State of the Nation: Emergency Economic Conference

GRIPPED by the free fall of the naira to the dollar, Nigeria has shipped into a panic mode of all kinds. That explains why Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, suggested that a conference of a motley crew of lettered and unlettered Nigerians, including the academia, labour unions, artisans, market women, etc., to discuss the way out of our economic woes. There is nowhere this panic is more acute than in the inner chambers of Aso Rock, where President Muhammadu Buhari is jittery but not enough to force the recantation of the 2016 budget. The dollar and its scare tactics are reconfiguring our budget parameters and forcing a rethink on all fronts. The illusion of the infallibility of the 2016 budget “the budget of change” – has now proved hollow. Our naira has proved vulnerable as it has ignominiously fallen prostrate to the reckless and dangerous power of the dollar in international exchange markets.

The economic architecture of virtually all countries is in a free fall. As we write, Britain is grappling with Brexit, a new political and economic orthodoxy, that may see it leave continental Europe for good. Momentum is growing behind Britain’s exit campaign in which it wants to end the central control by Brussels and reclaim its own destiny and freedom to manage its own affairs. The panic action on the part of Britain is underscored by economic consideration and the impact of immigration on its overstretched resources. But Britain is not alone. Nigeria is already in a quagmire of economic catastrophe. As the oil revenues fall, Nigeria has problems with servicing its external debt and funding its budget, what with the exorbitant increase in commodities prices across the whole world. A continuous and irritating language of the aggrieved is now the currency of the realm. President Muhammadu Buhari’s dedicated focus on fighting corruption is rapidly losing its messianic fervour to the tyrannical volatility of our economy. Our economic downturn is shaping our fear of the present and the future; it is redounding to our collective anxiety. Every day that dawns sees us overdramatizing our anger against former President Goodluck Jonathan as though endless jeremiads about preceding governments are what we elected this government to do on the socio-economic and political theatre.

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Our economy is now running on blown gasket because the new government has not put a workable economic policy in place as much greater emphasis is placed on eradicating corruption and fighting insurgency than on our economic survival as a nation. The call by Prof. Soyinka would have been wonderful except that Nigerians had witnessed so many such conferences in the past that were not productive of the desired results. A conference of erudite and illiterate market men and women, of waifs and strays in the land, is likely to issue forth in a potpourri of rabble-rousers with no intelligent ideas for the way out of our economic predicament.

President Muhammadu has a cabinet of technocrats in place; he also has in place the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). Additionally, he has in place the Ministries of Finance and of National Planning; he has the Bank of Industry, the National Economic Council, etc. He does not need to constitute a new government to be styled “Economic Conference”. An economic conference of the size, of any size, suggested by Prof. Soyinka will turn out to be a waste of our dwindling resources. Such a conference is not unlikely to gulp billions of Naira at a time when all the governments in Nigeria are cash-strapped.

A time like this calls for ideas that transcend fruitless partisanship. Our current economic problem has provided a space for our intellectual actors, in and outside government (not artisans and market women, most of whom cannot read a B from a bull’s foot!), to roll out ideas that will bail this nation out of its economic cul-de-sac.