Clear the way for an ox…

On paper at least, the Nigeria Industrial Revolution Plan (NIRP) and the National Enterprise Development Program (NEDEP) launched by President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja last week looked well thought out. They are aimed, he said, at ushering in a new era of industrial, micro, small and medium enterprises development in Nigeria. He said, “NIRP…will fast-track […]

On paper at least, the Nigeria Industrial Revolution Plan (NIRP) and the National Enterprise Development Program (NEDEP) launched by President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja last week looked well thought out. They are aimed, he said, at ushering in a new era of industrial, micro, small and medium enterprises development in Nigeria. He said, “NIRP…will fast-track industrialisation, accelerate inclusive economic growth and job creation, transform Nigeria’s business environment and stop the drain on our foreign reserves caused by importing what we can produce locally.” He listed agriculture and agro-products, metals and solid minerals, oil and gas, construction and light manufacturing services as targeted areas where Nigeria has a competitive advantage.
Jonathan said something very interesting, that this plan will boost the manufacturing sector’s contribution to GDP from 4% now to 10% in the next five years. It will also boost the annual earnings of Nigerian manufacturers by N5 trillion per annum, he said. He said another interesting thing; that there are 17 million MSMEs in Nigeria today employing 32 million people. “If each of these 17 million MSMEs employs one more person, we will create an additional 17 million jobs,” Jonathan said.
Is that right? Most of these 17 million SMEs are struggling with poor power supply and Nigerians’ low purchasing power and are hardly able to pay the workers they have now. How could each one of them add one more worker so that government will say it created 17 million new jobs overnight? It is not only Nigerian rulers that resort to this kind of voodoo economics in times of adversity. US President Dwight Eisenhower once said his country’s economic recession would be over if only Americans would buy. “What should they buy?” he was asked and he said, “Anything. Let them just buy.” Certainly the shops will boom if everybody goes on a spending spree, but how do you do that without solving the small matter of paying?
The probable reason for the lukewarm response that greeted the launching of this new plan is that if all the national development programs launched before this one had succeeded, there would have been no need for this one. For example, the plan to boost agriculture is an old one in Nigeria. In 1976, then Head of State General Obasanjo launched Operation Feed the Nation [OFN] to make Nigeria self-sufficient in food production. It was a simple concept; he asked every Nigerian to cultivate any available land he could find. Obasanjo was shown on television sporting a kampala jumper with a hoe slung over his shoulder. He planted maize on a plot of land right inside Dodan Barracks. Soon, most civil servants in Nigeria took after him and crops were growing in all government quarters. Thirty eight years since OFN, we are importing food at record levels.
Three years after OFN, President Shehu Shagari launched the Green Revolution program as part of NPN’s Food and Shelter slogan. Unlike OFN, Green Revolution emphasised supply to farmers of imported fertiliser. By then however, the gap between Nigerians’ food needs and local supply was so huge that Shagari set up a Presidential Task Force on Rice headed by his most powerful minister, Umaru Dikko. The task force did not grow any rice; instead it imported it by the armada.
It was not only in agriculture that this country once had tall programs. Think about today’s public service, enmeshed as it is in corruption and ineptitude and you probably think that nothing was ever done to address it. Actually, when General Murtala Mohamed came to power in 1975 with Obasanjo as his deputy, their first project was to purge the civil service of “deadwoods.” Everyday there were screaming newspaper headlines such as  “NWSG sacks 500,” “Unilag boots out 50 profs”, “Ochefu, 100 other army officers axed” etc.
Twelve years after the Murtala purges, IBB launched another program of civil service reforms. Civil servants were told to build a career in one ministry; ministers rather than perm secs became the accounting officers while perm secs were renamed directors general. Another 20 years later, the public service had reached a level where Obasanjo had to create Servicom as well as a Bureau of Public Service Reforms. How many times must we purge and reform this service?
The Nigerian economy too has been reformed many times. Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Program [SAP] of the 1980s led to a rise in fuel prices, freezing of salaries and employment, introduction of VAT and deregulation of the naira. Apparently it didn’t succeed because 20 years later President Obasanjo was still talking about reforms. The same theme spilled over into President Yar’adua’s Seven Point Agenda whose central plan was to declare a state of emergency in the power sector. This was never done. 16 billion dollars spent by Obasanjo to reform the same sector vanished without trace.
Don’t forget about Vision 2010 and Vision 2020. Each one of them looked very good on paper and each one of them also promised to lift up this country in the ranks of nations. Vision 202020 specifically promised to raise us into the ranks of the world’s 20 largest economies by the year 2020. I was just wondering; any club that intends to end up in the top four of the English Premier League by season’s end should at least be around number 6 at mid-season. Year 2020 is only 6 years away; are we around number 30 today?
Many people have said these problems tend to reoccur due to the collapse of ethics in Nigerian society. That too has been tackled by many regimes. In 1977, General Obasanjo went to Jaji and declared that Nigeria must be a society that is disciplined, just, humane and African. Four years later, Shagari had to do it all over again when he launched the Ethical Revolution. In 1983 he even appointed Yusuf Maitama Sule as the Minister of National Orientation, a concept borrowed from Nasser’s Egypt. A year later in 1984 the Buhari/Idiagbon regime launched the War Against Indiscipline, WAI. Nigerians were forced to queue up in banks and airports; people could no longer urinate, defecate or hawk wares by the roadside; tampering with a NEPA cable or trafficking in cocaine could get you the death penalty while cheating in an exam could fetch you 20 years in jail. Why is it that three decades later we still need a National Orientation Agency, NOA?
President Jonathan has been pursuing a Transformation Agenda since 2011. If Labaran Maku is to be believed, the agenda has made such great impact in many areas that Nigeria is already on the way to becoming an Eldorado. Why then is Jonathan launching another program with only a year to go before his presidential mandate runs out?
I am not saying all these in order to discourage promoters of the new program from doing their best to ensure that it becomes the first successful such project in our national life. I am only reminding them that there have been too many failed grandiose programs encompassing all sectors of Nigerian national life. The columnist George F. Will once wrote that “if all the money voted by New York City for anti-poverty programs actually went to the poor, they would be rich by now.” If all the national development programs rolled out by various Nigerian regimes over the years had delivered on their lofty promises, this country would be thoroughly developed by now.
The president launched a program to transform Nigeria and no one paid any attention. Must be one of those things that locals say “We are tired of being told to make way for the ox to pass when we never saw any horns.”