For daring to put its snout into the Nigerian trough uninvited, and also for going as far as to proffer an endorsement to Tinubunomics at a time the wailing tribe have desperately sought to declare it a disaster, a good number of Nigerians have since drawn the daggers at the Breton Woods institution – the World Bank.
So much for his audacity for saying what most Nigerians probably hate to hear about the twin pillars of Tinubu administration’s reforms – the removal of fuel subsidy and abolition of the multiple foreign exchange regime introduced by the current administration – the World Bank Country Director for Nigeria, Ndiame Diop insists that while the reforms may bring hardship, they are actually the tonic needed at this time to ensure the nation’s long-term stability.
“Reversing these reforms would be detrimental and would spell doom for Nigeria”, he was quoted to have said.
The bank’s Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, Indermit Gill, would echo a similar sentiment: Nigeria requires the next 10 to 15 years of the reforms to establish itself as a leading economic power, in sub-Saharan Africa and the global stage.
I guess that it does matter that the message is coming from a quarter that most Nigerians have come to loathe. After all, Nigerians are only too familiar with the Breton Institutions with their misery-inducing conditionalities. Such have been their meddling in the political economy as indeed our officials’ wild embrace of their doctrinae prescriptions, warts and all, that Nigerians’ patriotic instinct should ordinarily be roused into action at the mention of their name.
Yet, for the tribe that have long gone past convincing about the current path as being anything but ruinous, they are free to see the endorsement as taking nothing from an assumed toxic brew, but rather as supplying a quick-acting, but no less lethal enzyme to the mix!
So much for the Tinubunomics and its lofty promises of renewed hope; the metrics, some 17 months after, not least the harsh realities that Nigerians are forced to contend with, are to say the least, dispiriting. And so also the pains that Nigerians are forced to bear together with the palpable frustrations that have attended to them. Not discounting the palpable anomie and the helplessness in the face of the increasingly unbearable cost of surviving the current time.
My question: couldn’t these have been foreseen; or better still, couldn’t these have been foreseeable? Shrugged off as many are wont to about the answer which are in plain sight, it seems to have been long settled that the demon, of which Nigerians and their utterly irresponsible elite has long opted to live in its denial, will somehow have to be confronted someday. That is the essence of Tinubunomics, an exigency forced on the nation in the moment of dire emergency.
It is precisely why those fingering the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as the author and finisher of the ongoing reform and so blame them for the current predicament, alongside their partners framing the issues as ideological could not be more wrong! In fact, the old anger about some external bodies forcing an unpopular pill down the throat of a hapless nation would seem not only diversionary but an extension of that old culture of denial that birthed the lingering debate on the subsidy.
The point really is that the problems are ours to fix; aside the plain common sense of it, it is hard to see anything that remotely suggests a meddling by any external body in what the government has done.
But then, as the government may have also now realised that forcing a shift from the programmed misapprehension of the subsidy question by a section of the vociferous elite is not exactly the same as getting the majority of Nigerians to accept either the fact or the justice of it. One thing is clear though: to say that Nigerians are no more convinced that the government acted right on the matter than they were pre-May 29, 2023 is merely stating the obvious. Sadly, none of the argument about the quantum of under-recovery known to run into trillions every year, the industrial scale smuggling of our relatively cheaper fuel across the borders, seems to have settled anything.
The same could be said of the merging of the forex rates. The government’s explicitly stated rationale about dismantling the arbitrage-laden infrastructure that characterised the old forex management regime might seem the right thing for all times and seasons, not a few, apparently, are still of the persuasion that the forex regime under which those connected to the corridors of power had free passage to a world of wealth without work through discretionary forex allocation should still be in place!
As it appears, the problem isn’t just that the government chose to tread a difficult, but sensible path, but that an institution like the World Bank also thinks it is the most pragmatic thing to do! And that in our clime is supposed to be treasonable! Can anyone beat that?
World Bank officials or not – Nigerians surely, do not deserve the programmed confusion that have trailed them. For nothing in the consequential measures undertaken by the administration could be deemed to be outside of what the then candidate Tinubu said he would do. And surely, the administration has never been in denial about the pains that would be associated with the measures. As for those having problems with the prerogative of an elected government to undertake such reforms as it deems proper and right for the people, they are certainly entitled to their fantasies; only that administration will not be judged by those standards as much as the ultimate deliverables.
I guess takes us to the final point. Surely, the administration has assured that the current pains are temporary. It has to be. With Nigerians currently are at the tipping point, the challenge is for the government to make the people feel the impact of the various ameliorative measures it has put in place.
Take the CNG initiative as an example, the government still has a long way to deepen its penetration particularly among the commercial transport workers. At the moment, the progress in that sector would seem too slow given the dire emergency currently facing the country. Same with the other broad initiatives rolled out by the government; somehow, they have been rather tardy in delivering on their objectives. Now seems the best time for Nigerians to begin to see results.
As for the exchange rate, this columnist has made the point before: there is nothing sacrosanct in the exchange rate. The only solution is for the country to export more. We know the challenge with oil production; the problems in that sector are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. As an alternative, there has to be a renewed focus on the non-oil sector. Thus far, Nigeria seems to have made a bad job of it!
Time in view, for a strategic rethinking of the economy!
