WHY BUHARI DESERVES FOUR MORE YEARS

The president has laid a solid economic foundation, writes Ike Nwawelugo

For all the presidential candidates in this week’s elections, it is the time to convince the voters of what they will do if elected. But for Muhammadu Buhari, President and presidential aspirant, it is also a time to tell the electorate what he has done since May 2015 when they gave him the exalted position. And he has a lot to say. The economic wellbeing of the citizenry is one of the principal functions of the state and it is perhaps the first plank on which any government is judged. However well a government has done for the social welfare of the people, it would still be adjudged a failure if the economic welfare of the people is in a poor state.

With crude oil prices at less than half of its average for the preceding 24 months, Muhammadu Buhari had his work cut out when he swept into office with his All Progressives Congress (APC) party in May 2015. And nearly four years later, he can beat his chest and announce that he has laid a solid foundation for the Nigerian economy.

For starters, the macroeconomic indices are much better than they have been for years. Foreign reserves hit a five-year high of US$48 billion in April 2018, up from US$23 billion in 2015 when this government came in. At US$43 billion presently, it provides very comfortable import cover.

The country was steered out of the recession into which it was driven by oil price shocks in 2016, within five quarters, and is on the upward swing again. This speedy recovery is well ahead of contemporaries like South Africa and Brazil which went the same road at about the same time and are still stuck there.

Foreign exchange which had hit a high of N525/US$ at the bureau de change at the height of the recession, has since stabilized at about N360/ US$. Inflation which had risen to a high of 18.7% amidst the recession has since started heading towards the single unit, hitting 11.1% in July 2018 before being driven a bit higher to 11.25 at the end of the year by food prices.

Perhaps the greatest testament to the macro-economic stability that the Buhari government has achieved is gleaned from the unusual resilience that the stock market is showing right into the election week. Right through the week preceding the elections, the bulls remained on rampage! Most unusual! The Nigerian economy had been running on four-year cycles coinciding with the elections. It was a system well-known to institutional investors, especially foreign investors. And it had ensured constant rebooting without growth for Nigeria.

Speaking last week, Canada-based investment analyst, Dr Pat Okaro, explained how the system worked and how it is playing out this time:

“In Africa or the developing world, foreign investors sell off before any presidential election to avoid heightened risks of anarchy and breakout of violence post-election. And so, if you’re into the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), you’ll notice that the market crashed every four years.

“Now, enter Acting President Osinbajo who set up a special forex window for foreign investors. This window guarantees them to take out their dollars at the same rate they brought them in. So that removes the panic because in every election cycle when they sell off, not only does the stock market crash, but the naira also crashes as a result of oversupply. So with this guarantee, the foreigners are a bit relaxed.

“At this time in the last election cycle, GT Bank was N17. Today, it is N33.50. At this time in the last election cycle, Zenith Bank was N17. Today, it is N22.50. Some of us have keyed into this predictable market response pre-election and have played it successfully in the last election cycles… this time, the returns obviously won’t be as usual.”

For decades, successive Nigerian governments had chanted the mantra

CENTRAL TO PRESIDENT BUHARI’S AGRICULTURAL DRIVE IS HIS ANCHOR BORROWERS PROGRAMME WHICH IS DESIGNED AS A FOOLPROOF SYSTEM OF CREDIT DELIVERY TO TARGETED FARMERS

of laying a solid foundation for the economy only to leave it same or worse than they met it. It was as if the nation was jinxed and moored to the shores of under-development while we watched other nations that started with us sail over to the prosperous shores. Thankfully, Buhari has finally got the job done, and Nigeria has set sail towards real economic development.

With about half the population of the nation living below the poverty line, President Buhari knew that he had to start with food. A hungry man is an angry man, we say. He knew that platitudes and exhortations would not do.

The previous government knew also that the population had to eat before any other thing too. But it had chosen the easy way – importation. The bill of the top four food imports – rice, wheat, fish and sugar - amounted to N1.4 trillion per annum. This was more than 30% of the national budget!

This was clearly unwise and unsustainable. The viable way out was to produce what Nigerians eat, at home. It was a tough task. But Buhari was ready. Feeding the nation with homegrown food required solid planning and dedicated execution. And he was ready.

With a carefully selected hands-on agricultural technocrat, Audu Ogbeh, serving as his minister of agriculture, Buhari set out to touch Nigerian agriculture like it had never been touched before. And he has not only succeeded in terms of output, but has set agriculture on a trajectory of quantum leaps.

Central to President Buhari’s agricultural drive is his Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP) which is designed as a foolproof system of credit delivery to targeted farmers.

It had to be so, given the failure of the agricultural credit delivery schemes of the previous governments. These schemes had either by deliberate fraudulent design or shoddy implementation, ended up delivering credit to politicians and their hangers-on who had no farms.

Conceptualised as a micro-credit scheme and targeted at Nigerian small scale farmers, President Muhammadu Buhari personally launched the Anchor Borrowers Programme on November 17, 2015 in Kebbi State.

Mindful of the failures of other programmes under previous governments, the Buhari government deployed modern technology in the form of biometric data of real farmers for the running of the ABP. In this way, the fund gets into the hands of the persons for whom they are intended, without fail.

By targeting smallholder farmers, the ABP not only had agricultural production in focus, but also mass employment. This was informed by the fact of massive unemployment which the government met on arrival. Three years later, the ABP has emerged as an unqualified success with study teams coming from multilateral institutions and other African countries to understudy the programme! Many of the farmers that joined the scheme have since graduated from subsistence smallholder farmers to commercial out-growers for larger industrial enterprises with resultant leaps in income, boosting the rural economy.

By the third anniversary of the ABP in November 2018, some 902,489 farmers had subscribed to the scheme and cultivated 935,862 hectares of land. And in the line of doing so, they have created some 2.5 million jobs for fellow Nigerians down the agricultural value chain.

A major testifier to Nigeria’s under-development is the poor state of infrastructure. About half a decade ago, it was estimated that the infrastructure gap in Nigeria needed an annual injection of some US$10 billion per annum over a decade or more to bring it to par.