By Charles Onunaiju
President Bola Tinubu and his administration bask in the euphoria that they have taken some “tough” and “courageous” measures that would deliver prosperity to Nigerians in the future. The coordinating minister of the economy, Mr Wale Edun, recently stated that despite public uproar at the harshness of the measures and their devastating impact on the lives of Nigerians, along with the more frightening dimension of security meltdown, the administration has been receiving accolades at several international forums, including the World Bank, IMF, and the G20 meetings.
However, it is not because the measures are tough, courageous, and may have attracted accolades from outside that they may fail to produce any result close to prosperity, but because they are extraneous and largely disconnected from the existential reality of the current condition of the country. The choice of the word “measures” to denote government response is deliberate, even as it is widely called policy.
Policy is more nuanced because it is an aggregate course of actions derived from extensive and broad interrogation and inquiry of the country’s specific existential reality with compelling exertions to seek truth from facts, which is to design policy from the actual and prevailing condition. Both in economic and philosophical terms, no two realities are the same. Therefore, while other countries’ experiences are important to study and examine, any conclusion that seeks to mechanically replicate the choices others have made is doomed to fail, despite its attractions.
Lessons from the experiences of others are factors to
be taken into account while designing one’s own choices, with special attention
to the pitfalls and low points, and nothing in the high points or successes of
others’ choices should give any optimism that such is possible in another
clime. Policy advisories of international partners, including international
financial institutions, are not to be taken lightly or dismissed offhandedly
with arrogance, but to hold them as the banner of eternal truth is the
well-known historical pathway through which nations fail or even die. Such
advisories or counsels are crucial policy lessons to be acutely examined,
studied, and integrated into the overall framework of experiences garnered from
looking at oneself exclusively in the mirror, which is the relentless
interrogation of one’s specific condition and reality.
Nigerian
policymakers, including the current administration of President Tinubu, have
continued to treat policy as a general prescription valid in all circumstances
and times and across all climes. Otherwise, why would his coordinating minister
of the economy feel more validated by the cheers in international circles
rather than feel sobered by the enormous uproar and backlash at home? There is
nothing in traditional economic policy or, to be specific, Western economic
policy prescriptions and outlines that Nigeria has not yet done, yet
progressive socio-economic decline with the added negative factor of an increasingly
toxic political process and worsening security situations are the real
outcomes.
From
austerity measures of former President Shehu Shagari to the Structural
Adjustment Programme of subsequent military regimes to the long lines of
neoliberal measures, including privatisation, deregulation, commercialisation,
and floating of the national currency, all based on the familiar rhetoric of
taking the bitter pills that would produce a better tomorrow for Nigerians,
have rather seen worsening living conditions for Nigerians instead.
President
Tinubu and his team have simply followed the overtravelled path of his
predecessors, offering the same rhetoric as they have. Some people say that
doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the
actual definition of insanity. The question is, why have Nigeria’s subsequent
governments and regimes been bogged down in inertia and thought atrophy,
ostensibly limited to one way of seeing things and unable to break through and
free from a sterile economic orthodoxy that has serially failed? Why are they
persistently unable to align their thoughts and thinking with the stark and
existential reality of Nigeria’s specific conditions, which are on a daily and
routine display? Probably because public office-holding and the toxic politics
that enthrone it have developed as a privilege-seeking and entitlement rather
than, a public service which comes with exertions and privations of
self-sacrifice.
To
this extent, policy responses to complex realities are reduced to simplistic
measures, gathered with ease and the least exertion and offered with a magic
glee to command the disappearance of problems. More than half of Nigeria’s
existence as a sovereign nation, these lacklustre, simplistic measures have not
worked, and one can confirm with the benefit of critical insight that they
would not work in the immediate or distant future.
Again,
President Tinubu’s government and the ones before him may not lack good or
honest intentions and even a genuine desire to turn around Nigeria’s fortunes,
but the reality is that honest intentions and genuine desire are the least of
the categories/criteria required to transform the fate and fortune of a country
in a desperate and dire need like Nigeria.
To
this extent, government well-wishers and supporters are the least of the
government’s urgent requirements to understand and appreciate the depth of
crises for which the country is sunk, and the options and choices needed to
outline the difficult pathway for repositioning the country. Policies are not
tested for their toughness or sublimity but by their efficacy, and this is not
determined by some esoteric future, when, with a bang, prosperity will appear.
The
efficacy is known by the visible, tangible, and incremental results that it
produces much like Chinua Achebe’s pointed proverb in Things Fall Apart that a
chicken that will grow into a cock is known the very day it is hatched,
solidifying the wise saying that “only fools are comforted by promises.”
From
Indonesia to Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, United Arab
Emirates, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Singapore, France, Greece, South Africa, Rwanda,
and Botswana, countries have sought to leverage the international system and
order and the experiences it offers, to drive a persistent policy of reform,
and varying results have been based on how efficiently home-grown initiatives
have predominantly led the way in managing opportunities and reducing risks.
Where the easiness and glamour of so-called best international practices have
taken preeminence with domestic initiatives grounded in local realities
dovetailing it, the result has been a calamity.
Nigeria’s
policymaking community since the return of civil rule has been more inclined to
“international best practices,” which actually means nothing except the
cumulative experiences of different nations but which the Nigerian policy
community lazily identifies narrowly with the so-called “Washington consensus,”
a neoliberal outline that has long fallen out of favour and been overtaken by
the historic rise of emerging nations and their representative institution of
the BRICS.
Broadly
speaking, policy is not that you must do something when there is actually no
need. In fact, policy is essentially to do nothing to interfere with or harm
the course of natural or historical processes when it cascades along to the
happiness and civic bond of society. Policy, therefore, in this instance,
becomes an act to identify, detect, and remove any noxious influence, be it
special interests that stand in the way of unyielding economic factors and
social variables operating in tandem with human will to optimise efficiency and
make the greatest returns to the greatest numbers. This tendency and trajectory
are antithetical to any ideological obstinacy and bigotry that holds that any
given school of thought is the sole proprietor of economic truth and social
practice.
Meanwhile,
the existential and critical policy vacuum that has been historically masked by
ideological bigotry, especially one beholden to the myth of the “Washington
Consensus” and its underlying neoliberal outlines, has hobbled Nigeria and
driven it to the current cesspit of socio-economic and security lethargy.
Any
prospective solution that disproportionately includes travelling the already
traversed path is a sure way to fail. There have been arguments that the policy
choices that have failed are not because the policy is not good enough but
because its implementations have been wrong. This view offers simplistic
reasons or explanations of why policy fails. Any policy without the inherent
capacity to modify the behaviour of its implementers or target audience is
fundamentally deficient in its characteristic as a policy and is either not
sufficiently adjusted to the reality of its operating environment or is
anything but policy.
The
President’s wife, Mrs Remi Tinubu, claimed some time ago that her family is
sufficiently made and that there is nothing they want from Nigeria, except to
render service to the country. Nobody can justifiably question her sincerity,
but it takes more than such effusive declarations, no matter how honest, to turn
around the fortunes of the country. President Tinubu has started on a false
premise.
His
desperate shop for foreign investment to fuel domestic economic revival is a
non-starter. He is not in a position to command foreign investment to come and
even foreign investments have different colours, and aligning those willing to
come with your critical economic priorities is a nuanced endeavour.
But
more importantly, the challenge is to unlock and unfetter the constraints to
domestic productive processes through fair competition, rational resource
allocation, and policy incentives free from the toxins of special interests and
influence peddlers. President Tinubu has not demonstrated any courage to do
this. The government’s removal of petroleum subsidy and floating of the naira
have endured more as rhetorical flourishes, with devastating impacts on the
lives of Nigerians, than any policy instrument to address the seeming lacuna.
The
government has not demonstrated any fiscal discipline. Floating the currency
would have come with such measures as tightening government spending and
especially restricting it to value-creating and multiplying productive
activities. Nothing of that sort has been remotely seen in the behaviour of the
government. Government-inspired excessive demands on foreign exchange have
brought desperate pressure on the domestic currency and sent it spiralling down
to a level never imagined before.
The
excess from petroleum subsidy has also triggered profligacy, with government
officials and their associated hangers-on indulging in wild hedonism. Social
media exposes of their hedonism, for which many ordinary Nigerians are
familiar, instead of making the government rethink its way, are rather
emboldening them to consider blocking the free cyberspace.
*Onunaiju is a commentator on public
issues
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