It is our patriotic duty as Nigerians to protect the image of our country at all times. This duty requires us to conduct ourselves properly everywhere and every time, especially before foreigners. It also requires us to choose our words very carefully and deliberately, yet with candour, when we discuss the dark internal sides of our country in public places and fora. The performance of this duty is often complicated by those in authority, who ordinarily should be custodians of the national image. The uproar following the release of the Ease of Doing Business Index of the World Bank ranking Nigeria 169 among 189 countries is to me like crocodile tears. The question to ask is what we did differently since the last report was released. How many of the archaic laws in the books have the National Assembly repealed or amended? How many of the charges and fees identified as too high have been reviewed? Has there been any development in the civil service that shows they are interested in making life easier for the business community?
Nigeria does not hold a patent to the challenges it faces. Other countries face them too. Unfortunately, very small problems get magnified in Nigeria because of poor leadership. With due respect to our founding fathers, who may have had a modicum of thought and dream of a great united Nigeria, and at the risk of being misunderstood, I believe that even as we write, it may not be uncharitable to say that Nigeria is yet to find leaders that truly put the country first despite all the political rhetoric. Leadership is the basic problem of Nigeria.
I know we play in a global village but to talk about ease of doing business focusing only on the formal sector of the economy is misplaced. We appear so confused that anyone standing outside will think we are a bunch of retarded people. With over 170million people and over 60 percent of them economically active, there is more incentive to fix the impediments to domestic business than to fix the needs of outsiders. Don’t play the foreign investment card with me because if we get Nigerians to invest here we will not be cringing before foreign investors. It is like the current struggle to fix Nigeria’s competitiveness. Without providing the things that make the environment friendly we waste our time. The Nigeria Competitive Council must be engaged in the search for a needle in a quicksand.
The trending culture is for everybody to claim to love Nigeria, but nobody is prepared to give anything of value to it. Most of what one sees masquerading as leadership and patriotism today is nepotism, tribalism and religious bigotry. We see a problem hurting the nation but before tackling it we first find out who is benefiting from it. If it is the “right people” we set up a committee so as to discard its report. We have perfected the art of lying to our people and this is why nobody seems to respect our leaders. We need to hear what the people say when we drive past in our sirens. It appears that every succeeding administration in Nigeria has been worse than the one it replaced. They often seek to profit from the things they complained about in the government before them. This is why nothing ever changes.
We have developed the culture of throwing money at problems without following up on execution of the task. The result is that we set up committees at the slight perception of a challenge, probably to divert attention and never to use the output of such committees. In trying to boost the performance of MSMEs, we created a myriad of intervention funds without much drawdown by the intended beneficiaries. The reason is that what we see as financial problem is often the reflection of a bigger nonfinancial challenge.
It is ineffective to provide finance to entities that cannot evacuate their produce and have no access to the market due to bad roads. Nor would finance remove the problem of a scandalous[y decayed infrastructure and insecurity. The Small Business Community (SBC) also needs to do business with ease. What is impeding the ease of business dealings is not the process of registration at the CAC. How can one quicken the process at CAC when they have no light to process documents? In any case, if registration was a key impediment, how come unregistered businesses often win large government deals? Nor is it access to finance. Focus on infrastructure and you make a breakthrough.
Representatives of government may insist that it is too early to judge them. They may also be quick to point to the mess the past regimes left them. These may have some merit. We shall therefore leave room for them, as Franz Fanon would say, to discover their mission out of relative obscurity, and to achieve or betray it. The Buhari administration has every good reason to do better even though available indices do not point much to the desired future.
For one, the tension among the ethnic groups in Nigeria has never been more palpable. Although Nigeria has always lived with the phenomenon of disregard for human life as people get killed and the killers are never brought to book, it has never been at such a national scale as it is today. Second, government has never been so powerless and unresponsive to the killing of Nigerians as it is today. The security agencies have never been more opaque as the strong continue to kill the weak at will. Nobody does business under such conditions, not even the citizens.
With regard to the economic well-being of the people, Nigeria has never been this much at sea on the economy. Those in Nigeria know that the report, which shows us improving, is false because nothing actually changed. Is it the corrupt public service that subverts the government it is meant to support? The process of joining the federal civil service is so corrupt that most young Nigerians no longer bother to seek employment there. One has to be sponsored by a politician or connected to powerful people in government before one is even allowed to contest. Positions are being filled everyday by privileged people without advertisement. Only the future will tell what the civil service will look like in ten years’ time.
In any case, if people can pad budgets in the presence of a man said to be intolerant of corruption, and pay ghost workers under his nose, how much more spiteful could the Nigerian civil service be of the president. And strangely they seem to get away scot free. The minister of Finance last week enthusiastically told us the quantum of ghost workers she has “been catching” but she did not tell us whether she also caught the people who hired them; how their salaries were paid and to which bank. To remove the names of ghosts from the list without more is tantamount to a cover up. Nigeria should also know the roles played by those in charge of salaries and wages.
We cannot be doing the same thing and expecting a different result. We have been on the matter of simplifying business dealings for too long but no far-reaching reforms. The question to ask is what business really are we doing in Nigeria? Most people have been structured to the periphery of the economy. The informal sector is bloated with people in motion but really no movement. The power supply challenge has got worse. At 2500 megawatts for 170million people, our per capita power consumption is among the lowest in the world. Nigerians are now wondering if their national power assets handed over to some unprepared privileged entrepreneurs was not another official fraud. There is nothing that gives the semblance of business simplification in Nigeria. The small business community is on stop. What we see is motion without movement.
Emeka Osuji
