the bank? Economists call this, doing your public sector borrowing requirements. So, if we have an analysis of our public sector borrowing requirements we now have to have an analysis of exactly how much we have. We have to measure all these, and that’s what Accountants are good at doing. With that analysis, I need to, therefore, see the President take tough decisions; and those tough decisions will be across a number of sectors.
“Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said he would get 4 million Americans out of unemployment every month; mark you, at that time of the Great Depression about 20 million Americans were out of jobs. He said he was going to see that about 4 million Americans were employed in a month and he did it by creating massive public works programmes.”
Agbakoba also listed some sectors he believed, if appropriate actions are taken, could take the country out of the woods.
“There are some areas of our sectors that President Tinubu can look at: Aviation; Agriculture, Maritime (Apapa is completely degraded). The President will do well to pass an Emergency Regeneration Act to fix Apapa, because how is it that Apapa which produces N20 billion a day will be left in this condition; this is crazy; the same thing for Onitsha which generates substantial revenue.
“You have to have a Trade Policy that puts Nigeria first and not a Trade Policy that makes Nigerians import everything. You have to say that the government has no place in business anymore; government can only do that which it is entitled to do which is policy making and allow the private sector to get on with business. Sell off everything. I know that people complain that the privatisation process has not been too fair, but that is not to say we should not consider it.
“Why do we have Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries just lying fallow? Give it to people who know how to turn it around, so you begin to reduce the size of government. The Oronsaye Report is still there; you implement it,” he said.
The Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) pointed out that to leverage Agriculture for the needed revenue, there must be a change in policy in that regard.
According to him, “Agriculture can’t work if it takes 10 years to get a C-of-O (certificate of occupancy); so we have dead land all over the place. But agriculture is the basis for the viability of lots of economies but people cannot access land easily in our country. We need to mechanise agriculture which brings in a lot of money, but that is not happening. So, we need to tinker with the frameworks of the Land Use Acts so that it can become more efficient; if people want to apply for Land Use, the process should be quite simple. Right now, 80 percent of Nigerian land is lying fallow. That is not helping at all.
“Back to the Maritime Sector, the Cabotage Act is supposed to keep Nigerians in coastal trade, but we don’t have Nigerians there, we have foreigners; 25,000 vessels are trading in Nigerian waters; so, how can we get employed? When people say we have got to create jobs, you’ve got to create jobs by creating policy and critical legislation.”
Listing what he called the “lowest hanging fruits”, Agbakoba said: “The lowest hanging fruit is to do the credit and debit analysis at the end of which you then know what is it that you have in your pocket.
“Having determined what it is you have in your pocket, the second low-hanging fruit is to say what are those internal resources that we have omitted that can give us money? Even the last minister of finance said she commissioned a preliminary study of MOFI (Ministry of Finance Incorporated) which holds all the assets and she said on a simple analysis she discovered that the Federal Government had N33 trillion and that some valuations of government assets were so ridiculous like the Nigerian Railways with all its assets were valued at N20 billion when the thing is N3trillion to N5 trillion; so, those are the low hanging fruits.
“The President needs to set up a multipurpose professional team that can immediately say, by the way, there are 56,000 uncompleted Federal Government projects. Some are just waiting for a little bridge to be put across. Fifty thousand valued at about N50 trillion over the last 30 years all broken.
“These are at least, in relation to land, the government has about 15,000 massive lands across Nigeria valued at about N10 trillion; they don’t even know where some of them are, wasting. So, these are the low-hanging fruits. For the government to harness all these, it got to have people who are able to think through this process.There are huge resources in Nigeria that are not in use because corruption is the most attractive product.
“If you tell a minister, if you do this project it will have a likely impact on the economy, he is not interested; he is interested in creating a project that will give him money. Do you think that all these governors that are building flyovers in their states were doing so because they liked the people?
“What’s the point of building flyovers around poor people who cannot even eat, instead of building the people- human development, that must be the focus? The first thing to do is to build the people and then say to yourself, Maybe, we owe N80 trillion, we securitise those debts (clean it out) you sell it.
“When you sell it and by the time you have the analysis- how much do we owe? Where do we have our money hidden? By the time you finish the analysis, you might as well find out that you have zero account.
“The Chinese want our oil and gas; we call them and say, we owe you a loan of 80 trillion; we will exchange this by giving you what we call Futures Oil Contract. Of course, they will be happy. By this simple process in a month or two we can clean out our books. Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala did it.
“That was exactly what she did; she cleaned out all our debt- Paris and London Club. This is because if you are burdened by the debt there is nothing you can do. So, that’s the lowest-hanging fruit. The president has to clean out all these debts, then he can say how do we make money? It will be all these sectors I have mentioned.
“We must also not forget the housing stock (housing stock in Lagos, according to the PwC was worth N7trillion but it has no value because the housing stock in the US or UK or elsewhere must be linked to the financial market so if you have a house you can take it to the bank as collateral but now the entire housing stock in Lagos is dead. It is called dead capital. So, that is another area you can create money. By the time you are doing all these, the economy begins to flourish.
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“When the current Prime Minister of the UK came into office; he had an inflationary rate of 12 percent but because they think, it has reduced to 8 percent; and he says his target is to take it down to 2 percent. Now, when inflation drops, it eases the pressure on people.
“You must have a Finance Minister who understands how to run a macroeconomic system. So, I hear that someone like Wale Edun might be appointed; and that could be a very good choice. We need to have a very good governor of the Central Bank; I hear that Chike Obi and Yemi Cardoso are all in the running. So, you need to have people who can advise you and deliver on what you need to deliver; that is the only way to go.”
Agbakoba also noted that the task ahead of the President was onerous, needing tough decisions.
“The work that Tinubu has come to do is very tough. He has to take tough decisions. It would be painful, but as long as we see that it is going to lead us forward, it is worth doing,” he said.
