By Charles Onunaiju
In 2011, the U.S multinational financial services cooperation, Fidelity Investments coined the acronym MINT in reference to the then, potentially emerging economies of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey.
The choice of the countries then considered emerging economies with potential to realize economic growth were based on certain geographic, demographic, and economic factors.
The acronym MINT was later to be popularized by the British economist, James O’Neill of the Goldman Sachs, an international banking, investment and assets management conglomerate.
O’Neill had earlier in 2001 coined the acronym BRIC in reference to Brazil, Russia, India, and China, as emerging global economic heavy weights.
In 2006, the four original BRIC countries began a formal dialogue and in 2011 the group admitted South Africa to make it BRICS. Not only has the BRICS countries emerged as important global players but are reshaping the world’s financial and economic architecture.
In 2014, the BRICS founded the New Development Bank based in Shanghai China to “support public or private projects through loans guarantees, equity participation, and other financial instruments”.
The core aim of the bank is to mobilize funding for infrastructure and sustainable development. Its unique ownership structure is that all members hold equal shares and no member has veto power.
The story of the BRICS is essentially the translation of potential into concrete reality as the group accounts 42% of world population, also represent about 30% of global GDP.
The MINT, though not formally organized as the BRICS were equally, an optimistic group of countries, following in the footsteps of the BRICS as emerging economies with potentials to build international economic clout and affect the global outlook.
Among the MINT countries, Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey fulfilled the manifest destiny of emerging, middle-income economies and are now permanent members of the Group of 20 high performing economies.
The G20 is the exclusive club of top global economies and also premier forum for international cooperation on the most important aspects of the international economic and financial agenda.
It brings together the world’s major advanced and emerging economies and consists of the European Union and 19 others – Argentina, Australia, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom of Britain and the United States of America.
Nigeria, ostensibly the largest economy in Africa was the only country among the MINT hopefuls that did not make it to the G20 of the world top performing economies.
Altogether, the G20 economies are said to account for about 90% of the Gross World Product (GWP), 80% of global trade, 2/3 of the world population and an estimated half of world land area.
Missing out in the list of 20 top world performing economies for which her peers in the MINT are all members, Nigeria the 7th largest populated country after China, India, America, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan, remained a potentially crippled economic giant, with little prospects of breaking to the big league of world’s leading and emerging economies.
At the founding of G20 September 1999, Nigeria was said to be favourably considered, but institutional weakness, endemic corruption and skewed economic growth were considered formidable obstacles.
And the only summit of the G20 and select African countries held in Berlin in 2018, Nigeria was not invited. Why has a hugely endowed nation with both material and human resources so lagged behind while its peers climb in quantum leaps, the ladder of economic progress.
Institutional weakness is at the base of Nigeria’s perennial dilemma. Despite elaborate outlines of constitution and other key regulations, manipulating the formal state institution and up-ending the due process is the well-known art of Nigeria’s political class and other key players in the country’ public life.
Institutions largely function as mere façade, for which nocturnal and primordial interests essentially manipulate to realize goals of wealth accumulation, ethnic hegemony and other sundry perverse goals that are not overtly or explicitly outlined in the constitution or any other regulatory framework.
Because the frameworks of formal state institutions are mostly farcical, it is unable to inspire, motivate or mobilize the latent human resource of the huge population into a national asset to prosecute the agenda of sustainable and inclusive economic development.
The state elite maintain a stranglehold on the fringe of Nigeria’s economic endowment of oil, gas and other mostly service sectors like telecommunication and banking because of its huge and quick returns while leaving aside the more tasking job of turning the abundant human assets into national capital for critical and strategic investments.
The human capital remained essentially untapped because of low investment to develop and harness it. All these require long term planning and investment, but the Nigeria’s power elite thinks and plans only for the next elections.
Saddled with weak institutions with opaque functions, Nigeria’s economic prospects have languished in a perennial cycle of potentiality.
Elite consensus on political accommodation and method of recruitment to public institutions has ensured that the process produces mediocrity, depriving the country the service of its best materials.
Corruption is everywhere in the world but the only difference with Nigeria is in the consequences. Elsewhere, corruption has dire consequences for the perpetrators but in Nigeria, the consequences mostly consist of higher political office, traditional titles, social and national visibilities and even popular acclaims.
No doubt, the current administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has done more than any of its predecessors to tackle corruption and even punish its perpetrators but his effort is little more than a tiny drop in an ocean that is saturated with assorted sharks, hippos, and other corruption kingpins.
The structural enabler of corruption is the weak state institutions, and fighting corruption without tinkering with its underling infrastructure is basically a public relations stunt without any possibility of institutional entrenchment.
The internal mechanism of Nigerian state is weak and highly compromised by vested and vicious interests and a democratic process, whose institutional process is under durable assault risks incremental and expansive hollowness from within despite the paraphernalia of its outward appearance.
The world largely pay attention to the substance and not the colour and style and because of this, Nigeria has no seat on the table, among comity of nations whose destinies are to outline, shape and influence the trajectories of the human condition.
Despite the missed opportunities, the Nigeria power elite has neither reckoned nor feel ashamed that they are punching far below the country’s potential and manifest destiny.
And the big issue is that they are not even ashamed and are unable to do the essential stock-taking that is the criteria for a catch-up.
- Onunaiju is senior research fellow at Abuja based Think Tank
Leave a Reply