By now, it is clear that the president is fast becoming his own undoing. For instance, his acclaimed credentials of being a detribalized Nigerian is already being challenged, even though that doesn’t matter at all. So is his democratic credentials, as is shown by his dictatorial arrogance on his tax reform bill. On economy and managing national assets, he is already running a roadside mechanic on them. For him and his handlers, if something is not urgently done, by the time he is through with his tenure, he will have ruined every quality he is touted to have had.
To start with, all the stuff the president is doing on the economy does not require any superior knowledge; in fact, he never said it does. Even his handlers have learnt to helplessly shift the conversion to his courage, rather than any wisdom.
And courage is not an art, it is not a science, it is not even any virtue; it is just one of the many social add-ons for normal living, and those who never had any have lived very well without any fuss. Ironically, even mad men in our streets have courage in sheer abundance and none ever got back his senses because of, or through it. In fact, if not so well couched and responsibly launched, courage left to itself, is a remnant of our wild subhuman-ness and will lead to a massive collateral destruction of self and society such as we are seeing now in this country!
The president, with his makeshift, so-called economic toolkit has helped to shut down and throw out of relevance even the so-called economic experts, who only spoke high-sounding Queen’s English over actually nothing. After goading him into taking these obviously unintelligent economic decisions—as they tried with Former President Muhammadu Buhari, albeit unsuccessfully—he has now thrown them out of business. They can no longer even hail him, as their long-term prescriptions failed woefully from the outset, making the business of ‘hailing’ the most difficult thing in the country now.
In truth, the word ‘economist’, let alone the expert extension to it, as is generally applied to people who claim some extraordinary understanding of economics, especially in Nigeria, is a misnomer, if it exists. If anything, it is an official adjective for those who studied Economics. They would, yes, know demand and supply, and the like, in their formal covers, but it does not necessarily mean they understand the real forces behind them in any given economy.
Such a person cannot, because he goes by an academic adjective, genuinely acquired or not, and by just that, prescribe solutions to problems that involve men. Economic decisions are supposed to be rooted in an abundant knowledge of economic history, global and national, as well as the present realities of a people. That is why economic history is important.
We cannot copy society-specific solutions and force it on a country with 200m people, all with different historical phenomena. Even in the countries where the president and his economic team are copying these policies, they were never truly the reasons they succeeded.
Their economies were built through plunder, colonial exploitation and slave labor—besides other large-scale economic practices such as protectionism and border closures, now forbidden as global economic malpractices by proponents of the laissez faire. In fact, these so-called liberal free market policies are thrown at the economic progression of third world countries, as a ‘containment’ policy at best, to prevent them from attaining their full potential at the global economic playing field.
Nigerian political economy has its own elaborate history and can very well provide solutions that can very effectively blend and work with modern systems. Nothing serious happened to Nigeria. Our people just stopped and elsewhere lowered their production and moved into urban areas, where they took salaried jobs and forgot about everything else. Modern government institutions and structures made a lot of us so dependent on them that we left the all-important business of production to rural communities—with little or no investment in infrastructure, public utilities and advanced tools of production.
Instead of working on that, this government went all out against the remaining vestiges of it. For instance, the farming communities can no longer afford transport, seedlings, fertilizers and labor. In fact, there were a lot I have seen this farming season who have gone from being highly productive farmers to laborers in other people’s fields. There are thousands thrown out of their decades-old trade, livestock business and other local production activities. Whatever the government thinks is completely mad!
Production is done by people, not by setting up ministries and agencies. What these people need is not big interventions… that are only happening on the pages of newspapers. All they need is for the cost of production to be lowered, incentivize them by providing instant off taking after production and etcetera. You cannot remove petrol subsidy in a struggling economy and say it is to help the economy.
To be very honest, the argument of the so-called economic experts, such as subsidy being a problem to economies, is a grand mob action against the sanity of our leaders. It is not true; but as you know, propagandists say that it does not have to be true, it only needs to be repeated consistently. It worked, after over 40 years! And our man who is doing it, a victim of propaganda overload, thought that what he is doing is the magic wand needed to turn the country around.
True, some argued that the subsidy didn’t help the country. Yes, just as others said petrol didn’t, in fact even going as far as to say it is a curse. They said subsidized petrol is smuggled out of the country through the borders and so this is a way to stop it. I am sorry, I will now tell you the stuff that are smuggled out daily because these obviously useless and suffocating policies.
