The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • A minister’s albatross

    A minister’s albatross

    Power Minister Adebayo Adelabu. Few Nigerians today remember the Minister of Power for his high octane visits to Zungeru, Shiroro and Kainji Dams in the quest for power stabilisation. Rather, the talk is all about Friday’s miscue regarding how Nigerians should consume less of what is not available. For this, most Nigerians who have spoken of Friday’s ministerial outing have been as unsparing as they are uncharitable. Some have dubbed it a disaster. It’s probably worse. 

     “A lot of people will come back from work and they want to have dinner or they want to play with their colleagues down the road, they switch on the AC for the room to be cooling before they come back.

    “Some people will be going to work in the morning and their freezers are left on for days… when all their items are frozen. This is because they are not paying enough.

    “We have all been overseas before, we know how conscious the power consumers are to consumption of electricity; this will enable us to manage consumption”.

    Those were the minister’s words. And this was just days after the federal government hiked electricity tariff from N66 per kilowatt to N255 for a category of users.

    As one might expect, Nigerians’ reactions have been utterly predictable, with many understandably angry. And this is not necessarily because the minister spoke out of turn but because he said something that was considered out of sync with the general mood in the country.

    Couldn’t the government have waited until perhaps, when things calmed a bit, before another hike on utilities is slapped on hapless Nigerians – they reasoned?

    Others, perhaps less charitable have, while reflecting on the pervasive dip in power supply across the country, saw the press conference as more of a forum by a somewhat overwhelmed minister to market alibis as panacea.

    Most probably have a point. With the nerves already fraying, couldn’t the minister have spared the people the lecture?

    The point remains though: there can be no running away from the problem. Indeed, the problem would appear to be more fundamental than what the government has been willing to put out. In fact, it is multi-layered. From the problem of gas supply to the generating plants, to forex issues, a grid system so prone to fits that it is best described as ‘abiku’, and finally an analogue distribution segment that lives by robbing the consumer to keep afloat, the image of an ill-fitting contraption could not have been more stark.   

    Which is why the solutions often passed out as a possible way out of the conundrum have tended to  be either simplistic or plain opportunistic.

    To heap the blames on the current minister who has only been a few months on the job is to ignore the deep structural issues underlying the current rot.

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    And now that sector has turned full cycle with the problems still enduring, the minister has only resorted to a tough call – in the figurative sense of the chick and the egg –the matter of which should come first. Unfortunately, whereas most Nigerians would readily frame the problem as subsidy removal, the government sees the push as one of cost recovery! And both are damn right!

    Talk of full metamorphosis of the Nigerian electricity consumer. Remember the old National Electric Power Authority (NEPA)? Famed for ineptitude, inefficiency and its culture of corruption, it was everything a public utility should not be. It neither had a programme of expansion in anticipation of the ever-growing needs of its customers, nor a maintenance regime to keep its system performing. Instead of a structured funding plan to guarantee its sustenance, and lacking in the motivation to collect its due revenues, it managed to survive on the budgetary lifelines dished out by the government. Its successor, the Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN) was no better with Nigerians no sooner after rechristening it as Problem Has Changed Name (PHCN)! 

    And so came the Power Sector Reform Act (2005); a supposedly transformational legislation designed to address those age-long problems. The rationale was that the sector needed to attract fresh capital that was no longer available to the government. Secondly, that the stifling bureaucracy was such that would neither permit nor afford the expertise and operational models that was required to transform the sector. And finally, that a new governance structure had to be in place to get things moving. And with the private sector’s enormous financial muscle said to be available to draw out to the pool of expertise needed to turn the sector around, such was the picture painted of the future of the sector that could not have been anything but glowing. 

    Nearly two decades on, Nigerians know better. Indeed, the old problem has merely morphed! In place of the old behemoth, we have a motley assembly of anaemic service providers that are private only in name. Yes, they continue to rely on the government for bailouts and other financial guarantees. As for the electricity consumer, he is still in the business of procuring transformers and other service accoutrements which are immediately appropriated by the Distribution Companies (DisCos). He is also required to pay for electricity meters, pay for upgrades whenever this becomes necessary – all of these without as much a thought to fair, equitable dealing. And all of these under a so-called regulator, National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) best described as ineffectual.

    Talk of the changing faces of the problem from season to season.  Olusegun Obasanjo – the supposed midwife of the farce packaged as reform blew billions of dollars away in importation of nearly a dozen turbines most of which never made it to the project sites. Umaru Yar’Adua freely bandied ‘emergency’ to underscore the enormity of the challenge until the word lost its meaning. Goodluck Jonathan may have unbundled the old PHCN behemoth into more manageable entities, yet, he is best remembered for handing them over to inept operators. Over all, he somewhat treated the sector as just another problem to be kicked down the road!

    As for Muhammadu Buhari with his ‘body language’, he offered what was at best a placebo to a problem that was organic! 

    I truly hope that those angry with President Tinubu’s Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, understand where the country is coming from and hopefully agree on the need to chart a different path going forward.  For whereas the minister may have touched the raw nerves of a frustrated citizenry on the matter of tariff classification, nothing that he said could be deemed to be outside of what is provided for in the Multi-Year-Tariff –Order (MYTO) as outlined in the NERC regulations. For yours truly, the minister’s sin is not about what he said but what he failed to say – which is when the current climate of darkness will lift! 

    Other than the tariff issue, Nigerians want to see those things being done differently.

  • As naira rebounds

    As naira rebounds

    Understandably, much of the reactions that have greeted the somewhat steady rebound of the naira have centred on whether perceptible gains was merely a fleeting phase or whether it signals an imminent return of strength in a permanent sense of which most Nigerians apparently feel that the local currency was entitled. For much as many would vehemently disagree that the administration is on track in its push to reset the entire gamut monetary policy management, fewer still would deny that the broad set of remedies in place to address the drift are beginning to work some magic; and that the economy may in fact be finally be turning the corner under the watchful eyes of its current managers.

    The same of course could be said of the much hyped food shortages that has since been revealed as one of more drama than substance, a rather family but nonetheless opportunistic misdiagnosis to serve narrow partisan ends.

    Agreed, there can be no misstatement of the current realities in the land. As they say in the local parlance –country hard! True, not only is inflation is at the highest, punishing levels ever, for businesses, the cost of keeping afloat has tended to be somewhat unbearable. There is also no denying the hunger in the land with prices of foodstuffs increasingly unaffordable. And surely, no one denies that the removal of subsidy on petrol and the harmonisation of the different rates in the foreign exchange market by the apex bank have come to constitute the main drivers to the hardship currently being experienced.

    But then, like a typical Nigerian accident scene where all you see is bedlam, there was initially, an exaggerated sense of panic that tended to get in the way of what is supposed to be ordinarily, a well-designed policy intervention.  From massive looting of warehouses and storage facilities by supposedly angry and hungry mobs, we heard of trucks being waylaid and their goods carted away by criminal elements to wherever; there was at some point, a sense of the state being in retreat as hoodlums – said to be looking for food – took over.

    Yet, if the truth must be told; ours was certainly not a case of essential commodities suddenly disappearing from the markets and supermarkets and with it a return to the regime of rationing of so-called Essencos as we had in the 80s; nothing of drought or pestilences in such degrees as to occasion massive crop failures and resultant famine. Insecurity was of course a major problem particularly in the rural areas with farmers across the country reporting inability to tend to their enterprise. Again, in all of these, there has – all of these while – been no suggestion that the country ever needed massive, wholesale importation of food and other essential commodities to address the hunger problem!

    Yet, if the panic stoked by the coalescing of the different forces said to be responding to the hunger stimulus could be said to rate high on the Richter scale, the management of the entire episode has been just as astounding!

    Mercifully, the situation is now different with civility finally returning. From Lagos to Niger, Borno to Oyo, Ogun to Kebbi, now the story across the board is that things are beginning to quieten; whereas the pangs of hunger may not have faded completely, there is at least a sense that some things are being done to quieten the accompanying rumbles of the stomach!

    Have the correct lessons been learnt? It seems yet early in the day to say. I supposed there is – at least at the moment – an increasing understanding of what each actor in the agricultural value chain is expected to bring to the table. Which means those looking to the steely precincts of the Three Arms Zone are simply wasting their time. Abuja has neither the land to till nor the farmhand to put to work. Even the old top-down approach of a federal government purchasing and distributing tractors and other vital farm equipment to state governments have become somewhat anachronistic.

    The states have the land, the structures and so should be encouraged to find the means to get the business done with the federal government availing them robust fiscal support in credit, tax waivers and incentives.

    Back to our beloved naira. I understand the concerns being raised about the value of the currency at this time. Should it be N1,200 or a return to N500 to one United States dollars?  Such discussions would seem to me as being utterly misplaced at this time. Agreed, Yemi Cardoso and his team have done well to put measures in place for effective monetary policy management. While the country can expect to harvest the returns in the long term, it seems to me as wishful considering that the fundamentals of the economy have not changed in any appreciable measure.

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    Unlike the current obsession with the value of the currency which in the long run could actually return to the country to the same starting block of import dependency, greater focus should be on currency stability with strict emphasis on the diversification on forex sources. What we are dealing with here goes beyond the sentiment of having a strong national currency. It is about the nation’s capacity to produce those basic essentials that it truly needs and competitively too. It is also about whether or not it can generate sufficient foreign exchange to import those things it cannot produce locally. In another sense, it comes to the question of whether a country with very little export base can afford the luxury of a strong currency without endangering any real prospects of export-led development.

    Yes, our super patriots making the case of naira-dollar parity might want to know that the South Korean currency – the Won, yesterday traded at 1,339.9714 to the United States dollar! Yes, the currency of that famed industrial powerhouse equally traded at 0.98977818 to our beloved naira!

    Talk of a country whose productivity compares with most of the developed world and one that actually boasts of top of the range industrial goods from automobiles to electronics preferring to keep its currency ‘undervalued’ to ensure an appreciable competitive edge for its exports and also to guarantee its slice of the pie in the highly competitive global trade arena!

    I do understand the tough choices that the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration is challenged to make. They are neither for the faint-hearted nor for those given to populism. They are painful but necessary choices if the country must leapfrog into the future that we all claim to desire.

    I mean a future in which the dream of a graduate after 10 years of working is to buy a ‘brand new tokunbo’ car because his country continues to lack both the technical and credit infrastructure to afford him/her the so-called ‘tear-rubber’!

    To those still reminiscing in the so-called good old times, the message at this time should be – where have that past led us!

  • Ningi: Uneasy calm after the storm

    Ningi: Uneasy calm after the storm

    Watchers of the budgetary process and its nuances ought to be forgiven for choosing to focus rather disproportionally on the computational, if not the utterly incomprehensible arithmetic, over Budget 2024 of the federal government now that some calm seems to have settled after the storm.

    Yet, much as the ‘snitching’ (for want of a better word) by a senator on his colleagues have become somewhat the central issue in the so-called budget padding saga, with the so-called breaches of the privilege of members in the upper legislative chamber and with it the bringing of the hallowed institution into disrepute becoming the dominant theme, there remains, in my view, no less troubling questions about the entire mess that speaks to the hypocrisy of a section of the nation’s elite and their Janus-face predilection; the opportunistic politics of ‘we’ versus ‘them’, the stoking of the same old divisions, the fault lines of north versus south.

    Yes, Senator Abdul Ningi was dead wrong when he insinuated at his BBC interview that the Senate – a body to which he belongs and which holds the power over the purse either tinkered or padded the budget. If that smacks of self-indictment, no less is his equally mischievous charge (could it be plain ignorance?), alleging the existence of a parallel budget which he claimed, is unknown to his sectional northern senators forum and perhaps the generality of the Nigerian population.

    Never mind the tepid disclaimer; could the senator truly be said to be speaking for himself alone? Yours truly remains unaware of any strident disclaimer of the grave charge that a budget duly passed by both houses of the parliament was designed in such a way as to inflict a ‘huge damage’ to the north! Yet, we move on!

    In other words; those weighty charges might be considered personal views to which the senator is eminently entitled; can we also say of his subsequent revelation at the same BBC interview, that the body, NSF actually paid a consultant to review the same budget as lacking their acquiescence?

    Beyond the noise and the hyperventilation over the so-called padding; this is where yours truly has had quite a bit of trouble comprehending! A consultant engaged by a forum of northern senators to review the national budget? Could the suspended senator, even as chair of the body, have acted without the concurrence of other members?

    And to what purpose might that be? To confirm, as insinuated by the senator, acting alone or at the behest of the NSF, ‘the huge damage’ done to the north and the country?

    Note the deliberate equation of ‘north’ with the country.

    Would the weaponisation of the budget instrument be tolerable in an already supercharged political environment?

    By the way, my understanding is that we are here dealing with a national budget that was not only presented by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to the two houses of parliament in joint sitting but also in the full glare of television cameras as indeed a global audience. We heard stories and reports of different committees of the two chambers working on the document for weeks with defence sessions with ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs); the sitting of the harmonisation committee from where it was finally passed into both houses for adoption and subsequent assent by the president.

    So, where are the smoking guns? The patchwork of ill-digested proposals authored by bureaucrats that speaks more to an inherent poor capacity and incompetence than anything else? The squabbles about who gets the bigger pie among the disparate actors in the annual ritual sharing whatever is on the table?  And who are those casting the proverbial stones here?

    Seriously; at what point did Senator Ningi and his NSF consider the federal government’s Budget 2024 as being anti-north hence the need for their hired consultant to establish that exact degree to which it is? And if, as later revealed in the course of the brouhaha, that the distinguished Bauchi senator drew the attention of the senate president, Godswill Akpabio, to the concerns of the northern senators with the latter showing willingness to look into the matter on its merit, was it also part of the script that Senator Ningi would head for the BBC Hausa Service moments after assuring Akpabio that the final report of the ‘consultants’ would be availed him whenever it was ready?

    Did Ningi and his NSF also communicate their concerns with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who incidentally is a fellow northerner?

    The whole affair strikes one as being far more sinister than the distinguished senator was willing to put out.

    All the same, we must thank Senator Ningi and his colleagues that one good thing has since come out of the development. We now have, if not entirely brand new, a revamped Southern Senators Forum, SSF not only to serve as counter-foil, but a forum to slug things out with their northern counterparts, whenever and if ever, things get to that! Clearly, if the unfolding development is any indication of the disdain with which some so-called northern senators hold the current leadership of the senate, it merely confirms what Nigerians already know of how politics continue to trump public service at a time the country is supposed to be yearning for fast-track development.

    Read Also: Budget padding: salient questions nobody is asking Ningi

    Is the storm then over? Of course, the mere capitulation of the distinguished senator and his subsequent rustication, far from being a happy ending, has only ended a chapter in what promises to be a running story. Most assuredly not; those powerful elements in the northern forum may have thrown the mouthy senator under the bus to save their skins; it certainly would be foolhardy for Godswill Akpabio’s leadership of the upper house to let down their guards. And so the distractions, as against real, effective governance, continue, perhaps until 2027!

    Which takes us to the matter with Budget 2024? Is the budget document perfect?

    Let me answer this way: there is no such thing as a perfect budget document. Not even in America where most Nigerians are only too eager to point as their model of best practices. Even the noise about the so-called padding is somewhat misplaced. Yes, Nigerians might want to know that America has, what in congressional parlance is called ‘earmarks’, money for projects that individual lawmakers slip into major congressional budget bills to cater to local issues. Moreover, the debate about whether those who possess the power of the purse also reserve the power to tinker with the elements is merely academic; it will remain so perhaps until kingdom come. What is important is for the process to be made more accessible and transparent and that every single kobo disbursed is made to deliver commensurate value to the citizen. Whether it is ‘zonal intervention projects’ or the more controversial issue of constituency projects over which members have not only drawn their swords but have left the country still bitterly divided, the key is for every interested Nigerian to be able to track how public funds are spent and to remove possible duplications.

    That to me is a far cry from the current mob culture of seeking to throw the baby out with the bath water. 

  • Nigeria on the move

    Nigeria on the move

    Although it might seem premature to describe the silent war going on in the country as akin to ‘revolution’, there are sufficient signs to suggest that our much-abused country is set on an irreversible trajectory.  Whether these signpost a new dawn in the wings is however a different matter; in a country where the not so silent majority are used to picking the wrong battles, where supposed opinion leaders are the first to misinform with a view to manipulate, any suggestion of ‘progress’ in the current circumstance might be dubbed ‘satanic’.

    What is incontrovertible is that the old order, increasingly enfeebled, have done little else than gawk in horror at the pace at which the changes are taking place. Of course, they do not consider the unfolding scenario as being funny – and that is understandable. But much as it might seem logical to expect resistance particularly in a climate enabled by ignorance and a horrendous bureaucratic superstructure, only in recent days we have seen anger and bile from the camp of those opposed to everything that the Tinubu administration represents rise to such levels as to trigger alarms.

    Sure, a tactical battle may have been won when President Bola Tinubu terminated the iniquitous regime of fuel subsidy on May 29, 2023. But so has resistance has been no less relentless; and that is even long after the more enlightened segments of the population have come to agree that the controversial fuel subsidy had to go in the light of national imperatives. And so when the government is not being accused of being utterly insensitive, it is charged with not doing enough to tame the monstrous inflationary spiral that attenuated it. Even the palliatives rolled out by the government were dubbed as too late and perhaps too little. For a government that cannot seem to do right in the eyes of its sworn enemies, even the logical consequences of the subsidy removal were held aloft as the surest evidence of how ill-prepared it is for governance, proof of the administration’s whimsical impulsive, if not entirely show-boat proclivities.

    Thou shall know the truth…and that truth shall set you free – so says the Holy Writ.

    In our peculiar circumstance, a good number of Nigerians would appear either too locked up in their self-curated prisons of prejudices or boxed into some narrow ideological alleys to understand either the import or the meaning of truth. For far from the dreary balance sheets painted by those for whom the measures essentially came to collective hunger and its cost-of-living correlates, the measures which the government have undertaken, although inevitable, could not have been any less courageous or revolutionary.  If anything, they underlie the need to re-set the political economy, to redirect it from the current ruinous path of entitlement to a more responsible path. After all, public education and health continues to enjoy robust subsidies, far more than the average citizen would care to admit.

    Understandably, the traditional, but nonetheless superficial argument was that the N3tn budgeted for subsidy, say from June 2022 to June 2023, was certainly wasteful; and that it would deliver far more public good than the petrol tanks of the estimated 11,605,207 vehicles on Nigeria’s roads. Again, it bears emphasis that the subsidy debate is far more nuanced; certainly more complex, than is usually put out by the government.

    Yes, it is about the political economy, the patently retrogressive pricing mechanism under which the more affluent gets to enjoy more of the subsidy and with this the massive diversion of resources that would otherwise have been deployed to provide critical infrastructure. More importantly, it is about the value Nigerians place on current consumption and its long term sustainability, particularly when the resource in question is a wasting one. While the measure would seem ordinarily revolutionary in that context, Nigerians should be able to appreciate why those involved in the N3trilion business will be hard pressed to give up without a fight! 

    Talk of the administration’s many battles; a new battle is also being waged ferociously at the monetary governance front with Olayemi Cardoso leading the charge. First, attention had to be turned to the kalo-kalo business that the forex market had become. A market where a supposedly tiny segment said to represent a paltry five percent would not only call the shots but have grown to service the peccadilloes of the privileged and the highly connected. As far as Cardoso’s apex bank was concerned, the market and with it the gross distortions they brought, had to go so that a semblance of order could return. And so without as much as firing a single shot, Cardoso announced the unification of all segments of the forex market, the result of which saw the naira not only reeling but yet to recover.

    While that was supposed to be bad business for the tiny segment that hawked currencies like one would oranges in street corners, it has become something of a casus belli. And while the result, although predictable, has been somewhat catastrophic for our beloved naira, only few are willing to understand that the CBN does not print the dollar notes and that what the apex bank had done is to level the playing ground for all classes of players. And so it became something of a call to arms by just about everyone with an axe to grind with the Tinubu administration. Manufacturers and their unending cycle of forex dependence; importers and their penchant to cut corners, speculators and all manners of players banded together in a collective outrage at what is supposed to be a ‘killer’ policy – the same players who only a while ago confessed that the so-called official market was pure fiction and that the black market was where things happen.

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    Lest I forget, the undertakers: the banks. Many of them, by the way, have long perfected the art of robbing Peter to further rob Paul; imagine all of them pooling their voices in some feigned anger at what these mean for business, when in truth, they are mourning the interment of their infrastructure of easy money!

    Unfortunately, that is not the only fight that Cardoso and company would have to fight to win. Cleaning the apex bank of the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) of image that Godwin Emefiele and company had foisted on the bank, particularly the odious N30 trillion Ways and Means advances unleashed in the former administration’s moments of financial brigandage is another top priority. And so is the subversion of every rule of modern banking by the regulator under an assumed national exigency. Yours truly refers here to those dubious interventions that reduced the apex bank to a lender of the first resort! And the riddle: the circumstances surrounding the brazen looting – allegedly done under the klieg light of CCTV cameras – of $6 million cash from the vaults of the apex bank by minders of the national treasury.

    Like Mr President his principal, Cardoso needs our prayers to win against these forces massed in battle.

  • Atiku and PDP governors

    Atiku and PDP governors

    If the situation were not as serious as we have it at the moment, one would have been content to sit back to enjoy the self-serving remonstrations of an elite class for whom everything begins and ends with politics. It’s been a week of brickbats between the PDP governors and the Bola Tinubu administration on the one hand and, the perennial presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar versus the Tinubu administration on the other, with the PDP governors only wrapping up a rather tumultuous week with an encore.

    The PDP governors are obviously convinced that the Tinubu administration is not doing nearly enough. Ever sly but barely magisterial in their outings, they have availed Nigerians a surfeit of proof: The naira – against the major international currencies – doing the yoyo spectacle. Food prices – not shortages please –reaching the skies and the neighbourhood, surfeit with an army of angry youths who simply can’t find anything meaningful to lay their hands on. And so they whined on and one like school children sent to undertake the day’s business without the accompaniment of their learning tools, forgetting that the problems being complained about are theirs and theirs to solve!

    And for these they want the president – not their membership club of predatory abdicators – to resign!

    Reminds yours sincerely of those days of yore when as a young staff writer in the National Concord, I alongside other colleagues went on tour of health establishments in Lagos with the late Minister of Health, Prof Olikoye Ransome-Kuti. At a stop in one federal medical facility, the officer in charge had ranted on and on about poor funding and how that was impacting on service delivery. He even dared to draw the minister’s attention to the long stretch of overgrown weeds threatening to turn the facility into a mini jungle only for the minister at this point to ask whether the facility had a labourer on its payroll! Of course, the director could only return an incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo about lack of critical equipment to rid the place of the weeds! In effect, the minister merely stopped short of saying that the problem is not so much about lack of funds but of the critical initiatives to get the job done.

    That same spirit – of corporate abdication – is unfortunately in full bloom with the governors eyes all set upon Abuja!

    Here of course is the irony: while the same governors trading blames have been smiling to the banks, sacrificing every single initiative of the Tinubu administration aimed at providing succour through their offices to sheer incompetence or political expediency; they forget, that the twin policies of fuel subsidy removal and foreign exchange reforms, which although painful for the citizens, has actually delivered far more positive outcomes to their treasuries and potentially for real governance than most of their whining lordships could ever have imagined.

    If there is any missing element, it must be their collective failure to articulate a programme of collaboration with the federal government to mitigate the pains on the citizens and to shorten the duration of the current adjustment. For that, the governors can rightly be accused of monumental abdication in a grave moment of emergency.

    However, unlike the governors who are in pole position to do something, the case of former vice president Atiku Abubakar is different. He understandably does not think much of the president let alone the policies of his administration, two positions of which he is eminently entitled. Atiku, interestingly, does not suffer a misapprehension of the issues at stake even if appears sometimes confused. Most certainly, he believes that he understands the problems more than anyone and perhaps that he alone possess the magic wand to solve them.

    Hear him: “The wrong policies of the Tinubu administration continue to cause untold pain and distress on the economy and the rest of us cannot keep quiet when the government has demonstrated sufficient poverty of ideas to redeem the situation.

    “After a careful assessment of the state of our economy at the twilights of the last administration, I knew full well that the economy of the country was heading for the ditch and came up with a number of policy prescriptions that would rescue the country from getting into the mess that we are currently in.” 

    And so his premises/options:

    (1) A fixed exchange rate system would be out of the question…it would not be in line with [our] philosophy of running an open, private sector-friendly economy.

     (2) Operating a successful fixed-exchange rate system would require sufficient FX reserves to defend the domestic currency at all times…He agrees that Nigeria’s major challenge is the persistent FX illiquidity occasioned by limited foreign exchange inflows to the country.

     (3) He says “A managed-floating system would have been a preferred option… in such a system, the naira may fluctuate daily, but the CBN will step in to control and stabilize its value. Such control will be exercised judiciously and responsibly, especially to curb speculative activities.”

    Imagine the individual who in one breadth pledged to reform the foreign exchange market by eliminating multiple exchange rate windows, which, he claimed, only benefited opportunists, middlemen, and fraudsters, bent on retaining the very infrastructure which gave it prop.

    That is vintage Abubakar, the acclaimed author and finisher of the Obasanjo-era reforms that have berthed in the current disaster that the country is only now, beginning to slowly but painfully extricate itself.

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    Surely, Atiku can go on theorising as many times as he wants. Just like his co-traveller, the acclaimed trader and fabulist that swears that he alone has the magic wand to move Nigeria from consumption to production, he is free to speak from both sides of the mouth. Clearly, the man Nigerians elected to solve the problem is Bola Tinubu.  While things might seem rough at the moment, the way forward surely cannot be a return to the old economy of rent and privilege but one in which level playing ground is availed to all classes of players. The two albatrosses of subsidy of fuel and multiple exchange rates belong to the ancien regime. We need to educate the throng still nursing the illusion of quick-fixes that the answer to the plummeting value of the naira is to encourage exports to boost the supply of forex.

    As for the governors, do they need Tinubu to tell them of the dire need to revive those farm settlements, the agricultural extension services of old, the site-and-service initiatives that took the drudge off the farming enterprise as a strategy only to rekindle the interests of our youths in agriculture? Come to think of it – is the job all about ‘forming’ the big man through the elite Nigerian Governors Forum?

  • As CBN goes bullish

    As CBN goes bullish

    The past fortnight witnessed something of a mild stampede in the typically gravity-defying parallel forex exchange market that expectedly provoked unusually searing questions about the real intentions of the apex bank as indeed the Tinubu administration itself. Most prominent among the many questions is whether the apex bank was finally ready to do battle with the cult that have come to elevate speculation over and above value-addition and more particularly, the tiny segment believed to constitute a mere five percent but have arrogantly transmuted to be the lordly players before whom the real sector and other critical players must bow. Rather trenchantly, questions are being asked about the content of the administration’s renewed hope that seems to have chosen the wings of despair to sail.

    Surely, the news of the shutdown of Bureaux de Change (BDCs) in Abuja must have come as a surprise to Nigerians. For a segment whose staying power is not so much about how much value it delivers to the economy but one that prides itself as conduit of convenience to all manners of players, licit and illicit, the tremor was something of a revelation about its often-assumed invincibility. While the message pushed to the public in the aftermath of the shutdown was shortage of the greenback, the trigger seems to have been the CBN-orchestrated sinking of the naira to an all-time low of N1,482 at a time the parallel market remained N1,450/$.

    Talk of a desperate season; it has been, for the apex bank, a season of boundless activism. Starting with the rollout of the prudential guidelines on foreign currency assets and liabilities and with it new mandatory reporting formats; to the removal of the allowable limit of exchange rate quoted by the International Money Transfer Operators (IMTOs), such have been the rash of measures that have left many wondering where the apex bank has been all these while.

    All of these, to be sure, indicative of a new resolve to clear the mess – the old, rentier economy of arbitrage, the ruthless betting on the naira and such other derivatives which the banks and their black market allies have perfected while the monetary authorities slept. 

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    Clearly, if panic and its derivative, the plunge in naira’s value best typify the current realities, the underlying message appears to be that things will get worse before they get better. How further down things might be is anyone’s guess. Surely, a lot will depend on the efficacy of the policies cobbled together by the fiscal authorities to address what is by far, a deeper, more complex structural problem.

    However, if the panic stoked by the reported shutdown of the BDCs is to be understood, it is only in the context of the apex bank’s targeted onslaught on the ungoverned spaces which the operators have claimed for themselves but which the CBN has only now chosen to impose a semblance of order. As for the other measures, particularly the payment of in-bound transfers in the domestic currency, the singular message is that the naira remains the nation’s sole, domestic legal tender!

    At issue of course is forex supply. How much do we have in the piggy bank called the foreign reserve? Is it – as the IMF says – $33.12 billion as of February 8, or – as the global financial service firm, JP Morgan once feared in its 2023 estimate –more realistically around the $3.7 billion mark after adjusting three key forex liability lines of FX forwards ($6.84 billion), securities lending ($5.5 billion) and currency swaps ($21.3 billion)?

    Here is how the bank summed up Nigeria’s situation in its Africa Emerging Markets Research dated August 17, 2023: “Net FX reserves are significantly lower than previously estimated…Based on partial information from the audited financial accounts, we estimate that CBN’s net FX reserves were around US$3.7bn at the end of last year, from US$14.0bn at the end-2021”. Has anything fundamentally changed particularly as oil exports have remained on a steady downward curve due to pervasive theft and inadequate investment in upstream infrastructure? Lest I forget, where are the forex earners aside the oil sector?

    While the above somewhat presents the harsh reality, the problem is that some Nigerians actually see the above are theirs alone to be dispensed at their pleasure.

    And to think that some people actually believe that Cardoso’s apex bank, could, with fiat, order the printing of fresh-mint notes of the greenback in the same manner that Emefiele flooded our streets and highways with those worthless wads of naira notes. It seems unlikely that anyone even heard, let alone understand, Cardoso’s treatise that many factors, so complex and variegated, most of which are outside the control of the apex monetary authority, actually determine the inflow into the forex reserves. His sin – an unforgivable one at that – is his insistence of rewriting the narrative of the only economy in the world where it is far more profitable to hawk foreign currencies than engage in truly value-adding economic activities.

    Again, I understand Nigerians’ fixation with the exchange rate. In an import-dependent economy, in it, Nigerians live and find their being! In recent days, we have seen the destruction that devaluation can wrought on a fragile economy. Never mind that cement, one of Nigeria’s supposed success stories, the bulk of whose raw materials are sourced locally, have suddenly seen prices skyrocket. Two weeks ago, a 50 kg bag sold for N5,500; last weekend, it jumped to N7,000! Now, even the neighbourhood yam seller has suddenly perfected the art of indexing his price with international currency movements.

    Surely, Nigerians being rational economists know what to do when the chips are down! It explains why the Cardoso devaluation has been so devastating with prices of everything going up. Still wondering why Nigeria is way different from say a country like South Korea that does not give a hoot about the exchange rate?

    I once wrote on this page of how the Asian country’s currency, the Won exchanged at 1311.85000 KRW/$. The country, an industrial powerhouse, has a vast array of goods and services to export – and so could afford the luxury of a severely weakened currency to boost its exports – unlike the self-acclaimed biggest economy on the continent, which, lacking any appreciable capacity to export anything, relies virtually on oil exports!

    At the very worst, Cardoso and company might be accused of performing a delicate surgery without anaesthesia; what is beyond debate is that the surgery had long been overdue! In any case, surgeries are known to require different skill-sets from anaesthetics!

    So much for the hues and cries over the devaluation: how many Nigerians actually benefitted from the regime of multiple exchange rates? Is it the genuine manufacturer, who after providing the naira cover in his account, is still made to wait endlessly while the banks fiddle with their funds? Or the students and the medical tourists that have long found a way round the pretence called banking?

    Of course we know those for whom the Cardoso pill has become something of a death knell: The highly connected for whom the margin between the official and the parallel market was once worth a pot of gold; the corporate executive for whom over-invoicing is fair game and letters of credit is no more than an instrument of capital transfer; add the bureaucrats, the banks and the bankers for whom the so-called parallel market constitute the surest pathway to unearned wealth.

    Let them suffer the same paroxysms that the rest of us have endured while we turn to the man we elected to get the job done for succour! Welcome to Cardoso’s new, equal opportunity world!

  • Ndume: Hypocrisy of the northern elite

    Ndume: Hypocrisy of the northern elite

    If Nigerians ever needed ample evidence of how tenuous the band that holds the nation’s fabric has remained, and of how utterly hypocritical the leadership of a section of a country is when matters concerning the well-being of the country as a whole is concerned, the furore over the planned relocation of some departments by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) to the nation’s commercial capital has since offered more than the country could have bargained for.

    For if it seems unimaginable that an exercise that should ordinarily pass for routine restructuring to enhance operational efficiency has led to the re-opening of old wounds as indeed the stoking of the age-long animosities that have held the country down, one only needed to be reminded that this is Nigeria – a country where nothing escapes the swirling attention of ethnic revanchists and allied conspiracy theorists.

    Short of pronouncing a fatwa on the Tinubu administration, a section of the country’s elite are suddenly up in arms, fearing the changing political calculus. From what began as barely subdued whispers about a phantom plan by the Tinubu administration to move the seat of the federal government back to Lagos few months back, our ethnic and regional champions, seems to have found some straws to latch to. And guess what, they have, not one but two, to hold on to!

    The first, an internal memo informing staff that the CBN governor, Yemi Cardoso, had pencilled the departments of Banking Supervision, DBS; Other Financial Institutions Supervision, OFISD; Consumer Protection, CPD; Payment System Management, PSMD and; Financial Policy Regulations, FPRD for relocation back to Lagos – an exercise in which 1,533 staff would be affected. 

    Said the CBN memo: “This action is necessitated by several factors, including the need to align the bank’s structure with its functions and objectives, redistribute skills to ensure a more even geographical spread of talent and comply with building regulations, as indicated by repeated warnings from the Facility Manager, and the findings and recommendations of the Committee on Decongestion of the CBN Head Office”.

    Hard to fault? Not so, at least to Nigeria’s sectional leaders. For all they care, the culture of indulgence and waste, under which a privileged few, are availed the monthly luxury of hefty duty tour allowances for what ordinarily should be a desk job, can continue ad infinitum.

    The second, a ministerial directive, ordering the movement of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) to its operational redoubt in Lagos. And this would be followed by a more informed clarification: “Those affected by the decision to move the headquarters to Abuja have since returned to Lagos as there is no office space for them in Abuja. It was ill-advised in the first place to move the headquarters to Abuja when there was no single FAAN building in Abuja to accommodate all of them at once.”

    Yes: two separate but related developments, whose underlying motives were to inject efficiency, rationality and common sense into governance said to amount an open declaration of war on the north by the Tinubu presidency!

    And to imagine that the drum major for this nonsense is Ali Ndume, the chief whip of Nigerian Senate, a distinguished member representing Borno South senatorial district since 2011. Appearing on Channels Television the other day, he belched fire, rage and division, insisting that only a reversal of the two measures would bring peace, going as far as threatening the president with grim consequences should he fail to order a reversal of the measures!

    That is how desperate things can sometimes get.

    Truth unfortunately is that Ndume is not alone. A number of other northern groups have spoken of the measures as aimed at decapitating their beloved north – interpreted as degrading their beloved Abuja. Most notable is the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF). The body, in a statement signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Prof. Tukur Mohammed-Baba on Sunday, described the measures, as reeking in bad faith, and ‘a deliberate ploy to further under-develop northern Nigeria.’

    Said he: “The ACF wishes to remind all concerned that decades ago, the seat of the capital of the Federal Republic was moved from Lagos to Abuja for reasons that remain valid, it is constitutional even more so today, constitutionally so, although, of course, a section of the country never liked the decision”.

    As one writer recently noted, the ACF chieftain rather conveniently forgot that whereas the nation’s key military institutions are almost exclusively located in his beloved north, the south has yet to complain of the need for parity.

    What else have we not heard or read? I even came about an atrocious reportage (online of course) which suggested that relocating the affected departments, being the only departments mentioned in the BOFIA Act [Banking and Other Financial Institutions Act], is akin to stripping the institution of its essence. Yes; that the movement will strengthen Lagos and weaken Abuja – and thus render the latter almost useless. To yet another group, the measure would in the end punish married women from the north!

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    And all of these because, in the opinion of the CBN leadership, the institution would deliver better on its mandate were the personnel to be deployed optimally. Interestingly, FAAN would say exactly the same thing: that moving the institution – not the aviation ministry as disingenuously and erroneously conflated and projected by opportunistic hacks – to its operational base will better serve the needs of its constituency!

    I perfectly understand why the issue has become something of a hot button. Those who wonder what the matter is all about only need to cast their minds back awhile when Godwin Emefiele reigned at the apex bank. That was a laissez-faire era during which children of the powerful not only flooded the bank with their children and relations, but conferred on them the right to dictate the departments where they were to work.

    As one might imagine, it was only a matter of time before the corporate headquarters building exceeded its carrying capacity, following which the bank would surpass its personnel requirement.

    Thanks to the new leadership at the apex bank, that day appears to have come sooner than expected. With the affected staff now expected to live by the rules which others had long taken for granted, it seems hard to think of a greater punishment by a people whose access to power and the privileges it confers had long defined such niceties as an entitlement.

    Now, the joke in town is that those ‘crying adults’ are outraged because their children and wards are affected. How many or how true, we may never know. What we do know and which a former CBN governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, has since attested to, is that the measure contemplated by the apex bank makes eminent sense; and that those at the CBN corporate headquarters are no more Nigerian than those in the field offices in Minna, Yenagoa or wherever. And finally that those who can’t be seen to work within the rules of their organisations have a choice: to move on.

    Surely, Nigeria and Nigerians have seen enough of the blackmail, the negative, ultra-reactionary activism to call out their purveyors be they in high or low places.  It is time to remind them that this is 2024.

  • Betta and other matters

    Betta and other matters

    Even without the benefit of the findings and recommendations of the team empanelled to probe the suspended Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr. Betta Edu, the unofficial jury across the board would seem to have turned in a verdict of guilty as charged on the embattled minister. Talk of a case being messy through and through; if ever there was yet another instance in which an accused public officer is presumed guilty until he or she is able to prove his or her innocence as against the standard prescription of innocence until proven otherwise, this latest case would be it.

    Understandably, Nigerians are angry. The particulars of the alleged offences, as contained in the leaked memo, would ordinarily be unnerving enough without the whiff of embedded criminal intentions. The outline is something that Nigerians have become only too familiar with: a public officer, who should ordinarily know better, flouting service conventions; going far outside of the rules of the Bible of the civil service– the Financial Regulations and the General Orders – to commit the treasury to such ends that are neither transparent nor entirely licit.

    Truth however, is that there are other aspects of the story – still unheard. Sure, while all the attention is currently focused on Betta Edu and all that she allegedly did wrong – ostensibly because she was a high profile public official; it is hoped that the committee empanelled by President Bola Tinubu to probe her and the ministry will in the end do justice particularly in helping to understand all that went wrong.

    By the way, the so-called Official Secrets Act, to which all levels of functionaries are sworn to its fidelity both in letters and spirit, would seem gone, forever. Not when, with a few kilobytes of data, and individual can, armed with a phone, choose to bring down careers built over decades, or if it comes to that, take down the impregnable walls of government secrecy at whim. Welcome to the new age. The sad part is that only a few are yet to appropriately read and digest the signs. Trust me: it is a raging inferno that is unlikely to be put out anytime soon!

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    To get back to Minister Edu; she was of course unlucky. Her crime, as it appears, was the route she chose. She requested Oluwatoyin Madein, the accountant general of the federation, to transfer the sum of N585.2 million from the account of the National Social Investment Office to the private account of one Bridget Oniyelu, the accountant in charge of the poverty intervention project –Grants for Vulnerable Groups – supervised by her ministry, last December. That was her mistake.

    Of course, the latter, a thoroughbred civil servant, refused to honour the request, noting that payments like N585.2 million “are usually processed by the affected ministries as self-accounting entities.” Advising the minister on the appropriate steps to take in making such payments in line with the established payment procedure”, she was mindful enough to put in a rather strong caveat: “No bulk payment is supposed to be made to an individual’s account in the name of the Project Accountant.”

    My question – would the case have been different had she not sought the payment from the wrong quarters as against her ministry where the funds were actually domiciled? In other words, where did the original advice on the funds request come from? Was she acting out of ignorance or plain naivety?

    And then her mistake number: failure to carry the hierarchs of her ministry along. Now, the question is – where in the world were her ministry officials? I mean those officials – the body of directors with the permanent secretary at the apex – that should have guided her to ensure that due process was followed in the processing of the payment? Like Pontius Pilate, their hands are supposed to be squeaky clean? Really? 

    How about the service rules, which designates the permanent secretary as the chief accounting officer of the ministry? And what role(s) did the official play in the entire affair?

    More pertinent: how was it possible for that powerful individual to have been shunted aside in the entire transactions?

    Better still, how did the N585 million manage to get through the layers of bureaucracy without the process being flagged at any point? Assuming the minister so directed that the sum be paid as conveyed in the memo, could she have forced the career officials to flout the rules when they are fully aware of the consequences? Could it be a case of quid pro quo?

    The best we can say at this point is that laws were broken. As to the extent, we do not yet know. However, thanks to  Jim Obazee, the President Tinubu-appointed Special Investigator of Emefiele’s CBN, we are finally coming to terms with the fact that the financial services sector is a major pillar in the national rot. In fact, the sector stinks to high heavens.  Unfortunately, few Nigerians recognise this let alone appreciate that no level fraud of any serious scale can succeed without the complicity of those entities. Call them the off-takers of all stolen funds; whether it is the story of Abdulrasheed Maina of the defunct Pension Reform Task Team (PRTT), and his theft of N2 billion in pension funds, or the similar one involving the one-time Accountant-General of the Federation, AGF, Ahmed Idris and his alleged pilfering of about N84.7billion from the treasury; it seems obvious that the roles of the banks in the continuing rape of the treasury is yet to be fully understood. Now we hear that some N44 billion somehow managed to disappear from the accounts of the National Social Investment Programmes Agency, (NSIPA), under the watch of its top gun, Halima Shehu as well as the laundering of another  N37.1 billion by officials of the same Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs during the tenure of its immediate past minister, Mrs Umar-Farouk.

    How come that none of the banks could flag the suspicious movements of the huge sums from the government accounts?

    It is unfortunate that not a few Nigerians still believe that a lone powerful official – in this instance, Minister Edu – actually pulled off the mess in question without the complicity of some individuals and institutional enablers. It explains why they want the minister kept behind bars with the writ of Habeas Corpus kept in abeyance until all matters – from investigations to her possible trial are concluded.

    Mercifully, the president sees things differently. A thoroughbred system’s man, he knows more than the mob currently baying for an individual’s blood that a thorough and dispassionate inquiry will, in the end, deliver more results than the current mob chants for crucifixion. In the end, there must be a world of difference between fundamentally changing the way things are done and a mob’s demand for instant justice. While the latter, as we have seen all too often, leads nowhere, the former could be sometimes too slow and tortuous. Yet, it is the one that best serves the society.

  • Brood of vipers

    Brood of vipers

    Thanks to Senator Tokunbo Afikuyomi, it seems now unlikely that Nigerians will keep their peace over the activities of a brood that seeks profit in other citizens’ misery. Now that the brood has succeeded in drawing the proverbial ‘first blood’ from no less a personage than the former senator, it seems only apposite to call them out for what they are – brood of vipers. Having invaded the wasps’ nest – so to speak – the moment to unleash the venom of an angry populace may have dawned.

    Of course, it isn’t that the criminal act of hacking into people’s phone by such elements is anything new. In recent time, it would seem to have acquired the status of a sport – the stuff of which most Nigerians would either shrug off, as if nothing happens, or cast as some form of expensive jokes to which another mugu has fallen prey. Yet, when laid bare, the brazen criminality, the attenuating erosion of the public trust the corollary of which endearing relationships are sundered – with the victim, left battered and bruised and in a state of disbelief – are such that the rest of decent society should deservedly take up arms.

    Take one that most Nigerians are only too familiar: An ordinary innocent mid-afternoon call, purportedly, by a member of the WhatsApp group to which you belong, to remind you of a scheduled meeting to which you were neither aware let alone privy to which a code has been sent to confirm your participation. And then as always, a follow up ‘request’ that you let out the code as sent in the course of the usually one-way conversation!

    While those unfortunate to have fallen victims have nothing but bitter tales to tell, the real mystery isn’t just that the perverted technology appears to have long outpaced the capacity of the regulators to address their menace, but the fact that more and more Nigerians continue to fall prey to the devious antics of those fellow citizens apparently sworn to strip them bare.

    Of course, Senator Afikuyomi’s last week’s visitation by the criminal network is neither out of the ordinary nor is the method any new. It is something that thousands of Nigerians suffer almost on a daily basis. On December 23 last year, yours truly would experience the same treatment from the band of outlaws.

    It started with a chat:  ‘Good morning’. That was my sister’s WhatsApp line no doubt, but the line of conversation was so nebulous that it seems fairly easy to decipher that a hacker was at work!

    ‘Please I need a favour from you’

    ‘Oh yeah’ – I replied.

    And then, the garbled English:

    ‘Have been trying to transfer money to someone in Nigeria from my bank account but I have limited (sic) my daily transfer limit.

    And then, he or she went on: ‘I don’t know if you can help me make the transfer to the person’s account details is 200,000 naira is urgent…please will send it back to you first thing tomorrow morning’.

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    That was supposed to be coming from my younger sister in the United Kingdom!

    I chose to play along: ‘Ok. Send your account details. But I’ll do it after I leave my meeting by 1.30 pm.

    And then the ecstatic response: ‘No problem thanks’. He then sent his account details as Happy Amaechi, Account number 5540033816 ECOBANK with the closing words: ‘Please let me know once it is done!

    Guess what my response was: Thanks. You are in deep trouble. I’m sending the details to the police and the EFCC. You are a scammer. The owner of the account surely will have a lot of explaining to do’.

    I would also add, as if in anticipation of possible deletion of the details of the conversation on the WhatsApp that ‘I have already screenshot the details!’ And delete is what he did, promptly.

    But then, yours truly was at least lucky. That was how far things went. Needless to state that I would call a friend who works with one of the security agencies moments later and his advice was that I get my UK-based sister to write a formal petition to enable action to be taken! Well, yours truly is still consulting!

    The former senator wasn’t as lucky. He would later put out a statement, but only after those chaps had wreaked havoc: “Many of my friends so contacted quickly called me up on the regular phone while some others spoke with my aides to alert me. However, unfortunately, a few others did not suspect that anything was wrong. They innocently complied with the fake request and made transfers of millions of naira to the various account numbers in different banks supplied by the scammers.

    Sad; but then, like in every tale of misfortune, there is always some good. He would thereafter swing into action: “I immediately complained to the relevant security and regulatory agencies and I thank the Anti-Fraud unit of the police for springing into action immediately. Their efforts led to identifying some of the account numbers and the details of the respective owners through which the scammers collected various sums of money. The security agents are also already deploying technology to geo-locate the perpetrators. Investigations by relevant agencies are still ongoing”.

    While the result of the investigations are being awaited, he actually gave out the number used as – 0903 – 832 – 6507 said to have been registered to one Ajaye Jaji.

    More than that, he also informed Nigerians of the banks where the transferred funds went including their beneficiaries. One Obinna Emmanuel, with First Bank account number 3209319999 is listed among them. There is also Bolum Emeka Gabriel with a GT BANK account number 0892269924, Taiwo Asanat Moshood, with Sterling Bank account number 0505551217, David Adesina Odeyemi with GT BANK account 0887334716, Bolum Emeka Gabriel with Zenith Bank account 1005557964 and Ndagi Garba with UBA account number 2164307270.

    For those who had sought to pin the fraud on the usual Anonymous Incorporated, now we know that there is no such thing.  The crimes actually have faces and names attached to them.

    As it is, the part that should worry Nigerians is what appears to be the criminal complicity if not negligence of those charged with maintaining the integrity of our critical institutions. Clearly, if you ever wondered at the audacity of the outlaws in an age of a supposedly fraud-proof Bank Verification Number (BVN), an age when the much hyped Know Your Customer (KYC rules) which banks are expected to mandatorily subscribe subsists, still, countless questions must be raised not just about roles of those officials charged with compliance but also the purpose of the biometric exercise.

    No doubt, the good senator has raised the stakes. While his frustration was palpable and perhaps understandable, he has however, sworn not to be deterred: “I must at this stage express my dismay with the lack of due diligence in the bank account opening and maintenance system in our country. This is what has come out so far in the investigation of this phone hacking scam. The scammers opened so many bank accounts without supplying the banks with the necessary security checks and details required by the law. In the same manner, it is now obvious that some of the Over the Top Media Services (OTT) providers do not fully comply with the provision of Nigeria’s Data Privacy and Protection Laws”.

     As for his pledge “to do everything within the law to smash this evil syndicate that has brought pains and tears to many people within Nigeria and those in the diaspora”, it is surely something that deserves the support of every Nigerian.

  • A defining year?

    A defining year?

    For most Nigerians, the salutation – Happy New Year – has come to mean more than usual wishes about the potential good that the new year could deliver. In fact, it has become something of a desperate, high-intensity prayer that the dark palls enveloping the country will yield to the promise of a new dawn. In other words, for the once-upon-a-time happiest people on planet earth, the phrase goes beyond mere routine, temporal transition. It is rather a supplication of sorts for Divine intervention to enable them make a clean break from those dark elemental forces that seek to devalue their humanity – forces beyond their control. Something of a forlorn hope that something, no matter how minute, could still be salvaged from the mass debris that their national landscape had become. 

    Yes, country hard, or as the Americans are wont to say –It is the economy stupid. I understand that these are moments when the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS)’dreary data will hardly suffice to capture the reality that defines the daily grind of the ordinary Nigerian. And it is not as if the fellows at the NBS are not doing their best; it is merely stating that the arc of Nigeria’s moving averages on all of life’s indices are far too complicated no matter whether the measure(s) is/are single or multiplex! 

    New year or not; surely one needn’t a gaze into the crystal ball to appreciate the difficulties that lie ahead in the coming months. Inflation is currently at an all-time high at 30 percent; food inflation is much worse at nearly 50 percent; the few manufacturing entities remaining in the country are practically on life support – no thanks to the combined forces of the crushing foreign exchange regime, infrastructure deficit, and smuggling of cheaper and sometimes fake or substandard products.

    As for agriculture, the sector limps on with farmers either unable to access their farms due to the ravaging insecurity in parts where bandits and other outlaws have taken over or such other structural constraints that Nigerians are only too familiar. In the circumstance, Nigerians can only but wonder if there is anything of promise in the new year.

    Simply put: Nigerians’ anxieties about what the future portends are certainly not without basis. After all, in the energy sector, they have heard such countless deliverables in megawatts of electricity that ended up like the smoke. A nation that in 1964 started and delivered the Kainji Dam in just four years (1968) has since been unable to make a headway on the Mambilla Hydro power project several decades after. Obasanjo came with grandiose promises on thermal plants but delivered nothing after spending a record $16 billion. Nearly two decades after what is supposed to be the revolutionary Power Sector Reform Act, the country is still headed nowhere with our supposed saviour-operators acting more like Ogbanjes as against entities truly out to do business.

    Same with the petroleum sector; surely, few Nigerians remember that Shell D’Arcy actually built Nigeria’s first, 38,000 barrels per day capacity oil refinery at Alesa Eleme near Port Harcourt in late 1965. Possibly, fewer still remember that the military took it over; expanded it, and subsequently, three additional refineries were built to raise the nation’s stake in petroleum refining to 425,000 barrels of crude daily. That was before the locusts took over and ran everything aground. Ever since, the entire country has been locked in a no-motion mode – hung on the debate on subsidy and appropriate pricing of the products, with the country only now looking up to an individual to salvage the situation!

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    Just as tragic is the mess that we have made of our agriculture hence our inability to feed ourselves. As a secondary school student in the late 70s, when the study of agricultural science still made sense, such concepts as agricultural extension services were not textbook stuff; we saw them in live demonstration with farmers interacting with extension workers.

    I recall that in my school – Titcombe College, Egbe, Kogi State, practical agriculture was something that students took delight in; in fact, we actually had a massive orchard that supplied students with citrus in season! Today, most of our so-called policy makers only remember the farmer either when there are intervention freebies to share, or the subject is farmers-herders clashes – something they find handy to rationalise the pervading poverty of ideas at the highest levels of government! 

    Yet we wonder why the country is not only ranked among those on the bottom on the Human Development Index but why poverty stalks around our neighbourhoods.

     Nothing, I dare say, suggests that year 2024 is not going to be different however. At the cross-over service on the eve of the new year, I recall my pastor saying something about the darkest hour of the night being the closet to the morn. That may well be. Only that I cannot now recall if he added that if wishes were horses, that beggars would ride. In other words, if truly Nigerians have gone through such terrible times that it hard to imagine anything worse, that in itself is no guarantee the miracles that they are ever so eager to pray about (and which they have long outsourced to God) will drop without human exertion. Clearly, we can’t be doing things the same way while expecting a different outcome.

    As I see it, only hard work, more hard work and honestly of purpose particularly by actors in and out of government, will make all the difference in year 2024.

    Yes, with or without the crystal ball, I still see hope.  True, the Holy writ speaks of hope deferred as making the heart sick; I believe that we have now reached the point where all things being equal, things should begin to look up. 

    Let me anchor my hope on three things.

    First, I see the coming of the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote Refinery and Petrochemical Complex as something that would revive the wearied Nigerian spirit. Talk of the many benefits – from easing the demand for forex and with it the potential for shoring up the naira’s value, to the multiple jobs along the value chain – Nigerians surely shall, going forward, have many reasons to rejoice.

    Second, I see the power situation improving. Clearly, one needed not to be an incurable optimist to appreciate that the current situation cannot be allowed to continue. It is – and that is putting it mildly – embarrassing. It is hard to imagine President Bola Tinubu – a president sworn to renew the hopes of Nigerians – leaving the initiatives to the current club of clueless operators. I see drastic change in the air. While this might come incrementally, I see it enduring!

    Thirdly – on the security sector – we may have been on the same fruitless spot for so long that many have begun to lose faith. Whereas the Tudun Biri fiasco by the military and the Yuletide massacre by bandits on the Plateau are as unfortunate and regrettable, both incidents have merely brought what I consider a fierce urgency to the quest for a comprehensive solution. I see things beginning to cool down in virtually all the hot spots in the country – under the firm, able direction of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

    I close. I hear Nigerians daily say that things must change. I agree; only that change must begin with you and me. We must start by doing those little things that our common humanity, if not citizenship, demands of us.  Once again, Happy New Year.