On Friday, May 20th, 2016, Dr. Yemi Kale, the Statistician-General of
the Federation and head of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS),
revealed that Nigeria’s economy had not grown in the first quarter of
the year but had rather shrunk to its lowest level in 25 years! Since
the announcement was made, there has been various reactions with pundits
pointing at this or the other as being the cause of this setback. But I
am convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that this negative trend owes
more to President Muhammadu Buhari’s utterances on our economy and
polity than to any other single causative factor.
In the last 11
months, the president had traversed the globe and has spoken about
Nigeria’s economy as if he was the chief undertaker of our polity rather
than the chief marketer that he is meant to be. Of what benefit is it
to the president’s agenda or to Nigeria’s economic well-being for him to
go to foreign nations and instead of highlighting the positive things
that are happening in Nigeria, he begins to regale his hosts with the
most unsavoury stories about Nigeria. And some of the stories the
president tells are just that-tales. They are not factual. At best they
are arguable.
You go to India for a summit where other world
leaders are competing with you for the attention of venture capitalists
and foreign investors and while your counterparts are talking about how
great their countries are, you tell the audience how everybody in your
country is corrupt except you and oh, can they come and invest in your
country? Only a foolish investor would go and invest in a country whose
president thinks his citizens are ‘criminals’ (as the president said to
the Telegraph of UK in February) and whose officials are ‘fantastically
corrupt’ (as the president said in agreement with British PM David
Cameron when questioned by Sky News).
The president speaks on the
Nigerian economy and polity without any filters and his comments are
causing his chickens to roost with devastating consequences for all of
us. Never in the history of Nigeria has there been such a divestment of
investment as we have seen in the past year. Truworths has pulled out of
Nigeria, Virgin Atlantic has closed up shop, Iberia is pulling out,
RenCap is pulling funds from Nigeria, both Alquity Investment Management
Ltd. and Duet Asset Management Ltd. are divesting their Nigeria
holding.
Zenith Bank laid off 1,200 staff, FCMB let go 700
employees, Ecobank sacked 50 per cent of its top management staff. The
President of the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Tony
Ejinkeonye, revealed that in just two months, 50,000 staff were laid off
in Abuja alone. The results are telling. A little over a year ago,
Nigeria was projected by CNNMoney to be the third fastest growing
economy in the world behind China and Qatar, yet just two weeks ago, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its World Economic Outlook
and Nigeria is not even among the top 15 fastest growing economies in
Africa let alone the world!
And when you try to raise the alarm,
the refrain from the government and its horde of unofficial spokesmen is
that the downturn is caused by the fall in crude prices. Yet this logic
is flawed. The government’s own economic monitoring agency, the NBS
itself reported that the exponential growth Nigeria enjoyed especially
from 2012 to its 2014 climax (when our economy overtook South Africa to
be Africa’s largest economy) was spurred not by the oil sector, but
“this growth was largely driven by improved activities in the
telecommunications, building and construction, hotel and restaurant and
business services” to quote the NBS.
Yes, oil accounts for
something like 90-95 per cent of our foreign exchange revenues but it
only accounts for a mere 15 per cent of our GDP. The service sector and
the commercial and real sector are the engine or used to be the engine
of our economic growth. But these sectors are heavily capital and
technology intensive and require cooperation with foreign investors and
when you consistently bad mouth your economy and its regulators investor
confidence tanks and the result is what we are seeing today. I support
President Buhari’s anti-corruption war but it should not be a substitute
for sound economic ideas or policies.
And the way the president has carried out his anti-corruption crusade
is in itself self sabotaging and feeds the narrative of those who say
that Nigeria is far too complex and dynamic a country to be run by
someone who should be quietly collecting his pension. And President
Buhari’s behaviour is flowing down the pyramid. There is a contagious
effect in the utterances of major figures in his administration.
For
instance, when Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo tells the world that the
Goodluck Jonathan administration looted $15 billion in security
contracts, many people in the West who like to read such stories to
justify their hidden opinion that the Black man cannot govern himself,
will clap for him. Coming from the nation’s own vice-president, the
Western press will report the news as a fact. At that level, such a
statement carries the weight of an admission. But then ask yourself,
what was the entire security budget for the five years that Jonathan was
president of Nigeria?
In 2011, defence and security had a budget
of N348 billion or just over $2 billion. In 2012, it skyrocketed to N921
billion or $5.7 billion. It grew to N1.055 trillion in 2013 or $6
billion. In 2014, N968 billion was budgeted for defence and security or
$5.8 billion. The 2015 budget was passed in April and President Jonathan
handed over to President Buhari a month later so I cannot see how the
previous administration could have ‘chopped’ that money. So of the $19
billion budgeted for defence and security while former President
Jonathan was in office, how could $15 billion have been looted when more
than half that amount went to paying salaries?
Did Vice-President
Osinbajo think this accusation through? The president and his deputy
with their cabinet and their political appointees are not a court. They
cannot convict anybody. As such, when they speak this way, what it
amounts to is propagandised activity. In an anti-corruption war, one
must separate activity from results. Results are convictions from a
court after due and diligent prosecution. And when you look at it from
that perspective, this administration has been delivering activity and
not results.
For instance, then candidate Muhammadu Buhari and his
party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), had called the subsidy
payments made by the Jonathan administration a fraud! They claimed that
the amount was too high at N1.1 trillion in 2014. Well if fuel subsidy
had been a fraud, the first thing that should have happened naturally
when President Buhari took over was that the amount should have reduced,
but it DID NOT reduce. As a matter of fact, Nigeria spent over $5
billion on fuel subsidy in 2015 and President Buhari was in power for
most of that year!
The point I am making here is that the
elections are over. President Buhari and his administration should stop
tarnishing the image of Nigeria in the mistaken belief that they are
rubbishing the person of former President Jonathan. The president should
take in the big picture and realise that you need to be below somebody
in order to pull him down. One year has come and gone and has seemingly
been wasted pointing fingers in blame instead of at solutions. The time
for blame games have gone.
Only last month, Buhari complained that
the Sahara desert was advancing southward. He should also realise that
that is not the only thing going south. The Nigerian economy is going
south at perhaps a faster rate and blaming others for it will never stem
the tide. The president should focus on marketing his plans and
policies when he travels abroad instead of de marketing the plans and
policies of former President Jonathan’s administration. It has been said
that if you want a conversation with a habitual complainer to end
abruptly, just ask him how he intends to fix the problem. That is the
question Nigerians want answered by President Buhari.
Under former
President Jonathan, Nigeria’s economy exploded and became the largest
economy in Africa and the 24th largest economy in the world. Let it not
be said that under President Buhari that economy collapsed like a pack
of clouds because the hand that should have steered the ship was too
busy pointing an accusing finger.
