The Post Express (Lagos)
Oluwole Adejare
25 August 2000
opinion
Lagos — As Bill Clinton, the US President touches down in Abuja today, he is guaranteed a very warm welcome. Olusegun Obasanjo, his chief host would be his most ebullient self for having done it again.
He was military president (the wrong type) when Jimmy Carter, then US President, made history as the first American president to visit Africa's heart-beat, Nigeria, this paradise of paupers. Obasanjo has come a long way since then, purged by political imprisonment and forged by the fires of democracy. To the ordinary Nigerian, Bill Clinton will be effusively welcomed for three reasons.
The most mundane would be his heroic struggle during the Monica Lewinsky blackmail by his political opponents in their attempt to wrest power from him. Bill received a lot of sympathy from these shores because Nigerians could not understand why a president of prosperity should be so harassed. Were he a Nigerian he would have been offered the most beautiful virgin from each state for his economic miracles, if he had a mind to. Finally, Nigerians love and celebrate success and Bill is a success. Some might even believe that shaking hands with him would infect them with success, a true reflection of our condition as paupers in a paradise.
During his stay, there would be wining and dining, spectacles and speeches, a treatment fit only for an emperor. To pacify critics who have been out with their calculators computing how much the visit would set back the Treasury, the traditional drama of making some announcements in coded ambiguity would be staged to air the agreements or lack of them on the issues that Bill and Olusegun would have been chewing for 72 hours. You don't need to be a seer to predict that trade and investments will be top of the American's agenda. AIDS is guaranteed to receive attention though I wonder how Obasanjo will handle this since his Minister of Health has been denying honour to Dr. Abalaka who has made the now controversial HIV vaccine. Sierra Leone would also feature and assistance to make the born-again military more democratically compliant would feature. Drugs would be on the menu, you can bet. All told Bill is in for a treat that would last him a lifetime.
But these issues would not determine the success of Clinton's visit to Nigeria. What will determine the success of the US President's visit to Nigeria is the agreement or disagreement over the cancellation of Nigeria's crushing debt burden. It is the decisions reached over this topic that would determine whether the visit would be worth the hassle. This is borne out of the fact that the debt burden is the cog in the wheel of Nigeria's efforts towards regaining the military blighted paradise.
Nigeria is truly a paradise on earth. We are blessed with good soil, warm stable climate, enormous natural resources and people, over 400 nationalities totalling over 120 million souls. Our culture is rich and varied, the people dynamic and enterprising. Literally all we could ask for are here - oil, gas, coal, gold, timber, food, what have you. But ours is a paradise of paupers. The sixth oil-producing country in the world is ironically the sixteenth poorest nation on earth. Incredible poverty is the lot of the toiling masses who are therefore easy preys for the vultures of disease and ignorance. Yet, this is also a nation of palatial mansions built by those who had neither farms nor factories, people who have imposed themselves on the nation to loot the Treasury in collaboration with western international gangsters. The regime of lootocracy established by our military messiahs of pains and anguish has replaced the traditional ethics of hard work for success with that of looting. And, as the ranks of the looters swelled through the bandwagon effect, the ranks of the diligent middle class thinned.
On the social scene, education has been devastated by the ripples of the debt burden. Corruption crept into the system and turned FREE EDUCATION into FRAUD EDUCATION, with criminally low funding, most of which disappeared either into private pockets of corrupt officials or non-performing contractors. Increasingly, survival skills needed for life are being neglected while everything is being done to obtain a certificate. Worse still, because the many who left schools have no jobs some youths now consider education a waste of time. Rather than attending schools without job prospects, some young girls have taken to prostitution in unprecedented numbers at home and abroad. This has led to the harmattan-fire spread of AIDS as the rich prostitutes return home laden with dollars and the AIDS virus.
Interestingly, the developments outlined above are not in the interest of the US. They negate many of the stated objectives of the recently enacted Trade and Development Act of 2000 by the US Congress. Specifically, corruption and bribery will be difficult to wipe out if systemic poverty is not eliminated nor can stable democracy be guaranteed under the dog eat dog situation of poverty and want. Similarly, the war on drug trafficking would continue as endless battles as long as ethical alternatives are not available for the devastated middle class to make an honest living. Unknown to the outside world, drugs, with the exception of marijuana, which itself was introduced into Nigeria by soldiers returning from the World War II, are unknown to most Nigerians. So, if the President who brought Americans prosperity can teach Nigeria's President Obasanjo the tricks of national prosperity, the drug war would end over-night.
Nigeria's debt burden is, unarguably, an obstacle to legitimate trade and foreign investments, the current focus of the American government's policy for Africa. Apart from creating a difficult investment environment, it makes the emergence of a true market driven economy difficult. For instance, the recent jumbo strike by Nigerian workers nation-wide over the increase in the price of petroleum products shows that while withdrawal of subsidies may be easy in an economy where workers are well paid, it could lead to political catastrophe where poverty and low wages predominate, as in Nigeria. A popular slogan of the workers during that strike was most instructive: to buy fuel at world market rates, pay our wages in dollars.
President Bill Clinton is unlikely to catch a glimpse of the pulsating poverty of the Nigerian paradise. His movements have been restricted to Abuja and, as far as I can deduce, it is because of the fall-outs of the debt burden. Abuja, the only evidence we can show for all the nation's debt, is a political capital and Bill can only talk to our baby-cheeked politicians who have been rehabilitating themselves with our funds since they emerged, hollow-cheeked, from the common palace of poverty, on May 29, 1999, as our representatives. Of course, the mandarins too would be around, those clever chameleons who thrive well under all regimes. The irritating emerging shanties of the poor having been bull-dozed, Bill might look for traces of poverty in vain. Pity, he would not be in Lagos, Nigeria's economic capital, glittering on shifting sands of capital, interspersed by putrefying lagoons of poverty. Missing Lagos, the city of gold and cold, Bill certainly would not know Nigeria. But his restriction to Abuja could be understood. If he visits Lagos in the South-west, he must visit an oil city in the South-east and a sharia city up north, in the interest of federal character. Now, with our sporadic poverty-induced protests, there is no telling what Egbesu Boys might do in the oil-producing areas while nobody can be too sure that sad man, Saddam, would not pay some sharia fundamentalists to cause trouble up north.
So, Bill will be spared experiencing our infrastructural decay, epileptic NEPA, water shortages, poor telephone systems, our legacies from military "lootocracy" which the debt-burden is threatening to make a permanent feature of our lives. He would equally be spared the horrors of a collapsed middle class that now survive on the rejects of the west, popularly called Tokunbo. Of course, he would not be able to sense the vacuum left by thousands of our doctors and professors who have fled abroad to escape the pincers of poverty but whose absence has deepened the nation's intellectual pauperisation which has, in turn, had adverse effects on the health and education sectors. So, he might not understand why Nigeria's debts should be written off.
Nigeria's debt which is responsible for so much trouble is put at about 32 billion dollars. No one is actually sure of the exact amount. So dubious is the whole transaction. The more the nation repays, it would appear, the bigger the debt grows. It is one gigantic fraud. Ask where and on what were the supposed loans spent and nobody appears to know. What is now indisputable is that much of the so-called loans were involved in round-tripping tricks. The funds never really left the vaults of the banks of the lenders, in many cases. All that was done in such cases was to pay the corrupt Nigerian establishment men a cut of the loan and they signed away their inheritance.
Even where some of the loans were actually spent, they were spent on questionable projects. An example was the World Bank loan for the provision of textbooks for schools. This loan was entered into without the knowledge of the public and the teachers. Suddenly, there was a Government announcement that lists of books (inevitably foreign books) should be compiled by tertiary institutions. Some books did arrive but nobody could vouch for their value. The primary school section of the project was alleged to have involved some local publishers but my investigations show no trace of the books, some of which were "distributed" in front of television cameras. The only surviving evidence of the project in Lagos are the Peugeot 504 station-wagons distributed to Local Education Authorities, allegedly to facilitate the distribution of non-existing books. So, the only real beneficiaries of the project are the contractors, inevitably foreign ones with outlets in Nigeria. The Nigerian child has no books to read but his poor peasant farmer dad and his poor petty trader mum now have to forgo two out of every five naira they earn to repay the loan.
It is often argued by our western creditors that since the loans met all legal requirements they should be repaid. The British Overseas Co- operation Minister even believed that it was the fault of the citizens who allowed their military rulers to rip them off. If legal, the argument lacks moral basis. In the first place the military juntas, those illegitimate usurpers of power, were never installed by the people. If anything, from what we now know, the embassies of the creditor nations used to give them legitimacy, leaving the citizens with a fait accompli. And where the citizens decided to fight back as it happened during the Abacha years, our creditors were always more concerned with which rogue would take over rather than what the masses wanted.
President Bill Clinton is truly a president of prosperity for the American citizens. He radically expanded the American middle class through his magical economic growth policies. Nigeria, the nation with the largest wholly African population on earth, a veritable paradise, a land of immense opportunities, should be empowered to become a global partner with the US in the expansion of prosperity and progress through trade and investments. That can only be achieved if the crushing debt burden is lifted. We can fight for human rights. We are on the threshold, I believe, of providing the world a cure for HIV with the prospect of eventually taming AIDS, no matter what our mandarins say about Dr. Abalaka's HIV vaccines. Drugs are alien to our culture. We are good business men and women and we can shape our political future to ensure that the new democratic ideals become permanent in our lives. What we cannot tackle, unaided, is the burden of our dubious debts. President Clinton would be doing America, Nigeria and, indeed, the world the greatest good if he becomes persuaded of the need to wipe out our debt burden and if he persuades his G 8 friends to follow his anticipated example. That way, he would be remembered in history as the President who brought prosperity to the Americans on the threshold of the 21st century and who spread prosperity throughout the world.
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