ANOTHER FIT OF RANTING AT OFFICIAL INANITIES OF 2008

ULD by ol’Victor Ojelabi

No year had compared with the cataclysmic datelines in economic history since the great depression until the year 2008 came along. Global economic growth had skyrocketed over the last 20 years engendering a new measure of comfort and access to luxury as the population of the wealthy ballooned by the day. By the end of the first quarter of 2008, the stock market in Nigeria and those across the world had recorded mirthful growth, that the Nigerian bourse was rated the highest most profitable stock exchange in terms of returns on investment in the emerging market segment this is just as other investors around the world celebrated returns on their investment.

But by the beginning of the second quarter of the year, economic metrics started showing stressful signs of falling decimals on the statistics of economic performance measurement, this, soon engulfed news emerging from all sectors of the economies across the globe. Nigeria had capitulated even before the formal announcement of the global financial meltdown; the nation’s institutional regulators had frantically talked our stock market into a crisis, obviously, since non of these regulators were instrumental to the buoyancy of activities in the market either by deliberate planning or policy thrusts, they can’t, even up till now, fathom why the market took a dive from pronouncements that they apparently considered innocuous.

It is an enduring hall mark of the profligate characterization of the managements of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Securities and Exchange Commission and the Nigerian Stock Exchange that they still explain away the N3.2trillion lost to investors lose of confidence in the market as mere market correction. These institutions responsible for the state of health of the Nigerian Stock Exchange decidedly got inebriated with the unplanned success of the Exchange and having a lack of the knowledge of the growth trajectory of the Exchange they riotously claimed right of proprietary authority over the Exchange resulting in regulatory agencies brick bats that added to scaring investors in the country: A CBN outlawing margin loans by commercial banks, a SEC increasing by more than 1000 per cent the capital base of stock brokers, and an NSE that encouraged white collar daylight robbery by allowing dead companies to trade and did not see the need to investigate the moribund stocks when their prices galloped into the north by more than 5,000 percentage point. When the reality dawned on gullible investors, the stock market became an atrocious platform for losing money for eternity. Simple, no hope of recovering lost investments.

This is the sorry commentary on the nation’s stock exchange, unfortunately, the larger macro economics is the worst for it. Again, finance ministry officials and their alter egos in the CBN, those, who, up till this moment, cannot provide in logical sequence, reasons crude oil price shot to a high of $148 before its sudden dive for the dirt as last year prepared its curtains down, are busy in reassuring the nation that it would not be affected in the consequence of the global financial meltdown.

In an import dependent country where even toothpicks are imported into the economy, is it not logical that all the malignancies that diseased the exporting economies from which we import our goods and services are certainly imported into the country. The naira had since crashed against the benchmark dollar in the foreign exchange market; crude oil price is yet to settle at its economic natural point on the downward drive in the face of present realities and the nation profiles an infrastructure deficit that threatens to kill off any wealth sustaining or creating initiative. Yet the experts in Abuja talk flippantly of a national economic that can withstand the onslaught of the consequences of the global financial meltdown. Noting can be more rubbish.

It all adds up to a year that once again underscores the deficient capacity for planning and projection by Nigerian officials. If this limitation is restricted to plannessness perhaps we could have found succor in the fact that all the needed to be done to rehabilitate our ramshackle economic thinking space is to provide officials the incentives appropriate to thinking for tomorrow. Unfortunately, this won’t change anything, government officials have turned economic initiatives and policy thrusts into glib political maneuvers as if the business community has become object of conquest. This was very much underscored when the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, after denying any inappropriate policy resulting in the crashing naira for upward three weeks was forced to confess to members of the House of Assembly that were concerned enough about the turbulent engagement of the economy that they invited the governor to come and explain the direction of his monetary policies. The Professor of Economics had tongue in cheek told the House of Representatives panel that it was a deliberate policy of the CBN to let the naira depreciate.

Sadly, because Nigerians have become so shell-shocked to inanities of government and its officials nobody picked bones with the CBN Governor. In other more decent climes, the CBN Governor would have been asked to resign his office. Is it not reasonable for the purpose of planning and budgeting both by policy makers in the public and private sectors for the CBN to release a public statement informing the country of the CBN’s intension to allow the naira to depreciate and give a minimum two weeks notice. This would allow decision makers to know to plan and have an implementation procedure in response to the planned currency depreciation.

Rather, the CBN let loose the depreciation as if it was a war strategy on the business community. Really bad. Would things change in 2009? Hardly, despite President Umar Musa YarAdua’s commitment to realizing the potential of Nigeria in the New Year through the empanelling of a new federal cabinet, the fact of the matter is simply about lack of quality consciousness and sense of responsibility of government officials to Nigerians and project Nigeria. When other countries are engaged in strenuous efforts to rescue their economies, there is no outward sign by government in Nigeria of a serious effort to salvage an economy that may be inexorably headed for the sewage.

As published in the January 11th Edition, Issue 49, Vol 1.

IN THE SQUALOR OF THE RULE OF SILENCE

Last week, I confirmed an appointment to meet with a United States of America based journalist and researcher. He told me on phone that he was in Nigeria to research and evaluate the country’s financial sector with a view to submitting a report that will form the basis of Nigeria’s financial sector country report to his principal, a respected magazine in the US.

My talking date was scheduled with the foreign journalist on account of the content of FORTUNE&CLASS Weekly. He had excitedly talked about the magazine serving most of his information needs on the subject of his research and investigation in Nigeria, contents he could not get to see in other media class. Of course, I was humbled and though, I was in quandary on what exactly I was going to tell a foreign journalist on a mission to unearth hidden facts in the remote crevices of the nation’s banking halls and regulatory agencies.

I was caught between my intense patriotism for everything that can be possibly good about this country and knowing that an interview session with a journalist also means that I may fall into those emotive moments that a subject of an interview unconsciously fall into with the consequence of, perhaps, revealing some of those facts that won’t do the sector at issue good in international circles. Of course, I am a journalist, so I know how these things work, before you corrected yourself you would have crossed the boundary with some blabbing, remarkable to the journalist but embarrassing for me.

I may have to apologise on behalf of the media in Nigeria, it is a culture, you know; media practitioners, even around the world censor information, often, because of the practical standard of minimizing the extent of perception damage to an institution or sector.

The talking date didn’t happen after all, though we shifted the appointment twice, we could not get to meet. It suddenly turned out that the journalist’s temporary residence on Victoria Island, Lagos, was a travelling distance to my office in Ikeja, Lagos. The poor journalist made frantic efforts to get to Ikeja two times but he was not quite knowledgeable about the hours of convenient movement in the state. He always ended up in a traffic gridlock, and the two times he was compelled to ask his cab driver to turn back at the next access road; incidentally, such an access road won’t be available until he gets to the Gbagada end of the 3^rd Mainland Bridge where he’s also confronted with a non-moving lines of vehicles.

Well, as it were, I guess the Lagos traffic logjam helped out of a dilemma for the first time. Courtesies won’t allow me to reject an interview appointment with a colleague practitioner but, I was quite apprehensive that some information may not be right for this kind of discussion. So naturally, I was not going to encourage the journalist to get to Ikeja, and I refused to offer the option of locating him on the Island.

The kernel of my revelation here is that most of us have become co-conspirators in the some what cultic ways of information dispensation. The Mafian rule of absolute silence dominates information processing and dissemination; I ascertained the journalist must have been convinced he was not getting the quality of information he needed from official quarters, the reason he resorted to self help.

In self respecting countries, information is key, either in political governance or corporate relationship. To get required information that are in the public domain, all one needed do was to go on dedicated website or get a journal of the government agency or company you wanted to know its details. It’s that simple.

This tells much on the integrity of information, where information is treated as a prized jewel to be hidden in the bunkers of atomic bomb as it is the culture in Nigeria, concerned communities of the agency or company treat such information with a strong dose of suspicion. This has become so endemic that routine statistical information from the office of statistics is addressed with nonchalance in the public place. Bank statements of account, a document that is supposed to be sacrosanct in facts and details, are for Nigerians, another fanciful fictional paper work conveyed to the public in consummation of lip service to the satisfaction of a legal requirement that has lost all its potency of sanction many years ago.

Disclosure in governance and corporate relationship is essential to confidence building and until the breach of this is punishable not by the letters of laws but by political will, the nation would continue to flourish in the appalling cesspit of wheeler-dealing, creating a continuous circle of privileged insiders and ignorant outsiders.

Can the parliament take another look at the Freedom of Information Bill, please.