By Reno Omokri
*Buhari |
In today’s world, strength and weakness are gauged differently than they
were, say in 1984.
In the
millennial age in which we live in, information is power and lack of
information is weakness. My concern is that there are a lot of weaknesses in Nigeria ’s
seat of power because not enough information is being given to President
Muhammadu Buhari. I, like other Nigerians, have heard or read reports of
ministers in President Buhari’s cabinet being afraid to challenge him or
disagree with him. Perhaps unawares, the minister of state for petroleum, Dr.
Ibe Kachikwu, corroborated these reports in a recorded YouTube video now
circulating where he revealed that the President ignores his ministers when
they bring up issues that he does not want to discuss.
Having such anodyne personalities around you just means that you are
living in a bubble, seeing things as you want them to be and not as they are.
On Friday May 20th, 2016, Dr. Yemi Kale, the Statistician General of the
Federation and head of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics revealed that
Nigeria’s economy had not grown in the first quarter of the year but had rather
shrunk by 0.36%, the worst contraction in 25 years! Since the announcement was
made, there has been various reactions with pundits pointing at this or the
other as being the cause of this setback. But I am convinced beyond any
reasonable doubts that this negative trend owes more to President Muhammadu
Buhari’s utterances on our economy and polity than to any other single
causative factor.
The bigger problem is that even though I suspect that his
ministers know that what I have just said is true, they would rather pander to
the President and like Dr. Chris Ngige, say that Nigerians are lucky to have
President Buhari (obvious Ngige does not know the meaning of luck). In the last
eleven months, the President had traversed the globe and has spoken about Nigeria ’s
economy as if he was the chief undertaker of our polity rather than the chief
marketer that he is meant to be. Of what benefit is it to the President’s
agenda or to Nigeria ’s economic well
being for him to go to foreign nations and instead of highlighting the positive
things that are happening in Nigeria , he begins to
regale his hosts with the most unsavory stories about Nigeria .
And some of the stories the President tells are just that-tales.
They are not factual. At best they are arguable. You go to India for a summit where other world leaders
are competing with you for the attention of venture capitalists and foreign
investors and while your counterparts are talking about how great their
countries are, you tell the audience how everybody in your country is corrupt
except you and oh, can they come and invest in your country? Only a foolish
investor would go and invest in a country whose President thinks his citizens
are ‘criminals’ (as the President said to the Telegraph of UK in February) and
whose officials are ‘fantastically corrupt’ (as the President said in agreement
with British PM David Cameron when questioned by Sky News). The President
speaks on the Nigerian economy and polity without any filters and his comments
are causing his chickens to roost with devastating consequences for all of us.
Never in the history of Nigeria has there been such a divestment of
investment as we have seen in the past year. Truworths has pulled out of Nigeria , Virgin Atlantic
has closed up shop, Iberia is pulling out, RenCap is pulling
funds from Nigeria , both Alquity
Investment Management Ltd. and Duet Asset Management Ltd. are divesting their Nigeria holding. Zenith Bank laid off 1,200
staff, FCMB let go 700 employees, Ecobank sacked 50% of its top management
staff. The President of the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Tony
Ejinkeonye revealed that in just two months 50,000 staff were laid off in Abuja alone. The results are telling. A
little over a year ago, Nigeria was projected by CNNMoney to be the third fastest growing
economy in the world behind China and Qatar yet just two weeks ago the
International Monetary Fund released its World Economic Outlook and Nigeria is not even among the top 15 fastest
growing economies in Africa let
alone the world!
And when you try to raise the alarm, the refrain from the government and
its horde of unofficial spokesmen is that the downturn is caused by the fall in
crude prices. Yet this logic is flawed. The government’s own economic
monitoring agency, the National Bureau of Statistics itself reported that the
exponential growth Nigeria enjoyed especially from 2012 to its 2014 climax
(when our economy overtook South Africa to be Africa’s largest economy) was
spurred not by the oil sector, but “this growth was largely driven by improved
activities in the telecommunications, building and construction, hotel and
restaurant and business services” to quote the NBS. Yes, oil accounts for
something like 90-95 percent of our foreign exchange revenues but it only
accounts for a mere 15% of our GDP.
The service sector and the commercial and real sector are the engine or
used to be the engine of our economic growth. But these sectors are heavily
capital and technology intensive and require cooperation with foreign investors
and when you consistently bad mouth your economy and its regulators investor
confidence tanks and the result is what we are seeing today. I support
President Buhari’s anti corruption war but it should not be a substitute for
sound economic ideas or policies. And the way the President has carried out his
anti corruption crusade is in itself self sabotaging and feeds the narrative of
those who say that Nigeria is far too complex and dynamic a
country to be run by someone who should be quietly collecting his pension.
And President Buhari’s behavior is flowing down the pyramid. There is a
contagious effect in the utterances of major figures in his administration. For
instance, when Vice President Osinbajo tells the world that the Jonathan
administration looted $15 Billion in security contracts, many people in the
West who like to read such stories to justify their hidden opinion that the
Black man cannot govern himself, will clap for him. Coming from the nation’s
own Vice President, the Western press will report the news as a fact. At that
level, such a statement carries the weight of an admission. But then ask
yourself, what was the entire security budget for the five years that Jonathan
was President of Nigeria? In 2011, defense and security had a budget of ₦348 billion or just over $2 billion. In 2012 it
skyrocketed to ₦921
billion or $5.7 billion. It grew to ₦1.055 trillion in 2013 or $6 billion. In 2014, ₦968 billion was budgeted for defence and
security or $5.8 billion. The 2015 budget was passed in April and President
Jonathan handed over to President Buhari a month later so I cannot see how the
previous administration could have ‘chopped’ that money. So of the $19 billion
budgeted for defence and security while former President Jonathan was in
office, how could $15 billion have been looted when more than half that amount
went to paying salaries?
Did Vice President Osinbajo think this accusation through? The President
and his vice with their cabinet and their political appointees are not a court.
They cannot convict anybody. As such when they speak this way, what it amounts
to is propagandized activity. In an anti corruption war one must separate
activity from results. Results are convictions from a court after due and
diligent prosecution. And when you look at it from that perspective, this
administration has been delivering activity and not results. For instance, then
candidate Muhammadu Buhari and his party, the All Progressive Congress, had
called the subsidy payments made by the Jonathan administration a fraud!
They claimed that the amount was too high at ₦1.1 trillion in 2014. Well if fuel subsidy had
been a fraud, the first thing that should have happened naturally when
President Muhammadu Buhari took over was that the amount should have reduced,
but it DID NOT reduce. As a matter of fact, Nigeria spent over $5 billion on fuel subsidy
in 2015 and President Buhari was in power for most of that year! The point I am
making here is that the elections are over. President Buhari and his
administration should stop tarnishing the image of Nigeria in the mistaken belief that they are
rubbishing the person of former President Jonathan. The President should take
in the big picture and realize that you need to be below somebody in order to
pull him down. One year has come and gone and has seemingly been wasted
pointing fingers in blame instead of at solutions. The time for blame games
have gone. Only last month, President Buhari complained that the Sahara desert
was advancing southward.
He should also realize that that is not the only thing going south. The
Nigerian economy is going south at perhaps a faster rate and blaming others for
it will never stem the tide. The President should focus on marketing his plans
and policies when he travels abroad instead of de marketing the plans and
policies of former President Jonathan’s administration. It has been said that
if you want a conversation with a habitual complainer to end abruptly, just ask
him how he intends to fix the problem. That is the question Nigerians want
answered by President Buhari. Under former President Jonathan, Nigeria ’s economy exploded
and became the largest economy in Africa and
the 24th largest economy in the world. Let it not be said that under President
Buhari that economy collapsed like a pack of clouds because the hand that
should have steered the ship was too busy pointing an accusing finger.
*Reno Omokri
is the founder of the Mind of Christ Christian Center in California , author of Shunpiking: No
Shortcuts to God and Why Jesus Wept and the host of Transformation with Reno Omokri.
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