Growing Nigeria: A Collective Responsibility Today, I shall be speaking on Growing Nigeria: A Collective Responsibility. In spite of everything, in spite of all the negative news from Nigeria, in spite of the gloomy stories of corruption, insecurity, loss of territories to criminals, Nigeria has been growing, at least in economic terms. Recently, after we rebased our economy, we became Africa’s largest economy, with a GDP of $510 billion. Our annual growth rate remains around 6 per cent annually, which is good, even though we can double it if we are more serious. But what manner of growth is this? In spite of this growth which now makes Nigeria Africa’s biggest economy, Nigeria has more than 100 million people who are desperately poor, according to some reports that place the poverty rate at 60 per cent. That’s twice the population of the second biggest economy – South Africa. What that means is that only very few Nigerians reside in the sectors that are growing the economy. If one also looks at the incidence of poverty in the country, you will find that many states in the North, especially the far northern states are the ones that are extremely poor. This should easily explain the reasons why it is easy to recruit youths into terrorism in most of those states. Conservatively, more than 54 per cent of Nigerian youths are unemployed but in some of those far northern states, they get as bad as 80 per cent. So there are fundamental problems that will need to be tackled as a matter of urgency by the leaders of this country. Now, let’s look at education. The education of its youths should be the most important priority of any country. But 70 per cent of the students who sat for the WAEC examinations this year failed. And, according to UNICEF, 10.5 million Nigerian children are out of school; this is the highest in the world. This has been worsened by the Boko Haram menace in the North-East where all schools in Yobe and Borno states have been shut down to prevent the kind of genocide that Boko Haram has visited on Nigerian children. So even though our economy has grown, Nigeria remains in very dire straits. There is so much disorder in the country today, that it will be difficult for many to believe that this is the same country that is the biggest economy in Africa. At present, Nigeria is too divided to be properly called a nation. We are a country of quarrelsome people. And sometimes one wonders what Nigerians are quarreling about. But these are signs of a lack of leadership. And it actually appears as if our leaders enjoy seeing Nigeria in its present state. To make growth a collective responsibility, the Nigerian president must first unite the whole country behind him. No country that is as divided as ours ever makes any progress. Nigerians must see themselves as Nigerians first, and not as northerners, southerners, Ijaws, Nupes, Hausas, Yorubas or Igbos first. The divisions in this country are simply incredible if not comical. In Nigeria today, you hear things like I am a Christian, you are a muslim. And if you are Christians, you are either Catholic, Anglican or Pentecostal. Last year, the Catholic Church posted a bishop, an Igbo man to a community in Enugu State and he was rejected by the people on the grounds that he is not from that community. And of course among the Muslims, you hear people divided along the lines of Darika, Izala and the Shiite movement. It is the duty of anyone who wants to lead this country to unite the whole of these tendencies behind him so as to make growth an inclusive and collective responsibility. It is also about time that every state of this country starts generating its own revenues and contributing to the federal coffers instead of the other way round as we have at the moment. The current structure of this country is an unusual one. I look forward to the time when Zamfara State, for instance, will start exploiting its gold and harnessing its agricultural potential in billions of dollars and paying taxes to the federal government. I look forward to the day that Niger State, which is currently about the size of the entire South-West with waterways traversing the entire state will become the agricultural superpower of West Africa and feeding the entire sub-region and paying taxes to the federal government. Ditto for all the other states in Nigeria. the Dangote Group makes an average monthly profit of N5 billion from their cement factory in Obajana using limestone and other raw materials from Kogi State. But the Kogi State government goes begging for about N2 billion monthly from the federal government. Why won’t Kogi State pay attention to creating streams of revenues from its state? I am aware that to achieve this, we may have to tamper with parts of our laws. I do not see any problem with that. A courageous president would have no problem sending a bill to the National Assembly to that effect. But even before that is done, a lot can still be achieved in that direction. One more thing. The reason why poverty is so rampant in spite of the geometric growth of the economy is because the sectors that are driving the growth are not the sectors in which the majority of Nigerians operate. Therefore, a sector like agriculture must be made more attractive to youths. We must grow our agricultural sector to a level that will make impact to our growth. We must also create policies that will foster the creation of millions and millions of small businesses. And all these must be spread across the 36 states of the nation. If we start some of these, then all hands will be on deck. If we must make growth a collective responsibility, then we must make the sectors in which the majority of Nigerians operate to be the drivers of our economic growth. I refer to sectors and sub-sectors such as agriculture, small businesses and online businesses (there are 55 million Nigerians on the internet). If 115 million Nigerians own mobile phones, then we must find a way to create economic activities among this community of Nigerians and this can be made through enabling policies. The summary of all this is that to make growth a collective responsibility, we must tackle our leadership issue first. We must hold our leadership accountable and our votes must start to count. Nigerians should be able to vote out bad leaders very easily and vote in leaders that will lead the country responsibly. That is not too much to ask because that is precisely what democracy is all about. I believe that only Big Ideas can lead to sustainable and inclusive growth. I spoke about this extensively on November 4, 2014, in my declaration speech as a presidential aspirant on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC). The speech is still available at sam.ng. I thank you all for your kind attention. Sam Nda-Isaiah.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 10:03:59 +0000
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