The reality, however, is that our nation is at
war with a confounding enemy whose name is corruption, our economy is in
turmoil from the excesses of the recurrent expenditure and the abuses prevalent
in our governance. The healthcare
system is broken and only accessible to those who can travel abroad. On healthcare I am struck by how almost all our elected and ‘selected’
leaders fly abroad every year for treatment. Government schools
fail to provide opportunities to many of our children. Across the land, families are paying record
prices to fill up their shopping baskets and many Nigerians worry whether they
will be able to raise their offspring in safety and security.
But these challenges were not bound to happen,
they are the consequence of flawed policies and failing leadership. As the world has transformed, the thinking of
our leaders has remained ossified in time with the absence of new thinking. The
first few years of this new century should have been our moment, the time when
our leaders turned adversity into opportunity, launching us to the next phrase
of our development. This should have
been the time when bold and visionary thinking challenged conventional wisdom
and took us down a pathway of development and innovation.
Instead, our history is cluttered with white
elephants and corruption on a monumental scale.
I imagine what Nigeria could have achieved if we were united and worked
together. The last half-century of our
independence has been a failure of our leadership rather than that of Nigerian
people. I believe that we can change
course and that we must, and I project into the future an optimism that seems
foolhardy but comes from the hope that after darkness emerges light – ‘Post tenebras spero lucem’. This is certainly not the first time our
nation has faced grave crises of confidence but each time, our people have
found the strength to call out together and address our challenges. This moment cannot be different, and this
time demands more urgency. Working
together we can restore some sanity to our body politic, we can perfect our
federation and work towards a more worthwhile union by asking unthinkable
questions of ourselves. But to bring
about profound change we must be prepared to countenance some of the ideas I am
expounding in the chapters to come.
To develop my narrative further I proceed into
some background of the Nigerian chaotic economic planning and a series of
questions using anecdotes to prise them open. I am aware that the implementation of medium-term “development plan” has been the major
framework, which Nigeria has relied upon to restructure the economy since
independence. Four national development plans were launched between 1962 and
1985. The First National Development
Plan, 1962 - 1968 sought to put the economy on a fast growth path, by giving
priority to agricultural and industrial development, as well as the training of
high level and intermediate manpower. The
Second National Development Plan, 1970-1974, was launched after the civil war,
primarily to undertake reconstruction and rehabilitation of the infrastructure
damaged during the war.
The Third
National Development Plan, 1975-1980, was designed under a more favourable
financial condition of huge oil revenues, which accrued to the nation from the
mid-1970s. It emphasised diversification, balanced development and indigenisation
of the economy. However, a significant
portion of the plan was not executed because of unanticipated financial and
executive capacity constraints. Thus, many key projects were carried over into
the Fourth National Development Plan, 1981-1985. The execution of the fourth plan was also
adversely affected by the unexpected collapse of the international oil prices
soon after its inception. Thus, the volatility of the oil sector largely
determined economic policy direction as well as the financial capacity to
execute public investment programmes.
The adoption of
the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), initially for two years (July
1986-June 1988), was the major response to the dwindling oil resources,
macroeconomic policy distortions and the increasing need to diversify the
productive base of the economy. The
economy witnessed a number of policy reversals between 1988 and 1989 in an
attempt to cushion the adverse effects of the belt-tightening measures
implemented in 1986 and 1987. Consequently,
some of the gains of economic adjustment in those two years were gradually
eroded. From the start of the 1990s, the
government shifted the instrument of economic transformation from the five-year
plans to the three-year rolling plans, as they were more flexible and amenable
to periodic reviews. However, there was
no appreciable improvement in the performance of the economy since the commencement
of the rolling plans thus necessitating further economic reengineering for
sustained growth.
In the early
2000s, a comprehensive economic reform programme was initiated to fast- track
economic growth. Central to the reforms was the Medium Term Expenditure
Framework (MTEF), 2003 – 2005, which provide a macroeconomic framework to
strengthen fiscal management and improve the planning and budgeting of public
expenditure to curtail abuse and mis- allocation of resources[1]. What became apparent was during the Babangida
and Abacha regimes all pretentions of following a development plan were
abandoned.
The powerful and narrow sectional
interests have been the bane of Nigeria. I understand that when the initial
plans for Nigeria’s principal container port, the Tin Can Island Port which
handles about 5.75 million tons of cargo each year was laid, it included rail
lines, however, by the time the port was completed the rail lines had been
expunged! What modern nation builds a
seaport without and rail links? The
other port at Port Harcourt, a transshipment port located 66 kilometres from
the Gulf of Guinea along the Bonny River in the Niger Delta, handles about
815,000 tons of cargo each year and has a railway connection but it is not the
commercial nerve centre.
When the old Western Region built 24-storey
Cocoa House at one time tropical Africa’s tallest building, all the materials
and cement used to build, it came via rail links because the road network could
never have coped. Yet, when we built the
Federal Capital Territory Abuja with a land area of 713 kilometres square
we relied entirely on road links from Lagos to Abuja to transport all the
materials needed, the limited road network was never going to be able to cope
with the multiplier effects of so much traffic. Today we wonder why we do not have any good
roads. The limited rail infrastructure
we have, we have allowed it to be degraded through years of neglect of both the
rolling stock and allowed the right-of-way to seriously reduced the capacity
and utility of the system.
Nigeria with the largest road network in West
Africa and the second largest south of the Sahara, roughly 108,000 km of
surfaced roads in 1990 has had a history of poor maintenance. In 2004, Nigeria’s Federal Roads Maintenance
Agency (FERMA) began to patch the 32,000-kilometre federal roads network, and
in 2005, FERMA initiated a more substantial rehabilitation. However, this has not kept pace with over use
by the powerful interests who we allowed to lay siege to the Nigerian economy.
What of electricity? Have you wondered why most of the funds invested in the
sector make no difference? It is the
powerful interests that benefit from lucrative generator sales that conspire to
make nothing work. The stark analysis of
the sector reveals Nigeria had 5,900 MW of installed generating capacity,
however, the country was only able to generate 1,600 MW because most facilities
have been poorly maintained. The country
has proven gas reserves and around 8,000 MW of hydro development has been
planned.
The same extends to the scandal of the
refineries where most of the refineries are not working or under utilised
because of sabotage by powerful interests. It simply pays the few entrenched
interest that Nigeria does not work, they thrive and get rich on the misery of
the many.
Whilst Chief
Asiodu’s own central thesis of the problem with Nigeria traces it to the
Murtala/Obasanjo purge of the Civil Service in 1975. He suggests that before purge, from after the civil war Nigeria grew at 11.5 percent per
annum.[2] That if we had sustained 10 percent per annum
for 20 more years, today the per capital income of Nigeria would not be less
than 20,000 dollars. He makes a
comparison with Malaysia that is reputed to have borrowed palm oil technology
from Nigeria and is now so far ahead of us.
He claims that many countries overtook us because, we destroyed the
civil service; we abandoned the plan of 75 years which was the emphasizing of
capital and intermediate products, agro-allied industry, petrochemical, which
would have given us a very serious developmental pyramid.
I suggest we need a government that makes it
its fundamental objective to govern in the interest of the many and not the
privileged and powerful few. This would
mean challenging and taking on the powerful interests that have ground our
nation to a halt. But we need a process
that compels our government to take on these interests. It would require an active imagination, which
allows us to think outside the box and contemplate the unthinkable. I propose a process, which allows the
powerful interests to render a full and honest account of their crimes and
receive amnesty on the basis that a degree of restitution is made. The next chapter grapples with the details of
such a process one that needs to be free of government manipulation and
interference.
Whilst this book presents this as a choice, a
way forward, the reality is the Nigerian situation is unsustainable it cannot
go on as before and time is fast running out for the present crop of
leaders. I have carefully considered the
option of a truth and reconciliation process because I want my nation to avoid
a schism that would make that of Ghana a kindergarten play, the process I offer
remains the last hope for a peaceful resolution of the peculiar mess we find
ourselves in the risk is to ignore it and the peril that may follow.
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