Nigeria: Lurching ahead…Economist

LIKE a heavyweight boxer who has gone too many rounds, Nigeria sometimes seems punch-drunk. One minute it acts like a champion by virtue of the size of its girth and the smile on its face, the next it could be flat on its back, groaning in anguish. On the whole, the country is tottering along, acclaimed as much for its massive potential as for its actual achievements. It is still a sick man all the same.

Tracts of the north are poorer than ever and ravaged by Islamist terrorism. The brutal efforts of the police to suppress it make ordinary northerners all the more sullen. The oil-soaked Delta in the south is anarchic, gutted by the continuing large-scale theft of oil and riddled with corruption at a level that is high even by Nigeria’s lofty standards. The kidnapping of prosperous people across the country, especially in the south and in and around Lagos, the bubbling commercial capital, has become increasingly frequent. The mother of the finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, suffered such an ordeal in December, though she was released after five days.

Education and health care are still wretched. Electricity remains patchy as ever. The national infrastructure—especially roads and railways—is dire. Up to a fifth of oil output is stolen. Not a single oil refinery is functioning properly. Some 60% of Nigerians still live below the poverty line, while a rich elite—“the top million”, as it is sometimes jestingly called—educates its children privately (often abroad), relies on private health care and its own electricity, and is generally immune to the travails of ordinary Nigerian life.

Yet, since its 167m people make it twice as populous as any other African country, Nigeria is plainly the giant of a fast-growing continent. The GDP of Lagos alone exceeds that of Kenya, east Africa’s beefiest economy. When Nigeria’s GDP is reassessed (“rebased”, in IMF jargon) by new criteria that include earnings not on the official balance-sheet, its gap with South Africa, the continent’s largest economy, will narrow. Nigeria’s GDP may rise, according to its own bureau of statistics, by 40% to around $350 billion, not far off South Africa’s $400-plus billion. If Nigeria goes on growing by 7% a year (as it is expected to in 2013) against South Africa’s present 3%, it will become Africa’s biggest economy within a decade. Together, the two economies already account for a good half of the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa’s 49 countries.

President Goodluck Jonathan takes as much credit as he can. “A new political culture has emerged,” he says, along with “a clear electoral process”, a reference to his victory in 2011. “Corruption and issues of governance are being vigorously tackled on all fronts.” He hails Nigeria as “the largest destination of FDI [foreign direct investment] in Africa”. Calling for a revival of the moribund farm sector, he promises that Nigeria will have “no imports of rice by 2015-2016”, whereas it is now the world’s largest buyer of it.

In Mrs Okonjo-Iweala and Akinwumi Adesina, he has two dynamic ministers, at finance and agriculture respectively. Mrs Okonjo-Iweala boasts of achieving macro-stability through fiscal rectitude, reducing debt, privatisation and encouraging a more open and diverse economy, rather than one that still relies for more than 95% of its foreign revenues on oil.

Mr Adesina, too, has a host of good ideas, starting with vouchers now replacing wasteful subsidies for fertilisers (see box). “We were subsidising corruption,” he says. “We were not subsidising farmers.”

But such hopeful talk has yet to be translated into improvements in the living standards of most Nigerians. Last year the government’s plan to phase out subsidies on fuel was met with a national torrent of rage that led Mr Jonathan to back-pedal. Though those subsidies eat a huge hole in the country’s finances, most Nigerians cherish them as just about the only benefit they get from the government.

The failure of Nigeria’s vast oil wealth to trickle down is a continuing scandal. A Petroleum Industry Bill, intended on paper to ensure—among other things—a fairer distribution of oil receipts, has been stuck in the federal legislatures for years, with commercial, ethnic and other interests at loggerheads and no resolution in sight. FDI last year was a quarter less than in 2008.

Despite Mr Jonathan’s honeyed words, almost nobody believes corruption is being seriously tackled. Nuhu Ribadu, the most energetic head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Nigeria’s official graft-busting body, was squeezed out of the post at the end of 2007. His replacements have never had teeth as sharp. (Mr Ribadu, who ran for president in 2011, reckons that corruption cost the state $50 billion over the past decade.)

“Corruption is at an unprecedented level,” says Udo Ilo of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, which seeks to improve governance. On the rare occasions when big men are hauled into court for corruption, many suspect that they are merely the victims of political rivalry. Only a handful of the most venal governors or ministers have ever been sent to prison. Last month Mr Jonathan incurred national and foreign outrage for pardoning—for no good reason—a notoriously corrupt former governor of Bayelsa, the president’s own oil-stained state.

Indeed, it was that previous conviction that put Mr Jonathan unexpectedly in the state governor’s chair, from which he was then propelled into the national vice-presidency as a seemingly innocuous and obscure southerner who would pose no challenge to a northerner, Umaru Yar’Adua, chosen by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to run for president in 2007. It was on Mr Yar’Adua’s death in 2010 that Mr Jonathan took over, again by default.

Despite his election to retain the presidency as the PDP candidate in 2011, Mr Jonathan still gives the impression of acquiring and holding the job by accident. He is increasingly seen as lacklustre, weak and beholden to various competing monied interests. A television interview he gave in January to America’s CNN was widely considered feeble. He is particularly criticised for failing to propose a clear strategy for dealing with Boko Haram, an extreme Islamist group that is terrorising the north and deterring investment there.

No one is confident that, when an amnesty for Delta militants runs out in 2015, Mr Jonathan will be able to impose a new deal. Besides, as the illegal bunkering of oil persists, incurring enormous losses to the national budget, the militants are plainly acting in cahoots with leading southern politicians, whose loyalty Mr Jonathan needs for his re-election in 2015—an event that seems uppermost in his mind.

Opposition to Mr Jonathan is already gaining momentum, both within and outside his own party. In February four opposition parties, with ten of the country’s 36 governors behind them, said they would merge into an All Progressives Congress to oppose the PDP in the next elections. Among the weightiest figures behind the new formation are Muhammadu Buhari, Mr Jonathan’s chief challenger in 2011, alongside Bola Tinubu and Babatunde Fashola, past and present governors of Lagos state, both canny political operators and effective governors.

Perhaps more worrying for Mr Jonathan is backbiting within his own PDP, especially among northern Muslims who think he pulled a fast one by keeping the presidency at a time when, by party tradition, it was still the right of a northerner to have the job. It is possible that some powerful PDP northerners could align with the Tinubu-Fashola axis to take on Mr Jonathan. A popular and independent-minded Speaker of the federal parliament, Aminu Tambuwal, though on paper a PDP man, is mentioned as someone to watch.

Meanwhile, should the oil price dive and the masses feel the pinch of poverty even more acutely, could discontent ever boil over into revolution? In a society where patronage and ethnic loyalty still hold sway, that seems unlikely soon. But it cannot be ruled out for ever. “We’re sitting on a keg of gunpowder,” says Nasir El-Rufai, a former federal minister. “We have a demographic time-bomb.” Some even mutter about the return of military rule.

For the time being, Africa’s giant, under Mr Jonathan or not, is likely to stagger forward with its flawed system of multiparty democracy. Through patronage and chicanery the elite will continue to determine the lot of the masses—and, in the words of Kayode Fayemi, a go-ahead governor who opposes Mr Jonathan and the PDP, to maintain “inexplicable wealth alongside abject poverty”.

The PDP is an extraordinarily powerful money-machine that will be hard to defeat. Were the All Progressives Congress to prevail, things might change a bit for the better. But it is hard, in the short run, to see how Nigeria will turn into a prosperous, equitable and decent democracy.