There has been a lot of flak taken of late by the Federal government’s anti-business policies and approach to things from critics. Indications and indicators have shown that the economic policy of President Buhari’s administration has been more Statist than Reformist.
This notion was majorly courtesy of the backdrop of the Federal government’s batched payment of Nigeria Airways pension debt which had been hanging for years now since the government-run airline packed up, while same FG has notoriously refused to contribute its full quota for its workers in the contributory pension scheme being run by Pension Commission (PENCOM). Yet the same Federal Government, just a few months ago, wanted to waste tax payers money again on creating another version of a government-owned airline.
So as much as it was somewhat a good turnaround when the government announced it had started paying these arrears, the inconsistency is befuddling. The Federal Government stopped paying insurance premiums too from some time in 2016 claiming that the government was broke. Many companies in the insurance and pension related industry closed shop as a result of this and many lost their jobs too.
We also recall that the YouWin programme, which was started as an economic-boosting fund to induce job creation, was partially discontinued. YouWin has now been turned into a mere training programme where entrepreneurs don’t get a capital injection into their job-creating ideas. This is also a major policy hiccup.
When the Nigerian Customs Service, under the supervision of a conservative politician who was once at loggerheads with the erstwhile finance minister over control of what gets banned from the import list, unilaterally decided to close the land borders, economists raised an alarm warning that a free-market economy is the best bet for our nation at the moment. The people soon began to feel the negative impact of such policies as rice price, especially, has been up high for more than two years now.
The poorly managed N-Power scheme only became much of cash handouts to the teeming Nigerian youth who could not secure jobs after graduating from higher institutions. More and more youth get converted into the labour market but the vacancies available are insufficient to satisfy this labour supply because of horrible government policies.
The last straw which broke the camel’s back in interventions was the TraderMoni scheme. It has little or no impact economically, was shabbily hatched up, and anti-strategically positioned to appease a largely growing poverty base. TraderMoni was discovered to be unutilised Agric funds sitting idle in banks, but which is now being distributed to traders and market women as loans without a model for recollecting them. A scheme of this magnitude would only become cash handouts; and which will later become counterproductive because it will increase the money supply in circulation at the same time. Why not let the market freely determine who gets a loan for business rather than trying to induce economic indices?
Without mincing words, experts beat their chest that it was even the reforms enjoyed by the long-suffered 16 years of PDP rule that Nigeria is still enjoying 3 years after they left government, else, the economy would have been more badly hit than it is right now. A reformist angle to look at governance would have been by finding holistic solutions to Nigeria’s many lingering problems bedevilling the country with the right experts, making propositions for changes to retroactive laws, as well as setting adequately communicated policy directions. This struggle by the Federal Government to keep meddling in matters which should not be for the State, perhaps to garner swing votes at the coming election, is an impediment to the development which we should be witnessing by now. The struggle by the government to take credit and aplomb for basic and regular things reeks of a messianic complex which we do not need right now.
The very poorly performing economic and life expectancy indicators which foreign agencies have been screaming at our faces should wake us up and rather jolt us into working against the negative ideologies which have impeded our development for too long. The time to act is now!
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