Soludo: his brilliance and delusion

By Jonah Etufunwa

Prof. Chukwuma Soludo

I am an ardent lover of Soludo, but I have so many bottled up reasons to disagree with him for the first time this week. I also have much respect for him, for no one has a better curricula vitae than him for the position he occupies today in Nigeria.

Born brilliant, strode brilliant and appointed Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank based on his brilliance. I stand to be corrected of this view.

It is interesting to know that Soludo is really mortal and prone to the misdeeds of lesser mortals! Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), for his academic and professorial brilliance, remains an academic colossus on mind. Nothing else! Legends have it that he never for once took second at school. He took first all the time and ended up with Grade One in his School Certificate Examination and First Class in his degree course.

We learnt he also came tops in his master’s. He always topped his class and department at any given time. A genius indeed! There was not better admiration for this enigma than his exceptional academic and professional intelligence. Everyone was dazzled by his brilliance and he started brilliantly as his Governor of Nigeria’s CBN.

From nowhere, at least, not imagined by his contemporary mortals, he conceived a novelty: Consolidation of the banking sector. He was applauded and supported by the President of Nigeria and Nigerians in general. Nothing could stop him from being perceived as a genius. And he strode the landscape as one. He really deserved it. There was no aorta of doubt on the minds of Nigerians, that the CBN Governor was not a mere mortal.

He was perceived as head and shoulder taller than all Nigerians in economic intelligence, especially in money matters. Though, not given to hero worship, I preserved a portion of my heart for honouring him alone as an extra-ordinary human, especially in my thoughts about him. He was actually great in cerebral matters. I joined others in seeing him as a financial saviour. Sometimes we delude ourselves with our thoughts, hidden from our close associates. Nothing would have stopped me from hero-worshipping Soludo, if not for my religious training. I know that nobody is perfect. We all make mistakes and Soludo would not be different from this nature of man. I am not deliberately looking for ways to denigrate the ‘wisest’ man in our midst. I simply took him for what he stands for – extra-ordinary cerebral gift to Nigeria!

My first disappointment with him was when he allowed himself to be deluded by the former president Obasanjo over the printing of coins. Before they printed those coins, I personally knew that the coins would become artifacts immediately. I knew that denominations alone, as legal tenders, would not help us control inflation. Soludo would have thought the way I thought but too much acada intelligence was making him mad. He was living by ‘book,’ that was why he created coins that could help us to have such prices as 10kobo, 50kobo and one naira denominations that could not buy anything. And yet Obasanjo and Soludo went ahead to print and distribute legal tender metals that were utterly useless and only useful for decorating our ‘centre tables.’ I knew the coins would become so even before they were printed. I could not understand why both the President and the CBN Governor could not see what I saw as a lay economist. Obasanjo was busy making life difficult for ordinary Nigerians through multiple taxations and principally by increasing the prices of Federal Government’s products, such as PHCN bills and petrol products. Prices of such things cannot be increased without other products being affected on the upward side. Such prices daily affect cost of production and yet the President and the Governor of Money (Soludo) wanted magically different from what they sowed. You cannot be fuelling inflation and at the same time dousing it. They sowed whirlwind and expected to reap peace. They wanted inflation controlled without any input from their own end. How impossible!

Another laughable policy that Soludo did not succeed implementing was the case of N20 being the highest denomination in our cash economy. With the aforementioned state of inflation, just imagine how that could only have scratched rather than solving or checkmating inflation. I just knew it could never work. May be, we would having been paying more money to transport our currency for buying things than the prices of the products themselves. What the economy needs are just three activities: One, production; two, production; three, production. ‘Africa Must Produce!’ one editor wrote some time ago in one of the dailies. Nigeria Must Produce! Productive activities would solve our economic problems, not economic theories. Economics, no doubt, is a real science, and only scientific measures can solve our problems, no just acada approaches. For example, no rhetoric can solve our bearish capital market, but once the scientific or economic forces involved are right, our woes would be past. Same solution is what our forex market needs.

I do not need to be an economist to know that the U.S.’ financial recklessness of their economy would eventually affect Nigeria. When Soludo insisted that we were insulated, I knew he was lying deliberately or he wickedly ignored the facts on the ground just to delude or soothe us. I knew he was also deluding himself. I began to doubt his professorial wisdom and acada stardom. I became afraid of the unavoidable disgrace that would soon confront him since our economy was almost dollar dependent; not only ours, but the entire world’s.

If you love somebody, you would not want evil to befall him. I did not want shame to come Soludo’s way; I didn’t have to be an economist before knowing that he was not correct. I began to doubt the practical usefulness of his unquestionable brilliance. Knowledge is wisdom in the brain (mental wisdom) but it becomes real knowledge when applied to solving problems successfully. Soludo’s acada knowledge has no benefit for us in small things, but only in one big thing – bank capitalization – that has now left our banks near empty after bloating. As a member of the country’s economic management team, I expected Soludo to be shouting that the banks were not doing the right by not financing the real sector. He did not also warn Nigeria for spending excess crude oil revenue on wasteful things, anything outside the real sector is practically wasteful. Income equals consumption plus savings. We concentrated on consumption instead of savings, which ultimately means investment. I hope Soludo would not end up an all-rounder disappointment on our financial landscape.

Finally, I share the fears of many that saving the naira is not what can bring a lasting solution to our forex problem, but still those three things: Producing, producing and producing and diversifying our earning power of foreign exchange. Think about agriculture. It would help us save money on our international food bill, feed our agro-allied industry and earn us income through exports. Someone even suggested that spending on infrastructure rehabilitation would create employment and since Nigeria does not have money for that now, then public private partnership scheme would be the answer; and it can be a catalyst. We would not depend on crude oil alone. With oil alone, it is like we are unemployed as a nation.

It is just like an unemployed man who has little savings that may ordinarily last for many weeks if spent on his daily needs and he only sees solution of his inadequacies in spending his savings to buy what he needs NOW. I think what this man needs are two: gainful employment or gainful investment and not just meeting up his present needs by blasting off his savings. Soludo’s forex solution is too simplistic and lacking true wisdom. If the 20 billion dollars are spent on forex to shore up the value of the naira, how long would we shore the naira up? Who would eventually benefit? Of course, the exporters of what we are using the forex to pay for. The exporters would produce more and employ more of their citizens and raw material producers for their export (product).

If we want to banish poverty, we must never depend on oil alone. This is not Soludo’s department, though, he should tell his master, Yar’Adua and Nigerians the truth about what should and should not be implemented.

Our only source for financing our national budget is through sale of crude oil. The income is calculated in dollars. The world’s industrial activities are experiencing a depression. The demand for oil has fallen, can we now be expecting our income from oil to remain okay? Brilliance or no brilliance cannot change our fortune unless we think about other things to sell in order to get dollars or pounds or other international currencies for financing our budget. Our budget implementation is import dependent; because we are a consuming nation. We may still be importing toothpick and handkerchiefs. Bicycle spoke is not produced here. Producing spokes would depend of iron and steel technology and availability of energy (electricity) which we do not have. Fundamentally, all we need is production, but we lack the foundation, the platform. We can only start by building from the foundation. Soludo as a brilliant should have been bemoaning all that we lack fundamentally, that are hampering his ability to control inflation and contribute to the growth of the economy.

Soludo is a man I admire so much for his grey matter, can someone help us know why he has not been telling us the truth, because I still believe he knows the truth. If he does not, I think we need to know why.

My thoughts about Soludo are even driving me nuts. Someone, please, help us to find why the genius professor of economics does not know and do simple things that are true of scientific ECONOMICS.

Removing the log in our eyes

It has never been difficult identifying the reasons Nigeria is not functioning as it should be. Neither are we in short supply of expert opinions and solutions to the perceived problems confronting the country. In fact, if there is anything we are good at, it is in the area of noisily pontificating on challenges facing Nigeria with no efforts at strategically diagnosing the challenges.

The most disturbing aspect in this Oyingbo market setting approach to this Nigerian like conduct is the re-statement of the issues, with analysts and commentators taking well known uniformed stand on the cause or causes of the problems, which is usually hinged on corruption.

Painfully, we are living witnesses to this recurring decimal with no one giving us the lead on how best to solve the problems once and for all. Even those who are paid or who should be in the vanguard of seeing function as a society are themselves more guilty in seeing to it that only solutions that favour their greed are posited as policy solutions for the attention of so-called leaders, who have long given up on their statutory role of being the keeper and enforcer of the ‘good’ of the ordinary citizen, who haplessly and hopelessly watched his dignity debased in the most bizarre manner so much so he now begins to wonder if he is truly a Nigerian.

Sadly, those who held offices at various times in the past but could not move the nation forward, or leave behind some form of policy direction to tackling the problems, are now talking of what should have been done.

For example, someone who once headed the Economic Planning Ministry coming out soon after he left office with an accusation of policy inconsistencies against government, leaves much to be desired. It is the more disturbing when the person with all his academic background, is equating a national plan drawn out of a ‘presidential agenda’ to a National Plan. We now know better why we have not gotten it right these past years.

What the Professor is inadvertently stating is that there is no need for a comprehensive plan of action to move Nigeria forward except this piece-meal approach occasioned on the ‘beliefs’ of the man at the moment. This was the role they had played in successive administrations particularly those of IBB and Abacha that compounded our economic malaise.

We, perhaps, need to remind our economic experts to take a look at the Theory of Development, a major topic in Economics as a discipline, so as to be moderated on this grand-standing of proffering solutions to our economic woes that are macro based which have opened our economy to haemorrhage and now getting into a state of atrophy.

Is it high time we changed strategy and focus so as to for once allow Micro policies dictate our economic plans? Must we continue to look at what the developed and semi developed economies are doing as a yard stick to measure our response to getting out of the woods?

I thought our experts do know that we produce what we cannot consume like the crude oil we cannot even refine, and consume what we cannot produce, as in the many automobiles competing for space on our dusty, bumpy roads.

May be we are happy that our manufacturing sector is comatose, and are happier that we are selling their assets to our economic parasites. After all, that is the beauty in privatization, the Nigerian way. We are much more happy to be helping the Asians run their economy, solve their unemployment problems, while shutting down our own with high unemployment, and our citizens turning destitute both at home and abroad.

In all areas of existence in Nigeria, be it socio-cultural, economic or political, it is hard to tell the direction we are heading. In the name of privatization and commercialization, our commonwealth has been appropriated by the people we believe should protect and preserve it for us.

SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL

Government is no doubt the biggest business in Nigeria, so it is in countries around the world. Exception is that in more economically developed lands, especially those that are inclined to the capitalist economic model, rather than government to directly engage in the economic arena, they provide an environment where individuals play the economy in pursuit of personal benefit for the good of society in accord with the policies and philosophy of government.

The Nigerian situation won’t pass the test of a capitalist model, what with the confusion that defines government roles in the productive and service sectors that had left public utilities in vicious spasm of a slow death.

The failure of the Nigerian government in business and provision of society’s essentials like potable water and electricity power is no longer controvertible, Nigerians have generally given up on their expectations from government in this regard, it is, however, troubling that government and its agencies now garb economic policy positions and thrusts with odious subterfuge and double speak.

Moments after, the economies of the United States of America and the United Kingdom went into a tailspin, even the most economically ignorant was able to conjecture that the global economy was on its way to a storm which consequences may surpass the storied damnation of the Great Depression that commenced in 1929. But officials of Nigerian government would rather see no evil, hear no evil. The two finance ministers and the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria assured that the country was immune to the vagaries of the devastation that had begun to shake the economic foundations of the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Asia.

Yet, signs of malevolent economic change were becoming obvious. Price of crude oil, the nation’s mainstay natural resource suddenly took a dive southward from high in the $150 per barrel of crude oil to $44. Reason for this is obvious, one needs not be a Keynesian to rationalize that developed economies that are the major consumers of crude oil disciplined their appetite for crude oil which in turn reduced the pressure on the demand with attendant fall in price. For Nigeria the implication is grievous, reduced revenue collection, cut down in GDP growth projection, a cascading fall in value of the naira, the national currency, the direct deployment of the $58.11 billion foreign reserve as intervention to save an imperiled economy. And eventually, a life of further distress for the average Nigerian. You don’t need to be a professor of economics to anticipate this turn in the economic sphere.

Already, the scenarios are playing out, the national budget for 2009 is a deficit budget due to anticipated reduction in revenue, three weeks ago, the Naira took a hiding from speculators and others when it lost more than ten per cent of its value to the Dollar in three days; just as there are discomfiting indications of distresses in financial institutions.

The CBN, after its Monetary Policy Committee meeting announced it was going to intervene directly in the daily two way quote foreign exchange market with fund from the nation’s foreign reserve.

Apparently, government and its agencies lack economic anticipatory skill. Soon after the first sign of trouble in the west emerged, a more focused government and its agencies would have cobbled a fiscal and monetary policy position targeted at the eventual impact of the roiling global economic scene on the country.

It is not too late, rather than the piece meal attention to specific worrisome spectre of economic emergency, it is better for the CBN, finance ministry and whoever, to evolve policies and measures with strong anticipatory ingredient to address likely troublesome financial and economic scenarios that may impact the country in the next 12 months.

As it is, we lost the opportunity to seize the initiative of building a bulwark against the negative consequences of the global economic downturn by acting the ostrich with its head in the sand even as trouble raged.

Certainly, responsible and responsive countries around the world are girding their loins in anticipation of a long tenor of battling with the economic crises. For Nigeria, the consequences of the global economic troubles are yet to fully manifest in the country, it would, indeed, be a matter of common sense to put together measures and policies that can help stave the negatives of the eventual infiltration of the global economic crises. This is a better option than to continue to beat the chest in the assurance of the community enjoying certain immunity from the global crises.

We all know that Nigeria is not exactly blessed with enduring economic structures and initiatives that have the capabilities to self correct in the face of a crisis that slowly but inevitably heads toward the country.