Owei Lakemfa
3 December 2008
opinion
Lagos — Many evenings I watch on television the tape roll to the propaganda pieces on President Umaru Yar'Adua and his Seven-Point Agenda.
The seven points are usually picked one per day. We are told this is what will transform the country. Sometimes, there are snippets of the President as he reiterates his commitment to the transformation of the country. Usually, the propaganda piece ends with praises of the President.
Propaganda is okay but not when it is hinged on nothing concrete.
First, I assume that the Agenda had been conceptualised before the elections. Secondly, that it is the basis on which the President asked for our votes.
That to me presupposes a preparedness to work. So, what we need 18 months into his presidency is not television announcements about the Agenda, but its implementation.
What has been achieved in those 18 months and what is left to be achieved before his four - year tenure expires. Rather than assault the populace with sterile broadcasts, what is required is for us to be told what the administration has done in furtherance of the agenda.
What still needs to be done, within what time frame and how the government hopes to achieve the set goals.
Propaganda, to be meaningful must have content, but to just repeat that there is a Seven-Point Agenda, is to take the populace for granted.
This Government needs to tell us how its policies key into its agenda.
A major plank of the Agenda is wealth and job creation. The Senate during its retreat in Kano made time to visit the industrial city of Kaduna. I witnessed first hand how government policies and its uncritical romance with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) had wiped out the textile companies.
The senators visited textile companies where the hopes of industrialisation lay buried in the silent machines. Where once machines clattered, they were silent, and drabbed in covers that may well be shrouds.
They found that where thousand of workers used to be as busy as bees working to the clatter of machines, there was the silence of the grave yards.
Within the context of the Yar'Adua Agenda, what is the administration doing about government policies that push mass of employed people into the unemployment market? What is it doing about policies that have turned factory warehouses into religious centres where miracles are sought?
How does a government that claims job creation as a major programme, balance this with the mindless auction of public owned companies and attendant massive job losses?
How long do we continue to listen to the empty litanies about the market place when those who teach such hypothesis have buckled under and are massively pumping public funds into private companies, and in some cases actually taking them over.
In other words while government in Nigeria still sings that the best option is to privatise public corporations, those who taught us such fables are doing the exact opposite. So, if the foundations of the government's economic and ideological thoughts have collapsed, why does it still hold tenaciously to a failed vision?
Rather than listen and clap to the regurgitation of discredited IMF and World Bank thoughts that Prof Chukwuma Soludo mouths, can't we get people who are awake to the new realities?
Do we need any serious intellectual scrutiny to know that Soludo's claim that our economy, like the Titanic, is unsinkable because banks are making mega profits, is fictive?
How can we have a solid economy when banks give short term loans mainly for consumer goods like cars?
As usual, the international community is behind this false sense of economic prosperity. Merrill Lynch is said to be one of the world's leading financial management and advisory companies. It has announced that our economy is the least vulnerable in the world.
Do we need any school brat to tell us that this is a fake assessment? That "experts" that could not predict the crises in US or Britain cannot be as brilliant as they claim? If the mighty American economy is vulnerable how can the dependent Nigerian economy be immune to vulnerability?
The Barack Obama administration comes to office next January. But even before the November 2008 elections, it had shown the American populace quite clearly where it is headed and what it would do on basic issues such as health, education, employment, tax, security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In contrast, our own administration has been in office for a year and half and we have no idea what it is doing or hopes to do. Not even on issues as basic as the high taxes we pay and whether the Value Added Tax would be further increased or not.
Perhaps some of us simply worry two much about all these.
Supposing this government has no clues on what it wants to do beyond just occupying office and distributing monthly allocations to itself and other tiers of government.
Perhaps that is why it is all motion and no movement. These difficult times might turn out to be the Golden Age of the Yar'Adua administration.
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