Abdullahi Y. Bello, Suleiman M. Odapu & Idris Ahmed
11 October 2008
opinion
The three-day Northern Nigeria Economic and Investment Summit (NEIS) has ended. The challenge that remains is how to get the proper mix of potions that will constitute an effective and lasting cure to the North's socio-economic ailment. Weekly Trust reports.
The North is sick, it has contracted a strange kind of virus that is proving highly contagious such that when it sneezes the whole nation catches cold. Doctors have proffered different kinds of diagnosis for this strange ailment but the cure seems so far off. As for the pathologists, they are still in the laboratory hunched over their microscope trying to isolate the different strains of the virus that seem to be mutating by the day. The south is not finding all this funny; they have come out to protest that the North is turning parasitic, feeding on them and probably trying to infect them too.
The insults and snide remarks probably did it and suddenly the north has had enough. Now the dominant discourse in the region is how to arrest and reverse the stride of this strange ailment and once again help the north reclaim its superior standing as the economic power house of Nigeria. The economic doctors and pathologists say it has done it before and it could still do it again as all the medicinal potions it needs are still on ground: vast human and material resources that include high population and rich mineral deposits, vast tracts of arable land that will sustain commercial agriculture, a shared history, culture and identity between its peoples and one of the nation's most enlightened political cultures.
The doctors are now putting their money where their mouth is as evidenced by the three days Northern Nigeria Economic and Investment Summit organised by the Conference of Northern States Chambers of Commerce, Mines and Agriculture (CONSCCIMMA). The challenge now, as gleaned from the submissions of experts, is how to get the proper mix of potions that will constitute an effective and lasting cure. The doctors are divided on the method to go about this: there are some who think the cure is in entrenching a private sector-led economy for the north that will be free from government meddling while some think simply handing the economy of the region to the private sector will be inimical. Others advocate a third way that combines the virtues of the two, which is a partnership between the public and private sector. The last seem to be the best received and most advocated by experts and participants at the summit.
But the private sector been referred to here is the home-spun investor, not some investor that needed to be begged, Obasanjo-style, to come and invest. The foreign investor is expected to come in too, however, but he will be doing so willingly and when the business climate is competitive and properly set. Chairman of CONSCCIMA, Jani Ibrahim told Weekly Trust: "The more of us that can go into these businesses the more confidence building mechanism we are putting in place for foreigners and other Nigerians to come to our place. It is not about going round the whole world asking people; they want to see examples on ground: who has done it and it is working, that is what they want to follow."
But for business to thrive the doctors say the human and financial capital has to be in place. Also important is the presence of basic infrastructures like energy, water, sustainable environment, roads and the like. Here, it must be admitted the north, just like the rest of the country has kwashiorkor. But the northern strain of the disease is more deadly. While the south could be said to have made some progress in improving its human capital bank by the high rate of school enrolment and low drop-out rate, the north seem to be going nowhere. This failure to address the region's educational backwardness could undermine all its efforts at developing. The reason is quite simple: "We are now in a knowledge based world and any part of the world that would not educate its population cannot develop," says Professor of Business Administration, Mike Kwanashi, at the north's premier university, Ahmadu Bello University. Professor J.D Amin, immediate former vice-chancellor of the University of Maiduguri told weekly trust all the economic palliatives should wait as a matter of fact until the proper dosage of educational oxygen has been breathed into the north. "We need to devote a great deal of our resources to education and anything can wait," he says. "Education can solve almost all our problem in the north...education is key and the most important sector in the system." He says even the globally approved 25% of national budgets that governments are advised to invest in education will not do for the north, suggesting that "40 to 50% of the national budget should go into education."
The high toll the north's educational backwardness is exacting on its economic and social well being is not just a prophecy of doom that is far off and unlikely. Its vestiges are very much in the corner. Take the laudable initiative by the Kano state government for instance to introduce an Information Technology Park that will help to attract ICT companies into the state, which is the north's commercial nerve centre, to create ICT goods and services. The initiative faces serious challenges that could threaten its success in the absence of trained manpower to run it. A hitherto poor country like India, whose poverty rate at a time is probably worse than what obtains in the north today had with the aid of trained manpower and investment in ICT education swiftly turned around its economy. It is predicted to surpass the American economy by 2050. Kano and Jigawa states in contrast, while setting up ICT centres are greatly hampered by the poor educational capabilities of their populations. "Because the north is very weak educationally, it also goes on logically that the north is also going to be weak in terms of ICT," says Prof. Bashir Galadanci of the Bayero University Kano and coordinator of the Kano ICT Park project in an interview with Weekly Trust. "So you have a situation whereby most of our schools are not teaching ICT and even when they were how many of our children are going to school?"
Closely tied with poor human capital is the problem of financial capital. Here the disease is self-inflicted in some ways and in some other ways a creation from an unfavourable government policy that caught the north napping. Of the 25 mega banks in the country, only one, Unity Bank, has a Northerner controlling majority shares. The region's premier banking institution, Bank of the North set up specifically as a financing arm for its projects and investments, was so much battered by poor management that when the policy for banks to recapitalise to the tune of N25billion came on stream it couldn't make the mark and had to merge with other banks. Now, economic doctors say the north has been deprived of a vital source of blood that will give it a fresh injection of life. Banks now operate under more stringent rules and despite recapitalisation seem reluctant to finance long term projects.
The Northern Nigerian Development Company (NDDC), the regions investment arm now has to go cap in hand to the governors of the 19 northern states to seek financial aid to float some of its businesses. The NDDC's managing director, Alhaji Aliyu Alkali says the company's major challenge now is how to recapitalise and shore up its capital base to enable it invest in the kind of project that will bring in the best returns for investors. He is optimistic that the governors will bail out the company. He says: "As soon as the next meeting of the governors take place we will have their approval and the payment of the recapitalisation." Should it succeed, Alkali says they will be floating an oil and gas company, Nasara oil and gas and be looking at viable investments even outside the country that will act as additional sources of revenue for the northern states.
But while experts encourage big investments another regular suggestion is the setting up of microfinance banks to act as sources of finance to the poor who basically inhabit the rural areas. They say also that whatever developmental model the north chooses to adopt it must be one that puts the poor, especially those in the rural areas at the centre of its plan and implementation. "It is easier to go to the rural areas," says Ibrahim of CONSCIMMA. "We shall make sure this is our area of focus...what can the housewife do to contribute to wealth creation? These are some of the dynamics we are going to implement. With that we will see massive results coming out. And that will improve their lives, improve their purchasing power, empower them and in the process they will be able to appreciate the need to educate their children and to guide them so that they will be useful to their community and the nation at large."
Achieving this means paying closer attention to the development of agriculture beyond the mere lip service governors in the region have been paying to the sector. The potential for agricultural growth are quite vast, the economic doctors say and the payback quite enormous. But it will require adopting a different kind of approach to agriculture that goes beyond mere subsistence farming. This much was the submission of former Pakistani Prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, who devoted a considerable amount of Pakistan's development effort in the rural areas while he was Prime Minister of the country. Aziz says also that Nigeria must learn to exploit its natural resources to its advantages.
Here, the north has failed dismally. While the south had enjoyed the benefits of the full exploitation of petroleum resources, making it Nigeria's richest region, the solid mineral resources of the north which experts say could generate four times as much revenues than oil has largely been left buried in the earth while the region wallows in poverty. Economic doctors after economic doctors tried to come up with a treatment for this strange case of sleeping sickness. Now the blame is on the absence of finance to pay for capital-intensive venture like mining, absence of enabling environment that will encourage investors to come in, absence of infrastructures to aid transportation of solid minerals and the generally poor and disorganised state of the sector. They suggested revenue from oil should be used to finance the sector just as once revenue from agriculture was used to finance the exploration and growth in the oil sector.
Naturally, when the oil sector is mentioned, politics come in. Here also the nineteen governors of the northern states come in too because underpinning all the remedies proffered by the doctors is the very support of the governors of the nineteen states to cooperate in bringing the patient for treatment and paying for the treatment at the same time without waiting for handouts from the federal government.
Will they be willing to support the treatment of the sick patient? "We are ready. And we are ready as a result of necessity because there is a compelling need for us to do that," says Isa Yuguda, the Bauchi State governor and the only one among the nineteen governors to have sat throughout the three days of the summit without abstention. He adds: "We have appreciated the very condition and the apparent disaster that will befall the north if we don't take the positive and the right step to develop the north."
He could mean what he is saying as the World Bank recently rated Bauchi as the safest state for investment in the country. But this much could not be said for his other counterparts, except probably for the Zamfara State governor, Aliyu Shinkafi who also attended the summit but did not stay till the end. "I cannot speak for them," says Yuguda to Weekly Trust. "They may have some very critical engagement that would have stopped them from coming to this all-important occasion. Those reasons must be very strong; otherwise I cannot see any of my colleagues failing to attend this occasion."
But he could be trying to be charitable to his colleagues who even if excused have shown how far removed they are from an issue that is topmost in the heart of the people who purportedly voted them into power. The organisers of the summit say the absent governors sent in representatives but they weren't introduced as far as Weekly Trust could observe, because they were probably low government functionaries, except for Prof. Galadanci who made a submission on ICT at the summit. Presidential aspirant and Professor of economics at the Lagos Business School, Pat Utomi was more pointed about some of the reasons: "Everything in Nigeria is political," he says. "I have some powerful friends who are not here because they say the summit is supposed to take place in Kaduna and not Abuja." He suggests "we have to go beyond all these things and focus on the hard issues. How to change people's life for good."
The absence of a rallying leadership in instances like this brings to mind the memory of the once venerable leader of the north, the Sardauna of Sokoto. Prof. Kwanashie says of the north under Sardauna: "The north had a clear vision and the leadership of the region then worked tenaciously to achieve the vision, this vision was dictated by the general environment of the nation at that particular point in time, the need to compete. The need to identify the comparative advantages of the north vis-a-vis other parts of the country and the need to convert this comparative advantage to competitive advantage."
Is the north today under the current crop of its political leadership converting its comparative advantages to competitive advantages? Keep the statistics from the CBN and the World Bank aside about the poverty level in the north. Just simply take a stroll into the northern streets and see if poverty will speak to you or not.
"Even when the north controls the federal government, the impact from the state governments is low," says Kwanashie. "They still cannot influence because they are doing it in a very individualistic and from parochial standpoint. From that perspective, the impact and the influence on policy even when the federal government is under the north has not translated into transformation at the lower level."
This brings the pitiable story of the north full circle. If those entrusted with managing the affairs of the sick region today lack the will or the influence to bring him for treatment then of what use is all the drugs recommended by the doctors for the sick patient? Gov. Yuguda suggested the doctors should come out with practical strategies that will be implemented by the governors which they should now present to their Excellencies at the next forum of the northern governors. Which in a way means if those charged with looking after the patient cannot bring him for immunisation then the doctors have to go to the patient themselves before the virus mutates into deadlier strains.
Why the North has not developed? Again Kwanashie: The governors "were more outward looking towards the centre than they were inward looking towards their societies. This is actually the bane of development of the north." Does this define a parasite?
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