Corruption, it is said, is the albatross around the neck of our efforts towards national development. Well, there are other factors such as gross insensitivity or the indifference of the managers of our public affairs. I also want to believe that the entire system has been compromised right from the era of military regimes up to the point we started our full-blown experiment with liberal democracy.
The more humane welfare system instituted in the period after the Nigerian independence has gradually eroded especially from the time of General IBB who unilaterally decided to appease the hegemonic powers of the West, just in order to become their darling through his resolve to take IMF loans even when it was not necessary to do so. Remember his disingenuous adoption of IMF conditionalities without necessarily taking the loan!
That I think has been the beginning of Nigeria’s downward spiral into the dark economic morass, including the social anarchy we are relentlessly witnessing today. And instead of telling ourselves the home truth that the neoliberal economic direction is not working we should rather pretend that we do not have any option other than what is on offer from the Washington Consensus group.
Meanwhile, as our Nigerian experience with IMF loans is showing, the economic options forced down our throats are such that could not take Nigeria to the promised land of economic prosperity, social stability, progress and development. Do we really need someone to tell us that the IMF and World Bank loan options are not working here in Nigeria as indeed elsewhere in the world?
Just look at the negative impact of those obnoxious loans, their stringent conditions and how they caused the maldevelopment and endemic poverty in so many developing countries, including Nigeria. As a result, both the Nigerian State and Society have been considerably weakened to the point of dysfunctionality and unsolvability. In the trail of our poor development indices is of course the social disaster that has been visited on all sectors of the Nigerian economy.
Never mind the empty rhetoric or even the mantra that spread the dubious claim of Nigeria being the number one economy in Africa despite the horrendous tales of economic woes, naked suffering and the prospects of more difficulties starring us in the face. To say the least, our economic choices have woefully turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Our economic options have simply been structured to produce massive development failures and endless hardships for the majority of Nigerians.
To exemplify, do you now doubt that the countless rounds of devaluation of the Naira, our national currency, and the institutionalisation of multiple taxation regimes have unarguably been responsible for economic pains, dispossession and disempowerment of the Nigerian worker as well as other producers of wealth in both the formal and informal sectors of the Nigerian economy?
This inhuman economic trajectory is deliberately etched by our compromised policymakers all at the behest of some external forces that would never allow Nigeria to thrive, prosper and legitimately pursue an independent development agenda.
Those whose task it is to decide our economic options have mindlessly continued to tread the paths of World Bank and IMF economic prescriptions as if those are the only options open to Nigeria and other developing nations as well. The IMF and World Bank economic reform approaches have failed even in the most organised and disciplined nations that adopted them.
Those hirelings of Bretton Woods institutions in our midst do not seem to care in the least about the social costs of their economic prescriptions to the generality of Nigerians. For sometimes Nigerians have been consistently lied to that the entrenched neoliberal policies in the country would somehow eventually yield positive outcomes. But everybody is beginning to doubt the efficacy of those promises.
Right now, Nigerian workers in the Aviation sector have been forced out to the streets to demand an upward review of their slave wages. As the economic hardship bites even harder workers from other sectors would soon be forced to also take to the streets to demand wage increases despite the lame claims of the outgoing regime to plan to increase the wages of Nigerian workers in the new year.
But as far as we know, salary increase for workers has been tried before in Nigeria. However, salary increases without concrete economic tinkering would only turn out to intensify the misery of ordinary Nigerians. Inflation alone out of massive cash flows would inevitability erode the gains of the half-hearted salary increases.
And amidst this unbearable situation, the IMF could only prompt the Nigerian government to raise taxes across the board in order to be able to settle its external debts; a dubious debt regime that has done nothing to the economy except to shore up embezzlement on the part of our insensitive and corrupt power elite.
Going by what happened in the last eight years of President Muhammadu Buhari’s tenure one wonders who our politicians and technocrats, policymakers in general, are working for looking at their handling of the Nigerian economy! Certainly, economic policies and programmes have not been articulated, designed and executed in the best interest of Nigeria.
If concrete measures are not taken to reverse some of the neoliberal policies being experimented on in Nigeria in recent years the incoming government would have to be ready to face very trying times ahead with unintended consequences.
Nigerians have for long been pressed to the wall. They have been forced to the edge of the economic precipice without letting. The only option open to them is to react in whatever way possible they can, and their spontaneous reaction to difficult conditions would eventually lead to a state of anarchy as we have started seeing all over the place.
Should the incoming APC government decide to continue on the path of the neoliberal economic policies of its predecessor instead of coming up with conscious and realistic homegrown economic measures, it is undoubtedly going to experience the worst form of spontaneous protests, social instability and serious crisis of legitimacy. Structural violence always begets physical violence!
Already, we have started seeing a disturbing increase in the spate of social instability in other countries that tow similar economic trajectories. Indeed it is happening right now in some Western European countries. Currently, France is rapidly sliding into vicious rounds of mass protests, social unrest, violence and anarchy. Nigeria must by all means avoid the same path to social anarchy.
Professor Liman writes from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria
