Now that Nigeria has finally
embarked on the total implementation of the Washington Consensus package of
neoliberal economic policies, what becomes of the country’s economy, in the
long run, remains to be seen.
As a product of consensus among
the Washington-based World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
United States Department of the Treasury, the package was purportedly designed
to guide developing countries bedevilled by protracted economic crises to
recovery and achieve sustainable economic development.
Also, as a capitalist template with inherent and unmistakable lopsidedness in
favour of the rich and those with access to public resources, the package
encourages governments to literally but gradually wash their hands of the
critical economic sectors in favour of profit-oriented local and foreign
investors.
Under pressure from neoliberal international financial institutions, successive
Nigerian governments have gone to various extents in selective and partial
implementation of the package, triggering rounds of controversy.
However, now with the country going fully and irreversibly capitalist, there is
no more time to waste in criticising capitalism and romanticising some obsolete
socialist and populist ideas that are no longer realistic. After all, the
reform policies can still work out if the federal government pursues requisite
measures, which include, among other things, total transparency in governance,
governance cost-cutting and prioritisation of the strategic sectors of the
economy that have a direct bearing on people’s lives.
In other words, for the reform to
be effective, governance at all levels must be too transparent to accommodate
any act of corruption; and anti-corruption measures, including appropriate
punishments, must be in force and deterrent enough to deter any would-be
perpetrator.
Likewise, appropriate governance
cost-cutting measures must be implemented judiciously to save resources without
prejudice to productivity and efficacy.
Equally, public spending must strictly follow the public’s priorities that
entail appropriate investments in strategic sectors with clear short, medium
and long-term goals measured not by mere figures but by their real effect on
people’s living conditions.
With these and other requisite
measures in place, the investment atmosphere in the country will be transparent
and competitive enough to attract local and foreign investors with appropriate
job-creating investments that would facilitate real and sustainable economic
development.
That way, and with time, the local and foreign rent-seeking opportunists and
profiteers, who have dominated the business sphere in the country, making
hugely disproportionate returns compared to their real investments, will have
to follow suit to remain relevant or simply lose out.
Unless the Tinubu administration
pursues these measures with appropriate commitment, the reform will end up
counterproductive, thus making life even more unbearable to most Nigerians. At
the same time, a tiny politico-business clique continue to wallow in abundance.
Interestingly, there has been conspicuous silence on the part of
our local West-admiring Washington Consensus apologists, who have advocated
total capitalist reform as the only panacea to the country’s persistent
underdevelopment. Ordinarily, having passionately advocated it, they should now
feel morally obliged to show some understanding, or at least fake it, over the
ensuing escalating hardship in the country.
Besides, though supposedly
experts in economics and other related fields, none have developed a viable
alternative economic recovery package or even introduced viable inputs to the
Washington Consensus package to make it relevant to our peculiar circumstances
and other underlying challenges.
Daddy
