Erstwhile federal director of budget, Ben Akabueze, who left office recently, published an interesting article last week, the kernel of which is that, contrary to common belief by Nigerians, their country is actually poor, not rich.
There should ordinarily be little or no cause to contend with the former budget director, considering where he is coming from, but he argued and talked as public servants are wont to do. He circumnavigated facts all through his analysis and shied away from confronting the truth.
To support his assertion about the true economic standing of Nigeria, Akabueze waved some comparative data to show that Nigeria’s annual budget, for one, is far less in size and worth than those of South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Angola and Libya, among others. For instance, he pointed out, Nigeria’s 2019 budget was a mere $29 billion, while that of South Africa was $130 billion. Egypt’s was $90 billion.
It is not just that Nigeria’s budget is smaller in figures than many of the countries Akabueze referenced, these countries also have smaller population than Nigeria, he added. The implication of this is that Nigeria has more mouths to feed and more obligations that stretch its resources than many countries classified as poor. The former budget man found it curious, if not misleading, that Nigerians hold on to the idea, as they have been made to believe over the years, that their country is rich. He faulted this misleading notion of Nigeria as a rich country, insisting that statistics and reality do not support this ego-driven impression.
According to the former technocrat, there is an inherent danger in Nigerians holding on to the belief that their country is rich. One of the concomitant problems with such belief, he said, is the pressure many Nigerians, especially in the middle class, subject themselves to daily, struggling to live a lie. Such distorted life patterns include driving expensive imported cars, when in reality the citizens involved can hardly pay their basic bills. This is a lifestyle that is consciously or unconsciously made to prove that there is something, when indeed there is nothing.
There is validity, up to a point, in Akabueze’s observation that many Nigerians are living beyond their means in a bid to create an image of being well-to-do. To proceed thence, as he did, to the point of a definite assertion that individuals who live beyond their means are an extension of the faulty notion that Nigeria is rich, when it is not, is to stretch a logic. The conclusion is not only simplistic, it is actually faulty. His classification of Nigeria as a poor country is open to serious contestation, not out of pride or sentiment but based on valid facts.
The conclusion he reached from his disquisition is made even more contestable by his failure, or refusal, to confront the very factors that continue to define the overall health of Nigeria’s economy. The incontestable fact is that Nigeria was not born poor. It is being pillaged and impoverished over the years. Somehow, Akabueze did not acknowledge this crucial fact. It is true that ballooning population and uncoordinated demographics present problems of their own to the management of resources in the country. Even at this, size of population is not the cause of the haemorrhaging of Nigeria’s economy.
Nowhere in his matter-of-fact article, did the former director of budget attempt to touch on the potent factors that undermine the economic viability of Nigeria, the basis of the notion that the country is rich. Or is Akabueze contesting the fact that Nigeria is foundationally rich? It is not enough to declare that Nigeria is actually not rich, contrary to what its citizens have been made to believe over time. There is need to prove to Nigerians that the enormous resources surrounding them are of no value after all.
The notion that Nigeria is rich is not without basis. A more-rounded analysis of how the country and her people came to the present pass, where they are now classified as poor, rather than rich, is necessary, if not for anything else, for the records.
The former budget director needed to do more in his analysis of the true worth of the Nigerian economy. He knows and has to concede that Nigeria is a rich country that is being made poor by a stretch of blight that has ravaged its resources and blunted its economic prospects. The root of Nigeria’s “poverty” lies in the predatory tendencies of its political leadership over the decades. Akabueze restrained himself from acknowledging that certain induced factors have pushed Nigeria into anaemia. It is not true that Nigeria has been poor all along.
What makes Nigeria poor can even be seen easily in the character of its national budget, which the former director has good insight into. The farcical exercise known as annual budgeting, which consists of a hodgepodge of sectoral estimates, designed essentially to formalize periodic heist by heads of the various arms of the government and MDAs, stand as one good example of the enormous bleeding that cannot but make any rich country poor. The bloated estimates that almost always take out resources from the common purse with hardly any yield testify to the resilience of the Nigerian economy. If it was not rich, it would have since collapsed. Now, as if one annual budget was not bad enough as it came, the country has now been subjected to running three or four overlapping budgets in one year.
Nigeria was not born poor. On the contrary, it was imbued with all that should make it very buoyant. Indeed, it was once buoyant and can still be viable. Akabueze simply refused to point at the root of the country’s present economic travails. The reason for Nigeria’s predicament is located in the locust-like tendencies of the ruling elite. The country has been carrying the burden of a devastating economic exploitation that has lasted longer than any economy can sustain.
By sheer coincidence, two instructive incidents occurred last week, at about the time that the former director of budget was publishing his article. The two incidents offered further insight into why an otherwise rich country is now being classified as poor.
The first of the incidents was a public notice published by the government of Edo State, asking its immediate past deputy governor, Philip Shuiabu, to return government vehicles still in his custody. The notice listed out the vehicles in question, 22 in number. Twenty-two vehicles. For one deputy governor. Yet, Godwin Obaseki, governor of Edo State, is acknowledged as one of the most prudent and disciplined of the governors, in the management of state finances and resources. If a deputy governor was allocated 22 vehicles, multiply that by 36 + X, because deputies of “liberal” governors are likely to have more.
It is then left to imagination how many vehicles are in the fleet of governors. Multiply whatever the figures are by 36. The last time President Bola Tinubu was cited in motion, somewhere, no less than 76 vehicles, a number of them armoured, were counted in his convoy. The National Assembly has not yet being counted. Such is the wasteful culture that has hobbled the country.
The second relevant incident had to do with the general election in Britain. The election, very consequential as it turned out, saw the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak lose his office, alongside his ruling Conservative Party. In a twinkle of an eye, the election having being lost and won, as polls predicted (unlike in Nigeria, where polls predict an election outcome to go south, but declared results head north), the Prime Minister promptly handed over to his successor and smartly departed both his office and his official residence, the very next morning, without fuss. There was no multi-billion pounds transition programme, with a large transition committee.
The new Prime Minister had his cabinet announced as he was going into his new office. Also in Europe, in the Netherlands, the outgoing Prime Minister, Mr. Mark Ruthe, having lost the election, handed over to his successor and promptly left the office for his home, on his bicycle. Alone. Compare the British and Dutch scenario with that of a country where a deputy governor has 22 vehicles.
Ben Akabueze’s thesis that Nigeria is a poor country is not entirely correct. His interpretation of the worth of Nigeria is based on what is left over by the predators. Nigeria is not a poor country whose people erroneously believe they are rich. It is a rich country whose leaders, like locusts, devastate their common resources and render the land poor, through their rapacious activities.
If, in sincerity, Akabueze did not see enough at the budget office, of what makes a rich Nigeria appear poor, he should create time and visit with the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Olanipekun Olukayede, who recently cried out that what he has seen from his vantage position, in terms of the quantum of resources political leaders corruptly take out of the system, for no regenerative economic purposes, leaves him numb.
No, Nigerians do not believe in error that their country is rich. The place is, indeed, rich. Unfortunately, it is in the gips of malevolent spirit in spendthrifts and sundry bandits. Onyeka Onwenu was right on cue with her 1984 documentary, A Squandering of Riches.