Perhaps heeding the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s call for a national conference on the economy, the Muhammadu Buhari government has promised to hold one in the coming weeks. Rather than read Prof. Soyinka’s call as a show of concern for their lack of activism on a plummeting economy, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) interpreted the call literally to mean the usual jamboree of talking shop in the entertaining and elaborate manner Nigerians have become fanatically accustomed to. But even if the professor were to mean his advice in that sense, it would still not detract from the conclusion that he felt sufficiently worried about the very little being done to salvage the nation in the face of a collapsing economy, immiseration of the people, festering crime on a nationally unmanageable scale, and general paralysis.
However, from the general direction of the 2016 Budget, the government seems to have made up its mind on the key controversial issues of the economy, thereby making any discussion or debate nugatory. The president is implacably and even emotionally opposed to any talk of devaluation, but it is hard to see any conference not putting that issue at the heart of the debate. The government is not opposed to borrowing to finance its budget deficit, especially at a time of declining oil prices. That will also come up for debate should an economic conference hold. Indeed, for any conference to succeed, unlike the disdain and abrasiveness with which the federal government often approaches constitution-making and amendments, the Buhari government cannot afford to enunciate no-go areas.
President Buhari incongruously agreed to hold a conference when what will come up for scathing review and debate will be his government’s economic programme or lack of it. If any conference should hold, it should be organised and led by the private sector. The government should of course attend, take notes, correct or sharpen its own paradigms, and sensibly promise and pursue reforms or amendments. Indeed, it must be settled from the outset that the federal government has no business organising an economic conference even before the ink runs dry on its budget estimates, let alone before running the now controversial document through the vetting gauntlet of the National Assembly. But if it chooses to hold a conference, it is hard to see the outcome enjoying less neglect than the ruling party’s own manifesto which intelligently adumbrates plans to reinvigorate the national economy on a scale the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) never dreamt of when it held sway.
More germanely, President Buhari’s willingness to hold a conference signposts his and the APC’s inattentiveness to their own economic programme. (A part of the programme is excerpted in the box below as a general reminder). While it is true that the manifesto did not anticipate every distortion in the economy, especially given the rapidity with which key indicators are changing, often for the worse, it is still flexible enough to accommodate modifications, no matter how drastic they are. The manifesto is broad enough. It indicates an eight-point programme that places emphasis on “war against corruption, food security, accelerated power supply, integrated transport network, free education, devolution of power, accelerated economic growth and affordable health care.” Unlike the PDP, it even more engagingly enunciates a philosophical foundation for its economic plans, the intangible driving the tangible, the abstract inspiring the real. Said the party: “Our guiding philosophy will derive its impetus from these seven principles: Belief in, and the fear of God; upholding the rule of law; preserving national unity; pursuit of a just and egalitarian society; building of strong institutions; commitment to social justice and economic progress; and promoting representative and functional participatory democracy.”
The main problem, it seems, is not that the APC does not have elaborate plans for the economy, an economy that was already showing aggravated signs of distress during the Goodluck Jonathan years, or that those plans are not flexible enough to withstand shocks and fluctuations, or that party apparatchiks do not have sufficient understanding of the fundaments of the Nigerian economy. What ails the economy, nay the Buhari presidency, is that the president, for understandable reasons, can’t seem to find the composure to drive his party’s economic programme. And if, as everyone knows, he has shortcomings in the area of economic management, why has he neglected to find someone who can drive his economic plans? It would have been greatly helpful had he acquired the policy and theoretical wherewithal to marshal the efforts needed to revamp the economy, for then the radicalism the process would need, and the daring policy leaps the change his party talks about and the country needs, would not be threatened by the appalling ethnocentrism and sectarian bigotry that often obfuscate fundamental change and deep societal re-engineering in Nigeria.
In the alternative, considering his own shortcomings, the president should have more responsibly identified someone, or a small and effective group, with the capacity to think through the morass and moraines of the country’s declining economy, and come up with far-reaching and farsighted policy frameworks and designs to pull Nigeria out of the confusion and decay the PDP consigned it. But rather than pay attention to this great need, the president assembled a restrictive kitchen cabinet with whom should he deign to meet minds would sometimes obsequiously pander to his whims. Rather than satisfy that great need, he also took the circumlocutory route of first deprecating ministerial work in favour of the civil service, until disillusionment set in. And finally and more bewilderingly, he then partitioned the cabinet in such a manner that it was obvious the philosophical exactitude which the APC manifesto pretended to embrace had become inappropriate, irrelevant and appeared designed to accomplish other purposes than the desperate task of revamping the economy.
Many critics have slammed the president for entrapping himself in a political and economic time warp. They are probably right. He is struggling to respect the rule of law instead of internalising it and making adherence effortless. He has embraced and still nurtures fairly jaded ideas of politics contrary to the ambitious provisions the APC’s campaign manifesto indicated. And his economic ideas have quizzically not progressed beyond what he projected as military head of state. Thirty years out of power and 12 years trying to regain office have apparently not led him to rejig, refine and develop new and radical ideas about politics and economy, let alone the minor but important aspects of the structure and objectives of government. When he was in the wilderness, it would have been tremendously beneficial had he studied the policies that led to China’s rebirth and economic modernisation, not to talk of the great leap achieved by Brazil and the Asian Tigers in the late 60s and 80s. The lessons of those economic miracles are clear and unambiguous, and the identities and orientations of those who midwifed the changes are also not hidden.
Instead of calling an economic conference, and seeing that the he can’t offer more than the assets of personal discipline and integrity in addressing the economic crisis, it is time the president found someone with the intellect and chutzpah to shoulder the responsibility of conceiving and effectuating the change his party talks about and the country urgently needs. Given the apocalyptic pace of Nigeria’s economic decline, and the imminent and terrifying plunge to social chaos exemplified by the upsurge in crime rate, the president should appreciate that neither he nor his party can afford the luxury of pussyfooting. He does not have an economic team in the rigid sense of the phrase, and it does not make sense to expect that either the Budget and Planning minister or the Finance minister can step into that role. They will not, partly because they were not appointed to perform that role nor were they given that brief. Nor is it clear that even if they were given that brief they would be able to accomplish the huge task. If the president can’t be like China’s Deng Xiaoping, then let him look for someone like Ludwig Erhard in Konrad Adenauer’s post-war Germany’s cabinet that designed and accomplished that country’s economic reconstruction often referred to as the Wirtschaftswunder or economic miracle.
President Buhari is fighting corruption, but he must be mindful of doing (not talking) it within the ambit of the rule of law. He must build and strengthen institutions, which could run without powerful men flaunting credentials of integrity and honesty instead of visionary and philosophical accoutrements. He must also administer Nigeria in the expansive and unifying sense of incorporating Nigerians from all ethnic groups into the task ahead contrary to his present idiosyncratic inclination towards exclusion and perhaps inadvertent insularity. And while firmness and unyielding inflexibility have their advantages in a society long used to indiscipline and laxity, he must deliberately acculturate to the democratic nuances of consensus, persuasion and debate which some of his men in the secret service and the EFCC are repudiating under the guise of public safety and public good.
The task before him is difficult and enormous, and President Buhari has not even started, seeing how he has limited himself to just two tasks out of a myriad. And if he can’t seem to find his way around the stalagmites and stalactites of economic crisis, how can he, and when will he, address the desperate political problems truncating the country’s peace and progress? In many ways, economy and politics are interwoven, and sorting out one requires virtually the same philosophical foundations and tools as making sense of the other. If the president can’t succeed in one, it is hard to see him succeeding in the other. But he needs to succeed, for failure is not an option. Let him, therefore, demonstrate the capacity, the liberalism and the courage to change Nigeria in the substantial sense that even ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo could not fathom, nor Dr. Jonathan ever contemplate. But going by all the events of the past few months, and the crowd around the president, this column has his fears.
NATION
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