What recession means to ordinary Nigerians - Mike Onwukwe

I bring to the attention of the good people of Nigeria what the situation is like back home these days because any Nigerian who fails to speak up is an accomplice or accessory after the fact. The country is rapidly going grey in all fronts. The land is in peril and devoid of any real or imagined blueprint for recovery. It is better that you go to hell twice than to travel to Nigeria now. The man at the helm of affairs is called President Muhammadu Buhari who strikes me as a fading patriarch coming to terms with the realities and intricacies of governance. Yes! This is somebody who considered absconding immediately after he took over the realms of governance. That tells you his intellectual depth and preparedness for the arduous task. He is excused because he lacks the capacity to provide good governance.
Ex-President Goodluck Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party ran a well-oiled campaign. Buhari and the All Progressives Congress were busy preparing for war and reaching out to jobless youths and other miscreants, arming them for a showdown. In a flash of the pan, Jonathan conceded defeat before the battle-ready youths could be unleashed and Buhari found power and the Presidency on his laps clearly overwhelmed and buffeted.

Two reasons lend credence to this. First, it took him more than six months to assemble the much vaunted technocrats that turned out to be obsolete, recycled and expired politicians. Secondly, since he assumed the mantle of leadership, no blueprint or Marshal Plan has been laid out to steer the country out of the woods. The naira continues to plummet against other currencies.

Under Buhari, Nigeria continues to wallop from one misstep to a near fall. Boko Haram, we were told had been degraded, is still on the prowl.

The Niger Delta region, awash with rivulets of blood, is still on the mend with the boys becoming more potent and destructive. Nigeria is in recession, a deep one, and the reason is traceable to the dwindling oil revenues (no thanks to turmoil in the creeks) that used to accrue to Nigeria in the past and now the President, governors and ministers and LG chairmen have no money to fritter away like before. The common man is at the butt of this mismanagement and faced with recession, a result of several years of squandering and mismanagement of various regimes. Recession means to the common man the withdrawal of kids from schools, tradesmen idling away, women and men carrying long hairs, commuters trekking more distance avoiding taxis, self-medication, tenants owing landlords, boom in fried akara and second hand clothes and major events either cancelled or scaled down.

Fulani herdsmen are still marauding the villages (except in Ondo State) on a mission to depopulate the people. Power situation remains the same if not worse and funds said to have been recovered from politicians are not yet accounted for. Recruitment into the civil service remains a clandestine exercise reserved for the children of the rich and their cronies.

The country has turned into comic and hilarious cartoons. Here are few examples. In the Ijeshatedo area of Lagos, a housewife who stole head of stockfish lay helpless after being cornered like a rat at the dead of the night by full glare of vehicle headlamp. Other women had circled her, striped her naked intent on lynching until better heads prevailed. A similar scenario played out in Ilasamaja where a woman was strolling home after buying fried yam and akara for dinner for her household only to have it snatched by two boys on Okada. In Somolu, a housewife snatched a pot of rice from the hot stove still smouldering with hot flame because she had no food for her kids. A vigilance group in the Yenagoa Local Government Area of Bayelsa State arrested one Kaduna Enatime, a father of two, for alleged theft of a pot of soup, 12 wraps of fufu and a half basin of garri. He was nabbed at the dead of the night at two O’clock in the morning and was swiftly taken to the paramount ruler where he was publicly humiliated.

In the midst of pervading anomie and gloom, cooler and wiser heads are supposed to prevail but we are not anywhere nigh where the President can run the country as a bridge builder and not as a President of the North. The cabinet members should go back to his mother’s lap for new lessons in governance. They are eloquently intelligent but do not cut it.

The regime, whose head believes that women belong to the kitchen, made a somersault and headed to Germany where the head of state is a woman; a regime that used more than N300m to clear weeds in an IDP camp that shelter hunger-stricken people. A man who cannot generate money as a private person, a man who borrowed money to buy nomination form cannot change overnight and make money for the government.

He may have run three times for the job but he is clearly ill-equipped and unprepared to rule this country. There are no ideas and no think tanks. Nothing really has changed so much if not for the quantum leap into poverty and hardship. He is clearly a pacesetter in excuses, complaints and in no hurry to fix anything due to shallowness of thought. Jonathan assembled an economic team and you could see brilliant minds at work. The ancient Romans believed that it was better to know nothing at all about a subject than knowing half of it. The failure of Buhari’s regime to deliver democracy dividends has endangered mutual trust and confidence between the ruler and the ruled and may enthrone dissent in various forms. When this happens as it will, democratic values and legitimacy suffer and the common man will be at the butt of the joke.

Here are my personal observations, not anybody else’s opinion. Housewives will no longer snatch smouldering pots of soup or steal stockfish but will turn over their kids to their neighbours with the pretext of fetching water only to abscond forever due to hunger and inability to feed their children. This interlude playing out back home makes me believe that Nigeria as a nation is on evacuation alert and this should worry us to the marrow.

The fact that you claim to dramatise the fight against corruption is no confirmation that you fight it. His disdain for corruption may be curated but his immediate lieutenants are tarred with brush of corruption. This President has mediocrity as writ large.

The old dictator is just waking up after sleeping for six months before appointing ministers and snoring for 20 months before thinking about whether to have an economic plan or not. What would Buhari do with a $29. 9bn loan except to borrow ideas from the “demons that have taken over Aso Rock” and fritter it away. His hubris sticks out like festering open sore.

Mike Onwukwe, an International Security Adviser based in South Sudan wrote via Mikeonwukwe@gmail.com

Economic Recession An Opportunity To Diversify Economy – PMB

 

President Muhammadu Buhari has said the economic recession is an opportunity for Nigeria to diversify it’s economy, sustainable growth and shared prosperity.

The president also has assured potential investors that Nigeria would soon be one of the most attractive places to invest as his administration has embarked on significant economic reforms to realise that goal.

According to a statement by his special adviser media, Femi Adesina, the president gave this assurance to a large gathering of political and business leaders from the United States, Africa and other regions of the world at the Second United States-Africa Business Forum in the New York, on Wednesday, organized by the United States Department of Commerce and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Buhari said,  “These are no doubt challenging times for the Nigerian economy. But let me use this opportunity to boldly affirm our conviction that there is no crisis without an accompanying opportunity. In our case, we see Nigeria’s ongoing economic challenges – occasioned mainly by the fall in oil prices – as an opportunity to set the economy firmly on the path of true diversification, sustainable economic growth and shared prosperity.”

The President said that the reform measures taken by his administration since inception in 2015 have started yielding good fruits especially in the areas of security, anti-corruption and revamping the economy.

He said the priority investment sectors for his administration now are improving infrastructure, industrial productivity, agriculture, mining and digital economy where “young Nigerians are increasingly demonstrating that they have the talent and the passion to leverage.”

The Nigerian leader said that the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council headed by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, will soon come out with  wide-ranging business environment reforms on ports, visa-on arrival, improving the speed and efficiency of land titling and business registration. Some fiscal incentives he noted, include, up to 5 years tax holiday for activities classified as “pioneer;” tax-free operations; no restrictions on expatriate quotas in Free Trade Zones; and a low VAT regime of 5 per cent.

“We intend to make Nigeria one of the most attractive places to do business,” he declared, even as he noted that Nigeria remains the number one investment destination in Africa.

President Buhari added that his administration will continue to strengthen government institutions in order to address the concerns of investors and ease investments in the Nigerian economy.

“We are weaning ourselves from a historical dependence on crude oil, diversifying our economy, and putting it on the path of sustainable and inclusive growth. To this end, we have embarked on policies aimed at establishing an open, rules-based and market-oriented economy.

We will continue to actively engage with the private sector at the highest levels to listen to your concerns and to assure you of our commitment to creating enabling policies in which your businesses can survive and thrive,” President Buhari said.

He urged participants to “take advantage of this Forum to establish and strengthen business relationships, share valuable experience and collaborate for mutual benefits.”

President Buhari, while stressing that enormous potential exists for foreign investment and for the local economy, listed sectors which have barely been exploited to include Nigeria’s 180-million population and abundance of labour; arable land; forest waters; oil and gas; solid minerals; livestock and huge tourist potential.

On United States-Nigeria business relations, he announced the commencement of the US-Nigeria Commercial and Investment Dialogue with a focus on the infrastructure, agriculture, digital economy, investment and regulatory reform to be jointly led by the Nigerian Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment and his US counterpart.

President Buhari said after this Business Forum, he looked forward to increased trade and investment flows between Nigeria and the United States.

Osinbajo: Nigeria’s Economic Recession Is Inevitable

Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo on Tuesday reviewed the state of the economy and explained that the prevailing recession was necessitated by the loss of 60 per cent of the nation’s revenue in the first quarter of the year to the violent activities of militants and economic sabouteurs in the Niger Delta.

But he gave assurances that the recession would be short-lived because the federal government was putting in place some mechanisms that would aid the quick recovery of the economy.

The vice-president, who spoke at a convocation in Ede, Osun State, enjoined Nigerian youths to multitask in order to break even.

Osinbajo’s assurances of a quick return to better days was echoed in China by the Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr. Okechukwu Enelamah, who restated the federal government’s resolve to restructure the economy, saying that its policies focused on diversifying revenue sources would help the economy speed up the recovery process.

Explaining Nigeria’s sharp fall into recession, Osinbajo explained that there was no way the country could have avoided the recession since it had in February lost 60 per cent of its revenues to the activities of saboteurs.

He also identified pipeline vandalism coupled with the errors of some past leaders as some of the reasons for the current economic situation in the country.

The vice-president enjoined youths, especially young graduates to be diligent and take advantage of various international trading platforms to improve their status.

Also speaking at the convocation, a Global economic analyst, Mr Dick Kramer, in a lecture entitled, “Nation Building and Nigeria’s Economic Challenges,” said the country was in recession because it had failed to build a strong private economy over the years and also failed to create an economy based on industries.

While noting that the global economy had been relatively weak in the last 18 years, Kramer said Nigeria needed a new long term economic plan which must entail fostering an effective public/private partnership.

Also a former Minister of Defence, Lt-Gen Theophilus Danjuma (rtd), called for serious investment in the education system in view of its impact on the socio-economic development of the country.

Speaking in China, the Minister of Trade and Industry, Enelamah, said the federal government was taking advantage of the difficult economic conditions arising from the sharp fall in oil prices to restructure the economy.

He said China would continue to be an important partner in Nigeria’s ongoing quest for sustainable growth and development.

The minister spoke during a panel discussion at the Second ‘Investing in Africa’ Forum, which took place in Guangzhou, China, and was organised by the government of China’s Guangdong Province, the China Development Bank, and the World Bank Group.

Enelamah said: “Our principal economic policy direction in Nigeria is to diversify the economy, away from the longstanding traditional reliance on oil exports. We are taking steps to structurally transform the economy, so as to restore growth and create jobs.”

He listed some of the steps the government was taking to include: “Strategically aligning monetary, fiscal and structural policies, to engender much-needed investors’ confidence; creating a private-sector driven Presidential Council on Ease of Doing Business that will initiate and implement far-reaching business environment reforms; repositioning the Nigeria Investment Promotion Council to enable it effectively fulfil its core mandate, among others.”

According to the minister, the NIPC would provide the needed incentives and ‘aftercare’ services to investors, as well as proactively create regular opportunities for investors’ engagement.

The minister highlighted a number of “strategic” sectors for intending and potential investors in Nigeria to include: Agriculture and Agro-Processing, Automotive, Infrastructure (Roads, Rail, Ports and Power), Real Estate, Pharmaceuticals, and the Digital Economy.

In his closing remarks, Enelamah praised the ongoing cooperation between China and Nigeria on the part of both governments, and also the private sector.

Enelamah said: “The China miracle is one that provides very many useful lessons from which Nigeria can borrow, and is borrowing. Nigeria will continue to work hard and in close partnership with China for mutual benefits, growth and development.”