Nigeria Economy | |
Nigeria Economy | |
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Monday, November 12, 2018 11:05AM / OpEd By Tope Fasua /
Image Credits: Silent Touch
While everyone else is busy pursuing Buhari’s WAEC certificate -
something he clearly doesn’t have and which does not matter as much as we make
it - the economy has collapsed. Everywhere I turn we see all the debris, the
remains of a once promising economy. The carelessness, mismanagement and open
looting has never been worse and the figures show it. Nigeria is at its
tethers’ end.
I was busy trying to call attention to the severe and permanent
under-provisioning by the Nigerian government for our people. There is nothing
I haven’t done to open people’s eyes to the travesty that is the Nigerian society
and economy. I did an analysis that showed clearly that Nigeria is the laziest
country on earth in terms of leveraging its GDP.
Year on year, thinking, caring countries budget half their GDPs to
reflate their economies. The velocity of government spending in those
countries, is remarkable. Governments strive hard to be responsible to their
people by scaling up their provisioning via their annual budgets. But in
Nigeria the government prefers to go to town bragging about its large GDP and
how ours is the largest economy in Africa. The USA budgets 36% of its GDP
yearly on the average. South Africa budgets 30%. Ghana 26%. Tunisia 22%. Kenya
26%. Algeria 40%. Norway and Austria budget 50% of their GDP yearly.
But consistently, our dear country via its lost and wicked leaders have
budgeted for us as if they were budgeting for ants. And the little they budget,
they promptly embezzle. Our budgets hover consistently somewhere around 5% and
6%. As embarrassing and starkly evident as this is, even educated Nigerians
don’t believe it is an important issue. Many ask me where will the government
will find money for a larger budget, forgetting that the other countries I have
mentioned have simply got themselves organized better in order to unleash
productivity and therefore revenue.
Nigeria is an embarrassment to the concept of nationhood as is. I
have never seen where a people will deliberately punch beneath their weights
and where leaders will perennially and deliberately impoverish their own
people. The world is watching. And I have now seen clearly, that this country
is next set for self-destruction. What goes on here is unacceptable. One thing
all this mediocrity does to us is to make us all weak and vulnerable, ready for
the picking.
Where do we start from?
The Vice President recently tried to play a fast one on the people of
Nigeria by claiming that the Buhari/Osinbajo administration has only added
$10billion to our national debt. I felt sad because here is a church pastor
that we all respect. I was the first to call out Amina Mohammed, Nigeria’s
former Minister for the Environment - now an Undersecretary at the United
Nations - when she erroneously claimed that Dr Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala took
Nigeria out of debt but that the government she had served had now put us back
in debt. Indeed Okonjo may have ‘taken Nigeria out’ of the $36billion we
owed in 2006, but she promptly dumped us back in. Voodoo economics did the job.
I still recall all the economic gobbledygook they peddle while we scream and
complain that they are headed in the wrong direction. And so when she was
departing for the second time, Nigeria owed $63billion. Now we owe a tidy
$76billion and the debt is still climbing. How can we dig ourselves out of
$76billion when we needed an amnesty to clamber out of $36billion. We are
therefore certainly in a debt trap, but to make matters worse, it is impossible
to tell what these borrowings have been used for. The people remain starkly
poor.
Then there is the problem with workers’ wages. After 8 years on
the same salary level, the workers are agitating rightly. But the government
arrogantly says it has no money to pay anyone an increase. I tried to determine
compounded inflation from 2010 till date and arrived at around 70%. Nigeria’s
Naira has lost that much value since then. N19,800 in 2010 is barely worth
N6,000 today. Poor workers are suffering. But we hear that the Revenue
Mobilization Agency surreptitiously approves bi-annual salary increases for top
dogs in the civil service and politicians who wield the power. Nigeria is a
full mafia state. Only the top connected and those in certain clubs can get
ahead here. The rest are slaves; born to suffer. The reason why governors
cannot pay a farthing more to workers and are, still owing workers based on the
old wages is because the economy is broken. The system is broken. Our roosters
are coming home to sleep after causing much havoc all over town. The day of
reckoning is here. There is no more leeway to accommodate our poor workers and
pity them with a little stipend. The politicians have taken it all. The Buhari
government has caused irreversible further grievous damage to an already
terrible situation. From the ‘agreements’ reached on the wage
increase, it’s fairly evident that there is no intention to do anything soon.
What I can see is that an underproductive, consumer economy is coming to
its sad little denouement.
Most of the wealth we see in this country is not borne out of hard work
or anything productive. What we have are a few lucky people put in position by
this Mafioso connection and powers. If crude oil is our main sector and it is
so unprofitable, opaque and corrupt, where else can we find some comfort?
Indeed we don’t need any ‘main sector’ per se. If only people will be
responsible to society, things will go round. But in Nigeria, people have
pointedly chosen to be this way. And government condones this lethargy, simply
because most of the people in government are such that take decisions based
sentiments, not men of principles. They will do anything based on sentiments;
tribe, religion, sexual relationships and what have you. We need leaders
that stand up for principles for once.
So here are the figures that scare the living hell out of me.
We are the inequality and poverty capital of the world according to
Oxfam and the World Poverty Clock. We provide the least for our people, among
countries in the world. We also harbor and parade the highest number of
out-of-school children, maternal and child mortality in the world. Nigeria is simply
the most-misgoverned country in the world given its resources. Our comeuppance
has indeed come upon us.
We have this in bold relief - $76 billion in debt. They fraudulently
compare that to GDP to make it seem small. But as at the end of August 2018; we
have spent only N3.4 trillion of the N9.1 trillion that the country budgeted
for, instead of N6 trillion if we pro-rate the spending. And of this N3.4
trillion, N1.54 trillion was spent servicing debts, while N1.86 trillion was
spent paying salaries and ‘running government’.
It is only in our debt servicing that we spent 100% of what we planned
to spend for the cumulative period.
For recurrent expenditure, we spent 78%. For capital expenditure, we
spent 0%. It wasn’t until October 17, 2018, that N486 billion was released.
This is the same N9.1 trillion that is a budget for ants and against which I
demonstrated on the streets of Abuja.
According to the same report by our planning ministry, we were only able
to generate a mere 48% of our planned revenue. Our oil, non-oil and tax revenue
were short of projections by far. Yet the lowest price of Brent Crude this year
has been $62 per barrel. What has gone wrong? Where is the money,
in spite of the bragging by our government which claim to have totally
repositioned the economy?
What we can see is business-as-usual. Civil servants in privileged
parastatals continue with their ways. Buhari has gone to sleep. Even Goodluck
and Yaradua did put some breaks to profligacy in these places but the current
president has turned a blind eye to the final winding down of the economy; its
bleeding to death. I can only surmise that it’s because he and people in his
circle also feel guilty. So let anyone who can, also enjoy themselves to the
limit. All this while in our checkered journey, nepotism has never been as
bad.
Drawing Inferences
As I concluded this article, I came across a report about the new oil
subsidy regime, now known as ‘under recovery’. We heard that the
NNPC has spent the dividend it got from investments in the NLNG (Nigerian
Liquefied Natural Gas Co), without authorization. They reports indicated that
only two signatories know about the secret account from which this slush fund
was disbursed. Our main industry, Oil; lacks transparency. What will it take
for the minister of petroleum, who is also the president, to get NNPC to
publish its accounts? Ibe Kachikwu as NNPC GMD actually attempted something
along these lines but was promptly removed and we moved back to an era of
darkness. Now, of the N8.6 trillion budgeted for 2019, N831 billion or a whole
10%, will be used in running INEC - the election umpire, while oil subsidy (which
has already accrued over N1 trillion this year) will take close to 20% of
that amount! By the time the civil servants - big and small - collect their
salaries and pensions; there will be nothing left for everyday citizens (our
poor people)….and yet again, we will resort to even more massive
borrowing.
We need fresh new eyes to consider this economy. Anyone who has been near it at the controls can no longer do the job.
Massive cognitive biases would have set in. We need innocent minds who can
appreciate how bad things are and the urgency of the moment, and who are ready
to hanker down to start fixing this woebegone society.
Nigeria has got to that Biblical era when God sent prophets to Kings,
instructing them to tear their fine robes, dress in sackcloth, pour ashes over
their bodies, forsake worldly possessions and be contrite else they see
destruction come upon them and their charge. Nigeria has reached the Sodom and
Gomorrah level where God could not find even five (5) persons who are righteous
and had no choice than to destroy the cities because their sins had become
unbearable.
Inequity, impunity, incredible levels of injustice and wickedness reigns
in our land. There is hardly any need to start to explain at length to anyone.
All we have to do is open our eyes. The nation is broken. To un-break it,
extreme decisions of contrition need to be taken.
The Petition For Action – Tope Fasua
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