We gather today in deep respect and appreciation. This nation owes an unredeemable debt to DR. YUSUFU BALA USMAN. His love for Nigeria had no exception.
He cared for us all, the great and the lowly, the rich and the modest, the arrogant and the humble, those from the North, South, East and West. Moslem and Christian.
The beam of his keenintellect was only equalled by the glow of his humanity.
- It has been a decade since the great teacher, researcher, thinker, writer, polemicist, nationalist and pan-Africanist left us to enter into eternity on September 24, 2005.
Yet, the light of his incandescent life continues to shine brightly, showing present and future generations the path to personal and national greatness.
This unique and distinguished institution, the Centre for Democratic Development, Research and Training (CEDDERT) founded by Dr. Bala Usman is an enduring testament to his rare spirit and vision.
I commend the management and staff of CEDDERT for holding aloft Bala Usman’s banner of commitment to truth, equity, human nobility and justice.
- I thank the organisers of this event for considering me worthy to deliver this keynote address. It is an unalloyed honour.
Let me say that Dr. Bala Usman was no stranger to me.
I recall with nostalgia how hard he worked and how we joined hands in common purpose to help achieve the late Chief M.K.O. Abiola’s emphatic victory in the historic June 12, 1993, Presidential election.
So committed was Bala Usman to democratic restoration in Nigeria that he translated Chief Abiola’s manifesto, ‘Farewell to Poverty”, into Fulfude.
4.Reflecting upon that momentous election which might have changed the course of our history had it been allowed to hold, I must sound a caution for our times.
Bala Usman would have been pleased by the result of this year’s contest. It presents a chance for Nigeria to renew its march toward progress based on the ideals Usman espoused.
This change requires more than a change in policies; it requires a change in politics; it requires a change of heart.
5.While we have put forth a new government, too many of us who should be allied in changing the prospects of this nation have failed to put forth a new politics.
They remain mired in the broken ways of yesterday, placing every conceivable personal interest above the national concern.
Had we allowed such blindness to rule us, we never would have accomplished the historic merger that led to election victory and this opportunity for progressive change.
What we accomplished was based on a matrix of sacrifice and cooperation. I have sacrificed much for this day to come to pass.Thus, I want this day to endure.
I have done so by placing the welfare of Nigeria above my own advancement. I have done so because it is a lesson Bala Usman taught us every day of his life.
Those who consider themselves his students should do so not only while reading his books but also in our actions. The proof of our collective endeavour is not to be found in the word but in the deed.
We must remain united in cause – the development of this nation — and must do so from beginning to end.
6.You see, Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman was an intellectual not for the sake of intellectualism. He was an intellectual because he understood knowledge was the most vital weapon a besieged nation and its people could acquire.
Knowledge dismisses the fetters of poverty that many people come to mistake for the natural order of things.
His love of people and wisdom led him to see the economy we were given was not the economy intended for us.
We had become the victims of an unfair economic architecture arising from an unjust history.
- Bala Usman accepted a profound, unique mission. He sought to emancipate us from the yoke of the past, all the time warning that old forms of oppression would give birth to new forms of the inhumane contest for dominion of man over man, nation over nation.
Colonialists might leave; but the injustice they spawned would reshape itself into the imperfections of an independence nominally gained but superficially evolved.
Nigeria was declared a nation. But of nationhood, little was to be found.
We were an independent country but our economy remained the appendage of others. We lived in the shadows of global forces that mocked our economic freedom and democracy.
The nation trembled and stumbled because we were always unsure, afraid or both.
We never knew whether the shadows were our own harmless reflection or that of a force with motives and means sinister to our development.
8.The title of this address, “Towards the Economic Liberation of Nigeria: Bala Usman’s Enduring Relevance”, is patterned on Bala Usman’s 1980 landmark publication ‘For the Liberation of Nigeria’.
In that book, he wrote: “Whatever specific issue or subject they may deal with all these lectures and articles have a single and common engagement.
They are all about the liberation of the people of Nigeria from western imperialist domination at the national and international levels.”
Dr. Bala Usman’s activities as an academic and activist were motivated by his ardent commitment to the complete political and economic liberation of Nigeria as the precursor for the emancipation of Africa and the black man everywhere.
- Ideas he espoused over the decades apply with ever-greater force today. Here I give clear warning.
I do not aim to pay gentle tribute to man so that you may politely applaud once I sit down. Then we all depart upon our merry way as if nothing profound awaits our economic future.
Or, worse, as if the works of Bala Usman are intellectually stimulating but have no practical application to the situation at hand. I reject that notion.
The truth always has relevance. Meanwhile there are many great untruths this nation must erase before they turn our desire for a better Nigeria into something counterfeit.
Unless we embrace the truths that shaped the prescriptions of Bala Usman, Nigeria will remain a land of false mirrors, where we look at ourselves but see something else, a land of past potential but with its future gone astray.
Look, we have expended much too much money to purchase the poverty we now endure. Poverty should be much cheaper than what we suffered to pay for it.
10.Whether his thoughts on the Economic Crisis facing Nigeria, or the Manipulation of Religion for political advantage or his analysis against foreign economic oppression as espoused in his stance against the IMF loan in 1985,
Bala Usman traded only in truth and honesty at a time when neither honesty nor truth was the expected currency of our political discourse.
For decades, Nigeria has danced in close confines with economic disaster. In the past, higher oil prices allowed us to dodge the worst.
We have survived but not thrived. Improvised but not planned. Spent but not invested. Laughed, drank and feasted but did not build, construct or maintain.
Now, Nigeria has collided into a wall, merciless and immovable. The present downturn in oil prices may be more than a slump in the business cycle.
Global economic, geopolitical and technological currents suggest the price drop may be a long-lasting secular development.
11.To maintain market share and influence on the global market, Saudi Arabia keeps production high and prices low.
Should Saudi Arabia slacken production in a material way, North American production may escalate and even seek to capture a share of the export market from Saudi and Russia.
We also note that China is investing considerably in domestic and renewable energy sources. All this means that oil supply is high while demand has flat-lined due to flaccid global economic activity. We will be collateral damage in all of this. However, to us, the damage will not feel collateral. It will be central and it will be hard.
Even during the best of times and high oil prices, the economic model upon which Nigeria is based has poorly served us. That model has precluded broadly-shared development.
The only things its continuity promises are perpetual poverty for most Nigerians and the forfeiture of the best of our economic promise.
Nigeria needs economic liberation.
Before we can free our economy, we must free ourselves of the economic myths consigning us to our current predicament.
To achieve this objective we must return to Dr. Bala Usman. Confronted by the harsh realities of dwindling national revenue occasioned by crashing oil prices, saddled with collapsed infrastructure and an abused and wary citizenry, Nigeria demands a new paradigm.
Here, I must give the Nigerian people their just due. They had a stark and important choice to make during the 2015 election. They could have re-elected the government in place. This would have been the easier thing to do.
Yet, in matters of state and governance, the easiest thing is rarely the right one. Re-electing that administration would have lowered the curtain on our future.
The last government had become threadbare of ideas. They intended to handcuff the people to the mast of austerity, then command that we ride out the storm. Their hope was that the storm would quickly pass.
They forget that economic storms are mostly man-made. Thus, it takes man to unmake them.
12.President Buhari is an earnest leader who seeks to give Nigerians the lives we deserve by giving us a the vibrant economy and uncompromised security. My faith in his commitment to help the people is deep and abiding. He is on the right path and I have faith that he will continue to follow it.
That said, the task before us, is grave and daunting. With oil prices having declined so steeply, the question becomes how must the federal government shape fiscal policy so that we achieve optimal economic production and employment under the given circumstance?
Last year, I published an open letter to then President Jonathan. My critique of his economic policies was informed by the fact that the Nigerian economy had entered a critical stage.
His government was set to foist austerity on the people. This equated to pulverizing their already bruised economic circumstance.
Although, we were in the throes of an election, I thought it is vital that we offer even our opponent the best advice we could give.
He was our president at the time and our overall welfare was in the balance. His failure would be our deepening poverty. Today because he didn’t heed the genuine advice we are faced with a threatening depression.
Let me recall my opening statement.
“No matter who is in power, we must do whatever is in our capacity to do, to steer the nation away from economic woes. The people have suffered too much hardship already”.
I submitted that Nigeria’s economy was indistinguishable from one in the state of a chronic depression.
- The contours of the economic challenge facing government must be clearly postulated so that we see the vastness between where we are and where we should be.
The first order of business is fiscal in nature. Do we continue to peg our naira expenditures to our dollar intake or do we affix our domestic expenditure to a measure more apt to grow the economy?
To continue to link the government’s naira expenditure to dollar intake is to allow the decisions of foreign actors to hold undue influence over our fiscal policy. There is no logical necessity that foreigners’ taste for oil must determine our fiscal expenditures.
While no economy is completely independent, this linkage amounts to servitude so restrictive that it is as if the colonial tether was never severed.
Some will say the dollar linkage is fiscal prudent or they defend the practice by asserting this is the way we have always done it. But haven’t we also always fallen short?
This is not prudence. It is the strange vocation of being pennywise yet pound foolish. Perpetuating this linkage will confine us to the single-commodity economic model in such a manner making us further delude ourselves that we must adhere to this linkage even more. All the while, our national privation will become our main growth industry.
The second order of business has to do with the extent to which government helps direct and encourage private sectors activity. Do we allow ourselves to be slaves to the forces of the market even though we know that the market itself is not free?
Or do we engage in some level of national industrial, infrastructure and employment planning, as has every large and important nation that has ever achieved prosperity – from England, to the United States to China?
Regarding fiscal policy, I advocate the close dollar linkage be explicitly broken. The last I looked, Nigeria operates a Naira-based economy, not a dollar-based one.
The last I looked, the federal government has the sole power and sovereign right to issue naira or financial guarantees based thereon. It does not need the approval of the American Federal Reserve, the Bank of England or of the host of global oil buyers.
There is no innate legal or moral restriction strictly limiting the amount of Naira or the value of Naira-denominated guarantees placed in the system to spawn employment to match the amount of dollars collected via oil sales.
Oil is a passive asset in the ground. When cash-strapped yet in need of more revenue presently, a nation should also consider issuing guarantees on the future oil shipments on a price certain paid now; or selling a portion of its equity in the joint ventures.
Some may call this a variant of an oil futures. Whatever it is called, it should be considered particularly as a measure to improve our foreign currency position.
