Some people are calling for an emergency economic summit, which according to them, is to find ways of saving Nigeria from her present debacle. This call should have been discountenanced but for the loudness of it and the calibre of those making it. We just had a well-organized and properly attended economic summit, organized by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG). The Vice President sat through most of the time. We are yet to see any element of the summit report being implemented or utilized. That makes the call suspect.
Nigeria is a country of experts. It has in abundance all manner of well-trained professionals. We have doctors and lawyers, engineers and technologists, military tacticians and economists. Educationists, nuclear physicists and space engineers; all have substantial clusters of indigenous membership in Nigeria. Our world class experts abound in foreign countries.While many are found in our urban centres, a large number also now dwell in the rural areas, trying to make ends meet.
The country has an equally large and rising population of quacks, pseudo experts and outright ignoramuses, masquerading as knowledge power houses. And that is not unexpected. In an environment where forgery is high art and a large proportion of the qualifications you see are either forged or cloned at Oluwole, quacks will soon lead intellectual conversations. Many of us are “experts” infields we know very little about. That is part of the general malaise.
From time to time, Nigeria calls forth her experts and specialist, as well as the not so knowledgeable ones, to examine important issues and make suggestions on the way forward. And they always do make such suggestions. One thing Nigeria cannot deny its citizens (at least the middle and lower classes) is the credit for their patriotism. Nigerians have always supported their governments with all their might, hearts, brains and taxes, despite being duped by their leaders over many decades in which governance was simply a well-organized fraud.
Nigeria is not unaware of the causes of its present predicament. The current economic crisis consuming the country is not new. It has been long in coming and every government has expected this day to come. The only thing is that none of them took the risk of biting the bullet. The problem of monoculturalism is almost as old as Nigeria’s independence and it is not the crux of the matter we face. The problem is that the wrong people have led us for so long. And we can each check and see who represents us at every level of government and see that on a good day most of them have no business telling us what to do because they cannot possibly know the right thing. The kind of leaders thrown up by the kind of political system we run is a key problem.
Worrying over the price of oil is like crying over spilt milt. In any case, it has nothing to do with our problem because many people in the world have no oil and they are better than us. I have said somewhere in the past that we are in for the long haul. Oil prices may not return in a hurry, if they ever do return. Indeed, oil prices may never come back to anything near what we were used to. Those who understand the dynamics and politics of the oil industry know that what happened to fossil energy will happen to oil. It has started to happen. If so, then we had better begin to focus on the challenges that have arisen from the collapse of oil prices rather than the price of oil. What we should worry about is the worsening poverty among Nigerian households. This should be the subject of our economic summit if we must continue talking about things we already know.
We are moving away from the kind of poverty known to the World Bank, and can be measured in US dollars per day of consumption, to one that is below the radar of measurement – one that is so widespread. We are moving into the realms of mass abject poverty. Available statistics had put the number of Nigerians in the rural areas living below the poverty line at about 70 percent. The Vice President was recently quotes as saying that over 100 million Nigerians are living below the poverty line. That is over 60 percent, and we all know that this was a very charitable observation.
We know that the source of this massive poverty in Nigeria is not the fall in oil price. We know that the economic welfare of Nigerians is mostly inversely related to the nation’s oil revenues – the people were getting poorer as oil revenue increased in the past. We also know that Nigerian leaders, before now (hoping that these ones are different), have robbed their country and escaped punishment.Now that we have a ”change”, let no one confuse us with needless economic summits. The NESG features some of the best of the best in Nigerian intellectualism. They recently concluded their annual summit, which has for decades helpedthe Nigerian government to untie some economic knots.What we need to see is execution. The solution to the Nigerian problem has always been documented in the summit and other report.
In my view therefore, a call for economic summit at this time is not only diversionary, but also like a vote of no confidence on the somewhat dim economic team of the present administration. And truly those guys need to stand up and be counted. This team is portraying itself as opaque, I must say. Somebody ought to be speaking to us. An effective economic team must find answers to poverty, ignorance and disease now running wild here. We need no economic summit to know that the average Nigeria family is unlikely to pay children’s local school fees next semester, to say nothing of those abroad.
Some have suggested that the call was a kite flown by government agents to shift attention from things that are taking too long to happen. Such agents must hate this government so much to take such route. The president is a man in hurry but who, it appears unfortunately, does not have the best complement of resources (read human resources) to run with. Those calling for an economic summit should tell us what is going on at the National Planning Ministry. I know some great guys in there and I have an idea what’s going on in their minds right now. Let someone please tell us: when did the Ministry of Finance cease to be a national economic think tank? I happen to have had the privilege of working at very senior levels in both institutions. Some of our best brains are there. Perhaps they need champions who speak their language. Perhaps their arrow heads need a bigger head. Perhaps if those two places are properly arrow-headed, perhaps, just perhaps, we may not be talking of economic summit because that’s part of what they do every day in the Ministries of Finance and National Planning. Economic summit is simply the marshalling of inputs to economic planning. This used to be on the daily menu card in these places.
Emeka Osuji
