The 14th Daily Trust Annual Dialogue
The 14th Daily Trust Annual Dialogue that held last Thursday was hugely successful not just for the quality of those who attended but for the relevance of the issues that were thrown up for discussion in that large conference room of the NAF conference centre, Abuja.
The chairman of the occasion, Phillip Asiodu was a Permanent Secretary at the tail end of the First Republic and during the Gowon’s era. In the course of many years of his illustrious public service sojourn he became a Special Adviser to the President and later a Minister. Kemi Adeosun is the incumbent Minister of Finance. Atedo Peterside, a successful investment banker is the Chairman of Stanbic Holdings who also sits on the board of many blue chipped companies.
I have been hearing of Phillip Asiodu since my campus days in the early 1970s and I came to know more of him later as a person who never shied away from saying the unpalatable truths on key national issues. His voice has been consistently loud on particularly two issues. First, it is his belief that the decision to purge the Nigerian Civil Service massively after the military coup against General Yakubu Gowon was the root cause of the malaise that affected the civil service till today. The fact that Government did what was patently wrong at that time and got away with it, gave later governments at both federal and state levels the courage to sack tenured civil servants at will.
The second issue Phillip Asiodu strongly felt about was on the lack of consistent planning at all levels of government. He is a well - grounded economist from the Queens College, Oxford University where he read the PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) in the same set as Allison Ayida his friend and embattled colleague in the Federal Civil Service of the mid-1970s. At graduation he joined the Nigerian Foreign Service, and a few years later moved to the Home Service as Deputy Permanent Secretary. It was when he became a Permanent Secretary in 1965 that his romance with national economic planning seriously began. By virtue of this position, he became a member of the Economic and Finance Coordinating committee which advised the Prime Minister and Cabinet. This continued throughout the Gowon’s regime until the coup of 1975 when Asiodu himself was abruptly retired.
The nationalist he is, whenever and wherever he spoke, he left you with the distinct impression that he is still bitter that those who succeeded Yakubu Gowon completely abandoned the 3rd National Development Plan (1975-1980) they worked so assiduously to produce. Not only that, but there has been a lot of policy flip flops by succeeding governments on matters affecting long term national planning since then. It is the need to give primacy to long term planning that Asiodu emphasised throughout his introductory remarks.
Kemi Adeosun assumed her ministerial post in November 2015 at a time when the country was facing very difficult times. The economy was in dire straits, shortfalls from oil revenues seriously affecting the total revenue inflows into the national coffers for distribution to all tiers of government. It was not the best of times to be a Minister of Finance, for you would be expected to be on the defensive at every turn. She came to the post awashed with excellent credentials. She was born and bred in Britain where she trained as a Chartered Accountant. She worked there before returning home to head a blue chipped company and was later invited to serve as Commissioner of Finance in Ogun State. She had a reputation of a can do person in the Ogun State Government where she was reputed to more than triple the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) accruing to the State.
As expected, the Minister was on the defensive. She told us that she had to do a lot of plumbing work in the Ministry of Finance to plug leaks which were as a result of activities of rapacious civil servants padding the day-today government expenses and dolling out large sums to ghost workers. Even after plugging these holes, money had to be found to invest in infrastructure such as roads, rails, airports, ports and power, as a means of unlocking the economy. The only alternative was to borrow. She said, ‘last month FAAC shared only N310bn out of which the Federal Government got about N140bn but it needs N330bn for its payroll and overhead costs alone. So when we start having the debate whether we should borrow or not, I don’t think it is an argument. You have no choice’.
Many of us who knew the antecedents of Atedo Peterside who spoke after the Minister thought his contribution would be tinted with some anger. Though Atedo Peterside made his name in Investment banking he has a lot stake in the manufacturing and other services. Though he has never kept away from serving governments whenever he was asked, he has always been a man who spoke on issues publicly whether through interview he generously granted newspapers or articles he penned personally. As for serving government he has had his fill. Up till 2015 he was a member of National Economic Management Team and the National Council of Privatisation (NCP).
Atedo Peterside characteristically spoke in measured tones, typical of the board room Guru he is, putting across the eleven items required to be done by the government to get the economy out of recession. These items include political decisions such as reaching accommodation with Niger Delta Militants, tinkering with the constitution to allow payment of 1% royalty payment to host communities, restructuring the federal set up and doing away with States to be replaced by zonal arrangements, implementing the Oronsaye report on the rationalization and restructuring of Federal Government Parastatals Commissions and Agencies and declaring redundancies where necessary. The economic decisions that need to be taken by the government include directing the Central Bank to relax its foreign exchange policies to reduce restrictions, and be even-handed in the distribution of foreign exchange to all sectors of the economy, the sale of national assets to raise funds, etc.
The Governor of the Central Bank, Godwin Emefiele who was among the invited guests felt piqued by Atedo Peterside’s remarks on the role of the Central Bank and immediately rose to defend it. I have been watching the Central Bank Governor on television and I have dismissed him as one of those humdrum civil servants but I was taken aback by his robust reply. He gave an Oscar performance defending the forex restrictions to the various sectors and the control of the exchange rate though this would not cut ice with those who are bearing the brunt.
There were equally robust contributions from audience. I picked on Nazifi Abdullahi Darma an Associate Professor of Development Economics at the University who was once a functionary in the Federal Ministry of National Planning and had worked on Vision 2020 plan. He was clearly dismayed by the jettisoning of a plan that they worked so hard to package.
On the whole the Dialogue was worth the effort. As we rose to leave the venue of the event I am sure the prayers on every lips was that next year when we gather for a similar event, the Chairman Board of Media Trust would have cause to declare 2017 Annus Mirabilis rather than Annus Horribilis that was 2016. Dori wrote this piece from Abuja.