This column has referred a number of times in the past to the conceptualization by the 19th-century British historian, Arnold Toynbee, of the response by societies to the challenges of crises as the basis for human progress across space and time. Today, Nigeria confronts another of those debilitating economic crises that have been a recurrent feature of our post-independence experience. Astronomical spirals in food, transportation, healthcare and electricity costs among others have worsened existential conditions and deepened poverty levels.
In a recent exchange on an online platform, a contributor compared prices of basic food items such as garri, yams, rice, beans, eggs, poultry, beef, fish, pepper, tomatoes and vegetables among others before the present administration and now and concluded that Nigerians are worse off today than they were before May 29, 2023. Those who are of this school of thought lay the blame for the current existential hardships solely on the shoulders of the Tinubu administration which has just clocked a little over one year in office. But is there a viable alternative to the removal of the fuel subsidy as well as the merger of the parallel exchange rate markets that constitute the twin pillars of the administration’s economic reformist agenda?
Did all the major Presidential candidates in the campaigns towards the last general elections not promise to immediately remove the fuel subsidy which had become clearly unsustainable? The truth is that practically all observers grossly underrated the negative implications of the fuel subsidy removal on living costs for the majority of citizens and any other administration would still have been confronted with the dilemma faced by the PBAT administration in implementing the inevitable policy.
Even if it is true as some opposition elements contend that there is still some degree of subsidy being paid on fuel imports as the country awaits the resuscitation of the Port Harcourt refinery as well as the full take-off of the Dangote refinery next month, humongous amounts from the largely dubious scheme are currently being saved. This is evident in the near tripling of the amount accruing to the Federation Account and shared by all levels of government monthly since the subsidy removal. The enhanced revenue levels available especially to the sub-national levels of government have in turn increased the tempo and magnitude of palliative programmes being implemented by various states albeit at different levels of efficiency, efficacy, and transparency.
Again, the merger of the dual exchange rate markets has substantially blocked the opportunity for a few favoured and well-connected persons to buy Forex at cheap rates at the official window and sell the same for a fortune at the parallel market without an iota of contribution to national productivity. Most experts agreed that had the hemorrhaging and distortions associated with both the fuel subsidy regime and the criminal exchange rate syndicate continued, the economy would for all practical purposes have collapsed by now.
The restoration of sanity to the operations of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) under the leadership of the current governor, Mr. Olayemi Cardoso, and the resumption of responsibility for fiscal policy within the purview of the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr Wale Edun, are gradually but steadily helping to recalibrate, redirect and reinvigorate the economy even though magical solutions cannot be conjured in the short run.
For the better part of this writer’s adult life, the country has always been faced with one form of economic crisis and high living costs or the other. Perhaps one exception was during the oil boom of the immediate post-civil war era in the early to mid-1970s when the General Yakubu Gowon regime claimed that Nigeria’s problem was not the availability of money but how to spend it. There was also the short-lived boom squandered by President Shehu Shagari administration in the Second Republic between 1979 and 1983. Indeed, by 1981, that administration had to introduce drastic austerity measures as the economy had run into crisis due to its ineptness and venality.
Under the military President, General Ibrahim Babangida, the country again reaped humongous revenues from oil proceeds as a result of high prices due to the Gulf War, earnings which were again largely squandered. In the latter years of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration running on into the Dr Goodluck Jonathan administration on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the country again earned substantial revenues from high international oil prices which were neither invested to effectively bridge the infrastructure deficit nor meaningfully alleviate poverty.
Many have been led to perceive the 1960s as the golden years of Nigerian development when the country was a virtual Eldorado in terms of living conditions. But even then the country at the time experienced a high living costs crisis. That was when the highlife maestro, the late Victor Olaiya, sang his hit song in Yoruba: “Ilu le o, kosowo lode. Obirin kigbe, Okurin kigbe, won kigbe nitori Owo”. (This translates to “The country is hard, there is no money in town. Both men and women are crying because money is scarce). In our history, we can also recall the chronic scarcity of essential commodities and harsh austerity measures including the mass retrenchment of workers that characterized the Buhari/Idiagbon military regime of 1984-85 or the various students, workers and civil society uprisings against the hardships associated with the Babangida regime’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) between 1986 and 1993.
Rather than utilize the unanticipated oil boom earnings to consolidate on the agricultural productivity gains of the immediate post-independence era and pursue agro-allied industrialization, the country became grossly import-dependent for all manner of necessities and luxuries including indulging in massive food importation.
With the massive devaluation of the Naira attendant on the introduction of the IBB regime’s SAP, the scores of manufacturing industries in textiles, tyres, vehicle assembly, paper mills, pharmaceuticals, and other goods established on the import-substitution-industrialization model folded up as the country suffered massive deindustrialization and the attendant large scale youth unemployment. These industries were largely dependent on the importation of raw materials in many cases as well as spare parts and critical technology, activities negatively affected by the currency devaluation.
Quoting the late Professor Claude Ake at a lecture he delivered in Abuja on Thursday, Professor Mike Ozekhome (SAN), referred to the continued ‘disarticulation’ of the Nigerian economy referring to a situation in which we produce what we do not consume and consume what we do not produce. This has been at the root of Nigeria’s protracted economic development malaise that far predated the Tinubu administration. As Professor Okwudiba Nnoli succinctly makes the point, there is “A divorce between our local resources and those (essentially foreign) that go into the production of the artifacts usually associated with development. As a result we are alienated from our bio-physical environment and unable to creatively transform it for our own benefit and progress”.
The recurrent economic crises we have experienced since independence had not been utilized by successive administrations as an opportunity to respond to the challenge of dependency and underdevelopment thus laying a foundation for autochthonous development. Our fixation with foreign exchange in our development policy matrix is a function of the substantially dependent nature of our economy which has made the almighty dollar king in our economic transactions and processes.
Even as President Tinubu’s economic managers continue to draw on their professional and technocratic ingenuity to devise strategies to continuously boost the value of the Naira, the President can utilize the opportunity of the economic crisis to massively mobilize Nigerians to rediscover their self-confidence, become significantly self-reliant, cultivate consumption habits predicated on local resources as well as nurture productive practices based on local technology and expertise to a significant extent.
The President gave an indication that he is inclined to move his administration in this direction when on Thursday, as a special guest at the 142nd meeting of the National Economic Council (NEC) in Abuja, he personally rallied state governors to engage in massive food production to enhance food availability and significantly scale down food costs. But the success of this bid will depend not on the individual heroics of the governors but their ability to vigorously mobilize their citizens, especially energetic and enterprising youth to engage in agriculture and other productive activities.
The challenge to actualize this kind of mass mobilization of popular energies to achieve self-reliant development will not fall within the purview of the president’s orthodox economic managers whether at the Ministry of Finance or the CBN or other such agencies. Rather, it will be a core mandate of a critical agency like the National Orientation Agency (NOA) to conceptualize and implement mass mobilization strategies to inculcate in a critically significant mass of Nigerians consumption habits, fashionable tastes, productive inclinations and dispositions as well as psychological orientations conducive to accelerated national transformation.
Again, the ruling party, the APC, and ruling parties at sub national levels will have to be transformed into vibrant, virile and vigorous organizations that are organically alive and can serve as a transmission belt of developmental values from the leadership to the led.
A key philosophy underpinning this unorthodox approach to development must be the understanding that no people can ever develop another people or confer or transfer development on others. We can ride Chinese constricted trains but will never be masters and owners of this aspect of development until we internalize train manufacturing technology for ourselves. It is only a people through self awareness engendered by transcendental leadership that can develop themselves.
The second key point is that there will be no easy shortcut to development. To paraphrase the great Awo who once put it with characteristic pungency “Nigeria’s national objectives and aspirations can be stated in simple and succinct terms. But this should not be taken as suggesting that our national goals can be achieved with any kind of ease or simplicity”. How then can President Tinubu mobilize Nigerians to utilize the current economic crisis as an opportunity to fundamentally change the country’s developmental narrative and trajectory in the fastest possible time frame bearing in mind Pandit Nehru’s rallying cry at India’s independence that what the country did not produce she would not consume and if India could not clothe herself she should go naked? Today, India is a global economic power.
