The likes of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, then Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy and now DG of the WTO; Charles Soludo, then Governor of the CBN and now governor of Anambra State and Oby Ezekwesili, a former Vice President of the World Bank, are Nigerian-born apostles and advocates of the World Bank- and IMF-style economic policies.
They were in the vanguard of the Olusegun Obasanjo years as president. For all her criticisms of the Bola Tinubu administration, can anyone point to any full-throated censure of the present Tinubu economic policies from Oby Ezekwesili beyond generalised criticisms of the government with regards to how Nigerians have been immiserated and being badly governed?
Or is it any surprise that Okonjo-Iweala praised President Tinubu's economic reforms during her keynote at the last NBA conference? Hers was an upbeat observation of these much-criticised policies. But, somehow, her words eluded the attention of her listeners who for that moment suspended their understanding of the issue concerning the economic debates and praised Okonjo-Iweala with a sense of nostalgia, while throwing stones at the President and his supposedly mediocre economic team that could not hold a candle to the team led by the local IMF and World Bank advocates of the Obasanjo years.
We may, in fact, ask if it was coincidental that Mr. Indermit Gill singled out the period between 2003 to 2007, the Obasanjo years when these local agents of the IMF and World Bank held the reins of the Nigerian economy, as the best reform years since Nigeria's return to civil rule? It was the period when the kind of reforms being implemented by the Tinubu administration gained traction but on a low scale. That these reforms were not followed-up by the succeeding Umaru Yar'Adua, Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari administrations, we are now being told, is the reason our economy is where it is today: gravely ill and largely unresponsive to the remedial economic reforms of the present administration.
But Nigeria must learn not to take IMF too seriously or treat as the gospel everyone of its hairbrained prescriptions that the IMF itself is quick to deny when things go south. At the very least, Nigerian leaders, in this case President Bola Tinubu and his team, must learn to reject some of the prescriptions of the IMF, World Bank and other Western financial and development agencies. They could at least domesticate and localise such reforms and prescriptions they consider feasible for our environment. A wholesale, unmediated adoption or transplanting of economic policies forged elsewhere to address Nigeria's economic and political realities, are doomed to fail. That many of these policies tend to be harsh and anti-welfare should be enough warning to our policy makers to accept them but only with caution.
As far as our future as a nation is concerned, Nigeria must stop the "follow-follow" syndrome and learn to think for itself. If the reforms of the last 18 months are not working, it is not by the dumb implementation of more of such reforms that they can be made to work. Rather, we must tinker with them to address local realities. We have been told that fuel subsidy was not addressing the needs of the poor majority, only expanding the account balance of oil oligarchs with foreign currencies, while the country's foreign reserve is quickly depleted. Yet, that's not the same thing as saying that Nigerians don't need or deserve subsidised fuel. The whole point of fuel subsidy being called a scam is the opaque nature of its execution to service the greed of a corrupt few. This, on the other hand, amounts to government's admission of failure to tame corruption and protect the vulnerable poor.
A thinking government, not the follow-follow type, can at this point in time reconsider the idea of subsidy removal now the Port Harcourt Refinery has again joined the Dangote Refinery in business. Their existence should have effectively terminated the regime of fuel importation or disbursement of foreign currencies in the name of subsidy to crooks masquerading as oil importers or marketers. Now government has stopped importing fuel, is anything wrong in subsidising local fuel consumption in naira?
Oh yes, Dangote is yapping about the naira for fuel payment not working- but is it not reasonable to ask why it is not working? Whatever is the answer, it wouldn't be a bad idea for a creative government to provide subsidised fuel to Nigerians with the latest developments in the oil sector. The claim that lower fuel pump price encourages smuggling to neighbouring countries is simply untenable. Is that Abuja's way of saying it is helpless to protect our borders? Is that why foreign criminal groups like Lakurawa are criss-crossing our borders without any challenge?
The whole point of constructing a local refinery was to ease the burden of fuel importation and consumption on Nigerians. It was part of what the construction of the Dangote Refinery was supposed to address in the face of the failure of the NNPC that could not guarantee the return of the country's three major refineries? Why has the government chosen to be totally silent about this aspect of its plan for supporting the construction of the Dangote Refinery? This at a time when the reforms advocated by the government's foreign mentors are not only being slammed as either not working or unworkable but are in fact being denied by the same economic doctors that prescribed them? The idea of subsidy under the new regime of local fuel refinement seems a sound and workable proposition at this time.
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But beyond all of this, any economic reform that ignores the urgent transformation of the structures of governance, namely, the total overhaul of our presumed federalism, is nothing but a cosmetic endeavour, a treatment of the symptoms and not the cause of our governance problem. Remove Tinubu from office and replace him with a thousand and one Peter Obi, Atiku Abubakar and Olusegun Obasanjo- bring them all together in one administration with the combined experience of every other person that ever had the privilege of leading Nigeria- ask them to govern Nigeria under the present structure and they will all fail roundly.
Our problem is fundamentally not about the person in charge. A leader with the right mental and moral capacity will definitely be of added advantage but the real problem that has hobbled our growth as a country of diverse cultural, economic and social energies, is the impaired structure of our so-called federal system. We must re-negotiate our governance structure to address our needs. This process cannot but take us back to the founding principles of our nationhood and we must journey through it with neither fear nor recrimination.
