Did you hear the sound and fury of the slugfest? Outgoing AfDB President, Akinwumi Adesina, was the first to land a blow at the chin of Nigerian leaders post-1960. I doubt if he was aiming a dig at President Bola Tinubu’s government. It’s safe to say that given his antecedent as a non-allied public servant, he was only just making a comparison of the different phases of the economy.
He had said at a recent event in Lagos that Nigeria’s GDP per capita in 1960 was higher than what it is today. At $1847 in 1960, it has tanked to a miserable $824 today, Adesina said. That looked like an uppercut at the leadership.
And the President’s men don’t welcome such acrid criticism, whether based on right or wrong premise. So, they returned Adesina’s ‘gbas’ with a timely and well-aimed ‘gbos’. The man on top of his game, Bayo Onanuga, a veteran journalist and public communicator, unsheathed his strong fist from the carapace of Aso Rock and jabbed Adesina on his lower chin. Uppercut jams uppercut, and now there’s a deep cut, a gash, almost, on both chins. Onanuga dismissed Adesina’s tales and statistics as tissues of lies fabricated in the foundry of some frustrated Nigerian politicians. Adesina based his statistics on false and baseless assumptions, Onanuga fired back.
Adesina’s analysis of the nation’s economy was far-reaching and was not necessarily aimed at Tinubu’s government. It was a historical introspection on the degradation of Nigeria’s economy since Independence in 1960. The former Minister of Agriculture under President Goodluck Jonathan and AfDB president did not only point national attention to the nation’s sagging economy, he suggested measures the government should adopt to walk the nation out of the bind.
His thesis suggests that despite the fatness of Nigeria’s economy in terms of GDP, the country’s economic structure remains deeply flawed and unsustainable. He listed decades of policy missteps, institutional weaknesses, over-reliance on crude oil exports, and chronic underinvestment in key sectors as the chief factors for such economic regression. He offered solutions: “Nigeria belongs in the league of developed nations. To get there, we must shift our mindset and pursue rapid economic growth.”
Adesina compared Nigeria’s economy with that of South Korea, which had a lower GDP per capita than Nigeria in 1960 but has since grown into a global industrial leader, currently boasting a GDP per capita income of over $36,000. He highlighted what many Nigerians already know: the preponderance of potential, without the will and capacity to harness such potential. Put simply, a failure of leadership.
The AfDB boss, a man not known for verbal frivolities and brigandage, laid out five urgent priorities to reposition Nigeria’s economy: these include universal access to electricity, development of world-class infrastructure, rapid industrialisation, innovation-driven growth, and competitive agriculture.
To overcome the headwinds against a welter of national involvements, Adesina counsels that Nigeria needs to invest in technology, infrastructure, and innovation. Nigeria must become Africa’s industrial powerhouse. He gave the example of Dangote Refinery as a model of large-scale, private sector-led industrial enterprise.
While the statistics dogfight persisted, some busybodies and big-mouthed persons and groups recruited themselves into the stats war. Human Rights Writers Association, HURIWA; the Independent Media and Policy Initiative (IMPI) and an economist, Dr. Paul Alaje, all jumped into the stats debate.
But for or against, statistics do not heal a grieving soul. They do not make the hungry full. Ghandi once said, “to a hungry man, food is God.” And that says it all. While the experts and pseudo-analysts bandy statistics and figures from IMF, World Bank and other elite bodies, the real statistics resonates among the millions of hungry and angry Nigerians trapped in the web of poverty. Some are workers, who now trek over long distances to offices to save money just to have a meal a day. Some are federal and state government employees, whose monthly wages cannot wedge hunger even for two weeks. Some are artisans whose earnings from their labour cannot sustain a life, let alone a family. Yet, some are an army of unemployed youths, out of school and left to drift to nowhere, poorly skilled as graduates of poorly resourced and equipped institutions. They wander in their millions without hope, without jobs, without any enterprise that money could start.
Have we forgotten the legion of widows and abandoned mothers left to cater for their kids; the swarm of out-of-school children now said to be over 18 million; and several millions of Nigerians in the under-employment bracket. These people have a job but they still wonder if that’s truly a job because the pay is so poor it mocks logic. The list is long, of persons that make up the real statistics governments at all levels and their recruits of busybody analysts should be worried about. Go to the malls, open markets, make-shift night markets, just any market, you’ll see the shege (anguish) Nigerians go through. Many Nigerians no longer eat what they desire to eat, they simply eat whatever is available. These are the real stats. They stare us in our faces, in our neighbourhoods, offices, worship centres, etcetera.
And banish the thought that Tinubu created this mess. Never. He inherited it. Tinubu was handed a ‘dead economy’, to use the exact words of Vice President Kashim Shettima. An economy snatched from the military almost anaemic in 1999, then nurtured for a season to grow enough flesh and build enough blood; and radically ravaged by the same people who nurtured it, the PDP government in its 16 years; before Muhammadu Buhari finally killed it in his eight years of acute incompetence.
But dead or dying, Tinubu is now the foreman hired to fix the mess. He is the current driver of the vehicle called Nigeria. He must stay focused and so should his appointees and spokesmen. You don’t respond to every criticism. It’s akin to a driver always focused on the rearview mirror instead of on the stretch ahead. Away with stats. Attend to the realities.
•Written by Ken Ugbechie
