Nigerian Economy Collapsed Under Buhari – Having worked twice at the Nigerian Presidential villa and once at the British Parliament, if there is anything I have learnt, it is that it is impossible to over inform a leader.
You can under inform him, but no matter how much information you give a leader, you cannot give him too much information.
In today’s world, strength and weakness are gauged differently than they were, say in 1984. In the millennial age in which we live in, information is power and lack of information is weakness.
My concern is that there are a lot of weaknesses in Nigeria’s seat of power because not enough information is being given to President Muhammadu Buhari.
I, like other Nigerians, have heard or read reports of ministers in President Buhari’s cabinet being afraid to challenge him or disagree with him. Perhaps unawares, the minister of state for petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, corroborated these reports in a recorded YouTube video now circulating where he revealed that the President ignores his ministers when they bring up issues that he does not want to discuss.
Having such anodyne personalities around you just means that you are living in a bubble, seeing things as you want them to be and not as they are.
On Friday May 20th, 2016, Dr. Yemi Kale, the Statistician General of the Federation and head of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics revealed that Nigeria’s economy had not grown in the first quarter of the year but had rather shrunk by 0.36%, the worst contraction in 25 years!
Since the announcement was made, there has been various reactions with pundits pointing at this or the other as being the cause of this setback.
But I am convinced beyond any reasonable doubts that this negative trend owes more to President Muhammadu Buhari’s utterances on our economy and polity than to any other single causative factor.
The bigger problem is that even though I suspect that his ministers know that what I have just said is true, they would rather pander to the President and like Dr. Chris Ngige, say that Nigerians are lucky to have President Buhari (obvious Ngige does not know the meaning of luck).
In the last eleven months, the President had traversed the globe and has spoken about Nigeria’s economy as if he was the chief undertaker of our polity rather than the chief marketer that he is meant to be.
Of what benefit is it to the President’s agenda or to Nigeria’s economic well being for him to go to foreign nations and instead of highlighting the positive things that are happening in Nigeria, he begins to regale his hosts with the most unsavory stories about Nigeria.
And some of the stories the President tells are just that-tales. They are not factual. At best they are arguable.
You go to India for a summit where other world leaders are competing with you for the attention of venture capitalists and foreign investors and while your counterparts are talking about how great their countries are, you tell the audience how everybody in your country is corrupt except you and oh, can they come and invest in your country?
Only a foolish investor would go and invest in a country whose President thinks his citizens are ‘criminals’ (as the President said to the Telegraph of UK in February) and whose officials are ‘fantastically corrupt’ (as the President said in agreement with British PM David Cameron when questioned by Sky News).
The President speaks on the Nigerian economy and polity without any filters and his comments are causing his chickens to roost with devastating consequences for all of us.
Never in the history of Nigeria has there been such a divestment of investment as we have seen in the past year.
Truworths has pulled out of Nigeria, Virgin Atlantic has closed up shop, Iberia is pulling out, RenCap is pulling funds from Nigeria, both Alquity Investment Management Ltd. and Duet Asset Management Ltd. are divesting their Nigeria holding.
Zenith Bank laid off 1,200 staff, FCMB let go 700 employees, EcobaNigerian Economy Collapsed Under Buhari – Having worked twice at the Nigerian Presidential villa and once at the British Parliament, if there is anything I have learnt, it is that it is impossible to over inform a leader.
You can under inform him, but no matter how much information you give a leader, you cannot give him too much information.
In today’s world, strength and weakness are gauged differently than they were, say in 1984. In the millennial age in which we live in, information is power and lack of information is weakness.
My concern is that there are a lot of weaknesses in Nigeria’s seat of power because not enough information is being given to President Muhammadu Buhari.
I, like other Nigerians, have heard or read reports of ministers in President Buhari’s cabinet being afraid to challenge him or disagree with him. Perhaps unawares, the minister of state for petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, corroborated these reports in a recorded YouTube video now circulating where he revealed that the President ignores his ministers when they bring up issues that he does not want to discuss.
Having such anodyne personalities around you just means that you are living in a bubble, seeing things as you want them to be and not as they are.
On Friday May 20th, 2016, Dr. Yemi Kale, the Statistician General of the Federation and head of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics revealed that Nigeria’s economy had not grown in the first quarter of the year but had rather shrunk by 0.36%, the worst contraction in 25 years!
Since the announcement was made, there has been various reactions with pundits pointing at this or the other as being the cause of this setback.
But I am convinced beyond any reasonable doubts that this negative trend owes more to President Muhammadu Buhari’s utterances on our economy and polity than to any other single causative factor.
The bigger problem is that even though I suspect that his ministers know that what I have just said is true, they would rather pander to the President and like Dr. Chris Ngige, say that Nigerians are lucky to have President Buhari (obvious Ngige does not know the meaning of luck).
In the last eleven months, the President had traversed the globe and has spoken about Nigeria’s economy as if he was the chief undertaker of our polity rather than the chief marketer that he is meant to be.
Of what benefit is it to the President’s agenda or to Nigeria’s economic well being for him to go to foreign nations and instead of highlighting the positive things that are happening in Nigeria, he begins to regale his hosts with the most unsavory stories about Nigeria.
And some of the stories the President tells are just that-tales. They are not factual. At best they are arguable.
You go to India for a summit where other world leaders are competing with you for the attention of venture capitalists and foreign investors and while your counterparts are talking about how great their countries are, you tell the audience how everybody in your country is corrupt except you and oh, can they come and invest in your country?
Only a foolish investor would go and invest in a country whose President thinks his citizens are ‘criminals’ (as the President said to the Telegraph of UK in February) and whose officials are ‘fantastically corrupt’ (as the President said in agreement with British PM David Cameron when questioned by Sky News).
The President speaks on the Nigerian economy and polity without any filters and his comments are causing his chickens to roost with devastating consequences for all of us.
Never in the history of Nigeria has there been such a divestment of investment as we have seen in the past year.
Truworths has pulled out of Nigeria, Virgin Atlantic has closed up shop, Iberia is pulling out, RenCap is pulling funds from Nigeria, both Alquity Investment Management Ltd. and Duet Asset Management Ltd. are divesting their Nigeria holding.
Zenith Bank laid off 1,200 staff, FCMB let go 700 employees, Ecobank. The results are telling. A little over a year ago, Nigeria was projected by CNNMoney to be the third fastest growing economy in the world behind China and Qatar yet just two weeks ago the International Monetary Fund released its World Economic Outlook and Nigeria is not even among the top 15 fastest growing economies in Africa let alone the world!
And when you try to raise the alarm, the refrain from the government and its horde of unofficial spokesmen is that the downturn is caused by the fall in crude prices.
Yet this logic is flawed. The government’s own economic monitoring agency, the National Bureau of Statistics itself reported that the exponential growth Nigeria enjoyed especially from 2012 to its 2014 climax (when our economy overtook South Africa to be Africa’s largest economy) was spurred not by the oil sector, but “this growth was largely driven by improved activities in the telecommunications, building and construction, hotel and restaurant and business services” to quote the NBS.
Yes, oil accounts for something like 90-95 percent of our foreign exchange revenues but it only accounts for a mere 15% of our GDP.
The service sector and the commercial and real sector are the engine or used to be the engine of our economic growth. But these sectors are heavily capital and technology intensive and require cooperation with foreign investors and when you consistently bad mouth your economy and its regulators investor confidence tanks and the result is what we are seeing today.
I support President Buhari’s anti corruption war but it should not be a substitute for sound economic ideas or policies.
And the way the President has carried out his anti corruption crusade is in itself self sabotaging and feeds the narrative of those who say that Nigeria is far too complex and dynamic a country to be run by someone who should be quietly collecting his pension.
And President Buhari’s behavior is flowing down the pyramid. There is a contagious effect in the utterances of major figures in his administration.
For instance, when Vice President Osinbajo tells the world that the Jonathan administration looted $15 Billion in security contracts, many people in the West who like to read such stories to justify their hidden opinion that the Black man cannot govern himself, will clap for him.
