In the last few days, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Chukwuma Soludo, a professor of Economics has began a reverse journey from that deep ocean of irrelevant structural functional economics which he and other colleagues in the infamous Obasanjo's economic management team were deeply submerged in throughout the first eight years of this attempt called democratic governance.

Readers will remember that Professor Charles Chukwuma Soludo was first introduced into governance as the Chairman of the National Planning Commission and Chief Economic Advisor to the President after the exit of Chief Philip Asiodu in the turn of 2000. The emergence of Soludo came with it some measure of vibrancy characteristic of a young university professor who had tremendous energy to dispense in the process of governance.

Chukwumma's first major project was the packaging of the failure called National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy, (NEEDS) which many Nigerians since the launching of the program had dismissed it as a mere repackage of those obnoxious World Bank/IMF conditionality that were set to simply accomplish the aspirations of the Washington consensus.

Prominent Nigerian intellectuals like the late Dr. Yususf Bala Usman took the pains to immediately study the shabbily put together documents that were incomprehensive and observed that the entire program called NEEDS was nothing but an attempt at intellectual scam intended at shortchanging the Nigerian people. Equally critical to the agenda was a renown Nigerian Economist of repute, Professor Sam Aluko.

Those who thought these scholars especially and the sea of critics who saw in between the justification, methodology and other critical condiments of the NEEDS escape are by now very convinced of the apprehension, skepticism and doubts over not only the intention behind the introduction of the program but importantly the obvious failures that have greeted the scheme..

Let me give some examples, the NEEDS documents for instance spoke about right sizing in the public service, which invariably meant cut down in workforce. Yes, this was achieved because the Federal Government did ask Nasiru el-Rufai, the former FCT Minister to retrench federal staff. That was done. Another issue was the vision to create over ten million jobs by December. This is November, I am sure the reality is that more jobs were lost in the corresponding period than was created. More local industries especially textiles that is one of the three major employers of labor in third world economies have closed shop. The last in the Northern part of this country was the UNTL and it went off about a month ago.

Another lie was the issue of raising the level of electricity generation from about 4,000 megawatts to 10, 000 megawatts by the end of 2007. It is already November 2007, with about a month to the end of the year, the generation capacity is still below 4,000 megawatts after over $5 billion has been wasted in the venture of power generation and supply in the country. The only achievement recorded in that area is the frequent change of name of the electricity corporation.

The program also spoke about wealth creation and new ways of doing government business. I know for certain that wealth was not created for citizens throughout the period in question, unless of course that General Obasanjo after leaving told us that he had created about eight billionaires from among the 140 million of us.

The summary of the fact is that truly, NEEDS is a colossal failure. All the set objectives were never achieved and in fact, the statistics looks worst than they were presented at the beginning of the program. What has been depleted instead is the colossal resources that were injected into 'realizing' the program's objectives. The new song we hear now is a distinction between NEEDS 1 & 2. I wonder therefore what will NEEDS 2 mean when in reality, NEEDS 1 was a painful failure.

It was the bravery of Professor Soludo perhaps that excited the then president to heed to the agitation of his egg head economic management team to transfer the professor from National Economic Planning to the apex bank. There too, it was a galore of experimentation beginning with the rule that every bank must have a minimum share capital holding of at least N25 billion. The professor spoke loud and hard about the new agenda without considering the fundamental infraction the national financial and fiscal community were e likely to be subjected to.

It became a rule that banks had to merge, consolidate or perish. Capitalism at its free trade stage is normally characterized by the formation of mergers, monopolies and syndicates for the purposes of increasing profitability, reducing competition and maximizing the market space. Mergers and acquisition are not normally a product of policy but purely a reality of the market condition.

What the professor missed therefore was the correct intellectual parameter of placing the issues in their right context. Lenin did write severally on this stage of capitalism and has made it very clear that corporations and other concerns will find it more profitable and expedient to break their barriers and come together so as to face the common enemy who is equally gathering tremendous momentum, that is the laborer or worker. This explains why for instance oil giants Total went into merger with ELF, EXXON and Mobil, CNN and Times among many of such and even in the banking industry, there was a merger between Standard Bank of South Africa and IBTC Chartered Bank. All these were not brought about by policy fiat but market conveniences.

After the consolidation blues which in my humble opinion is a fundamental distortions on the rights of middle class citizens to start and run financial institutions in tune with certain local and traditional characteristics, the professor went on to create a thousand Naira denominations.

Central in this whole policy rigmarole is the failure of the Central Bank of Nigeria to take effective control of the nation's fiscal policies by keeping an effective eye on the banking sector. For instance, throughout these years of financial turmoil in Nigeria, there was never a time the apex bank detected and saved any ailing bank from collapsing.

The CBN was always there after the patient had died. The leaderships of the bank have been immodest in the ability to accept failure. They are always willing to becloud issue with some technocratic arrogance and as an agency of government, they advise not only wrongly but selfishly while the nation and its finances and economy continue to suffer from their failures. I am not surprise. It is argued that among the central banks in Africa, it is only in Nigeria that ours is run like a bureaucracy.

When Professor Chukwuma came with his idea of introducing and minting new one thousand Naira notes, even those ordinarily level economics students who read O.A. Lawal knew that it was aimed at creating further inflation. It was only the Professor who insisted instead that it was a remedy. Everyone can see at least that by the way the successes said to have been achieved in curbing inflation are more on statistical horizon than in reality.

We are glad that they were stopped from redenomination the Naira as a strategy of adding value to it. What a mechanical way of valuation? Those who accuse the professor of devising these policies as a strategy of reaping from the system may after all not be wrong if placed along the spectrum of logic, reason a and rationality.

The same Chukwuma was reported last week as warning on the dangers of poverty in Nigeria. A member of the team who deprived education, industry and other infrastructures of over $12.8 billion paid to a dubious Paris Club in the name of debt repayment. Who collected the commission? Who brokered the deal? They are not talking about all these but I believe sooner or later they will have to.

If Professor Soludo doesn't know or is just realizing, the army of poor people is already a Nigerian reality and they were mainly created through very obnoxious policies that people like hi m have either evolved or spear-headed in breaking up. The new song he is singing is indeed a very old one in our ears.