Nigeria's Poor Economy - Blame Ibrahim Babangida!

25 January 2016
blog

I woke up this morning to a report in the media that Chief Audu Ogbeh is holding former dictator, Ibrahim Babangida and SAP, responsible for the current poor state of the economy. Babangida introduced SAP and led Nigeria to an over-reliance on oil and that is why we are where we are today. There is nothing wrong with historical illumination. There is everything wrong when it becomes a tired cliché constantly mobilised as alibi when you don't appear to have the answers to setting a new course. That is the trouble with President Buhari's ministers. When a few months ago, Lai Mohammed blamed President Jonathan, I urged Nigerians to be glad that he did not blame it on Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The rate at which President Buhari's ministers are scrambling irresponsibly to blame the past instead of doing their work and facing the future - and let the anti-corruption efforts proceed on other fronts - is alarming. If President Buhari does not rein them in, they will blame Lord Lugard. I am compelled to reproduce an apt excerpt from "Building Rome in One Day", the inauguration lecture I delivered in Kaduna for Nasir El Rufai on May 28, 2015. Read on:

"The sky is falling! Nigerians, please bear me witness: my predecessor has emptied the treasury o. My predecessor has shackled me with debts o. He has borrowed money that we must pay for the next sixty years o. Things are so bad. There is nothing to work with. I will probe him; I will not probe him; yes, I will probe him." As true as these statements are in terms of the actualities they describe, it is also true that they are cliché, repeated ad nauseam by every in-coming administration. Nigerians heard it from Chief Obasanjo and all the governors in the 1999 set; they heard this rhetoric again in 2003; heard it in 2007; heard it in 2011. To hear it in 2015 would be the very definition of continuity because there is nothing in that rhetoric that the people have not heard before.

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