When the ‘talk’ is hard (II)

I understand that morale is low because some civil servants have not been paid salaries for three months!Habiba: Fall in oil prices is taking its toll but the nation’s economy has been drained by oil theft. The Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the nation was losing about 300,000 barrels of crude per day […]

I understand that morale is low because some civil servants have not been paid salaries for three months!
Habiba: Fall in oil prices is taking its toll but the nation’s economy has been drained by oil theft. The Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the nation was losing about 300,000 barrels of crude per day which translates to the loss of $1 billion in revenue per month. The nation loses $12 billion per annum to oil thieves!
Lucy: Government then pays billions of Naira to retired militants for the protection of the same vandalised pipelines. That explains why we have people with more money than sense and too many private jets in the country.
Chinyere: A colleague of mine on the social media Prince Charles Dickson underscored our plight on the issue of corruption. He said ‘now the dollar talks, Naira shivers, public officials loot in dollar, and we the hapless citizens spend our hard earned Naira to cowardly defend them because of  ethnic cleavages. He/she is not a thief, if he/she comes from my own side of the wood.’
Isa: I read an interesting piece on the social media ‘the bitter truth about the economy that the Jonathan government will not talk about’. The analysis shows that although the Jonathan government’s fiscal deficit remains small by international standards, it is still higher than that of many oil exporting countries which are all accumulating surpluses rather than deficit and using the opportunity of high oil prices to invest in long term infrastructure.
Chinyere: With lower revenue and higher expenditure projections, the result is a deficit balance. The Debt Management Office DMO is then required to “borrow” at excessive cost “to finance the deficit”. But with the usual less than 70 percent implementation rate of the budget, nobody has bothered to find out why there is still a deficit if the budgeted amount was not spent and why the need to accumulate new debt!
Habiba: Nigeria’s budgetary process is now adjudged one of the weakest in the world. In the annual “Open Budget” Survey, Nigeria’s ranking has declined progressively since 2006 and in the latest ranking for 2012, Nigeria scored 16 per cent. This does not compare favourably with the performance of South Africa (90%), Uganda (65%), Ghana (50%) and Angola (28%).
Ayo: This accumulating public debt is disturbing because the analysis shows that public debt stock is much higher than at any time since the Paris Club debt exit of 2006. In 2007, total public debt fell to N2, 678b ($3.5b external debt from $36b, and N2.2b domestic debt). But as of end 2013, public debt has increased by more than 300 percent to N8,423bn ($8.2bn external, and $60b domestic).
  Habiba: If other agencies’ debt are included, the total debt burden is now over N1 trillion. We can then project that by end of 2014, Nigeria’s total debt should easily approach over $100b, most of which were accumulated in the past 6 years.
Lucy: Our suave economists then bamboozle us with 7 percent growth rate of our economy but the growth rate of any economy is meaningless unless we put the people at the centre of development.
Isa: Apart from the growth rates that do not match economic realities, there are serious questions about the quality of Nigeria’s growth. Sustained growth over the years has not reduced our poverty, or led to broad-based improvements in living standards. While some indicators improved in the early post military era, many have now nose-dived, as no conscious effort has been made to skew policies in favour of socio economic wellbeing of the people.
Chinyere: I can cite some examples: Life expectancy here is just 54 years, eight years lower than in Ghana and 20 years lower than in Brazil. The rate of childhood malnutrition is 24 percent, more than eight times the rate in Mexico, basic literacy among 15- to 24-year-olds is just 66 per cent, compared with 99 per cent in South Africa.
Ayo: The poverty rate is scandalous for a country like Nigeria. Official estimates of poverty rate vary from 41 per cent to 56 per cent, depending on whether the poverty line is drawn at 2,500 calories per day or at US$1.25 per day. However, according to a recent study, 74 per cent of the population lives below the economic empowerment line.
Lucy: What is the difference between the economic empowerment line and the poverty line?
Ayo: It is a more stringent definition than “poverty line”. As a result, there are still 32 per cent of the population that are above the official calorie-based poverty line but are not “economically empowered”.
Isa: We cannot effectively address poverty when infrastructure remains a major challenge: electric power, transportation infrastructure, telecommunications infrastructure and internet and broadband access is limited. Water and wastewater systems are nonexistent outside a few cities.
Lucy: Add to this our reputation for widespread corruption which remains high. Nigeria ranks 139th out of the 176 countries on Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perception Index.
Habiba:  Am worried about security. We have the highest number of Internally Displaced persons in Africa. The National Commission for Refugees (NCFR) in February 2014 reported that there were 3.3 million IDPs in the country as of 31 December 2013.  The Presidential Initiative on the North-east (PINE) and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) reported that Boko Haram had displaced 1.5 million people in the north-east. The year in not new for these people and season’s greetings is a strange language.