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By Charles Onunaiju
President Ahmed Tinubu and his administration basks in the euphoria that it has taken some “tough” and “courageous” measures that would deliver prosperity to Nigerians in the future. The Coordinating Minister of Economy, Mr. Wale Edun said recently to the effect that in spite of public uproar at the harshness of the measures and its devastating impact on the life of Nigerians and the more frightening dimension of security meltdown, the administration has been harvesting accolades at several international forums including at the World Bank, IMF and the G20 meetings.
However, it is not because that 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 as 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 a compelling exertion 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 are 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 in other’s choice 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 off-handedly with arrogance but to hold them as 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 integrate its lessons to the overall framework of experiences garnered from looking oneself exclusively in the mirror, which is relentless interrogation of one’s specific condition and reality.
Nigeria policy makers, 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 how would his coordinating minister of economy feel more validated by the cheers in the international circles rather than feel sober by the enormous uproar and backlash at home. There is nothing in the traditional economic policy or to be specific, western economic policy prescription and outlines that Nigeria has not done yet progressive socio-economic decline with added negative factor of increasingly toxic political process and worsening security situations are the real outcomes.
From austerity measures of the former president Shehu Shagari to structural adjustment programme (SAP) of subsequently military regimes to the long lines of neo-liberal measures including privatization, deregulations, commercialization and floating of national currency with 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 over travelled 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 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 to the stark and existential reality of the Nigeria’s specific conditions which are on a daily and routine display. Probably, because public office-holding and the toxic politics that enthrones 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 exertions and offered with a magic glee to command the disappearance of problems. More than half of Nigeria’s existence as a sovereign nation, this lack- luster, simplistic measures have not worked and one can confirm with the benefit of critical insight that it would not work in the immediate or distant future.
Again President Tinubu government and the ones before him may not lack good of honest intention and even a genuine desire to turn around the Nigeria’s fortunes but the reality is that honest intentions and genuine desire are 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 urgent requirement to understand and appreciate the depth of crises for which the country is sank 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 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”
Form Indonesia to Malaysia, India, Vietnam, brazil, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Turkey, Kazakhstan, Singapore, France, Greece, South Africa, Rwanda, 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 preponderantly 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 calamity.
Nigeria policy making community since the return of civil rule have more inclined themselves to “international best practices”, which actually means nothing except the culminative experiences of different nations but which the Nigeria policy community lazily identities narrowly with the so-called “Washington consensus”, a neo-liberal outlines that has long fallen out of favor and over taken 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 or harm the course of natural or historical process when it cascades along to the happiness and civic bond of the society. Policy, therefore in this instances becomes an act to identify, detect and removing anything 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 optimize efficiency and make the greatest returns to the greatest numbers. This tendency and trajectory is 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, existential and critical policy vacuum that has been historically masked by the ideological bigotry, especially one beholden to the myth of “Washington Consensus” and its underlining neo-liberal outlines have hobbled Nigeria and driven to the current cesspit of socio-economic and security lethargy.
Any prospective solution that disproportionally includes travelling the already traversed path is a sure way to fail. There have been arguments that the policy choices that have failed is 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 inherent capacity to modify the behavior 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.
First lady, Mrs. Remi Tinubu has claimed sometime 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 colors and aligning those willing to come with your critical economic priorities is a nuanced endeavor.
But more importantly, the challenge is to unlock, unfetter the constraints to domestic productive process 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 removal of petroleum subsidy and floating of the naira have endured more as rhetorical flourish, with devastating impacts on the lives of Nigerians than any policy instrument to address seeming lacuna.
The government has not demonstrated any fiscal discipline. Floating the currency would have come with such measure as tightening of government spending and especially restricted to value-creating and multiplying productive activities. Nothing of that sort has been remotely seen in the behavior of government. Government inspired excessive demands on the foreign exchange has brought a desperate pressure on the domestic currency and send it spiraling 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 expose of their hedonism for which many ordinary Nigerians are familiar, instead of making the government to rethink its way are rather emboldening them to consider blocking the free cyber-space.
The reality as it is obvious now, is that the government has no policy to address the country existential challenges and the harsh measures it is currently implementing to the detriment of millions of Nigeria is a testimony to the deficit of original insight to the nature of Nigeria’s problems.
• Onunaiju writes from the FCT, Abuja
