Penultimate Monday July 13, the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ), Lagos, held the seventh in its series of annual lectures in honour of the Nigerian Nobel Literature laureate. The venue was Abuja Sheraton Hotel and Towers and the theme “Nigeria and the Oil Fortune.”
Not being an oil man himself, the reason for the centre’s choice of Malam Nasir Ahmad el-Rufa’i, the governor of Kaduna State, as guest speaker was not quite apparent. But then as a self-styled “accidental public servant”, the first class quantity surveyor has had an abiding interest in public policy and public finance for many years. So it was no accident that WSCIJ picked him to speak on what is probably the most topical issue facing an oil-rich country that has virtually bankrupted itself precisely because it is oil rich!
El-Rufa’i’s over 3,000-word lecture reminded me of the trademark one-inch column front page editorials New Nigerian was famous for in its halcyon days. Those editorials were compulsory readings if only for their style, syntax and substance. This particular one was published 41 years ago last month – on June 29, 1974, to be precise. At that time the late Malam Turi Muhammadu was editor and Malam Mamman Daura, nephew of, but older than, President Muhammadu Buhari, its managing director.
Entitled “Oil Money: Honey or Poison”, that editorial is to me the most prophetic any Nigerian newspaper has ever written in post-colonial Nigeria. For that reason alone – not to mention its precision, clarity and relevance even today – it is worth reproducing in all its roughly 460-word length.
“It is,” the editorial said, “commonplace to say that Nigeria is at the moment very lucky because of oil revenues. In a very real sense we have much more money than our system can absorb. Unofficial estimates put the figure added to our reserve this year at N2,000m. In many essential respects this bounty has been a blessing. It has enabled us to repay some of our outstanding foreign loans, liberalised commercial and industrial policies and has enabled increased revenue to be diverted to building of modern infrastructure commensurate with our executive capacity.
“But the reverse side of this coin is painful to contemplate. The nature and source of oil money put it in a class of its own. A few years ago, a disturbing international report was published arguing in stark terms the failure of all underdeveloped oil producing countries to make more than marginal use of their splendid fortune. No effort is involved on our part. It is the foreigners who employ their capital and skills to exploit this resource and we simply receive huge autonomous additions to our national income.
“Such un-worked for riches can land a country in trouble of a peculiar kind. There is soulless opulence of the few, in evil contrast to crushing poverty of the many. There is unimaginable corruption and disastrously wrong allocation of resources. Above all there is the absence of hard work without which the country cannot pull itself together. In that sense the oil money becomes poison rather than honey. How will an economic historian 50 years hence explain the relative expenditure on agriculture and on the various forms of so-called “culture”: All-African Games, Black Arts Festival and all the rest of it? He must conclude that we had taken leave of our collective senses.
“Happily, in the Nigerian case, the situation is by no means irretrievable. We could deploy considerable energies and resources in producing a commodity which is more important even than oil: food. We must at all costs get agriculture on the move again. There are millions of acres lying fallow when they could be used to grow food for our burgeoning population. The setting up of the two River Basin Commissions is a great step in this direction (although the staffing has ensured that the two schemes would not take off for some time.)
“Nor are we unmindful of individual state efforts. But fiddling about with N10-15m is just like one grain in a silo. We need a monumental plan. A N500m plan with the help of, say, Danish and Chinese experts under our direction, would do wonders for grain productivity in this country. We may or may not have oil in 50 years. But to survive we must have food. The ground work can be done now.”
The New Nigerian’s economic historian still has nine more years to go before he enters his verdict on how we have managed our oil fortune. Yet even today the historian would be dead right to conclude that we took leave of our collective senses long, long time ago.
In five years of Goodluck Jonathan’s presidency alone, for example, Nigeria, el-Rufa’i quoted United States Department of Energy as saying, earned nearly $500 billion from oil and gas trade, which comes to a stupendous N130 trillion! Yet today most human development indices say 40% of Nigerians, or about 70 million of them, live well below poverty line obviously because we’ve blown away all that good fortune in an orgy of incredible waste and venality.
It all reminds one, again, of a survey The Economist published about the state of Nigeria’s political-economy in its edition of May 3, 1986, a few months after our soldiers overthrew the fiscally reckless Second Republic under President Shehu Shagari and Muhammadu Buhari took over as military head of state.
“Nigeria,” the newsmagazine said in its abstract of the survey, “has had a stupendous party, but the wine merchants forgot to collect their money in advance. Now the debt collectors have arrived to find the winnings spent, the bottles and glasses mostly broken or stolen by the guests, and the soldiers who came in to keep order shooting each other.”
Twenty nine years on after The Economist’s survey it’s like we are back exactly where the Second Republic ended, only far worse and only also that instead of khaki, the same Buhari has returned in mufti to clean up the huge mess left by 16 years of PDP misrule.
Last time he hardly had enough time to start cleaning up the mess before he was thrown out in a bloodless palace coup. The question is, can he do the job this time, especially now that he cannot simply order people around? To rephrase this question using the words of the theme of el-Rufa’i’s speech, can a civilian President Buhari turn Nigeria’s oil misfortune into a fortune?
Like most ordinary Nigerians, el-Rufa’i believes the president can – provided he can slay what the governor has described as three “huge dragons” that stand in the way, namely “(1) a fixation with public ownership and control of every major oil asset, (2) the corruption and distortion that oil subsidy is inflicting on our economy, and (3) the NNPC in its current form…”
Put simply, el-Rufa’i’s solution is that the president should privatise our refineries, remove fuel subsidy and abolish the NNPC as it is, whereby, as he said, it has, at least since 2012, kept about 42% of its revenues meant for the federation, for its self-aggrandisement!
El-Rufa’i is, in a sense, right about fuel subsidy and NNPC in so far as they are creatures of the corruption that has eaten deep into the nation’s fabric. However, I am not so sure about his own fixation with privatisation. Public ownership of the means of production may have its downsides but then so also does private ownership. We have, for example, privatised our banks and our airlines but they have hardly been any more efficient or transparent than they were. Even the relatively successful privatisation of our telecommunications industry hasn’t made it as efficient as it can be, given its huge profits. The truth is, good governance and transparency, and even efficiency, is no preserve of any ideology.
As for the corruption that has eaten into the nation’s fabric, the problem is not so much corruption itself but the impunity with which it has been practised. After all, no society can be corrupt-free. What is important is to make sure people see that there will in the end always be a day of reckoning, no matter anyone’s station in life.
To succeed in this fight against impunity, the president, as el-Rufa’i said in his speech, needs every support he can get from the media and civil society organisations (CSOs), for no other institutions in the society have the power for advocacy, education and enlightenment that the media and CSOs possess.
Only time will tend how consistent the president will be in his war against impunity and how much support the media and CSOs will give him.
Re: Asiwaju and the National Assembly leadership crisis
Sir,
I refer to the above article of last week and wish to submit that Chief Akande should have used the phrase “Most Nigerian elite” instead of “Northern elite” and that the conspiracy was against APC as a party and Buhari’s anti corruption crusade and not against the Yoruba.
Secondly, you mistakenly wrote that APC has 69 senators. The correct number is 59.
Ademola Akande,
Port Harcourt. +2348057224608.
Sir,
The APC leadership should realise that the party is no longer ACN but a conglomerate of different political tendencies. Therefore, it should consult with all stakeholders and interests before rolling out decisions. Buhari’s government has had its task cut out for it, which is enormous. The crisis his party is witnessing at the moment is a distraction. Time is ticking and people are expecting action and not altercation.
Adewuyi Adegbite. +2347013065440
