Towards a stable economy

By Ehizuelen Franklin Imafidon

SIR: There is no right-thinking Nigerian that doesn’t know that we are in the middle of full-blown economic crisis as a nation. As a country, we have admitted that we are in the midst of a recession twice. Few months ago, the governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki bluntly asserted that the situation has become so bad that the government now prints money to pay salaries, which is really an escapist way of sustaining an economy. Any good economist will tell you that the economy grows by manufacturing, human capital development, export and distribution; nothing else works whether it is a capitalist or communist economy notwithstanding.

Professor, Pat Utomi on the August 3, 2017, in his article titled, “Is Nigeria going to be the next Haiti?”  sounded a wakeup call, and buttressed the need for diversification as soon as practicable. He opined that by 1789, Haiti plantation economy had the highest per capital income in the world ahead of Britain, Germany and United States of America, yet today the same Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere simply because it refused to diversify. And so, when the need for sugar dropped, the economy collapsed. Amazingly, this is the same mistake Nigeria is making today.

It is said that a people that refuse to learn from history will soon become the victims of history. There is a lesson that we need to learn here. Nigeria’s pre- and post-Independence economy depended totally on agriculture: groundnut, cocoa, rubber and palm oil. These crops made Nigeria to be projected as a future world power only for the Haiti syndrome to happen when the black gold was discovered. Nigeria gradually became lazy and transited into a monolithic economy, depending solely on oil, and on the mercy of the global oil price and OPEC politics. This is so different from what Dubai did with the wisdom of Sheikh Mohammed bin Al Maktoun. According to him, the Dubai miracle happened when he asked himself what will happen if one day oil is no longer needed in the world, without any other resources to sustain the Arab economy and without the option of going into agriculture at the time. He started investing in tourism and today, Dubai is the world’s number one trade and tourism destination. Then, the country also started investing heavily in technology, human capital development, education and agriculture. Incidentally, Nigeria is still a sleeping giant coupled with the curse of incessant clueless leaderships.

The earlier we diversify the economy, the better for us. Unlike Haiti, we have already been dubbed the global poverty capital. Security is not our friend, so we are not even sure of foreign investment neither does the world strongly depend on oil as it did in the 70s and early 90s. The world today is seriously going green, some countries have already given a deadline to ban the use of oil and any car that is not electric.

So, what do we do?

Without doubt, agriculture is our best bet. According to the World Bank, agriculture currently employs 65-70 per cent of the African workforce, supports the livelihood of 90 per cent of Africa’s population and accounts for about a quarter of the continent’s GDP. Yet, she is unable to build on agriculture to meet 21st century scientific standards for export, distribution and mass production. We are still at the subsistence level. We are a continent with 70 per cent of farmers yet we can’t even feed ourselves. We still depend on export, digging the soil with hoes and spades with a soil potency that is only 40 per cent cultivatable not to talk of the herder-farmer crisis which is already a heavy impediment to farming.

Akinwunmi Adesina, the African Development Bank president once said that the size of food and agriculture will rise to one trillion dollars by 2030. The population of Africa, now 1.2 billion will double to 2.5 billion by 2050. They all must eat and only through agriculture and agribusiness can we achieve that.

There is no better time for Nigeria to take agriculture seriously other than now. It will save us from further economic collapse, wholesale unemployment and famine. But this will need planning, funding of research and increase in budgetary allocation to agriculture and then intentional implementation, else we are already doomed be the next Haiti.

• Ehizuelen Franklin Imafidon

Better Nigeria Advocacy and Empowerment Initiative, London.