It is that time of year again, the release of the Federal Budget proposals, when we all become economists, at least for the three or four weeks that the plan dominates public discourse.
And why not?
After all we buy and sell and make and consume, and we are all subject to the vagaries of the Market which, to misquote Emerson, is in the saddle and rides all mankind. And there are those who would argue that, in a literal rather than technical sense, homo economicus is no less a plausible creature than homo sapiens.
If the statesman who led France through World War 1, Georges Clemenceau, had not said memorably that war is far too important to be left to the generals, another wise man would surely have laid it down with greater truth that economics is far too important to be left to the economists.
But don’t say that to the hearing of professional economists who have turned what used to be the engaging discipline of political economy into one of the most arcane specialisms, often involving facility with figures on a level with particle physicists; it is all equations and equations and graphs upon graphs and probabilities upon probabilities, not forgetting ceteris paribus.
Maybe that is why real economists do not take it kindly when dilettantes, to say nothing of lay people and even market women, presume to comment on the economy, a point made most eloquently by Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, the embattled Minister of Finance of the Babangida regime when the nation was debating the wisdom or unwisdom of taking a huge loan from the IMF that came booby-trapped with a Structural Adjustment Programme.
If Kalu had his way, something tells me that he would have made possession of a doctorate in economics from the world’s most prestigious academies the minimum qualification for participating in that debate.
He was never so incensed, I gather, as when one Bamako Jaji, obviously no economist, clinically took the whole SAP edifice apart in an op-ed piece for The Guardian titled “Against Kalunomics.” The Minister inquired frantically about the true name and identity of Bamako Jaji, aforementioned, with a view to challenging him to a public debate, and engaging him in single combat if that did not settle the matter.
“Bamako Jaji,” it is now safe to reveal, is none other than our own Biodun Jeyifo, who turns 70 this week. Congratulations, BJ, and welcome to the Club.
As I was saying before I landed myself in a labyrinth of digressions, this is the time when we all pivot on the much awaited federal budget proposals to sound off as economists and experts in matters fiscal. Although it is no more than a statement of intent that is more often honoured in the breach than in the observance, we invest it with the power of the accomplished fact. We take the deed for the intent. Thus, in Babangida’s time, it was not unusual to celebrate the release of the budget estimates with a sumptuous state banquet.
The hysterical Olisa Metuh, publicity secretary of the discredited PDP who is reportedly due to keep a date soon with the EFCC in the investigation of charges related to obtainment, has predictably dismissed the 2016 Budget proposals as a fraud and a scheme to enslave Nigerians of the present and future generations.
I will steer the middle ground between the reflex exultation of the Babangida years and the schizoid denunciation that is Metuh’s trademark.
Given the steady attenuation of the Naira, it is a wonder that estimated expenditure came out in billions rather googols (a googol is the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros). And if you factor in the declining fortunes of the Naira and the rate of inflation, officially put at a very conservative 9.3 per cent, the increase in this year’s expenditure over the previous year’s at a time of shrinking revenues is understandable.
Nearly one-third of the estimated expenditure is going to be borrowed. At first blush, this seems unwise, even profligate. Why not simply live within your means?
It depends on what the borrowed funds are used for. If you borrow to eat, to finance consumption, you are sowing the seeds of future economic and social turmoil. But if you borrow to finance projects that will create jobs and stimulate demand, if your borrowing is an investment in the future, you are sowing the seeds of prosperity. Borrowing outside this framework should be discouraged.
President Buhari was therefore right to have taken a dim view of the Senate’s outrageous proposal to buy luxury American-specification SUVs – no Dubai-assembled vehicles, please, for each of its 109 members for oversight committee duties, and to replace the 10-vehicle convoy of its president with exotica of the same vintage, at cost of N4.7 billion.
It is unfeeling, and downright provocative at a time when the authorities in a great many of their constituencies are saying that they can no longer afford to pay the anaemic minimum monthly wage N18,000, which they have never paid regularly anyway.
What happened to the last set of vehicles purchased for oversight work? Where is their conscience, their empathy? Is being a ward of the state their idea of public service?
By the same reasoning, the President should disavow the plan to buy a fleet of luxury cars for his senior officials who are guaranteed loans to buy their own vehicles, plus generous allowances for maintaining them.
And he should also raise serious questions on the plan to spend N5 billion for official residences for the vice president, the Senate president and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. What happened to the official residences built for the last holders of those offices? Will the government embark on this kind of construction each time new people take over these offices?
It has to be said that the President’s Economic Team – who are the members, by the way? – did him and the APC a bad turn in the way it approached a Budget designed to launch their agenda of Change. The team seems to have used previous budget proposals as their template, adding millions of Naira here and shaving off millions there, instead of determining whether an expenditure is warranted in the first place.
Only that approach can explain why new expenditures are now being proposed on kitchenware and cookware as were presumably expended in the budget for the previous year and the year before that on those very items, and on computers, exotic birds for the Aso Villa lawns, and so on and so forth.
What kind of kitchenware and cookware and computer hardware is it that has to b e replaced every year?
There is perhaps no greater task before the Buhari Administration than tamping down youth unemployment. As is the case with almost every aspect of Nigerian life, including the national population, reliable figures are hard to come by. When government officials who have a vested interest in keeping appearances rosy claim that as many as 25 per cent of young Nigerians are unemployed or underemployed, the chances are that the actual figure is around 40 per cent.
Neither figure is good for the nation’s health. The plan to employ 500,000 teachers during the fiscal year is to be commended, but only as a start. In recent years, not much attention has been given to adult and non-formal education on the one hand, and on the other hand to continuing education, the type that helps the newly literate stay literate. Vocational training has also been neglected.
Programmes designed for these ends can open up at least another 500,000 teaching jobs all over the country and sustain a book publishing industry that will open up still more jobs.
A highly literate population with matching skills is a prime national asset, and few will contest the wisdom and indeed the imperative of investing in it.
NATION
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