Last week, we agreed that the “possession of strings of academic degrees” should not be confounded with the possession of the gift of commonsense. The consensus arrived at, therefore, was that rather than religiously celebrating some textbook technocrats, we should be looking up to commonsense compatriots for economic salvation.
This part two is interrogating whether it makes any democratic sense for us to hand the people’s economy to the World Bank through its agents because they have our pigment! In other words, should some unelected ‘extraterrestrial’ technocrats, rather than our duly elected politicians, be running our economic affairs?
That question has since been answered by Joseph Nye in his book, ‘Soft Power,’ where he made it clear that what the West handed to developing countries like Nigeria is a shadow democracy, a system where on the one hand local politicians control the political machinery, while on the other hand, Western-smuggled stooges, pretending to be technocrats, control the real thing — the economy. In short, the Harvard professor has alerted us on how Washington’s invisible imperial strategy, recognising how addicted we’re to western certificates, has its stooges armed with irresistibly beautiful resumes to run our economy.
Are Washington’s actions today different from London’s which forced American leaders, from the first president, George Washington, to the 32nd president, Franklin Roosevelt, to always exercise utmost caution in ensuring that it’s only patriotic Americans who’ve access to the country’s corridors of power? Was it not the fear of populating America’s corridors of power with some British proteges that made Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd president in protest to angrily say, “Single act of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions…pursued unalterably through every change of ministers plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.” Or, wasn’t Franklin Roosevelt unapologetic to his critics when he said, “I don’t care about if he is the finest mind in the world; I only care if he is patriotic enough to use his finest mind for the good of the United States?”
But is there nowhere this fear of domestic economic espionage has been fully recognised and fiercely dealt with than in China? It is illegal for any Chinese who has lived overseas up to five years (unless on official assignment) to be allowed access to China’s corridors of power to the extent of joining the country’s elite economic team. For this reason, members of China’s elite economic team, besides being party-grown, need years of careful scrutiny as part of the unavoidable tedious process of selecting and positioning before they take charge of the economic fortune of the country’s 1.3 billion people.
Looking at Nigeria’s case, what do we see running our economy other than some ‘extraterrestrial’ technocrats, people who use their beautifully packaged western academic qualifications to deceive us? So naively we’ve embraced some highly certificated Washington-sponsored economic hit men and women, who’re openly pushing the interest of western neocolonialists. Or, what interest should an economic team too close to the CIA, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Brooking Institution, the World Bank, World Trade Organisation, and the Rockefeller Foundation be pushing?
To reclaim our economic sovereignty, it has become inevitable to advocate that from 2015, all the political parties should as a matter of law, be compelled to demonstrate beyond doubt that they have the party-grown men and women capable of running the country’s economic affairs. Otherwise, why seek our votes when the parties lack what it takes to manage the economy? It also means that during the 2015 electioneering, all the parties should present their presidential candidates along with their various shadow ministers for the voters to judge for themselves which party has the best team to manage the nation’s economy to their best satisfaction!
The shadow finance minister, for example, should be able to tell Nigerians how he or she would fix the economy, reduce the country’s bloated recurrent spending, and find unconventional ways to raise the hundreds of billions of dollars needed for fixing the infrastructure. The shadow trade and investment minister should be able to present the party’s industrialisation roadmap and strategy for creating millions of jobs during the four years in office. In the case of the shadow petroleum minister, it boils down to outlining some concrete measures not just for fixing the refineries, but also for turning Nigeria into an exporter of petroleum products. The shadow agric minister should have handy comprehensive commonsense approach not just in turning Nigeria into food sufficiency but also food exporter.
How could a woman former president Olusegun Obasanjo redeployed as finance minister be brought back by President Goodluck Jonathan to run down our economy with the help of some business moguls as members of the economic team? While one can question Obasanjo’s democratic ID, no doubt, he remains one of Nigeria’s uniquely gifted politicians, who sees what most contemporaries can hardly see.
Jonathan should as a matter of urgency send this incompetent economic team home along with their obsolete textbook development theories, as Obasanjo did in 2006. In whose place he should hire a team of vibrant goal-getters, men and women whose economic mission is complete harmony with our economic patriotism.
Rather than the so-called National Enterprise Development Programme of the minister of trade and investment, which not only hardly shows when and how Nigeria quits the WTO, but also how to stop the invasion of our economy by foreign product dumpers, the new economic team should urgently come up with a realistic industrialisation and economic diversification road map.
Mandated to create a minimum of 100,000 jobs monthly, the team should pursue an economic formalisation policy with the goal of making all businesses operating in the country to be legally registered and assigned both business and tax codes. Not only because doing so provides owners a secure employment but it also ensures that our moribund business service providers, particularly accountants, lawyers, and insurers, begin to witness high demand for their services.
Besides aggressively pursuing high import tariff regime with the goal of channelling such large tax revenues toward supporting the development of our small business sector, the new team should persuade our lawmakers to quickly repeal any acts stabling the ill-conceived YOUWIN and Sovereign Wealth Fund so that the money is spent on building specialised industrial parks in the country’s 36 states plus Abuja to be ready within 12 months.
The amended constitution should make it mandatory that the three tiers of government should have internally generated revenues as their source of recurrent money, while 100 per cent of the externally generated revenues (oil money) is spent purely on capital budget. For this to happen, our tax system should be fully overhauled so that taxes and other IGRs replace oil as government’s major source of revenue. The new economic team should impose an annual auto plates renewal tax, including fuel-guzzling cars like SUVs and trucks paying not less than N100,000 while N50,000 for medium-sized cars, and N5,000 for small cars.
The auto tax revenues should be reinvested in road maintenance and modernisation. The N273.5bn meant for SURE-P in the 2013 budget should be returned to where it belongs. It should be invested in building new refineries and renovating old ones so that within 14 months, rather than continuing as an importer of petroleum products, we’d become exporters of these products.
Retrieving the country’s construction industry from the likes of Julius Berger, Setraco, Arab Contractors, RCC, should require the aggressive promotion of indigenous construction companies, including mega national construction companies such as the Nigerian Military Construction and Engineering Company as a melting pot for our military and civilian engineers. Let the team push for a law to ban the award of publicly funded construction contracts to companies not owned 100 per cent by Nigerians or do not hire over 95 per cent of Nigerians as well as never repatriates more than five per cent of their profits overseas.
Tackling the power problem head-on requires unconventional measures, including persuading the three tiers of government to set aside as strategic collateral some three billion out of our 42 billion barrels of oil reserves so that they can be used for borrowing about $250 billion from countries like China (with over $3.7 trillion in foreign reserves) for generating about 100,000MW before May 2015. Ensuring it’s corrupt-free — that politicians do not divert money — the borrowed money should be kept in some foreign accounts from where all completed power projects are settled.
Foreign retailers should either be banned or forced to locally source a minimum of 80 per cent of their goods within the country. This has become inevitable given how their promotion of their homemade goods has continued to displace local goods. To discourage import dependency, the National Agency on Food and Drugs Administration and Control should make five years the mandatory requirement for low-tech and high-labour intensive imported goods registered in Nigeria to be locally made or else the goods are deregistered and banned from entering the country.