By Mohammad Qaddam Sidq Isa (Daddy)
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.
Mohammad Qaddam Sidq Isa (Daddy) wrote from Dubai, UAE. He can be reached via mohammadsidq@gmail.com.
