Underdevelopment

Underdevelopment: Private Sector’s Culpability

Abdullah Musa

Certain things are simply unthinkable! You cannot imagine a white American, walking the streets of New York, with a tray on his head, hawking raw meat. Could you conjure an image of a white woman, sitting in front of a gutter, with a baby on her arms, or sucking her breast, with a wood-fuelled fire in front of her, on which is a metal container, containing sizzling vegetable oil, roasting Akara or other food items?

A friend of mine who is a lecturer in one of the Nigerian universities was going for a PhD course in the UK. Since the university he was going to was based in Colchester, Essex, and his plane was going to land in London, he pondered out aloud how he was going to find his way to Colchester. I jokingly replied him that he would find a white man thundering at the top of his voice: Colchester Essex! Colchester Essex! Colchester Essex! That is to say, if the white man were to behave as black men do when beckoning passengers to join a bus to certain destination.

I may not be wrong to say that no 70-year old housewife in Britain had ever used firewood to cook meals for her family, talk less of fetching water in a bucket from a well or standing pipe, and carrying the bucket on her head. In a city in Northern Nigeria, I daily see teenage and even underage girls carrying water in plastic pails on their heads, and crossing main roads before reaching their houses. This had been going on for years, with no end in sight.

We are now in campaign season. All the parties that are fielding candidates are competing for our attention over the air waves and other media, telling us what they will do if we vote them into power. They may do what they promise. But at the end of their tenure we may find ourselves where we were before they came to power or worse. But why must this always be the scenario: one government takes over from another, or succeeds itself, yet it only scratches the surface of the old problems, while new problems are left unattended.

My view is that politicians come to power without plan. When they are in power they become obsessed with how to stay put. All their expenditures are geared more towards self-preservation rather than following a developmental blueprint. They promise to end water shortage, but they do not the maximum output from the source of raw water, neither do they care to find out the current installed capacity of the existing water works, nor the revenue earned from consumers. This applies also to electricity supply.

In a way we are more American than British. We do not want government intrusion into our lives, but we like service from the government since to our understanding, they must be free, even if we do not pay any tax. When government owned and ran Nitel, the workers, the management, and the consumers colluded and killed the company through hemorrhaging. A wealthy consumer will accumulate hundreds of thousands naira in unpaid bills with the active collusion of a compromised staff, and then jettisons it as an unwanted baggage and gets a new line installed. When laws were changed, and prepaid GSM services came in, consumers had to pay for their services in advance through recharge cards. Ironically, even though not unexpectedly, Mtel, Nitel’s mobile system, collapsed while the private sector’s thrived; affirming to us that those who manage government’s enterprises are either incompetent, or insincere, or both.

It is thus apparent that the private sector in Nigeria is not up to the developmental challenges of our country. They are empowered to set up refineries but they fail, blaming the government for fixing prices of petroleum products, which will make profitability impossible. But is the NNPC the sole importer of refined petroleum products? If yes, for what reason does a National Assembly exist in a capitalistic society such as ours? The organized private sector should lobby for the widening of the competitive space so that they can be allowed to import refined petroleum products. If the federal government subsidizes the pump price for the one imported by NNPC, then it should also subsidize the ones imported by OPS. The private sector should then go further to set up its refining plants within the country, selling its refined products to Mother Christmas NNPC, which will in turn sell below cost to consumers in Chad, Niger and so on.

I am of the view that two basic ingredients in our quest for physical development are better provided by the private sector: water and electricity. Considering the nature of the pervasive poverty in our country, and the over-pampered comprador business class, governments, (federal, state, local) may decide to subsidize such services by a certain percentage for a certain number of years, with a gradual, phased withdrawal.