Nigeria: Transformation or Status Quo?

By

Abdullah Musa

kigongabas@yahoo.com

Prof. Charles Soludo appears to me as someone who either enjoys his job, or position, or both. I come to this conclusion from looking at his various snapshots as appear in Nigeria’s dailies: he is either beaming from ear to ear, or looking very smug and contented like a cat that had just finished devouring a fat mouse.

Charles Soludo deserves a mention in our discourse not because the CBN is the object of our discussion, but because he introduced FSS2020, a financial strategy that seeks to make Nigeria the financial hub of West Africa. A hub to my non-technical mind is some device around which something revolves. In the case of finance, (I do not have all the details on Soludo’s strategy) it may mean that Nigeria may be the best shopping centre for finances in the sub-region. With banks’ consolidation, and planned further consolidation and expansion into other African countries, what this means is that anyone seeking to invest in West Africa may have to come to Nigeria to source finance.

If I were a banker, I would be able to see the potential in terms of profitability of the banks, and of course the spill over effect onto the shareholders. My concern as a non-black suited person is however with what happens to the majority of Nigerians, particularly those that ‘wasted their time to go through Nigeria’s university system.

If you are to analyze the make-up of Nigeria’s labor force you would roughly come up with a hierarchy (in the numbers employed in each category) like this: farmers, retailers, civil or public servants and artisans. I do not know whether by now those engaged in the transport sector dominated by motorcycles now rank higher in employment than those in the public service. Those in the banking or financial sector generally, must be very low in the hierarchy of numbers due to their paucity.

The question that easily comes to mind is how this financial hub strategy aims to transform the sectors that employ people the most? Or is there no spill-over effect, only more money coming to the money spinners? The financial hub strategy is in real fact not what we are focused upon. Of broader interest is what governments intend to do to transform the major sectors of the economy, hence our title which asks whether it is going to be transformation or status quos.

Our problems are gargantuan. Political leaders have so short a term of office (four years in the least) such that they may feel that they are unable to transform either their economy or the people or both. Soludo’s approach to my understanding is to rejuvenate the sector over which he has control. It is thus left to the Ministers of Industries, Agriculture and Commerce to rejuvenate their own forts. I have no quarrel with this strategy, for if everybody would grow his own piece of ‘land’ then the collective output may really be what we call progress.

At the top of the hierarchy in terms of numbers employed therein is agriculture. The status quo there means that there is the politics of fertilizer. I call it politics because on the one hand the fertilizer is never enough, and there is no goal attached to the subsidy. Subsistence is what had been used to describe our agriculture. Even at that classification we fail because the farmers are no able to provide entirely their food requirements. We are only analyzing the quantity level: growing enough cereals and tubers to last the period before next harvest. Grain farmers do not provide their own protein. For this they have to buy from the efforts of the roaming Fulani and they end up not having the cash to do so. To them therefore, protein is a luxury, and had been so classified by all those who are categorized as poor.

Looking back to early years after independence, one may say that the agricultural policy was more attuned to creating wealth for the farmers, for the export orientation of cash crops producers ensured an international market for the farmers and as a consequence an additional source of foreign exchange for the nation. I had been engaged in farming on an on and off basis. Every time I did so through the hire of manual labor I ended up with lower capital, definitely no gain. This happened, for immediately after harvest I would want to sell the grains and the fetching price had to be at loss. And the cycle kept on repeating itself till the capital was depleted for I had no reserve to thrive upon before the time prices were to peak. In some years, the price would never peak, the years of bumper harvest; ironically bumper harvest may seem to be a curse to subsistence farmers rather than a blessing.

For anybody interested in the transformation of agriculture in Nigeria, the most important fact is the qualification of the practitioners. It may not be an exaggeration to state that 99% of those engaged in subsistence agriculture are not literate in the western education’s sense. It took time, if they have scaled the hurdle yet, for them to know how to correctly use modern farm inputs: from fertilizers to chemicals. If you look at the output of Nigeria’s universities, how many take up farming after graduation. Ironically, even those who graduated in agriculture end up working in offices instead of farms, at best being distributors of fertilizer. So for us to continue to grow our food, it seems ‘logical’ that substantial numbers of our children, let us say 50% should not go to school! This is rationale for going to school translate to foregoing farming. It also means that if there is a Millennium Development Goal (MDG) in relation to school children enrolment, it should not be striven for, nor should it be achieved.

The Commerce sector seems to have the same character as agriculture. Those who engage in the distributive trade are mostly illiterate. They grow their businesses not with a sense of forming a Wal-Mart; employing people and slashing prices, but simply employing servants (in the case of Hausa- Fulani businessmen) who have no formal employment status and are dismissible at will. With the growth in number of participants in this sector, poverty seems to be the most recurring return; thereby eroding capital and leading to business collapse and associated social consequences. Graduates of Business studies may roam the streets looking for jobs, for no one prepared them to aspire for a life in the distributive trade. There are no longer supermarkets to work in to acquire skills; for even the elites are not comfortable with supermarket prices: heavy overheads and the same product as obtains from the street vendor or the rickety market stall. In Nigeria, bulk purchasers do not get much preferential prices. Because of the absence of laws, roadside make-shift structures sprout at alarming rate, selling all products which are housed in expensive rented shops. The consequence being that the fellow who establishes the formal structure fails in the business, the road-sider thrives till he becomes strong enough to rent a shop and his decline starts.

In summary, if there are policies to grow the economy, they have to take into consideration the nature of the practitioners in a particular sector being addressed. For years MAN had cried of neglect, of government not caring whether industries thrived or not. With then NEPA being run by civil servants, who were paid salaries whether they supplied power or they did not, the manufacturers were literally asked to use firewood to power their industries, just like my wife who is fairly educated is forced to cook food for her family using firewood, just like her mother, because I cannot afford cooking gas, in a nation that had been flaring gas for the past thirty or more years.

Graduates in Chemistry, Engineering and other technical courses need industries in order to be gainfully employed, and to have self esteem. Nigeria may be the financial hub of Africa, but those who come to take the funds will not set up industries here because on the one hand infrastructure is deficient, and the caliber of the graduates does not meet international standards.(ASUU must be chuckling silently) We are being called upon to understand the reason why we send our children to schools. We have shown the reasons why we should not. Soludo’s hub should be beneficial to all Nigerians not only bankers and stockbrokers.