WHY BUHARI’S POLICIES ARE NOT WORKING

The government has not given sufficient time to fight poverty and unemployment, the primary cause of insecurity, argues Ike Okonta

Come May 29 and it will be six years since President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress took power as chief pilots of Nigeria’s destiny. Six years is enough time to pass judgement on the policies of the Buhari government to the extent that they have impacted on the lives of ordinary Nigerians. The loud consensus right now is that President Buhari’s policies are not working and that come 2023 when he quits the stage he would have left Nigerians in an even worse condition than he met them in 2015. Nigerians point to the inflation that is presently ravaging the economy, the insecurity that has gripped the country and the corruption that pervades everyday life and say Nigeria has never had it so bad.

Nigerians are right to be angry. They are right to raise their voices against the government. This, however, is a time that calls for sober reflection and analysis. It is simply not enough to say that Buhari’s policies are not working. The more important question that needs to be asked is: Why, despite President Buhari’s best efforts and his apparent desire to see Nigeria take her place in the comity of nations as a prosperous and selfconfident country, the reverse has been the case? It needs to be pointed out that President Buhari began well policy-speaking in May 2015. Faced with a country with gargantuan economic and social problems in 2015; a country that Peoples Democratic Party politicians had bled dry since the advent of the Fourth Republic in 1999, President Buhari wisely narrowed down his policy and programme priorities to three: tackling corruption; reviving the economy; and improving security. Let us now see how these three important policy areas have fared in the past six years. Economic Planning Without Strategy The national economy that President Buhari inherited in May 2015 was in profound crisis. Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank economist and President Goodluck Jonathan’s Finance Minister was an expert in massaging the country’s economic statistics to look good on paper. Nigeria under Goodluck Jonathan, she claimed, had become the largest economy in Africa. Economic growth had averaged eight percent and millions of jobs were being created in all sectors of the economy. Okonjo-Iweala believed firmly in the IMF and World Bank’s neoliberal economic policies and she had sought to apply them fully in Nigeria: removal of subsidies on petrol and other vital necessities; privatization of public enterprises; and opening up the economy to all manner of imports in the name of “free” trade. Goodluck Jonathan is not an economist nor did he have any PhD development economists in his cabinet to serve as a counterweight to Okonjo-Iweala. She was given free rein with the high-sounding name of Coordinating Minister of the Economy.

However, the economic fundamentals that President Buhari and his team encountered when they assumed office in May 2015 told a more distressing story than was painted by Ngozi okonjo-Iweala. Local manufacturing was at an all-time low, averaging a miserly four percent of GDP; agriculture was gasping for breath despite the colourful speeches of Goodluck Jonathan’s Minister of Agriculture, Dr Akinwumi Adesina; and millions of Nigerians, particularly young university and polytechnic graduates were trudging the streets looking for non-existent jobs. The Naira was exchanging at a dollar rate manufacturers could not afford and everywhere one looked it was a bleak picture for the national economy.

To tackle this crisis, the Buhari government unfurled the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) in 2017 and promised to create 15 million jobs by 2020. Not done, the government introduced the Social Investment Programme (SIP), targeted at the poor and vulnerable, particularly petty traders, artisans, and rural dwellers. When the Brookings Institution, an American policy think tank announced in 2019 that Nigeria had replaced India as the ‘poverty capital of the world,’ the Buhari government countered this by stating its intention to pull 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years by means of its ‘tried and tested’ economic policies. However, by the end of 2020 when the dollar began to exchange for nearly 500 Naira, it had become obvious to discerning Nigerians that the Buhari government was long on rhetoric but painfully short in meaningful economic policies that would address the pains of ordinary Nigerians.

President Buhari’s economic policies failed because the government did not focus on fundamentals. The one sure way to pull the country out of the present economic doldrums is to quickly industrialise the national economy just as China and the other East Asian economic tigers did in the 1970s and 1980s. To industralise, you need to build a steel industry to serve as basic raw material input for manufacturing. Second, you need to tackle the perennial problem of electric power shortage and make it available and affordable. Steel and electricity are the cornerstone of the Asian Tigers’ economic miracle. President Buhari’s has absolutely no steel policy. Ajaokuta, after the dawdling and incoherence of the Olusegun Obasanjo government has been left to rot by the Buhari government. Regarding electricity, the country was generating 4000 megawatts following the partial privatization of the industry by the Jonathan government in 2013. Six years into the Buhari administration, the country is still generating 4000 megawatts. To put this in context, 4000 megawatts is what an average-sized American city generates. For a Nigeria of 200 million people, it is not even enough to power household needs, not to talk of powering the country’s industrial revolution.

––Dr Okonta was until recently an Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics, University of Oxford. He lives in Abuja

President Buhari’s economic policies failed because the government did not focus on fundamentals. The one sure way to pull the country out of the present economic doldrums is to quickly industrialise the national economy just as China and the other East Asian economic tigers did in the 1970s and 1980s

(See concluding part of the article on www.thisdaylive.com)