Repositioning the Nigerian economy for growth (1)
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| Odilim Basil Enwegbara |
Nigeria has been suffering from an oil wealth illusion. Because oil money flows without the people or the government involved, Nigerians have developed an entitlement mentality. Since some distant nations and people provide us with oil money we prodigally spend, we also believe that the same foreigners should be the ones responsible for our country’s development. That is how deep-seated the illusion has grown.
Waking up from this subconscious illusion remains extremely difficult because it should begin with a mental rather than economic decolonisation. Freeing the mind from its current imprisonment is the only way to have patriotism and common good mentality in Nigeria. It’s also the how to make people realise that minimising today’s comfort is the only to make tomorrow’s prosperity possible since there is no nation out there that we know of that one day woke up and became great without its people making all the necessary long-running sacrifices to make it happen.
So, Nigeria needs a full breakaway from its present mentality, a breakaway from today’s development that consolidates poverty. In other words, if we truly want to find our way out of this unending poverty, it’s time we did what is required to move in the right direction of development. But that would require enormous risk and boldness, boldness that comes when a people believe they it’s time to confront their problems head-on as well as seek original solutions to difficult challenges rather than adopt ones handed from some foreign nations and their accomplices. As simple as it may sound, the secret of development is this boldness as well as sacrifice by both the government and the citizens their efforts to confront the odds to its development. Quickening the process is when boldness comes with creative and unconventional approach to development.
The fact that those running our economy are addicted to western development textbooks is what makes us gutless as we try to find the right direction to our journeying to economic development. Wholly adopting economics taught in western countries only goes to further promote and protect western interests rather than developing countries’ interest. Our naivety comes with our poor understanding of the fact that as we fight to free ourselves from western exploitation as their cheap raw material backyard, so do they fight back to ensure that they keep the status quo intact, where they keep us suppliers of cheap raw material in exchange for their expensive manufactured goods. So, as they continue winning, so they continue determining the next stage of this unending survival of the fittest warfare.
Adam Smith and David Ricardo did all they could as British economists to try to fool the rest of the world into believing in that practising their own version of economics which was to keep the rest of the world Britain’s raw material backyard, while Britain remained their industrial goods supplier, nations that understood the game refused, knowing that there’s no way they too could industrialise like Britain if they continued to supplying raw materials. The same cleverness was what Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman displayed when they championed neoliberal economics or what I call Americanomics, designed to promote and protect more of American interest around the world and less the interest of the entire world.
It is this wholesale adoption of neoliberal economics because some of us who studied economics in the United States were so brainwashed in believing in Americanomics that we have become the prisoners of that fake knowledge. That adopting Americanomics is setting us backward rather forward is all over the place for every Nigerian to see, except those who are addicted to it. China and India not only joined the west but are now beating the west in the development game because rather than embracing Americanomics they came up with their development paradigm. In other words, the only way we too can escape this western development trap is to stop seeing development purely from the prisms of western textbooks. That is the only to discover that every development has its unique challenges which require unique solutions that are hardly learned from western textbooks.
That is why moving economies like ours in the right development route should start with the full abandonment of everything neoliberal. It should begin only when we embrace planning as the secret of development because planning systematically dismantles the assumed mysteries surrounding development. That is why neoliberals are against developing countries embracing planning in their quest to development. That is why as a neoliberal economist, the Minister of Finance quickly made the National Planning Commission redundant in Nigeria.
To restart our development journey, we should quickly embrace development planning, the inevitable map to guide us in finding our way in this journey into the unknown. Without this navigation tool, we should continue to get lost in this ocean of development. Without it, no nation has succeeded in this journey. But undertaking this development journey also requires the political will. It requires the devil-may-care leadership mindset.
Let’s, therefore, agree that Nigeria cannot continue pretending that it is making some progress in its journey towards development without having handy a development master plan. Or, how can we project what the economy should look like in the next five years, the next 10 years, and the next 20 years without rigorously planning all the processes and stages? We need it if we want to be time-bound, financial-bound, and execution-bound in our development. We need the master plan if we want to see ahead western roadblocks, neoliberal development blockades and how to avoid the ambush. We need it if we want to truly discover how scarce our current resources in meeting our development. We need it to stop the current wastages in government.
Imagine Lagos and Abuja competing with their plans in becoming Africa’s financial capital by 2020, or Port Harcourt wanting to become Nigeria’s Dubai by 2020. Shouldn’t it be a fierce competition when Kano, Abia, Anambra, and Ogun are competing with their individual state plans on which of them would emerge as Africa’s leading industrial hub by 2020? Imagine having Delta, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa and Edo fiercely competing among themselves on which of them should emerge as Africa’s number one petrochemical hub by 2020; or Enugu, Oyo, Imo, Osun, and Kaduna competing on which becomes Africa’s cultural and knowledge capital? What a ferocious competition should we expect when Kogi, Sokoto, Nassarawa, Katsina, Borno, Jigawa, and Bauchi fight over which of them becomes our solid minerals mining and processing hub; or Kwara, Benue, Plateau, Adamawa, Ebonyi, and Niger competing over the food basket of Africa? How messier could it be should Cross River, Plateau, and Bauchi all have plans to emerging Africa’s tourist destination?
Plans that set these high targets for the states should be plans that have explored all financial and implementation implications to realising the set goals. No doubt, such plans should come with unending nightmares to the governors, especially when competing over more domestic and foreign investors forces them to compete over whose state is Nigeria’s business-friendliest state, and the most sophisticated with unconventional revenue generating strategies. The good news is that the more intense the competition turns, the smarter and more businesslike each governor becomes, especially in an effort in maximising competitive advantages.
With peer competition, comes speedier development. Fierce competition among the states means constantly reinventing themselves, means reinventing business-government and business-institution relationships. And as they diversify away from oil, they become less and less interested in waiting for oil revenue allocation as it is a less important driver of competitiveness. With such business-like mindset, both the governors and the president begin to see government like a business, a business that should always justify every investment if it has to remain attractive and profitable.
Let’s imagine the national economic development plan which demands that all the state capital cities as well as major commercial and industrial cities across the country be fully redesigned to make them 21st century compliant. Imagine, in redesigning these cities with all humanist beauties and as important tourist destinations, the same national master plan demands the establishment of a National City and Urban Renewal Commission, which as the melting pot, attracts Nigeria’s best planners, architects, landscapers, civil and construction engineers.
Imagine an ambitious plan designed to transform BRICS into BRINCS before 2018. Imagine an ambitious plan that challenges us to turn today’s $275 billion GDP to $2,000 trillion by 2020. Imagine the plan that recognises that to realise this, the country needs to find the unconventional solutions to its current infrastructure deficit, including increasing its current 4,000 megawatts of electricity to about 100,000 megawatts by 2020, and aggressively expanding and modernising its current road network as a world-class road infrastructure that makes movement of goods, services and humans always easier, cheaper, and safer.
And above all, imagine a national development plan that comes with a full-scale industrialisation and economic diversification strategy and details, including how to find the money to start such industrialization revolution. Imagine a national plan that factors in the urgency for the country to quit the World Trade Organisation, so that by doing so it can freely impose high tariffs on foreign made goods or ban them from entering the country. Imagine and imagine the unprecedented unmatched multiplier and trickle-down effects as well as the explosion in job growth we should have by just fixing the country’s infrastructure, promoting and protecting millions of small businesses, especially by making available specially tailored cheap funds and venture capital financing to these small businesses. Imagine having such an infant industry law that forces governments at level to build both industrial backs and model factors, strategic factors built and sold to our gifted business people on mortgage basis which their ownership changes with mortgages payment completed. All this you have imagined are possible only if we plan ahead.
-To be continued next week.
Courtesy: The Punch
