Tag: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Yours sincerely was on vacation when Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, President Jonathan’s minister of finance and Coordinator of the Economy took on the self-assigned role of honourary, albeit unofficial adviser to the incoming APC-administration of General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd). I refer to the widely reported media event tagged “A conversation with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala” staged by the second deity in the presidential godhead (apologies to Azu) in faraway Washington. The outing was as one might expect: magisterial, unabashedly prescriptive –with just enough tips for the incoming Buhari administration to either follow or risk a flounder! Stripped of self-promotion and plain hubris, I actually wondered what purpose of the media event sought to achieve coming so soon after the Nigerian electorate had decided that ‘change’ was it.

At first reading, my instinctive reaction was to observe that the reality of that electoral loss may have taken far too long to wear off for the hierarchs of the expiring administration to appreciate that power has indeed changed hands. Or was I expecting too much to imagine that her ilk would fade like a thief into the night as part of the necessary rites to bring our 16-year nightmare under their watch to a closure? After a deeper reflection, it became clear to me the extent to which many, yours truly inclusive, has underestimated the resistance to the promise of change!

Of course, the problems wasn’t just that the same cocktail of measures which, though neither original nor particularly new, but which successive PDP administrations including two of which she was a frontline actor either lacked the nerves or the discipline to push through were being recycled as something novel. Or even the attempt to present the current crisis which took the whole of a decade and half to berth, as one that chanced upon us, as if we didn’t have the crisis of the 80s to instruct us.

Rather, it was her disingenuous way of papering over, if not entirely deflect, Pontius Pilate-like, her direct culpability in the making of the crisis via emergency management fantasies – something that have since become her stock in trade. At once, she would have us pretend that we didn’t know where the rains started to beat us; more than that, she would wish that the contributions of her cast and crew of undertakers particularly their free-wheeling policies simply recede from memory!

Of course, I daresay that only in that foreground could Madam Okonjo-Iweala’s gratuitous offer of advice to the incoming government after nearly 10 years of sojourn in the corridors of power, as honourary adviser, finance minister, foreign minister and finally as finance minister and coordinator of the economy could pass for barely ‘credible’!

Guess most Nigerians – outside of the innermost circle of its unrepentant courtiers, that is – know more than the hierarchs of the departing administration would care to admit about its legacy of broken public finance and unparalleled corruption and profligacy than to take any of their prescriptions seriously. Today, Nigerians must marvel at how our globally acclaimed technocrat, an individual headhunted from the Breton Woods institution to clean up our public finance has only one software of a payroll system to show as evidence of how much work has gone into the clean up, 10 years after! Suddenly, in the twilight of the administration, we are hearing about the hire of a foreign tax consultant said to have delivered additional $500million into the national kitty; now she gleefully recommends this to the in-coming government with a fatuous claim that they could to fetch $3billion over the medium-term!

And now, for crying out loud, our reform-minded minister cannot even pay creditors – you guessed right, fuel importers – without taking to the airwaves to lecture those owed about the virtue of patriotism! Truly, our redeemer liveth! Will somebody get serious?

Talking about the finger-pointing game, isn’t it amazing that our lady is ever too eager to cast the proverbial first stone? For the ‘crime’ of insisting on the sharing the proceeds of the piggy bank – the so-called Excess Crude Account – which the law deems ‘extra-legal’, the governors are adjudged guilty of squandermania before the court of that lone functionary with the double-barrelled office of minister of finance and coordinator of the economy!

Now the question: Which official went on a borrowing spree at a time of unprecedented oil earnings and at such costs that defy logic? Which official insisted that an infrastructure-challenged economy maintain an off-shore savings at a measly two percent while hankering after foreign funds at between 5-10 percent interest?

Should I go on?

What of the free-for-all bonanza of fuel import subsidies under which payments quadrupled in a space of one year? Have we forgotten so soon how the N240 billion budgeted for fuel subsidy under the 2011 Appropriation Act ballooned to N1.2 trillion under the watch of the same pretentious patriot-minders of the treasury?

I haven’t yet settled on the other ‘stain’ that comes close to undoing everything – the unresolved riddle of import duty waivers that top officials of the finance ministry would prefer buried. It started with the claim by Minister Okonjo-Iweala that her ministry approved only N170.73 billion worth of duty waivers and exemptions in three years.  The Customs as the implementing agency would later show that value of waivers processed for the same period was N1.4 trillion!

As against the minister’s claim of N55.96 billion for 2011, N55.34 billion for 2012 and N59.42 billion for 2013, the Customs posted N480 billion for 2011, N480 billion for 2012 and N603 billion for 2013! Imagine, we are talking of a figure that is more than a third of one year’s federal budget lost to the fancies of some top bureaucrats! Years on, while Nigerians waiting for the outcome of the reconciliation and, possibly the justification for the inclusion of such items as aircraft, helicopter, “motor spare parts” furniture, “building materials and cabinet parts for kitchen door drawers”- and wait for it – kolanut in a country battling with high unemployment – our pious minister has long front-loaded a ready defence: ‘Yes, in the past, it wasn’t good but now we have been running a different system for two years.’ Case closed!

It is possible that Madam Okonjo-Iweala served her principals well. However, for change to have its true meaning, it must go beyond the seductions to more-of-the-same preachments of a discredited member of an ancien regime. Nigerians didn’t vote for change for some pretenders to serve them old wines in some refurbished skins.  Good grief if they cannot read the signs that the market is over. It’s the broom revolution, and as they say – of what use is the broom if it cannot sweep clean?

The days ahead promises to be interesting.

Glad to be back!

If you needed evidence of how utterly unimaginative those in charge of the management of the nation’s economy are, one needed to look no further than the placebo rolled out by finance minister and coordinating minister of the economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala last week in response to the latest cycle of falling oil prices. Having the nation live under the throes of “industrial scale theft” under which more than 20 percent of projected earnings from oil are either stolen or unrealisable from month to month, the denial of the emergency could not have come as a surprise to anyone.

Little wonder the assurance by our internationalist finance minister, that the ill-winds winds will soon blow over; hence her cocktail of measures more astounding by their sheer ordinariness. As panacea, the 2015 Budget oil price benchmark is pegged at $73 per barrel as against $78 earlier proposed; now foreign travels by civil servants are axed unless for those deemed as absolutely necessary; the same goes for foreign training programmes except those with foreign sponsorship. To complement the measures is a renewed push to significantly increasing non-oil revenue via an aggressive tax administration under which owners of private jets, yachts and lovers of Champagne and other luxury goods pay more tax.

Nigerians obviously know where all of these are going. Already, the word is out: Nigerians should be prepared to further tighten their belts. For sure, a number of projects with potentials to renew the economy will be put on hold in the next fiscal year. Already, the crunch has created the first victim in the naira. Last weekend, the national currency hit the nadir at N180 to the United States dollars in the parallel market. By the way, with our Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) taking to the hyper-hustling to sell their man, there would be enough time to explain the sudden appetite for the greenback; suffice to say however that the development can only be anything but good news in a nation which relies wholesale on imports all manners of manufacturers.

And just in case anyone is tempted to imagine that the falling oil prices would bring some respite to motorists currently living under the threat of subsidy removal, the truth is that there can be no such thing: whatever differentials that might have existed by the fact of the falling prices have been gobbled in the event of the free fall of the naira! That shouldn’t be hard to understand: it is an in-built logic of Nigeria’s macro-economy.

To go back to the basic point, if Nigerians are any troubled at the remedy proposed, it must be not only from the lack of sensitivity to the issues which informed the belt-tightening in the first place, notably, the wave of exogenous forces which have seen oil fortunes plummet in the global market place. One refers here to the shale oil revolution and the improved fuel-efficiency standards particularly in the United States which have eventuated in the cutback, or as it seems increasingly likely, raises the prospects of elimination of demand by the country for Nigeria’s oil. Add that to the global oversupply by nearly 10 percent of current demands; the picture that emerges is one of a long dark night for oil producers.

This is where the astounding lack of creativity in the design of what is supposed to be the therapy comes as troubling. For while it was sufficient for the authors and finishers of the transformation agenda to mount the high road of cant in their familiar therapy of kicking problems down the road, it was also an instance in which the typically bored but overpaid policy wonks would show their true colours in seeking to present the problem as a fiscal or better still- a budget problem as against what is fundamentally a thinking problem.

No doubt, the slump in the price of oil presents enormous challenges particularly at this time. Never mind that the nation has had to endure the more destabilising phenomenon of oil theft now acclaimed to have attained industrial scale for more than three years running – something an administration less prone to abdication could have brought under control. The assumption here is that the administration sees the former as a greater threat than the former. I guess it is entitled to its delusions.

Howbeit, the choice at this time, is neither one between crying over split milk nor one of endless lamentation over what could have been. To be sure, the choice facing the country over the potential losses from falling oil prices, which at the moment comes to some 20 percent, is hardly one that demands that citizens put on sackcloth and ashes. For sure, the forces can be mitigated by clear-headed policies. The problem here is that those in charge, as yet, do not appear to have any profound understanding of the looming emergency let alone the talk of fashioning an appropriate robust, strategic response. For much as there can be no understating the opportunity cost of the decade of missed opportunities, which the Jonathan administration must see itself as no less complicit, the mundane thinking going on at the highest levels of government, something that The Nation’s perceptive columnist Idowu Akinlotan once described as extravagant lack of ambition, can only further compound the nation’s development dilemma.

Where do we go? Most certainly, the choice cannot be any clearer today than it was a decade or two ago. A thousand austerity measures, to be sure, offers no guarantee of future prosperity; if anything, it might even compound the problems. The challenge therefore seems as simple as finding the formula to unleash the nation’s potentials in manufacturing, in services and in all sectors. It is all about building the capacity of the economy – boosting the skills pool and investment in vital infrastructure. An economic orthodoxy which seeks to lock away the nation’s wealth in foreign shores in the guise of saving for the rainy day seems hardly the best bet in the circumstance.