Chief Audu Innocent Ogbeh, three-time minister, former National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, and author of many books is unhappy with the current state of Nigeria's economy and recalls with nostalgia how the economy was booming until 1986 when the then military administration bowed to pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to introduce the infamous Structural Adjustment Programme, SAP, which led to the devaluation of the nation's currency and the adoption of many unfavourable fiscal policies and programmes that have kept Nigeria on its knees till today.
In this exclusive interview with Soni Daniel, Northern Region Editor, Ogbe, who served and left as Agriculture Minister under the Buhari administration and continues to run successful agricultural projects in the country, says Nigeria's economic woes are directly flowing from the mistake of adopting SAP in 1986 and that it will take a lot of work and some time to revive the economy and attain growth.
YOU have been very quiet since leaving office as Agricultural Minister. Where have you been doing all this time?
Well, I would say that I am very much around; but I am a deeply troubled man when I look at what is happening and how our economy is going due to one mistake the country made in 1986, called the Structural Adjustment Programme, or SAP. We are suffering from it today. The project began when the IMF and the World Bank insisted that we embark on the so-called Structural Adjustment Programme.
The consequences are here now. Do not forget that before then, two outstanding academics in the US, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics at Columbia University and also adviser to the United Nations on economic matters, had condemned SAP; Professor Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner at Harvard, had also condemned SAP as the worst assault on Africa since the slave trade; and our own Professor Adebayo Adedeji had also condemned SAP for the way it was designed. But these guys--the IMF and the World Bank--in fact, some countries in Europe said if Nigeria did not adopt SAP, they would stop giving us credit or anything.
The highlights were that we should not worry about major development projects like highways, railways, ports, and so on but rather concentrate on importing; remain in the Africa that they are familiar with. The ulterior motive for most of them being in Africa is that sub-Saharan Africa should really not be allowed to develop but instead remain a source of cheap raw materials because the impact on Africa was immediate. Due to the harsh policies emanating from the programme, very vital companies such as Michelin Tyres, Dunlop, Anammco, Thermocool, Volkswagen, and the flourishing textile industry in the Northern part of the country all folded up, and Nigeria became a nation of importers until today.
The reason was simple: Nigeria produces oil, and the powers suck all the money out and leave it poor. So now, when people analyse poverty and think that it began overnight, it did not just start. It was on its way. Some external forces had well-laid plans to keep us on our knees. Unfortunately, we did not argue, we did not quarrel, and we did not analyse it before falling into the well-structured trap.
But did you not shout out at that time? Were you not in the country at the time?
No, I was no longer in the cabinet in 1986. I was doing my personal business at that time. In fact, I was away in Hong Kong the day they began auctioning the dollar under the SAP. And we said: "What was it? He said N3 to $1, and I said to my friend that this is the beginning of Nigeria's journey to disaster. I said one day it could be up to N300 to $1, and my friend said, no, it could not be, but we all know how the exchange rate is today. That is why when they talk about 133 million people being poor, it is real. It was programmed to happen. We are here, and we are seeing the woes in Ghana, South Africa, and others.
Indeed, the whole of Africa, apart from Egypt and a few others, is in turmoil. The whole of the continent is in turmoil, and people do not just have a sense of history.
If you fall while walking along the village path, they say: 'don't blame the ground on which your head fell, but check where your feet stumbled because there could have been a stone.' This thing began, and the consequences are just beginning to happen. Now you have an interest rate regime of 27 per cent, and nobody can take a loan to do anything meaningful because they cannot repay it. If they do business, they have to figure out how they can buy generators and diesel at very high costs, pay for other factors of production, and see if they could ever break even. Then we have 220 universities now.
I don't know how many kids from secondary school are coming out. Then you have a maliciously wicked underdevelopment of local governments at the hands of many governors, who will not allow the local governments to function. So, on average, N200 million a month go to local governments each time, and it just vanishes every month. I've been to India before. In 2012, I went with my son. We went to the state of Gujarat. ###The then chief minister, an equivalent of a governor in Nigeria, is the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. He arranged for us to visit the local government.
We went to a local government in India, about 200 kilometres from Ahmedabad, the capital. In the office of the local government chairman, they told us they had 1,000 industries in one local government. But here, you can't have a functional road, clinic, health centre or supply of running water for the people. It is a big crime we, the political elite, are committing against this country, for which we need to pray hard. We are currently witnessing the destruction of rural areas on the basis of constitutional arguments that local government is the responsibility of governors. You cannot go near there, and for that, the sum of N200 million on average per month vanishes into the pockets of some powerful politicians, and they are happy to see the people who should enjoy the cash, suffer endlessly.
Now recently when Order 10 or Order 11 came out when the president tried to get involved, they went to court and now let's be careful in this country. The rule of law must not become an excuse for anarchy and failure. There is corruption, theft, and waste at the local government level. Unfortunately, many pretend that nothing wrong is happening in the local government areas, but one of the immediate responses to the collapse of the system is that all the young boys are now in the forest and on the highways, kidnapping and causing all sorts of havoc. There are five million people in Lagos who have no business being in the city. They live under the bridges, they come from Zamfara, from wherever, to Lagos, believing there is activity there; they are here in Abuja too, and that is why the crime rate in Abuja is getting quite alarming.
Because there's nothing to hold them back in their states and local governments, and there's a debate that nobody in the political class talks about. We don't see anything. However, the IMF and World Bank, which sparked SAP, insist that Nigeria will only be able to recover from its economic crisis if it implements good governance in all branches of government and eradicates corruption.
How do you provide jobs, not in ministries, but in jobs created by industrial development? How do you embark on industrial development? That can be done through the provision of communications, highways, railways, and roads, and the provision of access to funds and foreign exchange for industry to flourish and create jobs for the citizens. Now, our only major source of foreign exchange is oil, and we are no longer earning enough from oil, and we continue to face capital flight and other factors draining Nigeria's resources.
As a result of these factors, the only thriving industry in Nigeria is politics. That alone doesn't guarantee these things. But how did India and China overcome their economic challenges? They shut their doors against excessive importation and concentrated on internal efforts to grow the economy. Look, in 1965, India's Prime Minister, Shastri, went on the radio and begged people to fast for at least four days a week because there was no food, and no less than two million people died in a year, some on the streets. He died two years later, and Mrs. Gandhi took over. Now people forget that India became independent in 1947, on August 15 to be precise, the same year as Pakistan. They were together, and then they fell out.
Between that date and today, 75 years ago, there has never been a coup in India, not once, in spite of the challenges; overwhelming challenge is nothing to be compared to what we have here. How is it that today India is the fifth largest economy in the world, overtaking even Britain? What did they do? No disruption. On the other hand, no elected government in Pakistan has ever completed its term; every single one has been interrupted. See where they are. These are the issues.
Good governance, yes, but is there continuity? Is there stability in the political system? And what are the factors that create instability, economic disagreements, and fault lines within the system? Why is the civil service so rotten today? The Murtala Muhammed government's reforms caused some disruptions. They came rather suddenly and flushed out many top government officials from their offices, and many had no place to go or lay their heads. It was a serious disruption that left many permanent secretaries stranded with no house to live in, no pension, or anything else. I knew a few in Lagos. I was at King's College, and I knew some of the senior government officials whose children were with us when the thing happened. So they talk of good governance.
Democracy is not worth the piece of paper on which it is written if it can't provide for the basic needs of society. That's why people now ask: "Is it development or democracy that we want?" They tell you what to expect from China. China is not a democracy, but it is making real, steady and measurable progress. Last year, 123 million Chinese travelled abroad; not one stayed behind.
If their country was that bad, they would have remained in the foreign countries they visited, but they all returned home. Of course, the system is hard, but it is meeting their needs. So this is it. We got squeezed into this thing so tightly that it is very difficult for us to get out of the squeeze.
Look at the exchange rate. I want to build a factory, specifically a palm oil mill that will also produce soybeans, oil and other products. The machines are worth $650,000; translate that to naira. If I go take that loan, first of all, I can't even borrow because if I do, I can't pay.
But how do we get out of this mess?
There are two things. A doctor can't cure you if he doesn't know; if you yourself don't know what is worrying you, tell the doctor. Number two, a doctor doesn't tell you to cut off your head because you have constant headaches. The headaches may not be coming from the head but from the heart or some other place. Three, we're not sufficiently open to debate in Africa because the debate is out there, not within the government. I was chairman of the PDP, and I said to them: "We must have a party conference once a year. We had one that Obasanjo attended, and he liked it, but there were people in the party who said I was arrogant and queried my audacity to call the President to come and stand before party members and explain some development issues to them, and I said I didn't call him to stand. In fairness, Obasanjo liked it.
But there were people who said it wasn't a good idea. Now in the current manifesto of the APC, which was completed in my sitting room here, I had included a number of items, including an annual party conference at the federal, state, and local government level where the governor comes and party members say: "Look, you've done well here, but what's going on? Why is this not working.
The schools are all running down, the markets, the stalls, and the women who voted for us are grumbling. Let him know because nobody else dares tell him. The state assemblies have finished. As a legislator in those days, we could summon any government official to appear and answer questions on the way the government was being run; but today it is the governors who run the show at every level and appoint those who should run the party and every other organ.
Can you summon a governor to appear today?
We even had some governors impeached during our time. In South Africa, the system is still active. At the federal level, the president still appears before the ANC, the oldest political party in Africa founded in 1912, and every year there's an annual conference, a regional conference, and a local government conference. But unless and until political parties in this country begin to run well, there will be no progress. They must be able to sit down and invite those running the government and ask them relevant questions regarding the policy and what to do in order to make progress. Without such sincere self-assessment and the provision of answers, not much progress can be made, while lamentation will continue to be the order of the day.
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But what must Nigeria do to return to a production country once again and reduce its reliance on other countries for survival?
Look, if we're going to return to production, this government or any government must recognise that it must deliberately and consciously hand-walk Nigerians into industrial production like a father hand-walks his child when he is learning how to walk. In other words, there must be massive support for an emerging industrial programme in this country. So when you expect two or three young graduates who want to make palm oil in the village to raise N5 million to buy machines, it is a clear signal that we are not yet ready to engage in production to change the way things are in the land at the moment.
This lack of interest in serious agricultural and economic ventures has been responsible for why Nigeria, which used to lead in palm oil production and supply at least 44 per cent of the world's needs, has dropped to a paltry four per cent at the moment. On the other hand, you dropped from being the world's largest producer of palm oil for 200 years to only four per cent capacity now.
We accounted for 44 per cent of the world's palm oil production. But the government believes that even with mounting debts, which some concerned Nigerians have complained about; the government is on the right path. If the government believes it is on the right track, the question to ask is why our debt is increasing on a daily basis and how we will repay the debts.
One immediate outcome of this is that while we continue to sell more oil and try to remove subsidies, the hardship in the land, especially, among average Nigerians, will continue to increase and the level of discontent will also grow. How are you going to repay the debts? When we sell more oil and remove the subsidy, the hardship increases.
Where did we go wrong in agriculture, and how can we recover lost ground?
The First Republic was fine. We all depended on agriculture, and we had enough to eat and some to export. Then Yakubu Gowon came, and everything slowed down. Then came the Second Republic and the Shagari administration, which began the River Basins Authority that really helped produce more food through irrigation, which the Obasanjo government sustained. Somehow, the current Nigerian political elite has very little interest in or regard for agriculture. We have a cosmetic interest in it, as cosmetics don't create permanent beauty.
First and foremost, you must request the rural populace; otherwise, you will fall like a man building a storey building on broomsticks. So this is the issue. At what point are we going to find state governors in some states who believe in agriculture and invest in it? Most of the governors have different backgrounds, and if they don't believe in investing in massive agricultural production, there isn't much we can do to improve agriculture.
