What is the value of a Nigerian to Nigeria? Are we really engaged with the Nigerian Economic Train (NET) or are we misguided by our biggest economy in Africa syndrome?
The major sectors touted as having been significantly transformed over the past few decades are banking, aviation, telecommunications and entertainment.
While the banking sector employs a lot of people, empowering them to earn bonuses and commissions with dividends to shareholders while busy declaring profits, their Letters of Credit for imports, rather than support our own export trade are simply contributing to the 92 percent import and eight percent export ratio that we are currently running.
Repeating this template is the aviation sector where most of our cargo planes come laden with imported goods but leave almost empty. These same planes go to Cameroon and Ghana to pick up cargo but nothing from Nigeria. But we have a population more than the whole of West Africa combined. All the aviation sector contributes to Nigeria is to transport us to Abuja to get contracts, move to Lagos to clear imported items to transport to the rest of Nigeria and hop over to Port Harcourt in ancillary support to the oil and gas sector. Apart from the support it renders to workers in Port Harcourt and its environs who are employed and empowered, hardly much is engagingly added to the value of Nigerian citizens.
Completing this tripod is the telecommunications sector which basically provides the network connectivity cable for all the ATM and online connections to make efficient connections to move funds around both locally and abroad to Mr Chen in China, Mr Singh in India and Mr Kim in South Korea. The difference between now and 25 years ago, is that the foreigners are now happy for connecting to us better and receiving their payments faster –making us excellently connected and disengaged ‘killers’ of ourselves economically.
Nollywood on the other hand does add to our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Product (GNP) with the actors/actresses in the movie industry, artists in the music industry, comedians, etc. These are Nigerians earning for Nigeria through their direct sweat both at home and abroad while employed, empowered and engaged with the Nigerian Economic Train.
While banking, aviation and telecoms are playing out their non-productive private sector roles, this is simply replicated by the public sector in Lagos – aiding our import consumption through the outposts of the Lagos Ports of Tin Can and Apapa; Abuja – controlling and distributing the proceeds from petroleum via the civil servants to the state and local governments with all their attendant emoluments; and Port Harcourt – the goose laying the golden eggs for the nation.
Our economic and financial policies revolving around monetary interest rates, money supply or inflationary control measures, fiscal/taxation policies, currency valuations or devaluations, buying or selling of treasury bonds or other financial directives are only of relevance to Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt and hardly touch the other 34 states of the federation.
In all these employment activities and empowerment initiatives, nothing of economic value is added to Nigerians engagement with their nation and underpins the low productivity of the GNP of our nationals.
The government has duly identified mining and agriculture as our options where our nationals can be usefully engaged. The challenge is that these sectors need finance, technical expertise of the populace, connection with the education sector, transport infrastructure and power availability. Power alone needs billions of dollars in investment. Overcoming these obstacles might take about a decade but the earlier we start the better.
Ditto with agriculture where we need to identify the products/produce with competitive advantage, setting up of cooperatives locally and regionally, keying in the public sector civil servants proactively.
Overcoming these can only be done by directly engaging the human capacity potential of the Nigerian people. This cannot be done without the entrepreneurial role of the governors, reorientation of the civil servants up to the local government level and bringing in the traditional and religious leaders who play about the most directly relevant role with the rural populace. Nigeria’s fate lies in the rural sector of the rest 34 states of the federation and not in Lagos, Abuja or Port Harcourt nor in the state capitals all waiting to be bailed out without having contributed that much value-added activities to the economic train.
Tapping into the role of the various rural entrepreneurs in the agro-industrial sectors is more than enough to boost rural employment and rural development, increase internally generated revenue, reduce dependence on Abuja, stem rural-urban migration and promote intra and inter-regional trade to culminate in export of our products/produce. Ambassadors and those in the Diaspora should be our national salespersons while at the same time drumming up investment opportunities to foreigners to come to the country. In this regard, the encouraging roles of the Bank of Industry, Bank of Agriculture, Nigerian Export Promotion Council, NEXIM Bank, Customs and Excise being more supportive of export than import policies as Colonel All (Rtd), the Customs boss recently alluded to, cannot all be over emphasized.
The education curriculum, one of the major – if not the major – root cause of our dysfunctional and disjointed economy should be directed primarily towards the agro-entrepreneurs and rural industrialists rather than the multitude of ‘pentrapreneur’ professions that adorn the education sector right from the primary to the secondary and tertiary institutions.
As we have seen all too often, those lucky enough among the letter would be chasing the immigration recruitment exercise annually or the best of them would ‘Andrew’ out to seek employment outside the country but disengaged from ‘Naija Inc’ and of no employment or empowerment value to Nigeria.
Well executed and implemented rural development policies would ensure that the income generated and any development that takes place would be from the engaged sweat of the people. At this level, we would have a higher GDP based on the GNP of the employed and empowered nationals rather than on a GDP which is propped up by foreigners’ activities which we manage to distribute to our economy.
Gainfully, the nation should reduce imports, increase exports and earn foreign exchange, improve foreign reserves, command a better currency value which will grant us access to international finance at favourable rates once our credit-worthiness is rated better. It is at this juncture that we can have better access to finance for our mining and agricultural long-term projects. Countries would be begging to come in rather than our propensity to seduce them with incentives. All our ambassadors would have to do is advise which areas to invest in instead of having to go a-bowl-a-begging with a wish-list about our potentials for them to come and dictate where to invest in. We would be employed, empowered and engaged as the lynchpins for attracting foreign investment with improved access to international finance at favourable rates – thereafter, our banks can offer lower interest rates…and not before.
Owolowo can be contacted on owolowo.dele@gmail.com
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