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At the risk of sounding nauseatingly repetitive, it is necessary to remind President Muhammadu Buhari that he needs a Council of Economic Advisers to help his government think through, and formulate, appropriate responses to the economic challenges facing the nation.
To achieve his intention “to implement initiatives that will lift our citizens out of poverty, through mass employment and social safety nets,” the President needs thinkers who will take a second look at every policy of the government.
This has become imperative especially because his ministerial nominees are long on politics, but short on economics. These politically exposed nominees, include returnee ministers, and former ministers, governors, deputy governors, legislators, state commissioners, board members, and political errand boys.
As someone has correctly observed, these nominee-ministers mostly represent primordial political interests that are cashing political IOUs. According to this usually accurate observer, most of them have been nominated for their political gravitas.
When they become ministers, they will be empowered to provide the visibility, leadership, finances, and logistics, needed to drive the fortunes of the All Progressives Congress in their respective states of origin.
To retain the Presidency, as well as win the governorship elections in more states in 2023 is a task that the APC has set itself. And the President has chosen tested grass-roots politicians who have all it will take to shore up the political fortunes of the party.
But as these ministers focus on their political assignments for Campaign 2023, the President needs those who will keep an eye on the shop, to formulate and articulate economic policies for the government.
The politics is in the economics, and a good economic scorecard will be the greatest campaign plank. Migrating 100 million citizens out of poverty will be the President’s most vivid testimony when asking for the renewal of the APC’s mandate in 2023.
The Council of Economic Advisers will remind the President and his men that they were offered the highest political offices in Nigeria to advance the welfare, and guarantee the safety and security, of the people of Nigeria. The absence of such an agency is partly responsible for the failure of governance in Nigeria.
The notion that a sub-committee of the Cabinet, made up of Ministers of Finance; Budget and Planning; Trade and Investments; Agriculture; Power, Works and Housing, and Information, and the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, and chaired by the Vice President, will run the economy is good.
But these officers are line managers, the CEOs in their own rights, too involved in the details of getting their jobs done, and will neither have the time, nor the inclination, to indulge in global reflections over government policies and programmes.
Yes, they will have some useful insights, but they cannot provide the detached reviews that a Council of Economic Advisers can offer. They just won’t have the time. As the Yoruba would say, “Nwon fi se’ka,” they mean no harm.
The President’s other device, whereby some economic and planning experts come in once in a while, for short bursts of sittings, to advise government on pressing specific economic issues, won’t cut the ice either.
Those gentlemen spend half the time sizing one another up, instead of getting on to the job. They come with varying ideologies and biases. You would have heard that a committee of 10 economists will likely deliver 11 opinions.
The two or three Ph.Ds in the Office of the Vice President also won’t do it. They are too few to have the breath needed for the job, even though they may have immense depth of knowledge. You also need those who have worked in industry, and come with the knowledge of how industry shop floor operates.
Adebayo Ogunlesi, investment banker and lawyer, who owns London’s Gatwick Airport, Philip Emegwali, who made quantum contributions to the development of the Internet, and Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, formerly of the World Bank, are some of those who should make the Council of Economic Advisers grade.
Something like this was largely responsible for the success of the Action Group political party that ran Western Nigeria in the 1950s and early 1960s. The AG was led by politicians who galvanised the electorate for support and votes, manned political offices, as ministers, board members, and parliamentarians, and implemented the economic and social policies of the government.
The intellectual wing, most of whom were in the universities, provided ideological direction and intellectual rigour for the formulation of government policies, while the media wing helped to popularise the policies.
The bureaucrats, within government Ministries, Departments and Agencies, guided the political office holders in the nuances of governance, and implemented the policies which they were privy to their formulation.
Those that Premier Obafemi Awolowo referred to as financiers of the party provided financial cover and logistics, and ran the strategic business units of Western Nigeria, while “party stalwarts” provided the street smarts.
The strength of these strategic wings was in their shared beliefs, which led to continuity of government policies, activities and programmes, regardless of whoever was in office. Even when Ladoke Akintola and his group left the AG to form the Nigeria National Democratic Party, it didn’t change the economic and social policies of their government. The only changes were in the orientation of the politics.
The free education, free health, and agricultural, policies continued, and the vision for the establishment of the University of Ife never wavered. Even when Akintola’s government thought that the mainstream media was not ready to propagate its political views, and report its activities, it established the Sketch newspaper, along progressive lines.
Though now defunct, because successor military administrations did not share its visions, the Sketch newspaper was regarded as one of the best and most vibrant newspapers ever established by government in Nigeria.
The military that succeeded the politicians in the governance of Western Nigeria, hardly knew, or were decidedly hostile to, the extant visions. You may recall that the military government headed by Gen Muhammadu Buhari cancelled the Lagos Metroline initiated by the civilian government of Lateef Jakande.
It was said that Buhari’s Supreme Military Council thought that a corrective government should not inherit and implement the projects of a government that it had come to replace. Thirty five years after that folly of a decision, commuters are still going through the killing grind of the traffic of the Lagos metropolis.
Despite their high professional and academic qualifications, the crop of commissioners and aides, appointed by the military administrators, also failed to buy into the ideology or corpus of policies compiled by their predecessors in office. So, Western Nigeria lost its edge.
Despite their good intentions, (some of them were politically exposed), they hardly had a common world view. Each practically operated in silos, chafing to reinvent the governance wheel. This negatively affected their outputs.
The strength of the Council of Economic Advisers is in the ability of its members to generate data to query the success, or otherwise, of government policies, and offer workable alternatives, from their wealth of academic and practical experiences, without being partisan.
It should not be too difficult to assemble this group of individuals, most of whom are huge successes, who merely seek to contribute what they can to make Nigeria better.
–Twitter @lekansote1
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