A former Minister of Finance, Dr Kalu Idika Kalu has asserted that it is unfair for Nigerians to attribute the nation’s unending economic woes to the regime of the former Military President, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (retd).
Against the high level of insecurity and the economic adversity pervading the country, he counselled that Nigerians should fix the country first before thinking about the 2023 elections. The elder statesman spoke with VINCENT KALU.
Are you worried over the state of the nation?
No one alive with any discernment whatsoever, youngster or adult; male or female political or apolitical, North or South will not be very worried by what we are seeing or what we hear. Just before your question, I read a harrowing story of what happened in Plateau State, it could be any other state.
It is just mindboggling how a nation with so much promise in every sense could be put through this for so long. The sheer depth of the crisis is what is so crazy about our case. Every nation has crises once in a while, but I don’t know how far this dates back to, but certainly it has accelerated in the course of the second term of the present administration. It is difficult to believe that not much can be done; yet our resources have depleted somewhat, yet we still have the ability to make sure that the prime role of government, which is the preservation, the protection and well being of her citizens is attended to in a reasonably tolerable manner given the sheer weight of the resources and the structures we have in place. This is what is most troubling about our crises.
When lives are threatened, everything is affected. You can’t talk of development, you can’t talk about resource mobilisation, you can’t talk about tourists’ revenue, you can’t about staying in institutions, such as schools and others that depend on minimum security because they are not supposed to provide themselves with security – ordinary market woman, farmers, students, health workers, public servants. Indeed, the ordinary citizen is not expected to carry arms. We are worried and worrying and wonder whether government cannot do more than it is evident they have done. It is not an easy problem to tackle, but surely, Nigeria should be in a position where they can quickly organise, expand the police force, expand the army, expand the intelligence to ensure that some of these problems are nipped in bud and tackled expeditiously when they occur. Like I said, I just read a story, it is a daily thing and if you stay long enough, just as every hour this sad news keeps coming from all parts of the country, it is just not good enough.
We can be talking of political restructuring, constitutional restructuring, we can be talking about devolution of powers, we can be talking about increasing investments, and we can be talking about borrowing to complement local resources to implement budget, but above all that, if there is no peace; if there is insecurity to the level we have had it for years, particularly in the last two or three years, all those things cannot mean anything to the citizenry, when there is insecurity to the point that people are not able to go about their daily business because of the primary emergency. The government cannot be talking about going out for conferences, going out for this or for that leaving a home that is dangerously in total anarchy.
At times when you read some of these stories, you get unsettled by unbelievable carnage supposedly in peace time and there is no evident presence of security to mitigate it, then that is of great concern.
How do we come out of these problems?
First, there has to be cognition or recognition. If you don’t recognise the severity of a problem, you cannot ask for a solution. This is obvious. A sense of what is really happening should be present in the leadership and defined in broadest sense. We have three branches of government; the two branches – the executive and the legislature should be able to declare that there is urgency in the land. The judiciary, perhaps cannot do that. The man at the top, his cabinet, the Senate president, Speaker of the House of Representatives and the members of the National Assembly, all of them have equal responsibility; the people in the state Houses of Assembly, regardless of whether their respective states are calmer than others, when whey read what we are reading should be able to cry out that there is emergency in the land and something has to be done. If the state doesn’t survive, these niceties, rhetoric comes to naught. The leadership has to recognise the state of the nation. All this pretence cannot mean anything if the ordinary citizen can see that these don’t relate to what they are seeing in their neighbourhoods, in their villages and towns.
Secondly, some people have called for a quick conference; we are in an emergency. It is not a nice thing to give weeks and weeks in advance. The president and his advisers can call for a quick representatives conference to discuss the issue. What do we do? How do we mobilise – if we need more police, more intelligence, military, that is of top priority compared to any other expenditures and other thing. We can have a quick meeting, get the experts, get the information and take quick decisions to make sure that manpower and material resources are deployed immediately. It is like to roll back as you cannot start solving a problem that has festered for while. But, you can begin to roll back to begin to restore confidence in the ordinary citizens that their government is aware of what is happening and is able to react to what is happening and they should calm down and assist in any way they could.
When those two things are going on, the other issues – the long term, medium discussion on how to get to the root of the problem, how to prevent this thing from festering, how to counter this thing in the medium and long term, then you are looking at government effectiveness from the grassroots to the cities. Those who are taking decisions about the peace of the citizens, are they up to the task? Are the structures that are in place from local government, state to the centre functioning the way they are supposed to function in order to forestall further occurrence of these crises? Those will be the three things that should be taken into consideration.
Former military president, Gen Ibrahim Babangida jus celebrated his 80th birthday. Some people are saying it was during his regime that Nigeria started being brought to its knees. You worked under him. What is your take on this?
We all have to be very careful, particularly, as I said, cognition, recognition – getting the facts and doing the analysis. It is not easy to pinpoint a date in time and say that’s when this started or aggravated. We should face the crisis instead of finger pointing to when it started and who started it. This is an empirical question, which requires a thorough study.
I was quietly involved with the government to a large extent. I have addressed the issue of turning around the economy from the time when oil prices collapsed, when commodity prices collapsed, when we needed to do the best to compliment the kind of development plan we were having; when we needed to restructure the economy in order to achieve higher goals to create greater employment, to have more efficient institutions and work towards a more equitable distribution of the wealth of Nigeria.
I was a commissioner in Imo State when he took over and I prepared a paper enough for me to implement. Of course, I had no idea that I would be involved, but the minutes he made a statement of what I have just discussed, recognition. If government recognises the need to end all the dilly-dallying on how to work with international organisations; and I have been set up to assist countries that showed seriousness in tackling their domestic problem, in that case, these are the things we should do. That is how I came up with the policy, and it is purely accidental that I refer to it as, ‘how to restructure the economy’. Actually, I didn’t call it that, it was much later the issue of structural adjustment of the economy came about. It was just a body of polices to address how we manage the micro economy, how we manage the macro economy, how we mobiles resources, how we create accountability, how we take initiatives in many areas. It is on record what we were doing in Imo State that I brought it into Lagos, as it were. Of course, others have the same ideas, but I was pushing it because I have already passed it in the old Imo State. And of course, as a staff of the World Bank, the countries I superintended, Korea in particular, to a large extent Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and China. This is a body of policies that every nation has to pay attention to, given their own circumstances, how do they move to the next stage in order not to get mired with the problems they are facing? The body of policies could be called by any other name, but we had a lot of noise about Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) as if it is the name, SAP that was the problem.
The issue really is identification of your problems and bringing up policies that will address them. That is the meaning of whether it is called a budget, a plan or strategy. There could be half a dozen comparable designations for the body of programmes that could be put together to solve your own problems. So, it is about time that we put aside the name, SAP because it shows that people don’t really think through to understand what one has explained over and over again.
So, I’m referring to this because I’m always amused when people say, ‘he, Babangida, introduced SAP’. There was nothing else he could have done or anybody could have done rather than to introduce policies that could solve Nigeria’s problems. The name is really neither here nor there, but when it is thrown at the administration of Babangida, and funny enough, they said he introduced the devaluation of the currency, or sacking of workers, it is absurd. By now, we should know better.
When you are restructuring your business, let’s say, you have five points of vending or selling your products, some lines may not be doing well, while others may be doing well. Nobody needs to tell you, to restructure, you reduce staff in one area and put in some other areas. You put more resources in one area because it is making profit; you don’t need anybody – World Bank, IMF, and ADB European Union to tell you that. We had to face those problems – oil prices have fallen to about seven dollars, we had unused capacities, we have lots of unutilised labour, the products of our commodities were failing that even farmers were also being impoverished, we could not fund our infrastructure, the exchange rate was dropping in relation to other currencies because we were earning less. You can go and on and list these micro and macro issues. You have to come up with a policy package that will address these issues. The name of that package is the choice of the leader or the choice of the economic managers. There is nothing written up in the sky that it has to be called Structural Adjustment Programme. One has got tired of over and over again to explain this.
It is not fair or even correct to say that all these problems started from the Babangida administration. It is not true.
You have led a team that turned around the economy of some now prosperous nations. What led to the failure of these policies because if they were properly implemented, by now Nigeria should be close to an Eldorado?
The first thing is whether we had the right policies for the problems we were facing. The second thing is whether the policies that were proposed were implemented. It is very important that we recognise the double structure of that question. Did we have the right policies? The fact that we called it SAP didn’t mean they were the right policies. The name itself didn’t tell you that the underlining polices were correct. Just like when we have a budget, the fact that you call it a programme or a budget doesn’t mean that we now abstracting from the body and start talking whether the budget was implemented properly, we still have to examine whether the budget components were correct.
The second thing is whether we even implemented the ones we put together, never mind what we called it: Two-year plan, four-year plan, rolling plan, structural adjustment, recover and economic stabilisation, etc. Were the policy components the right ones given the size, the debt of the problem, did we finance these things properly? Remember, we had a debate whether to take IMF loan or not. That was where we started derailing from the word go. We cannot put that just on the administration. Market women, lawyers, engineers, accountants, financial analysts, everybody was involved in that debate, equipped or ill equipped to understand the implications. For example, if you prepared a budget and you don’t mobilise revenue to fund that budget, does it require any expertise to understand why the budget may not work out? There are two issues. Firstly, I have enumerated all the problems of the economy, some of them due to local conditions and some of them due to external conditions. Did we make every effort to make sure that those policies were the right ones? In every government, there is always debate in and outside of that government. Some get more heard and others get less heard. Some have more expertise and other have less expertise. You cannot determine the outcome unless you ended up starting up with the right polices. Secondly, after you put in the right policies, implementation takes over. Did we implement properly, the whole rationalisation, liberalisation efforts at moving Nigeria to the global market? Did we adhere to those or did we bring political leash to bear on issues of privatisation? We give things to the wrong people to do, not those who understand the technology and have experience in the area, and not those who come up with the best way forward for that particular enterprise. I’m just giving you hints as to how the programme didn’t work out. It is presumptuous to just say, since we have SAP, why did it not work out? It is not as simple as that. You have to go behind the policies and how those policies were translated into instrumentalities in terms of sector, sub-sector polices, human resources allocation management, development infrastructure at the right scale by the right people with the technical financial and experience that will be required to make sure that if you privatise power it works, if you privatise refinery, it works well, etc, because those who take over are those who understand the technology and have the experience and requirements for running those things efficiently.
This heat in the polity, has it got anything to do with the 2023 election?
The year 2023 or any other date has to be secondary to the emergencies that we have just talked about. The issue of a date – short term, long term or medium term – can only be secondary to the identification of present problems that we need to tackle. We even have electoral problems; we even have issues as to how we are going to have elections; how the results will be transmitted in a transparent manner to those who voted, not to mention the issue of the great drop in employment, great drop in production and of course the entire issue of security.
So, when we have identified the emergencies we need to address now, then we can focus on 2023 or whatever. But if we cannot address those issues, it is putting the cart before the horse. We are talking of 2023 when we are not sure of 2022, when we are not even sure how 2021 will end because of the sheer enormity of the problem we are facing. People are kidnapped. Some people who don’t even have money to eat are forced to borrow to pay ransom. Those that have been kidnapped are even killed. Ordinary people, farmers, traders, who should be minding their own business, are being threatened by forces that they don’t even understand, to the extent that they will be on lockdown and would not be allowed to move around, and many of them don’t even understand. These are things that we need to face now. To be talking of 2023 is jumping ahead. We should be talking of emergencies that we have now.
What is your position on power rotation?
With the sheer number of crises, ubiquitous, everywhere, every level, the issue of facing the question – why are we having these issues, is it leadership, is it the structure of leadership, is it the type of representation we have, is it the lack of seriousness of those who represent us? Is it the lack of cohesiveness of different constituencies, whether you are talking of people in a local government, people from a state or from a zone? Surely, if they are working cohesively, they will be thinking of those who put them where they are. We should be talking about these emergencies, and stop talking about 2023. If those are the issues that are blocking us from thinking easily about 2023, we should face them now.
We should have a quick constitutional conference and table the major issues. Do we want to loosen up the federation? Do we want to devolve more powers – political, financial and fiscal? Do we want to do something about devolution of security – give more police powers to local governments and to states and reduce correspondingly the over-arching control of the Federal Government? What powers should be left with the Federal Government after we devolve some of these powers. The seriousness of the matter is such that it should not take us time. We are all suffering under this situation. People should not think that we have to have some elaborate set up before we can discuss these issues. We know how the shoe is pinching us to the point that production is declining, employment is declining, prices are rising, reserves are falling, exchange rate is depreciating and this has nothing to do with the World Bank, IMF, it has to do with how we are managing our economy. People say, it is Bureau De Change (BDCs) that caused it. It is not. The major thing is that we are not allocating scarce resources properly. If you don’t allocate foreign exchange to reflect the abundance of scarcity, of course those you are giving it to cheaply will set up markets, and those you are not giving it to will not have any market, and genuine investors who want to produce will be denied. It is not a question of BDCs; it is the inefficiency in the allocation process, the price mechanism being interfered with, which is impinging on the depreciation of the exchange rate.