Tag: The Nation newspaper

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is sure in prime “advisory” mood, the way it shells out advice, literarily by the dollar!

First, IMF’s loving lament, like some hot lover in scalding tryst, on Nigeria’s account.  Now, IMF is the hot lover.  Nigeria is the coy partner.

The language of love — now, not those guttural sweet nothings lovers trade in the “other room” but the hot exchange of the international economy — is Nigeria’s rising loan activity with China.

IMF is asking Nigeria to slow down on the China loan track.  Too many booby traps, it claims without exactly using those words, are there to snap you into international peonage, with China, which takes no prisoners, as the new international slave driver!

What is unclear though, is IMF’s angst.  Does it want to repudiate international capitalist peonage?

Or it simply resents the rude reality that China is emerging a hot rival to the monstrous metropolitan powers IMF represents, and on behalf of whose economies it spreads African and Third World under-development, wrapped in sweetened “reforms”, to further consolidate the Western economic hegemony on the globe?

Whichever way, it’s good lesson for Nigeria, even as the Buhari Presidency continues to ramp up infrastructure, under an alternative economic paradigm — infrastructure that decayed, no thanks to high corruption, during the supreme reign of Breton Woods orthodoxy, in the Nigerian economy, with disastrous consequences.

For Nigeria, it would be tragic indeed, to exit Western peonage but be snared in China’s.  There is no comfort in any slave chamber, no matter how gilded its chains.

But it all boils down to fighting corruption with rigorous accountability.  Those loans must be used for the infrastructure they are meant; and everything must be done to ensure steady cash flow, from the new modernized rails, as booming mass transit business.

That way, you pay back your loans without much stress, and move on to other mutually beneficial partnerships.  So, throwing the scarecrow, on the Nigeria-China loan issue, cannot be enough reason to clamber back to IMF and co., and their cruel conditionalities.

Truth be told: Nigeria’s infrastructure, though still on the mend, is clearly far better served, with less than four years of Chino-Nigeria collaboration, than under Western capitulation, from 1986 under IBB-era SAP; and its various policy mutations, since 1999, under the Obasanjo era, that terminated in 2015.

IMF has also been singing some not-so-new love songs on the fuel subsidy question — and Zainab Ahmed, Nigeria’s Finance minister, appears already getting charmed!

The IMF song isn’t new — remove petroleum subsidy, and divert the gains to social services, blah, blah, blah!  That sick deja vu is rattling, for we had heard such humbug, that amounted to nothing, in the past.

Let PMB and his government be told: petroleum subsidy is a wrong policy price the government has to pay.  However it pays it is its own business.  So, if the minister sings a tune that Breton Woods makes sense, Hardball hopes she remembers the import-processed-petroleum-journey-to-nowhere, was integral to IMF’s orthodoxy, which the Obasanjo-era again embraced like merry serfs. That dumb policy has greatly contributed to the present-day economic cripple.

So, the minister should not delude herself the government would pass the so-called subsidy to the people and not face bitter resistance.  Instead, let the government  ramp up the processes of local refining.  That way, subsidy dies a natural death — and everyone lives happily ever after!

Besides, this republic should have strong voices that speak for the poor and the vulnerable.  Enough of this elite selfish agenda, that pass the huge cost of avoidable policy mistakes on to the mass of the people — in form of the so-called “subsidy removal”.