Presidential Election Outcome

Neither Buhari nor Jonathan will be able to deliver on the fantastic promises being made in election campaigns on the economy, and if oil prices remain below $60, I see very difficult months ahead, with possible heady collisions with labour, civil society, and indeed the citizenry.

Campaigns

APC and PDP are missing the golden opportunity to sensitize the citizenry about the enormous challenges ahead… none of them has any credible agenda to deal with the issues, especially within the context of the evolving global economy and Nigeria’s broken public finance.

The Cost of Promises

A plan without the dollar or Naira signs to it is nothing but a wish-list….they are not telling us how much each of their promises will cost and where they will get the money. None talks about the broken or near bankrupt public finance and the strategy to fix it.

View on APC

I expected APC as a party aspiring to take over from PDP to come up with a knock-out punch. Evidently, from what we have read from the various versions of its manifesto as well as the depth of promises being made, it does not seem that it has a better offer.

Implication of Wrong Choices

What Nigeria is going through now is a consequence of deliberate wrong choices.  We have always known that the unprecedented oil boom (in both price and quantity—despite oil theft) of the last six years is temporary but the government chose to treat it as a permanent shock.

Previous Budgets

The budgets of the last five years can best be described as ‘consumption budgets’, with new borrowing by the federal government exceeding the actual expenditure on critical infrastructure, not one penny was added to the stock of foreign reserves at a period Nigeria earned hundreds of billions from oil.

Foreign Reserves

President Obasanjo met about $5 billion in foreign reserves, and the average monthly oil price for the 72 months he was in office was $38, and yet he left $43 billion in foreign reserves after paying $12 billion to write-off Nigeria’s external debt. In the last five years, the average monthly oil price has been over $100, and the quantity also higher but our foreign reserves have been declining and exchange rate depreciating.

Exchange Rate

My calculation is that if the economy was better managed, our foreign reserves should have been between $102 –$118 billion and exchange rate around N112 before the fall in oil prices. As of now, the reserves should be around $90 billion and exchange rate no higher than N125 per dollar… The Naira exchange rate to the dollar is $210 at the parallel market.

Domestic and External Debts

Today, the combined domestic and external debt of the Federal Government is in excess of $40 billion. Add to this the fact that abandoned capital projects littered all over the country amount to over $50 billion.

Re-basing GDP

Re-basing the GDP is no achievement: it is a routine statistical exercise, and depending on the base year that you choose, you get a different GDP figure.  Re-basing the GDP has nothing to do with government policy. Besides, as naira-dollar exchange rate continues to depreciate, the GDP in current dollars will also shrink considerably soon.

On President Jonathan

No other president had presided over the slaughter of about 15,000 people by insurgents in a peacetime; no other president earned up to 50% of the amount of resources the current government earned from oil and yet with very little outcomes; no other president had the rate of borrowing; none had significant forex earnings and yet did not add one penny to foreign reserves but losing international reserves at a time of boom; no other president had a depreciating exchange rate at a time of export boom; at no time in Nigeria’s history has poverty reached 71% (even under Abacha, it was 67 -70%); and under no other president did unemployment reach 24%. Surely, these are unprecedented records and he surely ‘outperformed’ his predecessors!  What a satire!

F 9 Grade

My advice to President Jonathan and his handlers is to stop wasting their time trying to campaign on his job record. Those who have decided to vote for him will not do so because he has taken Nigeria to the moon. His record on the economy is a clear ‘F’ grade.

Poverty Index

This is the only government in our history where rapidly increasing government expenditure was associated with increasing poverty. The director general of NBS stated in his written press conference address in 2011 that about 112 million Nigerians were living in poverty. Is this the record to defend?

Economic Team

Sadly the government’s economic team is very weak, dominated by self-interested and self-conflicted group of traders and businessmen, and so-called economic team meetings have been nothing but showbiz time. The very people government exists to regulate have seized the levers of government as policymakers and most government institutions have largely been “privatized” to them.

Buhari, APC Candidate

Fortuitously, just as he succeeded Shagari when Nigeria faced similar situations, Buhari is once more seeking to lead Nigeria. But times have changed, and Nigeria is largely different. First, this is a democracy and dealing with corruption must happen within the ambit of the rule of law and due process. Getting things done in a democracy requires complicated bargaining, especially where the legislature, labour, the media, and civil society have become strong and entrenched.

Anticipated Structural Adjustments

The scenario does not look pretty. The poor choices made by the current government have mortgaged the future, and the next government would have little room to manoeuvre and would inevitably undertake drastic but painful structural adjustments. The seeming crisis is not destiny; it is self-imposed. However, we must see it as an opportunity to be seized to fundamentally restructure Nigeria’s political economy, including its fiscal federalism and mineral rights.

Job Creation

Neither the APC nor the PDP has a credible programme for employment and poverty reduction. The APC promises to create 20,000 jobs per state in the first year, totalling a mere 720,000 jobs.  This sounds like a quota system and for a country where the new entrants into the labour market per annum exceed two million.  If it was intended as a joke, APC must please get serious.  On the other hand, President Jonathan targets two million jobs per annum but his strategy for doing so is a Job Board— another committee of sort.  Sorry, Mr. President, a Job Board is not a strategy. The principal job Nigerians hired you to do for them is to create jobs for them too. You cannot outsource that job, Sir.  Creating 3 million jobs per annum under the unfolding crisis would task our creativity and audacity to the limits.

Education system

It is estimated that more than 60% of graduates of our educational system are unemployable. You can understand why many of us are amused when the government celebrates that it has established twelve more glorified secondary schools as universities. I thought they would have told us how many Nigerian universities made it in the league of the best 200 universities in the world. That would have been an achievement.

Buhari and APC Victory        

If Buhari wins, he will ride on the populist wind for “change”……..the honeymoon will be brief and the pressure will be immense to magically deliver a ‘new Nigeria’ with no corruption, no boko haram or insecurity, jobs for everyone, no poverty, infrastructure and power in abundance, etc.

Jonathan and PDP Victory

If Jonathan wins, then God must have been magnanimous to give him a second chance to redeem himself. Most people I know who support Jonathan do so either out of self-interest or fear of the unknown…. The beginning of wisdom for every President in his second term is to admit that he is racing against time to cement his legacy. So far, your report card is not looking great.  You need a team of big and bold thinkers, as well as with excellent execution capacity.

Nigeria must survive and prosper beyond Buhari or Jonathan!

Compiled By Yusuf An-Nuphawi