Pious words, little vision

Unfortunately, the general experience is that they don’t.  Last Thursday, President Goodluck Jonathan was uncharacteristically ebullient in expressing his thoughts of what a great country Nigeria would be if the leadership makes the economy work for the citizenry. Speaking at the State House at a ceremony to inaugurate the National Council on Micro, Small and […]

Unfortunately, the general experience is that they don’t.  Last Thursday, President Goodluck Jonathan was uncharacteristically ebullient in expressing his thoughts of what a great country Nigeria would be if the leadership makes the economy work for the citizenry.
Speaking at the State House at a ceremony to inaugurate the National Council on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), the president made all the right noise about Nigeria’s endowments: it is blessed, and it has all it takes to be great. Therefore, he said, ‘it behoves on the leadership’ of the country to make things work.
These ‘things’ would entail a need to address all the ‘critical economic issues of inclusion and wealth creation’, he said. ‘This our land must be where our youth have jobs and our people can take their economic destinies in their hands. It must be a land where poverty is eradicated and our people can live in dignity. This is the Nigeria we all must work to make possible’.
Jonathan’s vision is however blurred by the reality as most Nigerians see it today. The security challenge is but one of many issues that make it so; it is not the principal factor. Nations prosper even in times of such challenges. The critical element is whether the leadership enunciates the proper policies and is committed to seeing them implemented.
There are over 40,000 small and medium enterprises spread across all the states of the federation. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has a policy of encouraging the growth of such businesses through its Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Fund (MSMEDF), which was launched in August 2013, with a takeoff capital of 220 billion naira. Commercial banks are provided special concessions under the CBN fund when they lend to individual and enterprises under the scheme.
Clearly, the country does not lack policy framework to make the MSMEs work; indeed, some may argue that appointing another superstructure such as the council under the chairmanship of Vice President of Nigeria will only add to the bureaucratic bottlenecks that have hindered the growth and development of this vital sector of the economy.
Then there is the question of power supply.
Everyone, including government officials, agree that the power sector is perhaps the most basic and critical infrastructure upon which all other development plans should rest.  Unless this issue is settled, the economic progress that the president hopes for in Nigeria would be shaky at best. Another critical area is agriculture. The government’s policy on this sector can be seen from the attention it has given it in budgetary allocations. In 2013, the federal budget devoted to the agricultural sector was 83 billion naira, just below 1.7 percent of the total expenditure estimates, and far below the minimum 10 percent that African Union member states agreed to fund the sector with annually.  This year, the figure was even more disheartening, a paltry 66.64 billion naira. Expectations that the reduced government’s spending in the agriculture sector as indicated in the 2014 budget proposal would expand the opportunities for the private sector to drive the federal government’s Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) programme to benefit new fronts in 2014 have not been matched in practice. Instead, it is the politically-driven, government-tolerated (if not sponsored) Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN), anchored on a self-propelling programme for Jonathan’s ambition to succeed himself in office in the 2015 general elections, that is on the ascendancy.
The Jonathan administration officials appear to be consumed by this single-track trajectory, and every government policy is attuned to that objective. That is why his projection that, with Nigeria’s 170 million people, the 9th largest workforce in the world, it could use these assets to ‘drive change and development’ can only hold true if the focus is equity in not just resource allocation, but in policy application as well.