Former Lagos State Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu and United States’ Consul-General Brian Browne have advocated a new economic model to solve Africa’s economic problems.
The National Leader of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and Browne, in a book, entitled: Financialism – Water From An Empty Well, noted: “Most of our leaders’ economic knowledge boils down to hearsay and scattered tidbits of information acquired by random incident.”
The book is to be launched today in Lagos.
The continent’s leaders, according to the book, “promise our people something new yet remain chained to the economic myths and policies of old. Their mouths are free to say anything and that they do. But their minds are bound and gagged by what they do not know as well as by the false knowledge that possesses them.”
The book described the Nigerian masses of being victims of a recurrent betrayal.
“With leaders ignorant or indifferent, the people are bewildered. They realise something is deathly wrong, that a fraud is being perpetrated, but they don’t sufficiently understand the principles of economy enough to know that what is done to them is not only wrong but also unnecessary.”
The book said “Financialism” serves an important purpose because it provides the people with a clear understanding of alternatives, more just economic principles than the ones that currently rule.
”On the scale of scientific objectivity, it lies somewhere between the reading of tea leaves and the 19th century elitist pseudoscience of craniotomy. Yet, we have been hoodwinked into seeing these old economic fairy tales as the perfection of the financial markets and the need for government deregulation of the economy as truths inviolate. We have been had, our financial bones have been picked clean by e swindle,” according to the book.
The authors not only delved into the proximate causes of the financial meltdown, they also provided a readable yet intelligent summary of the economic history and evolution of thought that have brought about the transformation of capitalism into its more ruthless progeny, financialism. The authors however, ”warned that if we allow financialism to continue to hold sway, our world will be one of frequent crises and a growing inequality of wealth. The current upheaval in the eurozone is evidence of their prescience. Theirs is a warning that must be heard and acted upon if African nations are to exit the gravitational pull of chronic poverty.”
They are not satisfied with analysing the problem. They have taken on the task of offering practical, if at times, radical solutions to what ails our political economy. They are humble enough to know their prescriptions are not a panacea. Yet this book is a huge step in a corrective direction for it offers important policy insights, such as the creation of a national industrial policy and the reform of government borrowing practice, that would create much greater fiscal policy latitude so governments, particularly those in Africa, can focus more attention and funds on genuine development while steering away from processes that lead toward increased levels of financial speculation.
The book also delved into the 2008 financial meltdown and how it undermined black people.
The authors in the book regretted that while such meltdown lasted, “blacks in the leadership and policy mainstream in Africa and the Diaspora simply wait to be told what to think and then bear down on the rest of us, mouthing authoritatively ideas and words they acquired as intellectual beggars”.
