The government has not given sufficient time to fight poverty and unemployment, the primary cause of insecurity, argues Ike Okonta
Come May 29 and it will be six years since President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress took power as chief pilots of Nigeria’s destiny. Six years is enough time to pass judgement on the policies of the Buhari government to the extent that they have impacted on the lives of ordinary Nigerians. The loud consensus right now is that President Buhari’s policies are not working and that come 2023 when he quits the stage he would have left Nigerians in an even worse condition than he met them in 2015. Nigerians point to the inflation that is presently ravaging the economy, the insecurity that has gripped the country and the corruption that pervades everyday life and say Nigeria has never had it so bad.
Nigerians are right to be angry. They are right to raise their voices against the government. This, however, is a time that calls for sober reflection and analysis. It is simply not enough to say that Buhari’s policies are not working. The more important question that needs to be asked is: Why, despite President Buhari’s best efforts and his apparent desire to see Nigeria take her place in the comity of nations as a prosperous and self-confident country, the reverse has been the case? It needs to be pointed out that President Buhari began well policy-speaking in May 2015. Faced with a country with gargantuan economic and social problems in 2015; a country that Peoples Democratic Party politicians had bled dry since the advent of the Fourth Republic in 1999, President Buhari wisely narrowed down his policy and programme priorities to three: tackling corruption; reviving the economy; and improving security. Let us now see how these three important policy areas have fared in the past six years.
Economic Planning Without Strategy
The national economy that President Buhari inherited in May 2015 was in profound crisis. Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank economist and President Goodluck Jonathan’s Finance Minister was an expert in massaging the country’s economic statistics to look good on paper. Nigeria under Goodluck Jonathan, she claimed, had become the largest economy in Africa. Economic growth had averaged eight percent and millions of jobs were being created in all sectors of the economy. Okonjo-Iweala believed firmly in the IMF and World Bank’s neoliberal economic policies and she had sought to apply them fully in Nigeria: removal of subsidies on petrol and other vital necessities; privatization of public enterprises; and opening up the economy to all manner of imports in the name of “free” trade. Goodluck Jonathan is not an economist nor did he have any PhD development economists in his cabinet to serve as a counterweight to Okonjo-Iweala. She was given free rein with the high-sounding name of Coordinating Minister of the Economy.
However, the economic fundamentals that President Buhari and his team encountered when they assumed office in May 2015 told a more distressing story than was painted by Ngozi okonjo-Iweala. Local manufacturing was at an all-time low, averaging a miserly four percent of GDP; agriculture was gasping for breath despite the colourful speeches of Goodluck Jonathan’s Minister of Agriculture, Dr Akinwumi Adesina; and millions of Nigerians, particularly young university and polytechnic graduates were trudging the streets looking for non-existent jobs. The Naira was exchanging at a dollar rate manufacturers could not afford and everywhere one looked it was a bleak picture for the national economy.
To tackle this crisis, the Buhari government unfurled the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) in 2017 and promised to create 15 million jobs by 2020. Not done, the government introduced the Social Investment Programme (SIP), targeted at the poor and vulnerable, particularly petty traders, artisans, and rural dwellers. When the Brookings Institution, an American policy think tank announced in 2019 that Nigeria had replaced India as the ‘poverty capital of the world,’ the Buhari government countered this by stating its intention to pull 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years by means of its ‘tried and tested’ economic policies. However, by the end of 2020 when the dollar began to exchange for nearly 500 Naira, it had become obvious to discerning Nigerians that the Buhari government was long on rhetoric but painfully short in meaningful economic policies that would address the pains of ordinary Nigerians.
President Buhari’s economic policies failed because the government did not focus on fundamentals. The one sure way to pull the country out of the present economic doldrums is to quickly industrialise the national economy just as China and the other East Asian economic tigers did in the 1970s and 1980s. To industralise, you need to build a steel industry to serve as basic raw material input for manufacturing.
Second, you need to tackle the perennial problem of electric power shortage and make it available and affordable. Steel and electricity are the cornerstone of the Asian Tigers’ economic miracle. President Buhari’s has absolutely no steel policy. Ajaokuta, after the dawdling and incoherence of the Olusegun Obasanjo government has been left to rot by the Buhari government. Regarding electricity, the country was generating 4000 megawatts following the partial privatization of the industry by the Jonathan government in 2013. Six years into the Buhari administration, the country is still generating 4000 megawatts. To put this in context, 4000 megawatts is what an average-sized American city generates. For a Nigeria of 200 million people, it is not even enough to power household needs, not to talk of powering the country’s industrial revolution.
President Buhari has compounded the nation’s economic problems by pursuing economic policies which have triggered inflation in addition to the already existing stagnation. Stagflation is a deadly disease. Bowing to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank, Buhari’s advisers further devalued the Naira and jacked up the cost of petrol and electricity. When ordinary people are complaining that the cost of living is too high, what a responsible and caring government should do is work out ways in which costs can be lowered and the Naira made to purchase more. The Buhari government did not follow this course. The result is the run-away inflation which Nigerians are now complaining loudly about. It is now clear that President Buhari’s economic policies are wrong-headed and are not likely to work in the two short years left of the administration.
Fighting Corruption Without Tools
President Buhari rode to power in 2015 on his reputation as a no-nonsense fighter of corruption. During his brief tenure as military Head of State between December 1983 and August 1985 he filled the country’s prisons with the thieving politicians of the Second Republic. Buhari and his deputy, Brigadier Tunde Idiagbon, were hailed as the country’s saviours and the press bent over backwards to trumpet their cardinal programme, War Against Indiscipline (WAI) and how it was about to usher in a new regime of honesty and clean-living in Nigerian public life. In the rush to praise the duo, the human rights abuses of the regime, its war on the mass media, and the fact that several of the politicians who were said to have embezzled millions of Naira were in fact innocent, was ignored. Even more worrying, there was no rigorous analysis of the root causes of corruption in Nigerian public life and how to devise a coherent and long-lasting strategy to end the malaise for all time. What passed for strategy as far as Buhari and Idiagbon were concerned was to pronounce all the Second Republic politicians guilty of corruption and dump them in prison until they could prove their innocence.
This crude way of fighting corruption worked well in Buhari’s first coming because his was a military dictatorship with power to make and unmake laws as it pleased. However, fighting corruption in a democratic dispensation which President Buhari has had to contend with since 2015 calls for altogether different tactics and strategies, and the tragedy of Buhari’s second coming is precisely that he has not been able to think up creative and new strategies for dealing with the hydra-headed monster called corruption. It is public knowledge that the epicenter of corruption in the country are the ministries, departments and agencies. Politicians at the state and federal levels and bank officials also routinely cook the books and stash away the proceeds in their bank accounts. The Buhari government’s response to these thieving individuals is basically this: wait for them to embezzle public funds and then send the EFCC after them. In other words the anti-corruption agencies close the gate only after the horse has bolted.
This is simply not good enough. What the government ought to do is to ask the hard questions: Why is Nigerian officialdom routinely corrupt? How do they go about stealing public funds? Can the gaps in the system which these officials exploit to steal be plugged so that it will be impossible for these officials to steal even if they want to? The Treasury Single Account, conceived by the Goodluck Jonathan administration but implemented by President Buhari, is a laudable step in this regard. But it does not go far enough.
The auditing and accounting systems in the public service and wherever else public monies are expended need to be further tightened so that they will be tamper-proof. Dr Kole Shetimma, head of the Nigeria office of the MacArthur Foundation has been leading efforts to think through the corruption problem in Nigerian public life. The Buhari government should tap into this effort with a view to boosting the intellectual content of the anti-corruption fighting agencies. For now, however, the verdict is that President Buhari has failed abysmally on the corruption front.
The nation’s security crisis has been building up since the early 1980s and it will be unfair to blame President Buhari for triggering it. Following the downturn in the economy in 1981 the National Party of Nigeria government of President Shehu Shagari adopted austerity measures to cut costs. This was when unemployment became a noticeable feature of Nigerian life. General Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme five years later led to the further erosion of the manufacturing sector and the retrenchment of millions of workers in the public sector. General Sani Abacha was only interested in looting the treasury and paid absolutely no attention to job creation. Successive governments since the return of civilian democratic rule in 1999 only paid lip service to the economic crisis. The inevitable result is what we have today: half the working population of Nigeria roaming the streets looking for jobs that are simply not there.
The unemployed person is a hungry person. The hungry person is an angry person. And there is a tendency for an angry person to dip his hands into illegality and commit crime. This is the genesis of the banditry and kidnapping that has gripped the nation. The loud clamour to change the armed forces chiefs, in the hope that new ones would come up with fresh ideas to tackle the insecurity menace is wrongheaded. Soldiers are not trained to tackle crime, but to protect the country from external aggression. The Buhari government should have explained this to the Nigerian people, but it didn’t. The government’s strategy for fighting insecurity should have also embraced the sober reality that the primary cause of insecurity in the country today are poverty and unemployment. It ought to have followed up the pronouncement with bold short-term programmes wherein this category of persons would be given short-term employment.
To sum up, the strategies deployed to address President Buhari’s three-pronged policy priorities – tackling insecurity, improving the economy and combating corruption – have not worked. The government has only two years left, and two years is simply too short to change course and come up with new strategies and policies. Political activists, politicians and policy analysts with an eye on a new dispensation in 2023 should study the President Buhari administration carefully with a view to understanding why it spectacularly failed in spite of Buhari’s eagerness to hit the ground running in May 2015.
––Dr Okonta was until recently an Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics, University of Oxford. He lives in Abuja
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President Buhari’s economic policies failed because the government did not focus on fundamentals. The one sure way to pull the country out of the present economic doldrums is to quickly industrialise the national economy just as China and the other East Asian economic tigers did in the 1970s and 1980s
