By Charles Onunaiju
Except for the extremely partisan bigots who hanker about our one naira exchanging for one U.S dollar, immediately after assumption of office by President Buhari, most Nigerians know that the changes we have witnessed in the past nearly eight months are nothing short of revolutionary against the background of the sordid political culture, in which institutions and processes were wantonly abused in the past years.
On the fate of our currency that continues to slide, it reflects fundamentally the dearth of creativity and decline in production. Money in any currency at all is the expression of value created by the people through innovations and productivity. If we do not continuously create and even add value, through productivity and innovations, the currency cannot on its own assume a value that was neither created nor added.
A plummeting currency as ours is a wake-up call to put on our thinking cap to produce and innovate. Except our national output is increased through productivity and innovation, debates about our collapsing currency would amount to sterile contestations. Even as individuals, the money we hold is receipt of our individual creative and productive endeavour. People who merely seek to make money without exerting commensurate productive endeavours are clearly rent-seekers and speculators whose activities undermine and distort the economic process and its aggregates.
Administrative intervention by the government or any agency of it, to shore up the currency without stimulating innovations and productivity are economic exercise in futility, which in spite of its alluring populist posture is a recipe for economic disaster. Nigerians, who are therefore, miffed at the fate of our currency and its decline, should clearly understand that each person has a role in reviving the ailing currency. Governments in the past which have squandered the value derived from oil receipt, without much thought on adding value to it, laid the volatile foundation, upon which our currency is now on a free fall.
To rebuild our key economic infrastructure like industries, agriculture and others are policy challenges which the President Buhari government must tackle frontally. Our economic reform process which has been singularly situated in the bird-cage of neo-liberalism only, has distorted the national process. The historic election of President Buhari, the only such important feat in our whole history when an opposition candidate defeated an incumbent, is not just the determination of Nigerians to change the face of leadership but a total agenda re-set of political and economic paradigm.
The key to success of any neo-liberal economic reform is effective formal rules and strong government that would hold the ring for fair competition among actors. Our system, especially in the immediate past is riddled with cronyism and state institutions were considerably weak and were subjected to serial manipulation and insider abuse. Under such circumstances the economic reforms of the past few years apart from mechanistic application of received wisdom from the West by its key operators suffers from a serious deficit of social and cultural compatibility. The change we have seen in the past few months is a strong and purposeful leadership that inspires move by its example than the offer of sterile rhetoric. President Buhari is evidently re-positioning governance. A formerly and compulsive honey-pot for the political elites and their private sector hangers-on, the oil industry and its foremost institutions, the NNPC is experiencing a critical shock therapy. Its topmost echelon has been streamlined. At least we are not paying Minister of Petroleum, the ace ministerial appointment that ethnic syndicates and other organized cabals desperately covet. The sector is now overseen by President Buhari himself and the Group Managing Director, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu who also doubles as the Minister of State for Petroleum. The fact that the oil sector would no longer accommodate rent-seekers, hence the “dashing” of oil blocks to friends, political associates and sundry economic parasites is a good reason to cheer.
At the same time, government appointees are becoming genuinely public servants. Bizarre display of ostentations, wanton abuse of office and others are looking set to belong to the yester-years. President Buhari’s example of modesty and integrity would soon rub-off on the critical sectors of our public life, in due course. President Buhari,s clear commitment to bring corruption to its heels, is actively compelling those who became fat cats through vandalization of our common patrimony to make restitution. Apart from the incompatibity of our socio-cultural terrain to neo-liberal economic reform, corruption made any chance of its success, a compulsive chimera. In what look like a hedonistic carnival, the past government especially the immediate past one threw open the national vaults for the primitive accumulation by its personnel and associates is harrowing and mind-boggling. The arms scandal, in which the scion of the powerful and influential Sokoto caliphate, Col. Sambo Dasuki was the key director of “the hammer house of horror”, is the most chilling act of elite chivalry especially against the background that people were massacred because funds meant to tackle the brutal Boko Haram insurgency was diverted to the leisure and pleasure of partisan political campaigns.
The emerging culture of the President Buhari regime in which corruption would have serious consequences would not mean that corruption would end but that there would be enormous costs to those who wish to indulge.However, the gains of the President Buhari administration are easily reversible if they are not anchored on a scientific and sound world view. The late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who made the most advanced effort in the modernization of the old Western region, drew generously from the framework of constitutional socialism. The challenges he confronted are still here today and the tasks he accomplished are still visible. A change is obviously taking place before our very eyes in which, the way things are done in the past are being challenged but defining the new future needs a scientific ideological compass that would navigate the great task that lays ahead.
•Onunaiju writes from Abuja.