It is official now. Nigeria is in economic recession. Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, has said so. Rather than plunge into despair and lapse into another round of blame game, we are of the view that the development should only challenge everyone, the government and the governed to roll up our sleeves in order to dig our country out of this economic abyss.
Instead of lamentation over falling prices of Crude Oil, which helped in no small measures to push our country into the current economic recession, the government must seize on the seeming misfortune to wean the Nigerian Economy of its age-long dependency on oil revenue. Beyond cliched rhetoric, now is the time to get serious about diversifying the economy away from oil.
This need not cost the country a fortune to do as some have claimed. A veritable ground to launch this national imperative is policy reforms with a view to creating jobs, improving indigenous capacity and even increasing our foreign exchange earnings from non-oil export.
The first line charge against the current recession should be radical, fast-implemented policy reforms, especially those informed by native intelligence and not necessarily found in economic textbooks even if they are written by Ivy League professors of economics.
In fact the government may not find any solution to the current economic recession by leafing through textbook theories. Our recourse must be to a dispassionate consideration of the problems at hand and an application of home-grown, uniquely Nigerian, perhaps unconventional, panacea to our quagmire.
We proceed to suggest the low hanging fruits, which President Muhammadu Buhari should consider. They are implementable within the constitutional powers currently wielded by President Buhari. He does not need any emergency power to implement them.
And if any of them is of the view that these cannot help to pull the country out of recession The Dream Daily challenges the Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs) covered by the editorial to do a point-by-point critique of our proposal, and come up with a better options:
Nigerian Visa Issuance Policy Reforms:
Although government often express the desire to attract more Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as a major plank to the growth of the Nigerian economy, our country’s visa issuance system undermines this important approach to get the economy back on track. Simply put, Nigeria’s visa issuance policy does not tell the world that this country is ready for business in a globalised world where there is a fierce competition for FDI.
This is how to quickly change this huge hindrance to attract FDI:
• Preferably at a major foreign business forum, President Buhari should announce a visa-free travel policy:
• All visitors to Nigeria should henceforth first get a security clearance from their home country and take that security document to any Nigerian Mission abroad for authentication/confirmation.
• After authentication/confirmation by the Nigerian Mission at the Foreign Affairs Ministry of the security clearance issuing home country of the would-be visitor to Nigeria, our own Embassy can then issue the Nigerian Security Clearance stamp, not visas, which should now be issued at ports of entries in Nigeria upon satisfactory presentation of the following:
• Security Clearance Certificate issued by Nigerian Mission in Visitor’s country of residence. This document must be verifiable electronically in a database linked to ALL Nigerian Missions abroad, at ALL ports of entry in Nigeria. This should be paid for online and directly into the coffers of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) by the Applicant in his/her country and verifiable by Nigerian Missions abroad electronically before processing and issuance of Security Clearance Certificate;
• At least $5,000 (Five Thousand United States, US dollars) for Visitors staying in the country for two (2) weeks. This should be carried in cash to Nigeria by the Visitor. The CBN shall set up a desk at all ports of entries to receive the $5,000 in cash from ALL Visitors and change same for them at the official rate of the day into Naira;
• However, to prevent the dollarization of the Nigerian Economy, the Naira must NOT be given to the Visitor in cash but via a special, pre-loaded and dated Automated Teller Machine (ATM) card either issued by the CBN directly or in conjunction with Nigerian banks that works on ALL ATM in Nigeria;
• This card should be programmed to expire automatically at the end of the Visitor’s period of stay in Nigeria and subject to ATM Card withdrawal limits in the country. To prevent abuse and forex round tripping, this special ATM card should NOT be useable on foreign soil or offshore online portals; In order to prevent currency trafficking, no Visitor is allowed to redeem more than $500 (Five Hundred Dollars from the unspent funds on the ATM at point of leaving Nigeria. The rest unspent funds should remain on the now expired card, subject to reactivation on return of Visitor with it to Nigeria on his/her next visit;
• ALL Visitors MUST present evidence of pre-booked hotel accommodation for their duration of stay in Nigeria and in ALL cities, towns, etc they want to visit during the trip, verifiable in a database electronically at ALL ports of entry in Nigeria;
• Any Visitor who does not present the complete documents MUST be deported with the airline he/she came on;
• Participating hotels must be registered with the CBN and set up online links to their websites on the CBN official portal where Visitors make all payments, including pre-booking accommodation and paying for it in dollars directly to CBN, which is then taxed appropriately and remitted in Naira and electronically to participating hotels;
• Participating hotels MUST make independent arraignments to pick ALL Visitors who pre-booked their accommodation from ALL ports of entries and protect them as appropriate in the course of staying in their facilities;
• Participating hotels must keep tab on Visitors movements in and out of their facilities, subtly give them security tips on their areas of domicile, inform security agencies immediately if suspicious of any Visitor’s activities;
• Participating hotels should enjoy fast-tracked forex purchase/payment with the CBN for the foreign components of their operations where applicable and is NOT on the CBN forex purchase prohibition list;
• The Nigerian Immigrations Service (NIS) must be aware, via electronic database, of ALL Visitors itinerary and duration of stay in Nigeria, with a view to tracking down any Visitor that might want to breach the law by overstaying in the country without renewing his/her visa;
• Visitors who wish to extent their stay beyond the initial period stated MUST reapply BEFORE their stay expires, subject to fresh security clearance, new accommodation pre-paid booking confirmation and $5,000 wired to them FROM OFSHORE through Nigerian banks.
• Nigeria should recall back home ALL visa Issuance officials and allied support staff in our Missions Abroad and post them to all entry points in the country for the same duty. This would save the country the forex costs of keeping these officials and their family members abroad, which would then be available for other pressing domestic, national needs.
Benefits To Nigerian Economy:
• Government: The Federal Government would receive directly into its coffers dollars paid online for Security Clearance Certificate and increase dollar inflow from Foreign Visitors to the national purse in Nigeria for official use; block forex leakages and misappropriation by Nigerian Foreign Missions; save forex overheads that are currently being incurred by posting Visa Officers, their families and allied staff abroad; keep undesirable elements out of Nigeria right from source; check the increasing dollarization of the Nigerian Economy; attract FDI more easily to Nigeria; create direct and ancillary jobs; increase government tax revenue; boost the Nigerian economy in general;
• Airlines (Foreign, Domestic): This port-of-entry visa issuance reform policy would translate to more passengers for foreign and domestic airlines operating in Nigeria, increasing their profitability, taxable income, etc;
• Hotels and Tourism: Nigerian hoteliers would enjoy more patronage under this visa policy reform, leading to more profits for them, taxable income for government, direct job creation for hotel and tourism graduates, website designers and administrators, etc.
• ICT Development: The policy would boost Nigeria’s ICT infrastructure and its connection to the global security, financial, travel and tours systems. It would also enhance indigenous capacity in ICT knowhow.
• Economy: This visa liberalisation policy reform will lift the Nigerian economy in terms of FDI inflow, forex influx to the Federation Accounts to build much-needed infrastructure, job creation and boost economic activities across several sectors.
As this newspaper’s patriotic response to calls by government for suggestions on how to move the country forward, The Dream Daily sent this visa liberalisation policy proposal to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in January. Our attempts to check on the progress or otherwise of its consideration by the Honourable Minister of Foreign Affairs met the legendary Nigerian Civil Service bureaucracy at its very snail-speed, convoluted, frustrating best. Few things have changes, if any at all, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since May 29, 2015. After The Dream Daily was sent on a fruitless search for the letter containing this visa liberalisation proposal in about four or five offices situated on various floors of the clean, well-kept Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ sprawling complex in Abuja, we simply gave up on the search for our letter!
Of course we have since not heard of the Honourable Minister of Foreign Affairs saying something remotely related to reforming the Nigerian Visa Issuance System as this newspaper proposed to him and his Ministry. Our letter must be lying somewhere in the labyrinthine warren of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ bureaucracy, discarded, perhaps, with fuming fury for its audacious proposition to take the lollipop of foreign postings away from thousands of Visa Officers Nigeria needlessly send and serviced abroad, alongside their families, with forex that should otherwise be spent on reflating the dying economy at home. So much for “Change” on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs front!
Ministries Finance/ Industry, Trade and Investment:
In order to rescue Nigeria from the current recession and snatch our nation back of the jaws of Neo-Liberalism, the subsisting global economic system that has ossified us and made Nigeria an import-dependent country, we must manufacture what we use in Nigeria. The Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment must take the lead in the recovering of the dead manufacturing sector in the country.
The ministries need not reinvent the wheel to achieve this radical change. A good starting point is to build on the foundation laid by former President Goodluck Jonathan Administration.
The President, his cabinet and the All Progressives Congress, APC, need not consider our last statement a heresy or apostasy. It is a non-partisan statement we made as informed patriots. We aware of the shortcomings of the previous administration. But the spirit of truth, fairness, good conscience and time-honoured objective journalism – rather than post-truth politics and propaganda – we acknowledge that President Jonathan indeed made his mark, however paltry to some, in promoting industry and entrepreneurship while in office.
This newspaper shares MKK Plaza, Jabi Abuja with three businesses set up from the scratch under the YouWin Programme of the Jonathan Administartion. All of them are still running and doing relatively well under the current circumstances, employing young Nigerians working in them, and paying taxes to the Federal Inland Revenue Services (FIRS).
Government is a continuum, ad infinitum. We note, however, that the Nigerian penchant to see nothing good in our predecessors and throwing away whatever they have done for our country is a bane of national development. It is a juvenile temperament we must do away with to change this country.
The YouWin Programme and related schemes of the previous administration were executed with funds belonging to the Nigerian People, to fund Nigerian start-ups and other businesses, which continue to exist, employing thousands of Nigeria.
The Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, in collaboration with all agencies under them, must build on the YouWin Programme to promote change in the industrial sector and entrepreneurship in this recession.
The change we have in mind cannot be left to the private sector. The Federal Government and willing states must lead it with direct funding and other resources, in a public, private partnership. Primal focus should be on direct funding of Labour-intensive industries capable of employing thousands of Nigerians currently roaming the streets jobless.
Our radical suggestion is that the Federal Government should immediately move to revive all comatose textile industries nationwide. From the trillions of naira now reportedly recovered from alleged corrupt officials of previous administrations, new machineries needed should be imported from manufacturers willing to sell and train Nigerians how to use and service the equipment. (Neo-Liberalism has ensured that many manufacturers of such machineries are looking for emerging markets to buy their equipment, so this should not be a huge challenge.)
Instead of helping an individual to own this business as was done under YouWin or run the revamped textile mills with civil servants, the Federal Government should allocate controlling shares to all workers at each mill. These workers should run the mills as their collective enterprise, closely monitored by experts from such government agencies as Small and Medium Enterprise Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), the Ministries of Finance and Industry as obtainable under YouWin.
The take-off capital should not be a gift to the textile mills. Rather, it is a grant that each mill must return to the national coffers as it makes money. It is only after paying off all funds expended on each textile mill that the workers can claim ownership in full.
To help the mills run smoothly, power supply should be prioritised to them for daylight operations only. The textile mills must be supervised to produce high-quality materials, which the President, his cabinet and all Nigerians must proudly patronise. As these mills come on stream, the Federal Government should increase tariffs on imported clothing as high as any global free trade we had signed permits, in order to generate more funds and curb the taste for foreign clothing in the country.
Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development
This newspaper has made no fewer than three fruitless attempts to obtain a copy of the agriculture blueprint of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development launched by the Minister Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbe.
While the document was nowhere to be found in the ministry on the three occasions this newspaper made efforts to obtain it for a review, The Dream Daily learnt that the Ministry has taken a mercantile approach to the blueprint with the decision sell it to farmers at N1,000 per copy. For an administration which promises to diversify the economy through agriculture, this a defeatist decision to take. How many farmers can read in Nigeria? How many of the mostly subsistence farmers in the country are willing to buy that document, apart from big-time farmers like the Honourable Minister Audu Ogbe himself?
The Dream Daily would review the agriculture blueprint whenever the Special Adviser (Media) to the minister, Dr. Olukayode Oyeleye, makes a pledged free copy available to this newspaper. However, it is our well-considered view that the blueprint ought not to have been printed at all. In the 21st Century frugal governments across the world only upload such policy documents on their website to be downloaded by anyone interested in it from any part of the world free of charge. Printing the agricultural blueprint as done by Chief Ogbe only toe the line of avoidable, wasteful spending of the past, which the Buhari Administration pledges to change.
In any case, if the agriculture blueprint those not pursue a direct establishment, funding supervision of value-adding cottage industry across Nigeria to process cash and food crops in the country, it will fall short of most Nigerians’ expectation and will achieve little, if anything tangible, towards diversifying the Nigerian economy and pull us out of the current recession.
It must be said that the narrative sold to President Buhari that we cannot feed ourselves as a nation is not true. Anyone who continues to promote this false premise will have the wrath of the Almighty Creator, Allah, to contend with on Judgement Day. The Dream Daily attests to the fact that Allah has blessed this country with all agricultural resources to feed not just ourselves but the whole of Africa, if not beyond. If Nigeria now depends on food import, it is a self-inflicted injury rather than a divine plague. Feeding fat on crude money, we have simply neglected to build a vibrant agro-allied industry to preserve our cash and food crops. If 60 per cent of food crops is lost post-harvest due to inadequate storage and processing facilities in the country as Chief Ogbe should know, how can we claim, with any sense of conviction, that we cannot feed ourselves?
For the economic diversification of this administration to make meaningful impact, it must move Nigeria away from being a glorified farmland-Supplier of cash crops to the value-chain of other countries. Government must intervene to build value-adding agro-allied cottage firm to be owned and run by Nigerians, especially the youth, with the same approach we recommended above for the textile industry. Any other approach is likely to be same of the same, and not change as promised by the President.
Ministry of Power, Works and Housing
John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) is quite a dense tome and poses a formidable challenge to read, even for the most determined scholar. But if President Buhari can use any economic advice from a textbook or its author now, John Maynard Keynes is the man to turn to.
Any average student of economy is aware of the Keynesian dictum in a time of recession like we have in Nigeria today. Against the grain of the penny-pinching theories of the conservative economists of his time, the irrepressible Keynes famously said in time of recession, “the government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up.” And when people would reply, “that’s stupid, why not pay people to build roads and schools?”, Keynes would respond saying “Fine, pay them to build schools. The point is it doesn’t matter what they do as long as the government is creating jobs”.
The Keynesian riposte emphasises the importance of government’s direct intervention in a recession to boost the consumer index and stimulate the economy, as opposed to mopping and locking up government funds in banks similar to the Treasury Single Account (TSA) we currently operate in Nigeria.
As an aside, while the TSA must have save Nigeria a lot of money, its implementation has had unintended repercussions for the Nigerian economy and may have unwittingly pushed the country faster into the current recession. As the reader should have noticed, The Dream Daily is not a big bank of Nigerian banks. We refer the reader to the story on our masthead in this edition for evidence of our claim. However, President Buhari will do well to review the TSA policy. As part of plans to beat this recession, we suggests that MDAs should revert to opening only three accounts with money deposit banks – one for salaries and other recurrent expenditure, the second for capital project execution and the third for revenue accruing to each MDA. This should help easecurrent illiquidity at commercial banks, which is imperative if the government wants them to participate in the war against recession.
However, we return to Keynes and how the ministry of Power, Works and Housing under Mr. Babatunde Fashola can help beat our national recession. To slay the behemoth Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2015 General Elections, the ruling APC, undoubtedly reached out to the grassroots and mobilised most Nigerian voters to vote for APC. Like the slain PDP, however, the APC now in power has abandoned the very structure it used to get the winning votes in 2015. The masses who voted APC are currently holding the shorter end of stick.
Any economic master plan that does not put money in the pockets of the Nigerian masses will received no support from them. The masses cannot be preached at. They want what they want, so to speak and any government which cannot provide for them lives on borrowed time.
Rather than concentrating on big projects which can only help big multinationals cum contractors get bigger with little trickling down to the grassroots, the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing must adopt the people-centric mobilisation machinery the APC, which gave it power in 2015.
With a keen eye on Keynes the government at federal and state level “should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up.” Ward-level mobilisers must be instructed to identify community projects like drainage, culvert and roads to be graded. These should be awarded to contractors resident in the areas who must be put under strict instruction to employ willing residents, especially youths, as direct labour in executing the contracts. Material procurements, such as concrete blocks, gravel, iron, etc, should be bought from each neighbourhood where such public works are to be executed.
To prevent corruption, all participants in the neighbourhood projects must present a bank account into which the government payment officer instructs banks to pay contractors, workers and suppliers in the morning of the next day after each working day. We suggest each unskilled worker received N3,000 for a full 9-5 working day and the skilled received N5,000 for the same period. Contractors and suppliers should not be paid more than 10% mark-up on contract sum and material cost, which should be fixed by the Ministry based on current prices, and non-adjustable to inflationary fluctuations.
Flooding and erosion have become a major nightmare for many states in the country, especially in the South-East and the North. The Ministry of Power, Works and Housing should engage the Nigerian Society of Engineers to come up with a master plan for a national aqueduct system to trap the menacing floodwater and used it productively for irrigation, hydro dam and inland waterways travel system. The aqueduct need not be complex. A simple gorging out of the earth wider and deeper than the drainage along major highways of Abuja should serve this purpose. This is another Keynesian project that would serve to engage thousands of Nigerians directly in this recession, pick up others indirectly and stimulate economic activities in the country.
Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs/NDDC
The official narrative is that this recession was caused by fallen oil price. However, a resurgent militancy in the Niger Delta has exacerbated the problem. After occupying the Presidency for six years and with the country’s main export domiciled by nature in that region, the Niger Delta has become a power bloc, which any Nigerian President must negotiate with in order to succeed.
After the acrimonious elections of 2015, anyone who holds the conviction that the rest of the country can continue to take crude oil from the Niger Delta as usual is delusional. A piratical rape of resources of one section of a country by the rest cannot be veritable grounds for nationhood. And anyone who advises or encourages President Muhammadu Buhari to “bomb the Niger Delta” and use the instrument of coercion to rein in the on-going militancy in the Niger Delta is an enemy of Nigeria as one, united, indivisible country.
The problem with the Niger Delta is the problem with every region of this country – neglect of the Nigerian People by a self-serving elite class. Only a honest change of attitude on the part of the Nigerian Establishment to the development of the country and welfare of the Nigerian People can end the Niger Delta Crisis and similar others in the country.
Rather than going on a contract-award spree in the Niger Delta as in the past, President Muhammadu Buhari must direct the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs and its agencies to come up with an implementable development plan to engage the youths trained under the Amnesty Programme in a gainful way based on their training.
The radical approach here is to group these trainees into limited liability companies and help them to set up commercial enterprises, which they would own and run by themselves. These businesses must engage in activities involving the main resource of the region – oil and maritime. The talk by the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachukwu, about setting up modular refineries in the Niger Delta should be followed up with concrete action, which the youths of the region should own and operate. What peace achieved through on-going negotiation without a direct, meaningful engagement of the Niger Delta youth as suggested here can only be a peace of the graveyard.
Other MDAs
President Muhammadu Buhari should issue all MDAs the matching order to come up with quickly implementable plans to beat this recession. Department heads and Directors-Generals of federal agencies in particular must come up with a blueprint to wean themselves off yearly federal allocation. All of them can do it.
This newspaper is aware, for instance, of a blueprint drawn up by the Director-General of the National Research Institute for Chemical Technology (NARICT), Zaria, Prof Ibrahim Bugaje, in 2012, which aims to take NARICT off federal budgetary allocation and turn the institute into a net contributor to national GDP.
NARICT is the agency which came up with the home-grown antidote to the “Tomato Ebola” which ravaged tomatoes farms across the North earlier this year, leading to a nationwide shortage of tomatoes and high prices for the food crop. As at 2012, NARICT has already developed the capacity to fabricate tomato and pepper paste processing machine on industrial scale.
NARICT also has the technical know-how and capacity to produce biodiesel and bio-fertiliser, which can save the country from spending scarce foreign resource. All that NARICT needs under Prof. Bugaje is the political will to assess the viability of his plan and implement it in phases for commercial end. Rather than consider that blueprint on its merit, however, the discredited Steven Oronsanye Report on the MDA merger/scrapping recommended that the three-decade-old NARICT be merged with an infant-agency in the Federal Capital Territory.
There are other federal research institutes doing great research like NARICT. President Buhari must bring them on to fight this recession and truly set our country on a path of sustainable change.
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