“Smash-and-Grab” Economics

We delude ourselves that we are in a hurry to build infrastructure, as that is all we need to become ‘developed’ economies.  We convince ourselves that we need as much cash as we can get each year, and so our budgets have been growing year on year.  The economists of this world have also convinced […]

We delude ourselves that we are in a hurry to build infrastructure, as that is all we need to become ‘developed’ economies.  We convince ourselves that we need as much cash as we can get each year, and so our budgets have been growing year on year.  The economists of this world have also convinced us – or we allowed ourselves to be convinced – that by notching up our budgets year on year, the economy is growing.  In spite of the apparent folly of reporting ‘economic growth’ that does not reflect at all in better societies, or a reduction in the display of ignorance among our people, still in the year 2013 and beyond, we intend to stay ‘committed’ to the realization of economic growth sans development.  This has been the practice for many years now, and is likely to be for many more years to come.  It doesn’t worry Nigerians at all, that the Millennium Development Goals targets, set in the year 2000, are upon us in 2015 and despite all the rosy budgets of the past 13 years since those targets were set, Nigeria has achieved exactly NONE of them!

But spend we must!  We are playing the politics of fraudulent ‘constituencies’.  We are running the largest government in the world!… and by far the most expensive.  Everybody goes to the centre to grab as much as they can.  Even revenues generated at state and local government levels are equally subjected to the smash-and-grab cycle.  There seems to be no concerted effort towards the achievement of a few clearly-stated goals.  The spending is all over the place.  Politics, ethnicity, religion, tribalism, clanism, nepotism, continue to dictate how and where Nigeria spends its revenues.  It is almost a fait accompli, that Nigeria is spending its way into extinction.  It is a fearsome scenario.

Perhaps that is what democracy and federalism is about anyway.  Politicians mount the rostrum daily, complaining about what someone somewhere is doing wrong to their constituency.  But in fact, they are only concerned about their own pockets. Pockets? No, it is the primitive acquisition that is the problem.  Nigerians are in trouble.  We are in the claws of a mismanaged culture.  We are writing our own history as a people, daily, and the picture is not palatable at all.  Nigeria should be the pacesetter for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, but we are setting the pace only for its annihilation.  Our biggest problem seems to be how exactly to make progress in a modern world, without dragging along, the baggage of our misunderstood, undocumented, unscientific, and fraudulently-put-together-by-colonialists histories, as well as a culture that mainly belongs in the past.  We are stuck in a time warp, not knowing how to carry those aspects of our culture which have value, into the future.  We are in a state of shock, having lost the narrative of who exactly we are as a people!

Yet we budget! And spend we must!  Every state and local government makes representations to Abuja, to negotiate for the largest slice possible, no mater how fraudulently.  Who cares? The guys from the south say they are tired of sharing with the north.  The easterners also lay claim to all the oil wealth emanating from their region as well as the south – by extension, that is…  A war was fought partly to prove that point.  The people from the west complain about being left out of governance in the new dispensation.  The people from the north say they are being short-changed in the revenue sharing process, and some of them have wondered whether not to bail out and form their own republic. Nigeria is a typical setting where things have fallen apart, and the centre is barely holding.

But my concern is that we should really dissect what exactly it is we are budgeting for.  The best way to understand the present and chart a course for the future, is to look at the past. What has happened to all the budgets of the past?  What have we done with all the money?  Why do our budgets keep increasing year on year without commensurate effect on the people? Just a few years ago, the national budget barely hit 1 Trillion Naira, but today, it nudges 5 Trillion and one can say that Nigeria has become worse as a country and an economy.  Where did all the money go?  Where does all the money go? Where will all the money go?  What exactly is wrong with us as a people?  What is wrong with our successive governments that they cannot break the mould, think outside the box and take the risks to do things anew?  Where are we heading to with this refusal to learn from our changing environment and our recent history? Those are the questions on the minds of our people.

Now let me tell you what is wrong with our budgets, and by extension our economy, and one will see, that there is no way we can make progress under the current scenario, except something fundamental changes, and perhaps radically too.

In the first place, our priorities are wrong.  Asides from the fact that the budget and the economy is operated on a ‘smash-and-grab’ basis where everyone goes for the jugular, and where oftentimes, for a bribe, a certain state, government agency or region could get its allocations increased by those in charge of that one way or another, at the end of the day, a major portion of our budget is being made for the wrong purposes.

Almost all our state governors prioritise the building of ‘ultra-modern’ governors’ houses and ‘presidential lodges’ (meant perhaps only for when the president visits them).  If the states had not totally destroyed the local governments under them by pocketing their ‘chairmen’ and the entire administration of resources at that level, perhaps we would have a situation where the local government chairmen will also spend a good portion of their resources on erecting ‘ultramodern’ chairman’s house and a befitting ‘state-of-the-art’ lodge for the governor for those few occasions when he chooses to sleep in their local government!  We seem not to care about the lessons set for us by those who introduced democracy into Africa.  No. 10 Downing Street in South West London, which houses the Prime Minister of the country that ‘civilised’ us, is just another flat in a semi-detached block of flats.  It is bordered on both sides by other flats resided by people who work in the British government.  No. 11 Downing Street is inhabited by the British minister of finance.  Kini big deal?

President Bill Clinton did not have a house until he left government and took a loan to buy one.  Barack Obama is focused on how to turn the American economy around and not how to build some ultra-modern edifice to fan his own ego.  But here in Nigeria, we are amazingly shallow!  More next week.