At this time last year, the spectra of a strike loomed over us. The new year had begun to yawn with woes even before it was born. When it dawned, fuel price soared at the same proportion with the rage in the land.
What was not debated with much frenzy at the early stage of the fulminations was the band of racketeers who turned our patrimony into platforms for cheap riches to fuel their showy lifestyles. Owned and rented jets, cars without number, palaces, front row seats in churches, superfine wristwatches, glamour mistresses, cameos with governors and the president, court jesters in high and low places, swarms of congratulation adverts in newspapers, birthday parties in Dubai, weddings in Spain. Society parties are coy without them.
These were men who thrived on cheap imports of oil. But in the bowel of our earth, we had crude aplenty. Our NNPC, increasingly playing the role of a glorified carcass, is unable to meet its quota to tap them with the other carcasses called refineries. So it swaps with so-called marketers who import oil to meet that quota.
The story of oil in Nigeria is the story of our impotence as a people. It is the story of ineptitude in high places. It is the tale of a state stale of ideas about indigenising an economy. Because all we do is import oil, we make import the queen of entrepreneurship.
Now, Nigeria is an economic dumpster. China is our chief dumper. Whether it is oil, or building materials, or pharmaceuticals, or textiles or electronics, we have our supplier in that Asian warrior.
I have worried over this in the past few years. The recent worry came when I learned that Dangote shut down his Gboko plant over cement importation. The first thing that came to mind was the textile industry. The once thriving giant, especially in the North with Kaduna as the beachfront, is now captive to foreign invasion.
In Dangote’s case, it is reported that it affects about 2,500 workers. And this spells a bleak holiday for the workers and their families. There has been a back-and-forth of attacks and recriminations about this between Dangote and the Ibeto Company that imports cement. The debate is healthy for the economy if anything will come out of it.
No argument can beat the concept of developing a local economy, not even when the importing company is also a monopolistic importer.
What is strange is that this was a country that debated in the years of IBB the IMF loan. By overwhelming majority, we voted with our voices against it because we wanted to protect the local economy from the ravages of the foreign behemoths. The then President Babangida yielded openly but craftily implemented the ideas of the Breton Woods Institution, allowing us to become receptacles of a wide variety of goods.
Bad as it was, today’s scale of imports is monumental. Look at building materials, for instance. We have the case of Dangote’s Gboko lament. But we also have all sorts of building materials from tiles to paints to pipes to chandeliers. Most of them come into the country without checks for standards. That is why when a person builds a house, the owner is assured to put money aside to replace much of the materials. They do not last.
In the imported cement, for instance, do we check the product for standards? I understand that some of the cement making it into our market lack gypsum, an important ingredient.
We are witnesses to the Chinese product called Gold milk, a teething powder that predated My Pikin and killed about 20 children. We are also witnesses to a step by NAFDAC sometime ago to crack down on fake Colgate toothpaste that contained the deleterious anti-freezing agent diethlyne-glycol that subjected its victims to bouts of abdominal pains, vomiting and liver damage. If taken in large doses, it could cause death.
Those undetected are many in the market. That is why it is important we emphasise local industries. No economy grows on an appetite for foreign products.
We call ourselves an oil producing country. If we take the inventory, we will find out that we import so much oil that it makes nonsense of our crude oil exports.
Now, the infrastructure is in a mess. Security is also in shambles. Every condition to help the local producer, including the farmer, is in a bad state. Loans are not readily available to the creative investor. It is harmattan haze without much spring, apology to Wole Soyinka.
The American economy complains of the Chinese rise, but virtually all of its imports are checked for standards before accepting them into the United States. We do little in that regard. We even flood the roads with cars and okadas that inflict diseases and environmental damages with their liberal fumes of carbon monoxide.
Our inability to protect local industry calls back the feisty years of American battle for independence when Britain imposed a variety of taxes, including the stamp tax. The Americans called for boycott of British imports. But the wife of one of the frontline nationalists, Benjamin Franklin could not live down choice jewelry from overseas. A disappointed Franklin quipped: “Alas, it is by the luxury and vanity of women that empires decay.”
We had such nationalistic fervour once. We saw importation as economic servitude and worked consciously as a nation against it. We had PAN that supplied governments with locally made cars. Odutola factory was a household name. Kanti Kwori in Kano was a behemoth now shrunken. Even vehicle spare parts were generally genuine. When you want to buy new phone chargers, you have to distinguish between Chinese and genuine one.
If we do not want standards, we cannot improve. The standards are not imposed. We brew them here on policy tables and on factory floors. The policy tables are sterile, so the factory floors are shrinking and dying. Dangote’s Gboko plant is the latest of such tales of woe.
No modern economy thrives without imports. But regulation is key to ensure that imports do not strangulate local production. When we do that, we create the racketeers like we have had in the oil sector. Import dependence spawns racketeers like we are dealing with in the so-called subsidy imbroglio.
We can love others, but let us love ourselves first. That principle will elevate our economic policy.
