Dr Kalu Idika Kalu responds to El Rufai's reply to Bill Gates observations on FG's economic policies.

Am surprised that my friend, El Rufai, had reasons to disagree with Bill Gates’ summary observation!
Our well known abysmal performance in revenue/ budget GDP ratio merely mirrors the very low “ social mobilization “ effort in the Deutsch sense!
Our government has a low “ du contract social “ in the Voltaire sense , and by not engaging fully to deliver services efficiently through a more ample collaboration with the citizenry, the commitment to raising revenues remains rudimentary.
We introduced the VAT at 5 % under my charge as Finance Minister in 1994, and till date, the government could not bring itself to raise that rate! By contrast the new South African government has raised the Vat rate from 15% to 17%! Our “ excuse” was the strange notion that it would “ impoverish “ the poor!!! But our foreign exchange policy, by depreciating the naira from 199 N/$ to nearly 400/$ , actually impacts far more severely on real incomes of the poorer income groups, not to mention so many other direct losses from leakages and rampant mismanagement!
Of course , taxes are meant to pay for services, and should not be seen as an unrequited withdrawal of income without the compensation of services provided!
Another perennial underfunding from the age old paranoia of IMF credit has forced the government to revert to far more expensive, massive, and still inadequate loan funding for viable projects!
The multiple discretionary monetary, credit. and inefficient foreign exchange slotting that the IMF recently cauctioned against , are among other indications of an appropriate policy package thrust that Bill Gates is talking about!!
Our “ recession “ recovery is way too slow and insignificant in relation to the basic strength of the Nigerian economy. With our massive real sector deficiencies (agriculture, mining, manufacturing and utilities. . power, rails, roads and communications, despite recent spectacular gains in capacity, ) the talk about exiting recession is just that. . talk! Our growth is still too low to affect discernible growth in real incomes , as population growth remains high; and the distribution of incremental income remains more skewed in Favour’s of the few rich thus aggravating the profile of overall income distribution!
A new thrust in economic thinking is long overdue to reverse the basic mistakes of misguided notions that have been with us since the mid 1980’s when these essentially erroneous anti- market notions countermanded our first stab at a thorough- going restructuring of the Nigerian economy. .We are yet to get back on track to enable the economy to grow robustly at a rate that is truly commensurate with our capacity!

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu responds to El Rufai's reply to Bill Gates observations on FG's economic policies.

Am surprised that my friend, El Rufai, had reasons to disagree with Bill Gates’ summary observation!
Our well known abysmal performance in revenue/ budget GDP ratio merely mirrors the very low “ social mobilization “ effort in the Deutsch sense!
Our government has a low “ du contract social “ in the Voltaire sense , and by not engaging fully to deliver services efficiently through a more ample collaboration with the citizenry, the commitment to raising revenues remains rudimentary.
We introduced the VAT at 5 % under my charge as Finance Minister in 1994, and till date, the government could not bring itself to raise that rate! By contrast the new South African government has raised the Vat rate from 15% to 17%! Our “ excuse” was the strange notion that it would “ impoverish “ the poor!!! But our foreign exchange policy, by depreciating the naira from 199 N/$ to nearly 400/$ , actually impacts far more severely on real incomes of the poorer income groups, not to mention so many other direct losses from leakages and rampant mismanagement!
Of course , taxes are meant to pay for services, and should not be seen as an unrequited withdrawal of income without the compensation of services provided!
Another perennial underfunding from the age old paranoia of IMF credit has forced the government to revert to far more expensive, massive, and still inadequate loan funding for viable projects!
The multiple discretionary monetary, credit. and inefficient foreign exchange slotting that the IMF recently cauctioned against , are among other indications of an appropriate policy package thrust that Bill Gates is talking about!!
Our “ recession “ recovery is way too slow and insignificant in relation to the basic strength of the Nigerian economy. With our massive real sector deficiencies (agriculture, mining, manufacturing and utilities. . power, rails, roads and communications, despite recent spectacular gains in capacity, ) the talk about exiting recession is just that. . talk! Our growth is still too low to affect discernible growth in real incomes , as population growth remains high; and the distribution of incremental income remains more skewed in Favour’s of the few rich thus aggravating the profile of overall income distribution!
A new thrust in economic thinking is long overdue to reverse the basic mistakes of misguided notions that have been with us since the mid 1980’s when these essentially erroneous anti- market notions countermanded our first stab at a thorough- going restructuring of the Nigerian economy. .We are yet to get back on track to enable the economy to grow robustly at a rate that is truly commensurate with our capacity!

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Mbaka is sick. Very sick

WHAT majorly " destroyed" us. . by Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

1. Our inability to comprehend and implement appropriate economic development policies in recent times. It dates back to Shagari, the first coming of Buhari, Babaginda, Abacha, Obasanjo( majorly involved from Babaginda right through to the second coming of Buhari),Jonathan, and the second coming of Buhari

The civilian, so called technical and the " professional" character personae are legion!! Most did not know better or chose " to stay in office"!!
Major disastrous' policy' instruments include a so- called second tier forex and non- effective financing stance that has persisted till date: denied the economy of critical financial support and has been primarily responsible for ensuring the " otherwise unwarranted" crashing of relative value of the naira for thirty odd years! Tha Naira/$ value with adequate funding of viable projects, should be no more than 10:1 at the worst, and despite the burst and the boom of the world price of oil! The growth of output and employment. . and Nigeria's place among the the top 15 economies can easily be imagined if we had listened to simple economic reasoning,and absorbed an additional use of about $5-7billion average annual funds and investment inflows over the past 25-30 years!! This represents a conservative minimum of $150-200 billion total loss in direct investment forgone, aside its multiplier effects !!!!
Other major components of the crass economic booboos, aside the major monetary and fiscal flaws associated with the ruinous and anaemic starving of the economy over these three decades, have been massive loses from divestment of existing primary as well as secondary industries, and inappropriate privatization policies, the worst being that of the critical power sector!
Corruption and associated multi- hydra-headed effects were almost inevitable results from an economy that performed well below its average potential , alongside a greed, as distinct from , a ' service- propelled , political culture!
A mass Rail transit should have been put in place by the early nineties, a modern wide gauge rail network( a Lagos - Calabar rail line to move fertilizer, oil, agriculture ,passengers , and other goods!); furthermore , a Lagos- Abuja ail line, through to Maiduguru, perhaps they the Sambisa, would , by the early nineties, have opened up the entire North East. . nipped insurgency and . . Boko Haram. . in the bud!! Alas!
Against all these catastrophes must be factored the question of leadership.. . and followership. . our ineffective and clearly ineffectual national cohesion that has kept us so fractured, and confounded our patient admirers everywhere ! The hype and expectations of Africa's most populace nation seemed so natural and justified at " independence " loomed in the late 1950's!!
Most observers now agree that despite the enormous resources " sunk". . wasted. . critical choices of leadership and policy have left the nation a very sad community by comparison with our immediate pre-independence past!
Which brings us to where we are under Buhari II!
The nation cannot Now, by chasing shadows, afford to drop the baton for a new start. . for a BOLD CHANGE. . a thorough Re-Start in just about every single facet of our lives, education, health, social safety net for the masses , perhaps 80-85%, that have been suffering through it all ! It is a Huge and daunting task. By the last election and the apparent consensus of all Nigerians and our friends out there, Mr President was the Man to infuse discipline and tame the poison-tipped tongue of the corruption serpent! Law and order, equal access and even- handed Justice, transparent and sharp- footed public administration, all were to flow in equal measure!
It is Not Too Late, despite the ominous signs. . Mr President and his team must brace up and turn this tide, avert this slide to the Nation's advantage!
Decision on minimally effective restructuring of the polity to improve equity and economic management; a move fully to decentralize and devolve fiscal and administrative power to a more representative " federating units structure "! Policies should be pronounced to this effect with discussions set in motion to work out the details based on all existing Conference Resolutions. Government should set up non partisan professional committees to advise immediate action on festering economic and financial questions, while it awaits the recommendations on political and administrative restructuring! The sheer enormity of both the depth , and the required resolution , of our political and constitutional problems are most probably not clearly understood by all the contending protagonists ! The entire atmosphere needs a calming down from the rushing pace of an otherwise ominous denouement!

WANTED BY POLICE

Police Manhunt for PETER ODOH, a native of Yala, Ogoja, Cross River State whose picture is here attached.
Peter , a junior steward, organized and invaded his boss's living quarters , after lacing his coffee with a heavy dosage of a yet -to -be determined sleeping substance. Peter led his armed accomplices to steal a number of prized items, including thousands of naira, wrist watches, rings, several phone handsets, IPad, IPhone, laptops and indeterminate documents, some of which was later recovered from a front road shop in Iyanipaja.
Any and all information leading to his capture and the recovery of the stolen items will be fully compensated. Please call Tony Okere (07030731232); Eke Uche(08065608620) or report to the nearest Police.

WHAT majorly " destroyed" us. . by Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

1. Our inability to comprehend and implement appropriate economic development policies in recent times. It dates back to Shagari, the first coming of Buhari, Babaginda, Abacha, Obasanjo( majorly involved from Babaginda right through to the second coming of Buhari),Jonathan, and the second coming of Buhari

The civilian, so called technical and the " professional" character personae are legion!! Most did not know better or chose " to stay in office"!!
Major disastrous' policy' instruments include a so- called second tier forex and non- effective financing stance that has persisted till date: denied the economy of critical financial support and has been primarily responsible for ensuring the " otherwise unwarranted" crashing of relative value of the naira for thirty odd years! Tha Naira/$ value with adequate funding of viable projects, should be no more than 10:1 at the worst, and despite the burst and the boom of the world price of oil! The growth of output and employment. . and Nigeria's place among the the top 15 economies can easily be imagined if we had listened to simple economic reasoning,and absorbed an additional use of about $5-7billion average annual funds and investment inflows over the past 25-30 years!! This represents a conservative minimum of $150-200 billion total loss in direct investment forgone, aside its multiplier effects !!!!
Other major components of the crass economic booboos, aside the major monetary and fiscal flaws associated with the ruinous and anaemic starving of the economy over these three decades, have been massive loses from divestment of existing primary as well as secondary industries, and inappropriate privatization policies, the worst being that of the critical power sector!
Corruption and associated multi- hydra-headed effects were almost inevitable results from an economy that performed well below its average potential , alongside a greed, as distinct from , a ' service- propelled , political culture!
A mass Rail transit should have been put in place by the early nineties, a modern wide gauge rail network( a Lagos - Calabar rail line to move fertilizer, oil, agriculture ,passengers , and other goods!); furthermore , a Lagos- Abuja ail line, through to Maiduguru, perhaps they the Sambisa, would , by the early nineties, have opened up the entire North East. . nipped insurgency and . . Boko Haram. . in the bud!! Alas!
Against all these catastrophes must be factored the question of leadership.. . and followership. . our ineffective and clearly ineffectual national cohesion that has kept us so fractured, and confounded our patient admirers everywhere ! The hype and expectations of Africa's most populace nation seemed so natural and justified at " independence " loomed in the late 1950's!!
Most observers now agree that despite the enormous resources " sunk". . wasted. . critical choices of leadership and policy have left the nation a very sad community by comparison with our immediate pre-independence past!
Which brings us to where we are under Buhari II!
The nation cannot Now, by chasing shadows, afford to drop the baton for a new start. . for a BOLD CHANGE. . a thorough Re-Start in just about every single facet of our lives, education, health, social safety net for the masses , perhaps 80-85%, that have been suffering through it all ! It is a Huge and daunting task. By the last election and the apparent consensus of all Nigerians and our friends out there, Mr President was the Man to infuse discipline and tame the poison-tipped tongue of the corruption serpent! Law and order, equal access and even- handed Justice, transparent and sharp- footed public administration, all were to flow in equal measure!
It is Not Too Late, despite the ominous signs. . Mr President and his team must brace up and turn this tide, avert this slide to the Nation's advantage!
Decision on minimally effective restructuring of the polity to improve equity and economic management; a move fully to decentralize and devolve fiscal and administrative power to a more representative " federating units structure "! Policies should be pronounced to this effect with discussions set in motion to work out the details based on all existing Conference Resolutions. Government should set up non partisan professional committees to advise immediate action on festering economic and financial questions, while it awaits the recommendations on political and administrative restructuring! The sheer enormity of both the depth , and the required resolution , of our political and constitutional problems are most probably not clearly understood by all the contending protagonists ! The entire atmosphere needs a calming down from the rushing pace of an otherwise ominous denouement!

WHAT majorly " destroyed" us. . by Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

1. Our inability to comprehend and implement appropriate economic development policies in recent times. It dates back to Shagari, the first coming of Buhari, Babaginda, Abacha, Obasanjo( majorly involved from Babaginda right through to the second coming of Buhari),Jonathan, and the second coming of Buhari

The civilian, so called technical and the " professional" character personae are legion!! Most did not know better or chose " to stay in office"!!
Major disastrous' policy' instruments include a so- called second tier forex and non- effective financing stance that has persisted till date: denied the economy of critical financial support and has been primarily responsible for ensuring the " otherwise unwarranted" crashing of relative value of the naira for thirty odd years! Tha Naira/$ value with adequate funding of viable projects, should be no more than 10:1 at the worst, and despite the burst and the boom of the world price of oil! The growth of output and employment. . and Nigeria's place among the the top 15 economies can easily be imagined if we had listened to simple economic reasoning,and absorbed an additional use of about $5-7billion average annual funds and investment inflows over the past 25-30 years!! This represents a conservative minimum of $150-200 billion total loss in direct investment forgone, aside its multiplier effects !!!!
Other major components of the crass economic booboos, aside the major monetary and fiscal flaws associated with the ruinous and anaemic starving of the economy over these three decades, have been massive loses from divestment of existing primary as well as secondary industries, and inappropriate privatization policies, the worst being that of the critical power sector!
Corruption and associated multi- hydra-headed effects were almost inevitable results from an economy that performed well below its average potential , alongside a greed, as distinct from , a ' service- propelled , political culture!
A mass Rail transit should have been put in place by the early nineties, a modern wide gauge rail network( a Lagos - Calabar rail line to move fertilizer, oil, agriculture ,passengers , and other goods!); furthermore , a Lagos- Abuja ail line, through to Maiduguru, perhaps they the Sambisa, would , by the early nineties, have opened up the entire North East. . nipped insurgency and . . Boko Haram. . in the bud!! Alas!
Against all these catastrophes must be factored the question of leadership.. . and followership. . our ineffective and clearly ineffectual national cohesion that has kept us so fractured, and confounded our patient admirers everywhere ! The hype and expectations of Africa's most populace nation seemed so natural and justified at " independence " loomed in the late 1950's!!
Most observers now agree that despite the enormous resources " sunk". . wasted. . critical choices of leadership and policy have left the nation a very sad community by comparison with our immediate pre-independence past!
Which brings us to where we are under Buhari II!
The nation cannot Now, by chasing shadows, afford to drop the baton for a new start. . for a BOLD CHANGE. . a thorough Re-Start in just about every single facet of our lives, education, health, social safety net for the masses , perhaps 80-85%, that have been suffering through it all ! It is a Huge and daunting task. By the last election and the apparent consensus of all Nigerians and our friends out there, Mr President was the Man to infuse discipline and tame the poison-tipped tongue of the corruption serpent! Law and order, equal access and even- handed Justice, transparent and sharp- footed public administration, all were to flow in equal measure!
It is Not Too Late, despite the ominous signs. . Mr President and his team must brace up and turn this tide, avert this slide to the Nation's advantage!
Decision on minimally effective restructuring of the polity to improve equity and economic management; a move fully to decentralize and devolve fiscal and administrative power to a more representative " federating units structure "! Policies should be pronounced to this effect with discussions set in motion to work out the details based on all existing Conference Resolutions. Government should set up non partisan professional committees to advise immediate action on festering economic and financial questions, while it awaits the recommendations on political and administrative restructuring! The sheer enormity of both the depth , and the required resolution , of our political and constitutional problems are most probably not clearly understood by all the contending protagonists ! The entire atmosphere needs a calming down from the rushing pace of an otherwise ominous denouement!

Hey hey! Sanusi should know better by now than to list kalu Idika kalu merrily, without appropriate caveat , as being among IBB's major Finance "Operatives"!
The whole truth is actually more widely known among those who were " adult enough" to read financial papers in the eighties and nineties. . The whole truth is being packaged in my memoirs as we speak!
Yes Kalu Idika Kalu (KIK) , as Commissioner of Finance and Economic Planning (Feb'84-Aug '85, or during the Buhari's First Era), composed the core of the economic reform policies of the subsequent IBB era. Some of these written proposals, such as the abrogation of the infamous 1976 Land Decree, have yet to be addressed up to date! However, it is a fact that the issues raised were so contentious ( including the infamous ' IIMF debate), that kik only lasted FIVE months in the Finance Ministry, Sept '85 to Jan'86! The fact that kik nevertheless continued to engage in the economic and finance discourse must explain why less discernible observers, like young Sanusi , assumed he was Minister of Finance under IBB for a long time! Such an erroneous point of view leaves out the myriad of Finance Ministers appointed by the regime that lasted from August 85 to the early '90's, some Nine Years!
The list of Finance/Planning Ministers included Chu Okongwu, Olu Falae, Alhaji Alhaji and Abubakir Ahmed, none of whom held the position for less than TWO YEARS!! Economic historians can research the tenures of our motley crowd of ministers! But it would be inaccurate to make the assertion attributed to our now Eminent Emir! I bet he now has a more informed assessment that will reflect the true facts of the position!
It is quite appropriate to state incontrovertibly that though my tenure was " fleeting", the lingering under performance of the Nigerian economy to date remains our inability to fully embrace the principles and prescriptions contained in my August '85 economic plan. The proposals included the abrogation of the Land Decree, essential macro and micro economic policies, with specific monetary and fiscal issues, privatization procedure, globalization strategy, and , above all, optimal financing , among other simple economic concepts that have really being bastardized and emasculated over the entire thirty- odd years. . with disastrous consequences that have gone beyond our economic welfare to threatening the very continued existence of Nigeria as a unified nation!

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Nigeria Not Coming Out Of Recession Soon By Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Nigeria not coming out of recession soon – Idika Kalu

Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu, a two-time minister, and Chairman of the Institute for Policy and Economic Development is at home with issues relating to the nation’s economy. In an interview with VINCENT KALU, he said Nigeria is not coming out of recession soon, and urged government to stop giving the citizens false hope that the recession will end this year.
According to him, anyone having such impression lacks understanding of the kind of recession the country faces. He also cautioned Igbo politicians against jumping into the fray because former President Olusegun Obasanjo told them that the time is ripe for them to produce the nation’s president. He however, highlighted how to achieve Igbo presidency.
The country is in recession, how can she get out of it?
From a professional standpoint, recession refers to a situation where capital structures are in place, but the means to sustain the recurrent expenditures that keep those structures working decline because of sudden change in taste and price.
It is wrong for us to think that we are merely in a recession. There is a drop in current receipts from oil and from other exports; we also have a sharp drop in our terms of trade, that is, the import prices weigh higher than export prices, and total revenues are a fraction of what we used to have.
So, we have a big gap in our current revenues, big gap in our balance of payments (the different between imports and exports), therefore, a sharp drop in the ability of our public finance to meet with the needs of government at various levels.
But it is worse than that because it has just exposed that we are not just at lower current incomes, but the capital structures are not even there to raise financing and get them working again.
Here, we still need to build roads, power, rails, mining structures, processing plants etc.
We don’t have the structures, if we had, it is just for us to borrow and get the idle power and others working again.
What is more serious indication of the depression we are in now is that even the manpower is not there. If for instance we got money to have modern high-speed rail, where are the people who are going to operate them? You need along time to bring them.
You need to put so much money into capital structures in order to create the employment facilities before the economy can begin to work again.
You look at the driving tools – the palm tree, cashew nuts, cotton field, ground nuts fields, cocoa farms, all of these are at different levels of disrepair and abandonment. They require large sums of money to restructure them before you can begin to operate them and come back to the previous revenues that you have attained.
We delude ourselves when we don’t realize that this is more than just a classical recession. It is a shortfall in revenues that have now exposed very deep structural problems within the economy. So, we have to address it from that standpoint; it is not a short-term phenomenon.
It is not just a question of what can we do to get the economy running again? A lot of these things require a minimum of one year. Talking about paper, it takes a very long period of gestation to plant the trees to produce papers. Palm trees take time to produce oil, and you have manage the farms the way they do in Malaysia, a country that came here and took away palm oil seedlings but is now exporting 30 times what Nigeria exports. We also import palm oil from them.
We have to acknowledge that this is more than a recession, which means that the entire economy has to be rebuilt properly.
Talking about rebuilding, the dearth of manpower, technical, and scientific management skill is another problem area. Universities of Technology, Colleges of Technology have to be properly staffed and equipped to bring out the type of people who can addressed the issues as I have just outlined. Farming is no more hoe and cutlass issue. It requires a lot of machinery and know-how.
We are more than in a recession because over the years, we didn’t plough back our resources deeply enough. We expended them on finished goods from other countries. We are still talking about assembly plants. The assembling we are doing today is worse than what had in the past.
At Peugeot plant, we were aiming at meeting 70 per cent of the content and the 30 percent imported, but today the reverse is the case, and this present 30 per cent includes labour.
Government is assuring Nigerians that in the third or last quarter of the year, Nigeria will come out of recession…
That is rubbish. It is nonsense for anybody to tell you that we are coming out of recession in the third or the last quarter of the year . They should stop giving us projections. They should tell us the concrete policies, resources they are mobilizing, the training they are doing, the restitution of the productive sector that is taking place. That is what the answer should be, not touching your lips and putting it into the air and telling us in three months or that you will come out of recession.
That is rubbish. If they are making those projections based on what I said, it is a different thing.
This is not an ephemeral recession of just improving liquidity and getting things going. We were in recession before the end of the last administration. The new administration is almost two years.
To define recession as two negative consecutive growth rates is what applies in advanced countries like Germany, US etc.
In our own economy, you have to go beyond that to underscore why you are having these negative consecutive growth rates. It goes beyond liquidity or foreign exchange shortage. It goes to address the real critical productive sectors of agriculture, non-agriculture, and mining, and even the tertiary services sector.
Look at what is happening in the aviation for instance. All of a sudden, Arik has to be taken over; at first we thought they were operating poorly because the clientele has fallen, as people don’t have the lush funds to fly up and down.
Where are the railways that should have been there to take up this slack; where are the roads; where is the security for more road travellers? As you go down the list, you find that these are not in place. They are critical issues.
They should stop giving us projections based on whims and caprices to make people feel happy. We all will be here, and the second, third and fourth quarter will come and another year will come. We better begin to address the real issues that have brought down the large sludge in unemployment. First, we always had large underemployment. By the time you put unemployment to underemployment, the rate of employment by comparison with industrialised countries must be a very small fraction.
It is best to define our problems in concrete terms, that is the way we can come out with concrete policies to solve our problems.
Acting President Osinbajo recently set up a taskforce to bring down the prices of foodstuff to ameliorate the suffering of the citizens. What is your view on this?
You will assume that these are all highly educated people in various fields, and you must also assume that after so many plans, so many budgets, so many high sounding development programmes, and we know that what determines a price is a function of what happens to the supply of the goods and the demands that register in the market.
The only way you can effect any change in the price is by going back to address those issues. Those issues are not what you set up committees to do. This is the whole point of planning, project development, policy-making and investment planning and plan implementation.
It is not something for which you would set up a committee to go to the market and find out why prices are high and bring them down.
There is no way you can bring down prices unless you address the short, medium and long-term factors that affect supply and demand.
No task force and no battalion that can force down the price, you would only end up creating more distortions in the price.
I will be surprised if this works. It may just be to give a sense of activities in motion.
The economy is in shambles, is this a function or the lack of expertise of the economic management team?
It is a function of everybody. I know it took a long time for people to accept that there was an economic management team. Most people thought there wasn’t any. It took a while for people to realize that there might have been an Economic Adviser when the cabinet was set up. It took a while for people to realise that there were other people who were recruited to join the cabinet to form the Economic management team.
Team or not, as they say, ‘the taste of the pudding is in the eating’. The results you expect from the Economic Management Team will be reflected in the qualities of the policies being implemented and how those policies are geared towards solving the problems identified.
For professional economists, you would assume may be, there is economic management team so far, in terms of resource mobilization, in terms of foreign exchange management, in terms of price management, in terms of growth of the real sector, in terms of improvement in infrastructures and other indicators, even though some of these require time to jell, at least you should be able to see the tendencies in the amplification of the capacity being created and the quality and well being in the lives of people as reflected.
I won’t take any comfort from the projection of coming out of recession in the third or last quarter.
Independently of that, as I said our problems are more structural than passing, and they are more deep rooted. So, any attempt to keep or make the people happy will be counter productive, and create so much cynicism that if at the end of the projected third quarter or last quarter, conditions are worse than even the first quarter; even when the government had come up with policies that may have some impacts that would need the cooperation of the populace, people would have been so disdainful to feel that they have any role to play to assist the government to achieve results.
Recently, former President OlusegunObasanjo advocated that the Igbo to produce the president in 2019. This has elicited mixed reactions. Some bought into the idea, while some were of the opinion that it’s restructuring that would benefit the Igbo. What is your position on these?
It was Chief Obasanjo’s right and privilege as a Nigerian and former president, as a politician to say what he likes.
Why should anybody spend time getting all worked up because Obasanjo said it?
Why should Ndigbo or any other section of the country need any individual from wherever to come and say such a thing? They should know that leadership should go round.
We should get a president by and large, whether from large or small group, somebody who can address these issues we are discussing; somebody who can do the job.
There is nothing that says we can’t get somebody from the Southeast to do the job. You don’t just pick somebody from the street and say that he is the president of Igbo extraction. The president is the president of Nigeria, who happens to come from one area. He happens to be the person at that material point in time, who can get the job done.
I have said it before to our people; we have to change through these problems and change through our reactions. It is parties that put up presidents and not ethnic groups.
For you to get one of your own to be president, that constituency must be involved in the political process. This connotes that people from the South-East should get off this penchant of not wanting to play in the big party, yet expecting to get the presidency. Common sense dictates that you must be involved in the major party. That is real politics.
We don’t need an Obasanjo to tell us, it is evident. The west has had it, the north and the South-South. Why shouldn’t the South-East have it? Also, it doesn’t mean that you run to Enugu and grab somebody and say we have got our own president.
The political class in the constituency has to work with their counterparts in other places; this requires political synergy, and networking. That is what we should be discussing, not whether it is a good idea or not.
It is about time that people from this area are given the chance to produce the president, even looking at it from a tripod arrangement.
It cannot be allocated; it has to be truly synergy and networking. I have always encouraged our people to get actively involved with the big parties.
Is it against the reason of getting actively involved in the big party that has led to the influx of many prominent Igbo politicians into APC?
It doesn’t matter for whatever reason they are doing that. I don’t think that is the reason. Why are they not going into the PDP? It is the Nigerian factor. They think that party is on the upswing, while the other one is on the downswing.
I certainly encouraged them even before the alliances were formed that we should have the simple political sense to make sure that we do the right political calculations, that if we do the wrong calculations we have nobody else, but ourselves to blame.
After we have done the wrong calculations, we are still going around beating our chests that we did the right thing. That is not very smart; that is not very truthful to us.
If you have any problem with Igbo politicians flocking into APC or other party I don’t. think that is what they should do. I could also be that they are responding, as some of us have actually been encouraging that, because we need to exploit the talent all over the country, we can’t allow it to be seen as if it is only one side or two sides that can supply the requisite quality of leadership that solves Nigeria’s mega problems.
So, we should be encouraging them to get involved, it is not only those who want to go for office, but the grassroots and the constituencies.
If you get involved and elect people at the state level or at the national level, you are able to hold them to explain their performance.
So far, we have had a very dismal record of calling people to account. You don’t call them to account when you are walking to your farm or to your shop. You hold them to account when you attend the local meetings, and your presence alone would demand hearing.
I have been encouraging our people to get involved not just at the election time, but long before the election to make sure that they prune the right people to represent them.
What is your fear for the nation, where ethnic organisations are pulling away from the centre towards their sides; more so, where you have self determination groups, which are making Nigeria not to emerge as a nation state, 56 years after independence?
Unless we call ourselves to order, we cannot blame providence or the colonial power.
We have tried to adduce all kinds of selfish motives in the way the structures were put in place. There were young men from various universities or high schools in Europe, who came here to manage the empire for their monarchs.
You would think that 56 years after that, we will not be blaming them for what they gave to us. Yet we are complaining that the quality of education they handed over to us have dropped; the quality of this has dropped, the quality of that has dropped.
At the minimum, we should have continued to improve on what was left for us. That already undermines this argument.
Depending on where you are and what you can see or touch, in some cases, there is no doubt that there is more disunity now than there was before, particularly in terms of economic hardship, in terms of decline in jobs, in terms of more strife and employment opportunities and distribution of positions.
At other times, you get the impression that things have not collapsed badly, and in some instances you find that there is still that camaraderie among the various groups. Even as we complain, there are more marriages among ethnic groups, and people speaking different languages in addition to theirs.
By and large, your question is addressing a very real problem, and unless we are able to provide better leadership that problem will remain there. So, leadership has always constituted the major problem in Nigeria.
Many countries are heterogeneous contraction of many ethnic nationalities, but if we can get a leadership… look at Rwanda, in spite of what they passed through, with the right leadership who have managed to get the various groups together, they are forging ahead.
If you can get a leader who can demonstrate and mobilize the best so that you can create opportunities maximally, then you we are getting our problem solved. When you are creating opportunities you are also reducing the potential for centrifugal infighting and people pulling from different directions.
First is leadership, second is creation of commensurate growth in opportunities so that the cake-sharing mentality can be in a way that it contributes to more growth.
My fear is that unless we get the leadership that can demonstrate obvious fairness to all, we are not going anywhere. This is not easy because everybody seems to be in a hurry.
You talked about creating fairness and opportunities, a situation where different criteria are used for different people into offices or admissions, won’t these put pressures on the centre?
We are different peoples. We received westernization at different levels. The speed with which we receive it is not a blessing or a curse.
However, we have the resources and with the right leadership, if well spent we will progressively be bringing everybody up to the same standard, but we misused it by trying to slowdown and append a ridiculous cut off marks for different sections. Those are not the right policies.
In an interview with Sunday Sun recently, Prof AngoAbdullahi, said the North was ready to break away from Nigeria, are the Igbo ready?
In 1966, the North was ready to breakaway. They were persuaded that it was not the right thing to do, rather a distinct opportunity… how can you do that when you have a whole territory that you can play with, and you wanted to run away from it?
The West had its own anthem; I have heard it sang here and there. I grew up in this part and I knew they would not take it so lightly and it depends on so many factors.
For the East, for 80 years, we have been shedding our blood, our sweat, we have been striving and we have been building all over this country.
When it came to strife that was imposed, of course there was no other option but to resist it.
My position is that what we have is a dearth of political, a dearth of rule of law, and a dearth of the mobilization of the right leadership. This is where our people should be focusing on until we sufficiently explore how we can change the situation for the advantage of everybody.
It will be superficial to say that we just want to breakaway. When it came for us to go, we didn’t need to discuss it. There was a representative government and it took the decision and forced the hand of the person who was at the top, and the evidence was there for everybody to see. Never mind that the other people didn’t like the idea. Many didn’t see the gravity of the crime that was committed; the enormity of the carnage, the pogrom, the killings. We have to see this thing from its proper context.
Look around the world, this is the way other countries passed through the hot crucible and they became modern nations. We should give it that shot and resist the temptation to break it up. When the time came to do so, we didn’t take to debating it. The situation now is very different from what happened in 1966. The circumstances

Fairness was the watchword in Nigeria’s former Eastern Region

By Efa-Iwa Rex Egbe

Some weeks back, I made a rebuttal about the erroneous and mischievous rants of some of my (our) misinformed NigerDelta brothers. First and foremost let me tell you all a little story for the avoidance of doubt, I’m from the Agbo ethnic group in Cross River State, we are located in Abi Local Government Area which is a coastal settlement and unarguably the smallest LGA in Cross River State in terms of landmass and to a large extent population slightly a few thousands ahead of Bakassi LGA. My fore bearers both on my maternal and paternal side were given the opportunity to serve in then Eastern Nigeria regional government, My grand uncle Dr. S E Imoke of blessed memory was an all influential cabinet minister in the regime of M I Okpara he held the Trade portfolio and was also Finance minister at a time until the unfortunate incident of January 1966 he was the longest serving Education minister his son the urbane Liyel Imoke is the immediate past Governor of our state “Cross River”,during the outbreak of the War he was the Biafran Commissioner for Refugees and Humanitarian affairs.

Aside SE one of my maternal uncles also served as Permanent Secretary in the ministry of health at Enugu, My maternal grand father was also a frontline member of the Eastern Nigeria regional house of Chiefs alongside other minority chiefs like Chief Offem of Ugep,Ndoma-Egba of Ikom amongst others,the Chairman of the very powerful and influential House of Chiefs was Chief Nyong Essien, OBE an Ibibio High chief of a not so prominent chiefdom “not the Obi of Onitsha nor the Igwe of any other powerful Igbo city”.

Outside my family circles, another great Cross Riverian MT Mbu was nominated a Federal Minister of Transport and Navy by the Igbo controlled NCNC,it’s on record that Mbu was Nigeria’s first Ambassador to the UK, UN, and US he is from Boki in Cross River state, Boki is another minority ethnic group just like my native Agboland, the Igbo’s gave him the opportunity to excel ahead of their own worthy sons at that time, he is the father to Senator. MT Mbu jr, another person who is noteworthy is the late Chief. Michael Eta-Ogon who was the Administrator of the oil rich Port Harcourt province in the first republic he is also from the same Boki with Mbu, Thomas Weir Ikpeme an Efik man from Odukpani in my native Cross River was the longest serving Permanent Secretary in the Eastern Regional Ministry of Education, the key point is that the Igbo’s were comfortable with us “the minorities” that was why they entrusted education solely in our hands, not only education but other critical areas like Public Works and Transport etc. NU Akpan an Ibibio man from Akwa Ibom state was the technocrat behind the eastern regional public service, he was the Secretary to the regional government, Anwana Esin a man from Oron in Akwa Ibom state, Oron is a distinct and small riverine ethnic group was the Eastern Regional Minister of Local government, so also was Ibanga Akpabio ,an Annang man from Ukana in present day Akwa Ibom state was the regional minister of Internal Affairs, the former Governor of Akwa Ibom state Godswill Akpabio is his nephew, they were other high ranking cabinet ministers of minority origin like one of our family good friends, HRH. Amanyanabo EP Okoya,Agada III the Ibenanowei of Ekpetiama in Bayelsa State,Chief. Erekosinma of Rivers and a whole lot of others who are too numerous to mention.During the secessionist struggle, An Ogoni from Rivers state, Chief Ignatius Kogbara was Biafra’s Ambassador to Britain.

My dad’s friend Chief. Lekam Okoi ,from Idomi in present day Yakurr LGA of Cross River state was one of Ojukwu’s trusted drivers, he is today a successful lawyer and a former commissioner in the Federal Character Commission, Capt.Akpet a minority from Cross River was also Ojukwu’s dependable aide on intelligence. Secondly for the avoidance of doubt, aside these political appointments, our people enjoyed immense goodwill from the Igbo dominated region by way of social security, my dad’s immediate elder brother received a scholarship from the regional government that enabled him study for a PhD in soil science,he is the first man “arguably” in Africa to obtain a doctorate in Soil science, I have friends across the Niger Delta whose parents, uncles, aunties and relatives also benefited from the benevolence of the regional government. It is also a known fact that our Niger Delta region received it’s last major facelift in terms of infrastructure when we were under the Eastern region. Till the abolition of the regional system of government the Eastern region was the most united region, they was never a recorded case of ethnic skirmish or BLOOD letting between the Igbo’s and other minority groups,during the pogrom of 1966 we all carried the same cross to “Golgotha”, both Igbo’s and eastern minorities where maimed in their thousands across Northern Nigeria by the blood thirsty HausaFulani/Northern folks without blinking an eye it doesn’t really matter if you were Igbo, Ijaw, Efik or a miniature Agbo person. I never really wanted to bore you with reading this lengthy essay but it’s my moral responsibility to tell the truth at all times, I was thought by my fore bearers never to distort history and to always separate facts from fictions. If we were not marginalized by the Igbo’s during the “analogue” age, how then can the Igbo’s marginalized us in this digital age and time?, the fear, misgivings and misconceptions of Igbo dominance by most of my (our) NigerDelta people who are poor students of history are unconscionable and unfounded, moreover there is no family in our region without Igbo relatives and blood so the cry is a much ado about nothing….“Man must know thyself” and “To thyself be true”. May God help us all

Fairness was the watchword in Nigeria’s former Eastern Region

By Efa-Iwa Rex Egbe

Some weeks back, I made a rebuttal about the erroneous and mischievous rants of some of my (our) misinformed NigerDelta brothers. First and foremost let me tell you all a little story for the avoidance of doubt, I’m from the Agbo ethnic group in Cross River State, we are located in Abi Local Government Area which is a coastal settlement and unarguably the smallest LGA in Cross River State in terms of landmass and to a large extent population slightly a few thousands ahead of Bakassi LGA. My fore bearers both on my maternal and paternal side were given the opportunity to serve in then Eastern Nigeria regional government, My grand uncle Dr. S E Imoke of blessed memory was an all influential cabinet minister in the regime of M I Okpara he held the Trade portfolio and was also Finance minister at a time until the unfortunate incident of January 1966 he was the longest serving Education minister his son the urbane Liyel Imoke is the immediate past Governor of our state “Cross River”,during the outbreak of the War he was the Biafran Commissioner for Refugees and Humanitarian affairs.

Aside SE one of my maternal uncles also served as Permanent Secretary in the ministry of health at Enugu, My maternal grand father was also a frontline member of the Eastern Nigeria regional house of Chiefs alongside other minority chiefs like Chief Offem of Ugep,Ndoma-Egba of Ikom amongst others,the Chairman of the very powerful and influential House of Chiefs was Chief Nyong Essien, OBE an Ibibio High chief of a not so prominent chiefdom “not the Obi of Onitsha nor the Igwe of any other powerful Igbo city”.

Outside my family circles, another great Cross Riverian MT Mbu was nominated a Federal Minister of Transport and Navy by the Igbo controlled NCNC,it’s on record that Mbu was Nigeria’s first Ambassador to the UK, UN, and US he is from Boki in Cross River state, Boki is another minority ethnic group just like my native Agboland, the Igbo’s gave him the opportunity to excel ahead of their own worthy sons at that time, he is the father to Senator. MT Mbu jr, another person who is noteworthy is the late Chief. Michael Eta-Ogon who was the Administrator of the oil rich Port Harcourt province in the first republic he is also from the same Boki with Mbu, Thomas Weir Ikpeme an Efik man from Odukpani in my native Cross River was the longest serving Permanent Secretary in the Eastern Regional Ministry of Education, the key point is that the Igbo’s were comfortable with us “the minorities” that was why they entrusted education solely in our hands, not only education but other critical areas like Public Works and Transport etc. NU Akpan an Ibibio man from Akwa Ibom state was the technocrat behind the eastern regional public service, he was the Secretary to the regional government, Anwana Esin a man from Oron in Akwa Ibom state, Oron is a distinct and small riverine ethnic group was the Eastern Regional Minister of Local government, so also was Ibanga Akpabio ,an Annang man from Ukana in present day Akwa Ibom state was the regional minister of Internal Affairs, the former Governor of Akwa Ibom state Godswill Akpabio is his nephew, they were other high ranking cabinet ministers of minority origin like one of our family good friends, HRH. Amanyanabo EP Okoya,Agada III the Ibenanowei of Ekpetiama in Bayelsa State,Chief. Erekosinma of Rivers and a whole lot of others who are too numerous to mention.During the secessionist struggle, An Ogoni from Rivers state, Chief Ignatius Kogbara was Biafra’s Ambassador to Britain.

My dad’s friend Chief. Lekam Okoi ,from Idomi in present day Yakurr LGA of Cross River state was one of Ojukwu’s trusted drivers, he is today a successful lawyer and a former commissioner in the Federal Character Commission, Capt.Akpet a minority from Cross River was also Ojukwu’s dependable aide on intelligence. Secondly for the avoidance of doubt, aside these political appointments, our people enjoyed immense goodwill from the Igbo dominated region by way of social security, my dad’s immediate elder brother received a scholarship from the regional government that enabled him study for a PhD in soil science,he is the first man “arguably” in Africa to obtain a doctorate in Soil science, I have friends across the Niger Delta whose parents, uncles, aunties and relatives also benefited from the benevolence of the regional government. It is also a known fact that our Niger Delta region received it’s last major facelift in terms of infrastructure when we were under the Eastern region. Till the abolition of the regional system of government the Eastern region was the most united region, they was never a recorded case of ethnic skirmish or BLOOD letting between the Igbo’s and other minority groups,during the pogrom of 1966 we all carried the same cross to “Golgotha”, both Igbo’s and eastern minorities where maimed in their thousands across Northern Nigeria by the blood thirsty HausaFulani/Northern folks without blinking an eye it doesn’t really matter if you were Igbo, Ijaw, Efik or a miniature Agbo person. I never really wanted to bore you with reading this lengthy essay but it’s my moral responsibility to tell the truth at all times, I was thought by my fore bearers never to distort history and to always separate facts from fictions. If we were not marginalized by the Igbo’s during the “analogue” age, how then can the Igbo’s marginalized us in this digital age and time?, the fear, misgivings and misconceptions of Igbo dominance by most of my (our) NigerDelta people who are poor students of history are unconscionable and unfounded, moreover there is no family in our region without Igbo relatives and blood so the cry is a much ado about nothing….“Man must know thyself” and “To thyself be true”. May God help us all.

Nigeria Not Coming Out Of Recession Soon By Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Nigeria not coming out of recession soon – Idika Kalu

Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu, a two-time minister, and Chairman of the Institute for Policy and Economic Development is at home with issues relating to the nation’s economy. In an interview with VINCENT KALU, he said Nigeria is not coming out of recession soon, and urged government to stop giving the citizens false hope that the recession will end this year.
According to him, anyone having such impression lacks understanding of the kind of recession the country faces. He also cautioned Igbo politicians against jumping into the fray because former President Olusegun Obasanjo told them that the time is ripe for them to produce the nation’s president. He however, highlighted how to achieve Igbo presidency.
The country is in recession, how can she get out of it?
From a professional standpoint, recession refers to a situation where capital structures are in place, but the means to sustain the recurrent expenditures that keep those structures working decline because of sudden change in taste and price.
It is wrong for us to think that we are merely in a recession. There is a drop in current receipts from oil and from other exports; we also have a sharp drop in our terms of trade, that is, the import prices weigh higher than export prices, and total revenues are a fraction of what we used to have.
So, we have a big gap in our current revenues, big gap in our balance of payments (the different between imports and exports), therefore, a sharp drop in the ability of our public finance to meet with the needs of government at various levels.
But it is worse than that because it has just exposed that we are not just at lower current incomes, but the capital structures are not even there to raise financing and get them working again.
Here, we still need to build roads, power, rails, mining structures, processing plants etc.
We don’t have the structures, if we had, it is just for us to borrow and get the idle power and others working again.
What is more serious indication of the depression we are in now is that even the manpower is not there. If for instance we got money to have modern high-speed rail, where are the people who are going to operate them? You need along time to bring them.
You need to put so much money into capital structures in order to create the employment facilities before the economy can begin to work again.
You look at the driving tools – the palm tree, cashew nuts, cotton field, ground nuts fields, cocoa farms, all of these are at different levels of disrepair and abandonment. They require large sums of money to restructure them before you can begin to operate them and come back to the previous revenues that you have attained.
We delude ourselves when we don’t realize that this is more than just a classical recession. It is a shortfall in revenues that have now exposed very deep structural problems within the economy. So, we have to address it from that standpoint; it is not a short-term phenomenon.
It is not just a question of what can we do to get the economy running again? A lot of these things require a minimum of one year. Talking about paper, it takes a very long period of gestation to plant the trees to produce papers. Palm trees take time to produce oil, and you have manage the farms the way they do in Malaysia, a country that came here and took away palm oil seedlings but is now exporting 30 times what Nigeria exports. We also import palm oil from them.
We have to acknowledge that this is more than a recession, which means that the entire economy has to be rebuilt properly.
Talking about rebuilding, the dearth of manpower, technical, and scientific management skill is another problem area. Universities of Technology, Colleges of Technology have to be properly staffed and equipped to bring out the type of people who can addressed the issues as I have just outlined. Farming is no more hoe and cutlass issue. It requires a lot of machinery and know-how.
We are more than in a recession because over the years, we didn’t plough back our resources deeply enough. We expended them on finished goods from other countries. We are still talking about assembly plants. The assembling we are doing today is worse than what had in the past.
At Peugeot plant, we were aiming at meeting 70 per cent of the content and the 30 percent imported, but today the reverse is the case, and this present 30 per cent includes labour.
Government is assuring Nigerians that in the third or last quarter of the year, Nigeria will come out of recession…
That is rubbish. It is nonsense for anybody to tell you that we are coming out of recession in the third or the last quarter of the year . They should stop giving us projections. They should tell us the concrete policies, resources they are mobilizing, the training they are doing, the restitution of the productive sector that is taking place. That is what the answer should be, not touching your lips and putting it into the air and telling us in three months or that you will come out of recession.
That is rubbish. If they are making those projections based on what I said, it is a different thing.
This is not an ephemeral recession of just improving liquidity and getting things going. We were in recession before the end of the last administration. The new administration is almost two years.
To define recession as two negative consecutive growth rates is what applies in advanced countries like Germany, US etc.
In our own economy, you have to go beyond that to underscore why you are having these negative consecutive growth rates. It goes beyond liquidity or foreign exchange shortage. It goes to address the real critical productive sectors of agriculture, non-agriculture, and mining, and even the tertiary services sector.
Look at what is happening in the aviation for instance. All of a sudden, Arik has to be taken over; at first we thought they were operating poorly because the clientele has fallen, as people don’t have the lush funds to fly up and down.
Where are the railways that should have been there to take up this slack; where are the roads; where is the security for more road travellers? As you go down the list, you find that these are not in place. They are critical issues.
They should stop giving us projections based on whims and caprices to make people feel happy. We all will be here, and the second, third and fourth quarter will come and another year will come. We better begin to address the real issues that have brought down the large sludge in unemployment. First, we always had large underemployment. By the time you put unemployment to underemployment, the rate of employment by comparison with industrialised countries must be a very small fraction.
It is best to define our problems in concrete terms, that is the way we can come out with concrete policies to solve our problems.
Acting President Osinbajo recently set up a taskforce to bring down the prices of foodstuff to ameliorate the suffering of the citizens. What is your view on this?
You will assume that these are all highly educated people in various fields, and you must also assume that after so many plans, so many budgets, so many high sounding development programmes, and we know that what determines a price is a function of what happens to the supply of the goods and the demands that register in the market.
The only way you can effect any change in the price is by going back to address those issues. Those issues are not what you set up committees to do. This is the whole point of planning, project development, policy-making and investment planning and plan implementation.
It is not something for which you would set up a committee to go to the market and find out why prices are high and bring them down.
There is no way you can bring down prices unless you address the short, medium and long-term factors that affect supply and demand.
No task force and no battalion that can force down the price, you would only end up creating more distortions in the price.
I will be surprised if this works. It may just be to give a sense of activities in motion.
The economy is in shambles, is this a function or the lack of expertise of the economic management team?
It is a function of everybody. I know it took a long time for people to accept that there was an economic management team. Most people thought there wasn’t any. It took a while for people to realize that there might have been an Economic Adviser when the cabinet was set up. It took a while for people to realise that there were other people who were recruited to join the cabinet to form the Economic management team.
Team or not, as they say, ‘the taste of the pudding is in the eating’. The results you expect from the Economic Management Team will be reflected in the qualities of the policies being implemented and how those policies are geared towards solving the problems identified.
For professional economists, you would assume may be, there is economic management team so far, in terms of resource mobilization, in terms of foreign exchange management, in terms of price management, in terms of growth of the real sector, in terms of improvement in infrastructures and other indicators, even though some of these require time to jell, at least you should be able to see the tendencies in the amplification of the capacity being created and the quality and well being in the lives of people as reflected.
I won’t take any comfort from the projection of coming out of recession in the third or last quarter.
Independently of that, as I said our problems are more structural than passing, and they are more deep rooted. So, any attempt to keep or make the people happy will be counter productive, and create so much cynicism that if at the end of the projected third quarter or last quarter, conditions are worse than even the first quarter; even when the government had come up with policies that may have some impacts that would need the cooperation of the populace, people would have been so disdainful to feel that they have any role to play to assist the government to achieve results.
Recently, former President OlusegunObasanjo advocated that the Igbo to produce the president in 2019. This has elicited mixed reactions. Some bought into the idea, while some were of the opinion that it’s restructuring that would benefit the Igbo. What is your position on these?
It was Chief Obasanjo’s right and privilege as a Nigerian and former president, as a politician to say what he likes.
Why should anybody spend time getting all worked up because Obasanjo said it?
Why should Ndigbo or any other section of the country need any individual from wherever to come and say such a thing? They should know that leadership should go round.
We should get a president by and large, whether from large or small group, somebody who can address these issues we are discussing; somebody who can do the job.
There is nothing that says we can’t get somebody from the Southeast to do the job. You don’t just pick somebody from the street and say that he is the president of Igbo extraction. The president is the president of Nigeria, who happens to come from one area. He happens to be the person at that material point in time, who can get the job done.
I have said it before to our people; we have to change through these problems and change through our reactions. It is parties that put up presidents and not ethnic groups.
For you to get one of your own to be president, that constituency must be involved in the political process. This connotes that people from the South-East should get off this penchant of not wanting to play in the big party, yet expecting to get the presidency. Common sense dictates that you must be involved in the major party. That is real politics.
We don’t need an Obasanjo to tell us, it is evident. The west has had it, the north and the South-South. Why shouldn’t the South-East have it? Also, it doesn’t mean that you run to Enugu and grab somebody and say we have got our own president.
The political class in the constituency has to work with their counterparts in other places; this requires political synergy, and networking. That is what we should be discussing, not whether it is a good idea or not.
It is about time that people from this area are given the chance to produce the president, even looking at it from a tripod arrangement.
It cannot be allocated; it has to be truly synergy and networking. I have always encouraged our people to get actively involved with the big parties.
Is it against the reason of getting actively involved in the big party that has led to the influx of many prominent Igbo politicians into APC?
It doesn’t matter for whatever reason they are doing that. I don’t think that is the reason. Why are they not going into the PDP? It is the Nigerian factor. They think that party is on the upswing, while the other one is on the downswing.
I certainly encouraged them even before the alliances were formed that we should have the simple political sense to make sure that we do the right political calculations, that if we do the wrong calculations we have nobody else, but ourselves to blame.
After we have done the wrong calculations, we are still going around beating our chests that we did the right thing. That is not very smart; that is not very truthful to us.
If you have any problem with Igbo politicians flocking into APC or other party I don’t. think that is what they should do. I could also be that they are responding, as some of us have actually been encouraging that, because we need to exploit the talent all over the country, we can’t allow it to be seen as if it is only one side or two sides that can supply the requisite quality of leadership that solves Nigeria’s mega problems.
So, we should be encouraging them to get involved, it is not only those who want to go for office, but the grassroots and the constituencies.
If you get involved and elect people at the state level or at the national level, you are able to hold them to explain their performance.
So far, we have had a very dismal record of calling people to account. You don’t call them to account when you are walking to your farm or to your shop. You hold them to account when you attend the local meetings, and your presence alone would demand hearing.
I have been encouraging our people to get involved not just at the election time, but long before the election to make sure that they prune the right people to represent them.
What is your fear for the nation, where ethnic organisations are pulling away from the centre towards their sides; more so, where you have self determination groups, which are making Nigeria not to emerge as a nation state, 56 years after independence?
Unless we call ourselves to order, we cannot blame providence or the colonial power.
We have tried to adduce all kinds of selfish motives in the way the structures were put in place. There were young men from various universities or high schools in Europe, who came here to manage the empire for their monarchs.
You would think that 56 years after that, we will not be blaming them for what they gave to us. Yet we are complaining that the quality of education they handed over to us have dropped; the quality of this has dropped, the quality of that has dropped.
At the minimum, we should have continued to improve on what was left for us. That already undermines this argument.
Depending on where you are and what you can see or touch, in some cases, there is no doubt that there is more disunity now than there was before, particularly in terms of economic hardship, in terms of decline in jobs, in terms of more strife and employment opportunities and distribution of positions.
At other times, you get the impression that things have not collapsed badly, and in some instances you find that there is still that camaraderie among the various groups. Even as we complain, there are more marriages among ethnic groups, and people speaking different languages in addition to theirs.
By and large, your question is addressing a very real problem, and unless we are able to provide better leadership that problem will remain there. So, leadership has always constituted the major problem in Nigeria.
Many countries are heterogeneous contraction of many ethnic nationalities, but if we can get a leadership… look at Rwanda, in spite of what they passed through, with the right leadership who have managed to get the various groups together, they are forging ahead.
If you can get a leader who can demonstrate and mobilize the best so that you can create opportunities maximally, then you we are getting our problem solved. When you are creating opportunities you are also reducing the potential for centrifugal infighting and people pulling from different directions.
First is leadership, second is creation of commensurate growth in opportunities so that the cake-sharing mentality can be in a way that it contributes to more growth.
My fear is that unless we get the leadership that can demonstrate obvious fairness to all, we are not going anywhere. This is not easy because everybody seems to be in a hurry.
You talked about creating fairness and opportunities, a situation where different criteria are used for different people into offices or admissions, won’t these put pressures on the centre?
We are different peoples. We received westernization at different levels. The speed with which we receive it is not a blessing or a curse.
However, we have the resources and with the right leadership, if well spent we will progressively be bringing everybody up to the same standard, but we misused it by trying to slowdown and append a ridiculous cut off marks for different sections. Those are not the right policies.
In an interview with Sunday Sun recently, Prof AngoAbdullahi, said the North was ready to break away from Nigeria, are the Igbo ready?
In 1966, the North was ready to breakaway. They were persuaded that it was not the right thing to do, rather a distinct opportunity… how can you do that when you have a whole territory that you can play with, and you wanted to run away from it?
The West had its own anthem; I have heard it sang here and there. I grew up in this part and I knew they would not take it so lightly and it depends on so many factors.
For the East, for 80 years, we have been shedding our blood, our sweat, we have been striving and we have been building all over this country.
When it came to strife that was imposed, of course there was no other option but to resist it.
My position is that what we have is a dearth of political, a dearth of rule of law, and a dearth of the mobilization of the right leadership. This is where our people should be focusing on until we sufficiently explore how we can change the situation for the advantage of everybody.
It will be superficial to say that we just want to breakaway. When it came for us to go, we didn’t need to discuss it. There was a representative government and it took the decision and forced the hand of the person who was at the top, and the evidence was there for everybody to see. Never mind that the other people didn’t like the idea. Many didn’t see the gravity of the crime that was committed; the enormity of the carnage, the pogrom, the killings. We have to see this thing from its proper context.
Look around the world, this is the way other countries passed through the hot crucible and they became modern nations. We should give it that shot and resist the temptation to break it up. When the time came to do so, we didn’t take to debating it. The situation now is very different from what happened in 1966. The circumstances

Nigeria Not Coming Out Of Recession Soon By Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Nigeria not coming out of recession soon – Idika Kalu

Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu, a two-time minister, and Chairman of the Institute for Policy and Economic Development is at home with issues relating to the nation’s economy. In an interview with VINCENT KALU, he said Nigeria is not coming out of recession soon, and urged government to stop giving the citizens false hope that the recession will end this year.
According to him, anyone having such impression lacks understanding of the kind of recession the country faces. He also cautioned Igbo politicians against jumping into the fray because former President Olusegun Obasanjo told them that the time is ripe for them to produce the nation’s president. He however, highlighted how to achieve Igbo presidency.
The country is in recession, how can she get out of it?
From a professional standpoint, recession refers to a situation where capital structures are in place, but the means to sustain the recurrent expenditures that keep those structures working decline because of sudden change in taste and price.
It is wrong for us to think that we are merely in a recession. There is a drop in current receipts from oil and from other exports; we also have a sharp drop in our terms of trade, that is, the import prices weigh higher than export prices, and total revenues are a fraction of what we used to have.
So, we have a big gap in our current revenues, big gap in our balance of payments (the different between imports and exports), therefore, a sharp drop in the ability of our public finance to meet with the needs of government at various levels.
But it is worse than that because it has just exposed that we are not just at lower current incomes, but the capital structures are not even there to raise financing and get them working again.
Here, we still need to build roads, power, rails, mining structures, processing plants etc.
We don’t have the structures, if we had, it is just for us to borrow and get the idle power and others working again.
What is more serious indication of the depression we are in now is that even the manpower is not there. If for instance we got money to have modern high-speed rail, where are the people who are going to operate them? You need along time to bring them.
You need to put so much money into capital structures in order to create the employment facilities before the economy can begin to work again.
You look at the driving tools – the palm tree, cashew nuts, cotton field, ground nuts fields, cocoa farms, all of these are at different levels of disrepair and abandonment. They require large sums of money to restructure them before you can begin to operate them and come back to the previous revenues that you have attained.
We delude ourselves when we don’t realize that this is more than just a classical recession. It is a shortfall in revenues that have now exposed very deep structural problems within the economy. So, we have to address it from that standpoint; it is not a short-term phenomenon.
It is not just a question of what can we do to get the economy running again? A lot of these things require a minimum of one year. Talking about paper, it takes a very long period of gestation to plant the trees to produce papers. Palm trees take time to produce oil, and you have manage the farms the way they do in Malaysia, a country that came here and took away palm oil seedlings but is now exporting 30 times what Nigeria exports. We also import palm oil from them.
We have to acknowledge that this is more than a recession, which means that the entire economy has to be rebuilt properly.
Talking about rebuilding, the dearth of manpower, technical, and scientific management skill is another problem area. Universities of Technology, Colleges of Technology have to be properly staffed and equipped to bring out the type of people who can addressed the issues as I have just outlined. Farming is no more hoe and cutlass issue. It requires a lot of machinery and know-how.
We are more than in a recession because over the years, we didn’t plough back our resources deeply enough. We expended them on finished goods from other countries. We are still talking about assembly plants. The assembling we are doing today is worse than what had in the past.
At Peugeot plant, we were aiming at meeting 70 per cent of the content and the 30 percent imported, but today the reverse is the case, and this present 30 per cent includes labour.
Government is assuring Nigerians that in the third or last quarter of the year, Nigeria will come out of recession…
That is rubbish. It is nonsense for anybody to tell you that we are coming out of recession in the third or the last quarter of the year . They should stop giving us projections. They should tell us the concrete policies, resources they are mobilizing, the training they are doing, the restitution of the productive sector that is taking place. That is what the answer should be, not touching your lips and putting it into the air and telling us in three months or that you will come out of recession.
That is rubbish. If they are making those projections based on what I said, it is a different thing.
This is not an ephemeral recession of just improving liquidity and getting things going. We were in recession before the end of the last administration. The new administration is almost two years.
To define recession as two negative consecutive growth rates is what applies in advanced countries like Germany, US etc.
In our own economy, you have to go beyond that to underscore why you are having these negative consecutive growth rates. It goes beyond liquidity or foreign exchange shortage. It goes to address the real critical productive sectors of agriculture, non-agriculture, and mining, and even the tertiary services sector.
Look at what is happening in the aviation for instance. All of a sudden, Arik has to be taken over; at first we thought they were operating poorly because the clientele has fallen, as people don’t have the lush funds to fly up and down.
Where are the railways that should have been there to take up this slack; where are the roads; where is the security for more road travellers? As you go down the list, you find that these are not in place. They are critical issues.
They should stop giving us projections based on whims and caprices to make people feel happy. We all will be here, and the second, third and fourth quarter will come and another year will come. We better begin to address the real issues that have brought down the large sludge in unemployment. First, we always had large underemployment. By the time you put unemployment to underemployment, the rate of employment by comparison with industrialised countries must be a very small fraction.
It is best to define our problems in concrete terms, that is the way we can come out with concrete policies to solve our problems.
Acting President Osinbajo recently set up a taskforce to bring down the prices of foodstuff to ameliorate the suffering of the citizens. What is your view on this?
You will assume that these are all highly educated people in various fields, and you must also assume that after so many plans, so many budgets, so many high sounding development programmes, and we know that what determines a price is a function of what happens to the supply of the goods and the demands that register in the market.
The only way you can effect any change in the price is by going back to address those issues. Those issues are not what you set up committees to do. This is the whole point of planning, project development, policy-making and investment planning and plan implementation.
It is not something for which you would set up a committee to go to the market and find out why prices are high and bring them down.
There is no way you can bring down prices unless you address the short, medium and long-term factors that affect supply and demand.
No task force and no battalion that can force down the price, you would only end up creating more distortions in the price.
I will be surprised if this works. It may just be to give a sense of activities in motion.
The economy is in shambles, is this a function or the lack of expertise of the economic management team?
It is a function of everybody. I know it took a long time for people to accept that there was an economic management team. Most people thought there wasn’t any. It took a while for people to realize that there might have been an Economic Adviser when the cabinet was set up. It took a while for people to realise that there were other people who were recruited to join the cabinet to form the Economic management team.
Team or not, as they say, ‘the taste of the pudding is in the eating’. The results you expect from the Economic Management Team will be reflected in the qualities of the policies being implemented and how those policies are geared towards solving the problems identified.
For professional economists, you would assume may be, there is economic management team so far, in terms of resource mobilization, in terms of foreign exchange management, in terms of price management, in terms of growth of the real sector, in terms of improvement in infrastructures and other indicators, even though some of these require time to jell, at least you should be able to see the tendencies in the amplification of the capacity being created and the quality and well being in the lives of people as reflected.
I won’t take any comfort from the projection of coming out of recession in the third or last quarter.
Independently of that, as I said our problems are more structural than passing, and they are more deep rooted. So, any attempt to keep or make the people happy will be counter productive, and create so much cynicism that if at the end of the projected third quarter or last quarter, conditions are worse than even the first quarter; even when the government had come up with policies that may have some impacts that would need the cooperation of the populace, people would have been so disdainful to feel that they have any role to play to assist the government to achieve results.
Recently, former President OlusegunObasanjo advocated that the Igbo to produce the president in 2019. This has elicited mixed reactions. Some bought into the idea, while some were of the opinion that it’s restructuring that would benefit the Igbo. What is your position on these?
It was Chief Obasanjo’s right and privilege as a Nigerian and former president, as a politician to say what he likes.
Why should anybody spend time getting all worked up because Obasanjo said it?
Why should Ndigbo or any other section of the country need any individual from wherever to come and say such a thing? They should know that leadership should go round.
We should get a president by and large, whether from large or small group, somebody who can address these issues we are discussing; somebody who can do the job.
There is nothing that says we can’t get somebody from the Southeast to do the job. You don’t just pick somebody from the street and say that he is the president of Igbo extraction. The president is the president of Nigeria, who happens to come from one area. He happens to be the person at that material point in time, who can get the job done.
I have said it before to our people; we have to change through these problems and change through our reactions. It is parties that put up presidents and not ethnic groups.
For you to get one of your own to be president, that constituency must be involved in the political process. This connotes that people from the South-East should get off this penchant of not wanting to play in the big party, yet expecting to get the presidency. Common sense dictates that you must be involved in the major party. That is real politics.
We don’t need an Obasanjo to tell us, it is evident. The west has had it, the north and the South-South. Why shouldn’t the South-East have it? Also, it doesn’t mean that you run to Enugu and grab somebody and say we have got our own president.
The political class in the constituency has to work with their counterparts in other places; this requires political synergy, and networking. That is what we should be discussing, not whether it is a good idea or not.
It is about time that people from this area are given the chance to produce the president, even looking at it from a tripod arrangement.
It cannot be allocated; it has to be truly synergy and networking. I have always encouraged our people to get actively involved with the big parties.
Is it against the reason of getting actively involved in the big party that has led to the influx of many prominent Igbo politicians into APC?
It doesn’t matter for whatever reason they are doing that. I don’t think that is the reason. Why are they not going into the PDP? It is the Nigerian factor. They think that party is on the upswing, while the other one is on the downswing.
I certainly encouraged them even before the alliances were formed that we should have the simple political sense to make sure that we do the right political calculations, that if we do the wrong calculations we have nobody else, but ourselves to blame.
After we have done the wrong calculations, we are still going around beating our chests that we did the right thing. That is not very smart; that is not very truthful to us.
If you have any problem with Igbo politicians flocking into APC or other party I don’t. think that is what they should do. I could also be that they are responding, as some of us have actually been encouraging that, because we need to exploit the talent all over the country, we can’t allow it to be seen as if it is only one side or two sides that can supply the requisite quality of leadership that solves Nigeria’s mega problems.
So, we should be encouraging them to get involved, it is not only those who want to go for office, but the grassroots and the constituencies.
If you get involved and elect people at the state level or at the national level, you are able to hold them to explain their performance.
So far, we have had a very dismal record of calling people to account. You don’t call them to account when you are walking to your farm or to your shop. You hold them to account when you attend the local meetings, and your presence alone would demand hearing.
I have been encouraging our people to get involved not just at the election time, but long before the election to make sure that they prune the right people to represent them.
What is your fear for the nation, where ethnic organisations are pulling away from the centre towards their sides; more so, where you have self determination groups, which are making Nigeria not to emerge as a nation state, 56 years after independence?
Unless we call ourselves to order, we cannot blame providence or the colonial power.
We have tried to adduce all kinds of selfish motives in the way the structures were put in place. There were young men from various universities or high schools in Europe, who came here to manage the empire for their monarchs.
You would think that 56 years after that, we will not be blaming them for what they gave to us. Yet we are complaining that the quality of education they handed over to us have dropped; the quality of this has dropped, the quality of that has dropped.
At the minimum, we should have continued to improve on what was left for us. That already undermines this argument.
Depending on where you are and what you can see or touch, in some cases, there is no doubt that there is more disunity now than there was before, particularly in terms of economic hardship, in terms of decline in jobs, in terms of more strife and employment opportunities and distribution of positions.
At other times, you get the impression that things have not collapsed badly, and in some instances you find that there is still that camaraderie among the various groups. Even as we complain, there are more marriages among ethnic groups, and people speaking different languages in addition to theirs.
By and large, your question is addressing a very real problem, and unless we are able to provide better leadership that problem will remain there. So, leadership has always constituted the major problem in Nigeria.
Many countries are heterogeneous contraction of many ethnic nationalities, but if we can get a leadership… look at Rwanda, in spite of what they passed through, with the right leadership who have managed to get the various groups together, they are forging ahead.
If you can get a leader who can demonstrate and mobilize the best so that you can create opportunities maximally, then you we are getting our problem solved. When you are creating opportunities you are also reducing the potential for centrifugal infighting and people pulling from different directions.
First is leadership, second is creation of commensurate growth in opportunities so that the cake-sharing mentality can be in a way that it contributes to more growth.
My fear is that unless we get the leadership that can demonstrate obvious fairness to all, we are not going anywhere. This is not easy because everybody seems to be in a hurry.
You talked about creating fairness and opportunities, a situation where different criteria are used for different people into offices or admissions, won’t these put pressures on the centre?
We are different peoples. We received westernization at different levels. The speed with which we receive it is not a blessing or a curse.
However, we have the resources and with the right leadership, if well spent we will progressively be bringing everybody up to the same standard, but we misused it by trying to slowdown and append a ridiculous cut off marks for different sections. Those are not the right policies.
In an interview with Sunday Sun recently, Prof AngoAbdullahi, said the North was ready to break away from Nigeria, are the Igbo ready?
In 1966, the North was ready to breakaway. They were persuaded that it was not the right thing to do, rather a distinct opportunity… how can you do that when you have a whole territory that you can play with, and you wanted to run away from it?
The West had its own anthem; I have heard it sang here and there. I grew up in this part and I knew they would not take it so lightly and it depends on so many factors.
For the East, for 80 years, we have been shedding our blood, our sweat, we have been striving and we have been building all over this country.
When it came to strife that was imposed, of course there was no other option but to resist it.
My position is that what we have is a dearth of political, a dearth of rule of law, and a dearth of the mobilization of the right leadership. This is where our people should be focusing on until we sufficiently explore how we can change the situation for the advantage of everybody.
It will be superficial to say that we just want to breakaway. When it came for us to go, we didn’t need to discuss it. There was a representative government and it took the decision and forced the hand of the person who was at the top, and the evidence was there for everybody to see. Never mind that the other people didn’t like the idea. Many didn’t see the gravity of the crime that was committed; the enormity of the carnage, the pogrom, the killings. We have to see this thing from its proper context.
Look around the world, this is the way other countries passed through the hot crucible and they became modern nations. We should give it that shot and resist the temptation to break it up. When the time came to do so, we didn’t take to debating it. The situation now is very different from what happened in 1966. The circumstances

Nigeria Not Coming Out Of Recession Soon By Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Nigeria not coming out of recession soon – Idika Kalu

Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu, a two-time minister, and Chairman of the Institute for Policy and Economic Development is at home with issues relating to the nation’s economy. In an interview with VINCENT KALU, he said Nigeria is not coming out of recession soon, and urged government to stop giving the citizens false hope that the recession will end this year.
According to him, anyone having such impression lacks understanding of the kind of recession the country faces. He also cautioned Igbo politicians against jumping into the fray because former President Olusegun Obasanjo told them that the time is ripe for them to produce the nation’s president. He however, highlighted how to achieve Igbo presidency.
The country is in recession, how can she get out of it?
From a professional standpoint, recession refers to a situation where capital structures are in place, but the means to sustain the recurrent expenditures that keep those structures working decline because of sudden change in taste and price.
It is wrong for us to think that we are merely in a recession. There is a drop in current receipts from oil and from other exports; we also have a sharp drop in our terms of trade, that is, the import prices weigh higher than export prices, and total revenues are a fraction of what we used to have.
So, we have a big gap in our current revenues, big gap in our balance of payments (the different between imports and exports), therefore, a sharp drop in the ability of our public finance to meet with the needs of government at various levels.
But it is worse than that because it has just exposed that we are not just at lower current incomes, but the capital structures are not even there to raise financing and get them working again.
Here, we still need to build roads, power, rails, mining structures, processing plants etc.
We don’t have the structures, if we had, it is just for us to borrow and get the idle power and others working again.
What is more serious indication of the depression we are in now is that even the manpower is not there. If for instance we got money to have modern high-speed rail, where are the people who are going to operate them? You need along time to bring them.
You need to put so much money into capital structures in order to create the employment facilities before the economy can begin to work again.
You look at the driving tools – the palm tree, cashew nuts, cotton field, ground nuts fields, cocoa farms, all of these are at different levels of disrepair and abandonment. They require large sums of money to restructure them before you can begin to operate them and come back to the previous revenues that you have attained.
We delude ourselves when we don’t realize that this is more than just a classical recession. It is a shortfall in revenues that have now exposed very deep structural problems within the economy. So, we have to address it from that standpoint; it is not a short-term phenomenon.
It is not just a question of what can we do to get the economy running again? A lot of these things require a minimum of one year. Talking about paper, it takes a very long period of gestation to plant the trees to produce papers. Palm trees take time to produce oil, and you have manage the farms the way they do in Malaysia, a country that came here and took away palm oil seedlings but is now exporting 30 times what Nigeria exports. We also import palm oil from them.
We have to acknowledge that this is more than a recession, which means that the entire economy has to be rebuilt properly.
Talking about rebuilding, the dearth of manpower, technical, and scientific management skill is another problem area. Universities of Technology, Colleges of Technology have to be properly staffed and equipped to bring out the type of people who can addressed the issues as I have just outlined. Farming is no more hoe and cutlass issue. It requires a lot of machinery and know-how.
We are more than in a recession because over the years, we didn’t plough back our resources deeply enough. We expended them on finished goods from other countries. We are still talking about assembly plants. The assembling we are doing today is worse than what had in the past.
At Peugeot plant, we were aiming at meeting 70 per cent of the content and the 30 percent imported, but today the reverse is the case, and this present 30 per cent includes labour.
Government is assuring Nigerians that in the third or last quarter of the year, Nigeria will come out of recession…
That is rubbish. It is nonsense for anybody to tell you that we are coming out of recession in the third or the last quarter of the year . They should stop giving us projections. They should tell us the concrete policies, resources they are mobilizing, the training they are doing, the restitution of the productive sector that is taking place. That is what the answer should be, not touching your lips and putting it into the air and telling us in three months or that you will come out of recession.
That is rubbish. If they are making those projections based on what I said, it is a different thing.
This is not an ephemeral recession of just improving liquidity and getting things going. We were in recession before the end of the last administration. The new administration is almost two years.
To define recession as two negative consecutive growth rates is what applies in advanced countries like Germany, US etc.
In our own economy, you have to go beyond that to underscore why you are having these negative consecutive growth rates. It goes beyond liquidity or foreign exchange shortage. It goes to address the real critical productive sectors of agriculture, non-agriculture, and mining, and even the tertiary services sector.
Look at what is happening in the aviation for instance. All of a sudden, Arik has to be taken over; at first we thought they were operating poorly because the clientele has fallen, as people don’t have the lush funds to fly up and down.
Where are the railways that should have been there to take up this slack; where are the roads; where is the security for more road travellers? As you go down the list, you find that these are not in place. They are critical issues.
They should stop giving us projections based on whims and caprices to make people feel happy. We all will be here, and the second, third and fourth quarter will come and another year will come. We better begin to address the real issues that have brought down the large sludge in unemployment. First, we always had large underemployment. By the time you put unemployment to underemployment, the rate of employment by comparison with industrialised countries must be a very small fraction.
It is best to define our problems in concrete terms, that is the way we can come out with concrete policies to solve our problems.
Acting President Osinbajo recently set up a taskforce to bring down the prices of foodstuff to ameliorate the suffering of the citizens. What is your view on this?
You will assume that these are all highly educated people in various fields, and you must also assume that after so many plans, so many budgets, so many high sounding development programmes, and we know that what determines a price is a function of what happens to the supply of the goods and the demands that register in the market.
The only way you can effect any change in the price is by going back to address those issues. Those issues are not what you set up committees to do. This is the whole point of planning, project development, policy-making and investment planning and plan implementation.
It is not something for which you would set up a committee to go to the market and find out why prices are high and bring them down.
There is no way you can bring down prices unless you address the short, medium and long-term factors that affect supply and demand.
No task force and no battalion that can force down the price, you would only end up creating more distortions in the price.
I will be surprised if this works. It may just be to give a sense of activities in motion.
The economy is in shambles, is this a function or the lack of expertise of the economic management team?
It is a function of everybody. I know it took a long time for people to accept that there was an economic management team. Most people thought there wasn’t any. It took a while for people to realize that there might have been an Economic Adviser when the cabinet was set up. It took a while for people to realise that there were other people who were recruited to join the cabinet to form the Economic management team.
Team or not, as they say, ‘the taste of the pudding is in the eating’. The results you expect from the Economic Management Team will be reflected in the qualities of the policies being implemented and how those policies are geared towards solving the problems identified.
For professional economists, you would assume may be, there is economic management team so far, in terms of resource mobilization, in terms of foreign exchange management, in terms of price management, in terms of growth of the real sector, in terms of improvement in infrastructures and other indicators, even though some of these require time to jell, at least you should be able to see the tendencies in the amplification of the capacity being created and the quality and well being in the lives of people as reflected.
I won’t take any comfort from the projection of coming out of recession in the third or last quarter.
Independently of that, as I said our problems are more structural than passing, and they are more deep rooted. So, any attempt to keep or make the people happy will be counter productive, and create so much cynicism that if at the end of the projected third quarter or last quarter, conditions are worse than even the first quarter; even when the government had come up with policies that may have some impacts that would need the cooperation of the populace, people would have been so disdainful to feel that they have any role to play to assist the government to achieve results.
Recently, former President OlusegunObasanjo advocated that the Igbo to produce the president in 2019. This has elicited mixed reactions. Some bought into the idea, while some were of the opinion that it’s restructuring that would benefit the Igbo. What is your position on these?
It was Chief Obasanjo’s right and privilege as a Nigerian and former president, as a politician to say what he likes.
Why should anybody spend time getting all worked up because Obasanjo said it?
Why should Ndigbo or any other section of the country need any individual from wherever to come and say such a thing? They should know that leadership should go round.
We should get a president by and large, whether from large or small group, somebody who can address these issues we are discussing; somebody who can do the job.
There is nothing that says we can’t get somebody from the Southeast to do the job. You don’t just pick somebody from the street and say that he is the president of Igbo extraction. The president is the president of Nigeria, who happens to come from one area. He happens to be the person at that material point in time, who can get the job done.
I have said it before to our people; we have to change through these problems and change through our reactions. It is parties that put up presidents and not ethnic groups.
For you to get one of your own to be president, that constituency must be involved in the political process. This connotes that people from the South-East should get off this penchant of not wanting to play in the big party, yet expecting to get the presidency. Common sense dictates that you must be involved in the major party. That is real politics.
We don’t need an Obasanjo to tell us, it is evident. The west has had it, the north and the South-South. Why shouldn’t the South-East have it? Also, it doesn’t mean that you run to Enugu and grab somebody and say we have got our own president.
The political class in the constituency has to work with their counterparts in other places; this requires political synergy, and networking. That is what we should be discussing, not whether it is a good idea or not.
It is about time that people from this area are given the chance to produce the president, even looking at it from a tripod arrangement.
It cannot be allocated; it has to be truly synergy and networking. I have always encouraged our people to get actively involved with the big parties.
Is it against the reason of getting actively involved in the big party that has led to the influx of many prominent Igbo politicians into APC?
It doesn’t matter for whatever reason they are doing that. I don’t think that is the reason. Why are they not going into the PDP? It is the Nigerian factor. They think that party is on the upswing, while the other one is on the downswing.
I certainly encouraged them even before the alliances were formed that we should have the simple political sense to make sure that we do the right political calculations, that if we do the wrong calculations we have nobody else, but ourselves to blame.
After we have done the wrong calculations, we are still going around beating our chests that we did the right thing. That is not very smart; that is not very truthful to us.
If you have any problem with Igbo politicians flocking into APC or other party I don’t. think that is what they should do. I could also be that they are responding, as some of us have actually been encouraging that, because we need to exploit the talent all over the country, we can’t allow it to be seen as if it is only one side or two sides that can supply the requisite quality of leadership that solves Nigeria’s mega problems.
So, we should be encouraging them to get involved, it is not only those who want to go for office, but the grassroots and the constituencies.
If you get involved and elect people at the state level or at the national level, you are able to hold them to explain their performance.
So far, we have had a very dismal record of calling people to account. You don’t call them to account when you are walking to your farm or to your shop. You hold them to account when you attend the local meetings, and your presence alone would demand hearing.
I have been encouraging our people to get involved not just at the election time, but long before the election to make sure that they prune the right people to represent them.
What is your fear for the nation, where ethnic organisations are pulling away from the centre towards their sides; more so, where you have self determination groups, which are making Nigeria not to emerge as a nation state, 56 years after independence?
Unless we call ourselves to order, we cannot blame providence or the colonial power.
We have tried to adduce all kinds of selfish motives in the way the structures were put in place. There were young men from various universities or high schools in Europe, who came here to manage the empire for their monarchs.
You would think that 56 years after that, we will not be blaming them for what they gave to us. Yet we are complaining that the quality of education they handed over to us have dropped; the quality of this has dropped, the quality of that has dropped.
At the minimum, we should have continued to improve on what was left for us. That already undermines this argument.
Depending on where you are and what you can see or touch, in some cases, there is no doubt that there is more disunity now than there was before, particularly in terms of economic hardship, in terms of decline in jobs, in terms of more strife and employment opportunities and distribution of positions.
At other times, you get the impression that things have not collapsed badly, and in some instances you find that there is still that camaraderie among the various groups. Even as we complain, there are more marriages among ethnic groups, and people speaking different languages in addition to theirs.
By and large, your question is addressing a very real problem, and unless we are able to provide better leadership that problem will remain there. So, leadership has always constituted the major problem in Nigeria.
Many countries are heterogeneous contraction of many ethnic nationalities, but if we can get a leadership… look at Rwanda, in spite of what they passed through, with the right leadership who have managed to get the various groups together, they are forging ahead.
If you can get a leader who can demonstrate and mobilize the best so that you can create opportunities maximally, then you we are getting our problem solved. When you are creating opportunities you are also reducing the potential for centrifugal infighting and people pulling from different directions.
First is leadership, second is creation of commensurate growth in opportunities so that the cake-sharing mentality can be in a way that it contributes to more growth.
My fear is that unless we get the leadership that can demonstrate obvious fairness to all, we are not going anywhere. This is not easy because everybody seems to be in a hurry.
You talked about creating fairness and opportunities, a situation where different criteria are used for different people into offices or admissions, won’t these put pressures on the centre?
We are different peoples. We received westernization at different levels. The speed with which we receive it is not a blessing or a curse.
However, we have the resources and with the right leadership, if well spent we will progressively be bringing everybody up to the same standard, but we misused it by trying to slowdown and append a ridiculous cut off marks for different sections. Those are not the right policies.
In an interview with Sunday Sun recently, Prof AngoAbdullahi, said the North was ready to break away from Nigeria, are the Igbo ready?
In 1966, the North was ready to breakaway. They were persuaded that it was not the right thing to do, rather a distinct opportunity… how can you do that when you have a whole territory that you can play with, and you wanted to run away from it?
The West had its own anthem; I have heard it sang here and there. I grew up in this part and I knew they would not take it so lightly and it depends on so many factors.
For the East, for 80 years, we have been shedding our blood, our sweat, we have been striving and we have been building all over this country.
When it came to strife that was imposed, of course there was no other option but to resist it.
My position is that what we have is a dearth of political, a dearth of rule of law, and a dearth of the mobilization of the right leadership. This is where our people should be focusing on until we sufficiently explore how we can change the situation for the advantage of everybody.
It will be superficial to say that we just want to breakaway. When it came for us to go, we didn’t need to discuss it. There was a representative government and it took the decision and forced the hand of the person who was at the top, and the evidence was there for everybody to see. Never mind that the other people didn’t like the idea. Many didn’t see the gravity of the crime that was committed; the enormity of the carnage, the pogrom, the killings. We have to see this thing from its proper context.
Look around the world, this is the way other countries passed through the hot crucible and they became modern nations. We should give it that shot and resist the temptation to break it up. When the time came to do so, we didn’t take to debating it. The situation now is very different from what happened in 1966. The circumstances

Nigeria Not Coming Out Of Recession Soon By Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Nigeria not coming out of recession soon – Idika Kalu

Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu, a two-time minister, and Chairman of the Institute for Policy and Economic Development is at home with issues relating to the nation’s economy. In an interview with VINCENT KALU, he said Nigeria is not coming out of recession soon, and urged government to stop giving the citizens false hope that the recession will end this year.
According to him, anyone having such impression lacks understanding of the kind of recession the country faces. He also cautioned Igbo politicians against jumping into the fray because former President Olusegun Obasanjo told them that the time is ripe for them to produce the nation’s president. He however, highlighted how to achieve Igbo presidency.
The country is in recession, how can she get out of it?
From a professional standpoint, recession refers to a situation where capital structures are in place, but the means to sustain the recurrent expenditures that keep those structures working decline because of sudden change in taste and price.
It is wrong for us to think that we are merely in a recession. There is a drop in current receipts from oil and from other exports; we also have a sharp drop in our terms of trade, that is, the import prices weigh higher than export prices, and total revenues are a fraction of what we used to have.
So, we have a big gap in our current revenues, big gap in our balance of payments (the different between imports and exports), therefore, a sharp drop in the ability of our public finance to meet with the needs of government at various levels.
But it is worse than that because it has just exposed that we are not just at lower current incomes, but the capital structures are not even there to raise financing and get them working again.
Here, we still need to build roads, power, rails, mining structures, processing plants etc.
We don’t have the structures, if we had, it is just for us to borrow and get the idle power and others working again.
What is more serious indication of the depression we are in now is that even the manpower is not there. If for instance we got money to have modern high-speed rail, where are the people who are going to operate them? You need along time to bring them.
You need to put so much money into capital structures in order to create the employment facilities before the economy can begin to work again.
You look at the driving tools – the palm tree, cashew nuts, cotton field, ground nuts fields, cocoa farms, all of these are at different levels of disrepair and abandonment. They require large sums of money to restructure them before you can begin to operate them and come back to the previous revenues that you have attained.
We delude ourselves when we don’t realize that this is more than just a classical recession. It is a shortfall in revenues that have now exposed very deep structural problems within the economy. So, we have to address it from that standpoint; it is not a short-term phenomenon.
It is not just a question of what can we do to get the economy running again? A lot of these things require a minimum of one year. Talking about paper, it takes a very long period of gestation to plant the trees to produce papers. Palm trees take time to produce oil, and you have manage the farms the way they do in Malaysia, a country that came here and took away palm oil seedlings but is now exporting 30 times what Nigeria exports. We also import palm oil from them.
We have to acknowledge that this is more than a recession, which means that the entire economy has to be rebuilt properly.
Talking about rebuilding, the dearth of manpower, technical, and scientific management skill is another problem area. Universities of Technology, Colleges of Technology have to be properly staffed and equipped to bring out the type of people who can addressed the issues as I have just outlined. Farming is no more hoe and cutlass issue. It requires a lot of machinery and know-how.
We are more than in a recession because over the years, we didn’t plough back our resources deeply enough. We expended them on finished goods from other countries. We are still talking about assembly plants. The assembling we are doing today is worse than what had in the past.
At Peugeot plant, we were aiming at meeting 70 per cent of the content and the 30 percent imported, but today the reverse is the case, and this present 30 per cent includes labour.
Government is assuring Nigerians that in the third or last quarter of the year, Nigeria will come out of recession…
That is rubbish. It is nonsense for anybody to tell you that we are coming out of recession in the third or the last quarter of the year . They should stop giving us projections. They should tell us the concrete policies, resources they are mobilizing, the training they are doing, the restitution of the productive sector that is taking place. That is what the answer should be, not touching your lips and putting it into the air and telling us in three months or that you will come out of recession.
That is rubbish. If they are making those projections based on what I said, it is a different thing.
This is not an ephemeral recession of just improving liquidity and getting things going. We were in recession before the end of the last administration. The new administration is almost two years.
To define recession as two negative consecutive growth rates is what applies in advanced countries like Germany, US etc.
In our own economy, you have to go beyond that to underscore why you are having these negative consecutive growth rates. It goes beyond liquidity or foreign exchange shortage. It goes to address the real critical productive sectors of agriculture, non-agriculture, and mining, and even the tertiary services sector.
Look at what is happening in the aviation for instance. All of a sudden, Arik has to be taken over; at first we thought they were operating poorly because the clientele has fallen, as people don’t have the lush funds to fly up and down.
Where are the railways that should have been there to take up this slack; where are the roads; where is the security for more road travellers? As you go down the list, you find that these are not in place. They are critical issues.
They should stop giving us projections based on whims and caprices to make people feel happy. We all will be here, and the second, third and fourth quarter will come and another year will come. We better begin to address the real issues that have brought down the large sludge in unemployment. First, we always had large underemployment. By the time you put unemployment to underemployment, the rate of employment by comparison with industrialised countries must be a very small fraction.
It is best to define our problems in concrete terms, that is the way we can come out with concrete policies to solve our problems.
Acting President Osinbajo recently set up a taskforce to bring down the prices of foodstuff to ameliorate the suffering of the citizens. What is your view on this?
You will assume that these are all highly educated people in various fields, and you must also assume that after so many plans, so many budgets, so many high sounding development programmes, and we know that what determines a price is a function of what happens to the supply of the goods and the demands that register in the market.
The only way you can effect any change in the price is by going back to address those issues. Those issues are not what you set up committees to do. This is the whole point of planning, project development, policy-making and investment planning and plan implementation.
It is not something for which you would set up a committee to go to the market and find out why prices are high and bring them down.
There is no way you can bring down prices unless you address the short, medium and long-term factors that affect supply and demand.
No task force and no battalion that can force down the price, you would only end up creating more distortions in the price.
I will be surprised if this works. It may just be to give a sense of activities in motion.
The economy is in shambles, is this a function or the lack of expertise of the economic management team?
It is a function of everybody. I know it took a long time for people to accept that there was an economic management team. Most people thought there wasn’t any. It took a while for people to realize that there might have been an Economic Adviser when the cabinet was set up. It took a while for people to realise that there were other people who were recruited to join the cabinet to form the Economic management team.
Team or not, as they say, ‘the taste of the pudding is in the eating’. The results you expect from the Economic Management Team will be reflected in the qualities of the policies being implemented and how those policies are geared towards solving the problems identified.
For professional economists, you would assume may be, there is economic management team so far, in terms of resource mobilization, in terms of foreign exchange management, in terms of price management, in terms of growth of the real sector, in terms of improvement in infrastructures and other indicators, even though some of these require time to jell, at least you should be able to see the tendencies in the amplification of the capacity being created and the quality and well being in the lives of people as reflected.
I won’t take any comfort from the projection of coming out of recession in the third or last quarter.
Independently of that, as I said our problems are more structural than passing, and they are more deep rooted. So, any attempt to keep or make the people happy will be counter productive, and create so much cynicism that if at the end of the projected third quarter or last quarter, conditions are worse than even the first quarter; even when the government had come up with policies that may have some impacts that would need the cooperation of the populace, people would have been so disdainful to feel that they have any role to play to assist the government to achieve results.
Recently, former President OlusegunObasanjo advocated that the Igbo to produce the president in 2019. This has elicited mixed reactions. Some bought into the idea, while some were of the opinion that it’s restructuring that would benefit the Igbo. What is your position on these?
It was Chief Obasanjo’s right and privilege as a Nigerian and former president, as a politician to say what he likes.
Why should anybody spend time getting all worked up because Obasanjo said it?
Why should Ndigbo or any other section of the country need any individual from wherever to come and say such a thing? They should know that leadership should go round.
We should get a president by and large, whether from large or small group, somebody who can address these issues we are discussing; somebody who can do the job.
There is nothing that says we can’t get somebody from the Southeast to do the job. You don’t just pick somebody from the street and say that he is the president of Igbo extraction. The president is the president of Nigeria, who happens to come from one area. He happens to be the person at that material point in time, who can get the job done.
I have said it before to our people; we have to change through these problems and change through our reactions. It is parties that put up presidents and not ethnic groups.
For you to get one of your own to be president, that constituency must be involved in the political process. This connotes that people from the South-East should get off this penchant of not wanting to play in the big party, yet expecting to get the presidency. Common sense dictates that you must be involved in the major party. That is real politics.
We don’t need an Obasanjo to tell us, it is evident. The west has had it, the north and the South-South. Why shouldn’t the South-East have it? Also, it doesn’t mean that you run to Enugu and grab somebody and say we have got our own president.
The political class in the constituency has to work with their counterparts in other places; this requires political synergy, and networking. That is what we should be discussing, not whether it is a good idea or not.
It is about time that people from this area are given the chance to produce the president, even looking at it from a tripod arrangement.
It cannot be allocated; it has to be truly synergy and networking. I have always encouraged our people to get actively involved with the big parties.
Is it against the reason of getting actively involved in the big party that has led to the influx of many prominent Igbo politicians into APC?
It doesn’t matter for whatever reason they are doing that. I don’t think that is the reason. Why are they not going into the PDP? It is the Nigerian factor. They think that party is on the upswing, while the other one is on the downswing.
I certainly encouraged them even before the alliances were formed that we should have the simple political sense to make sure that we do the right political calculations, that if we do the wrong calculations we have nobody else, but ourselves to blame.
After we have done the wrong calculations, we are still going around beating our chests that we did the right thing. That is not very smart; that is not very truthful to us.
If you have any problem with Igbo politicians flocking into APC or other party I don’t. think that is what they should do. I could also be that they are responding, as some of us have actually been encouraging that, because we need to exploit the talent all over the country, we can’t allow it to be seen as if it is only one side or two sides that can supply the requisite quality of leadership that solves Nigeria’s mega problems.
So, we should be encouraging them to get involved, it is not only those who want to go for office, but the grassroots and the constituencies.
If you get involved and elect people at the state level or at the national level, you are able to hold them to explain their performance.
So far, we have had a very dismal record of calling people to account. You don’t call them to account when you are walking to your farm or to your shop. You hold them to account when you attend the local meetings, and your presence alone would demand hearing.
I have been encouraging our people to get involved not just at the election time, but long before the election to make sure that they prune the right people to represent them.
What is your fear for the nation, where ethnic organisations are pulling away from the centre towards their sides; more so, where you have self determination groups, which are making Nigeria not to emerge as a nation state, 56 years after independence?
Unless we call ourselves to order, we cannot blame providence or the colonial power.
We have tried to adduce all kinds of selfish motives in the way the structures were put in place. There were young men from various universities or high schools in Europe, who came here to manage the empire for their monarchs.
You would think that 56 years after that, we will not be blaming them for what they gave to us. Yet we are complaining that the quality of education they handed over to us have dropped; the quality of this has dropped, the quality of that has dropped.
At the minimum, we should have continued to improve on what was left for us. That already undermines this argument.
Depending on where you are and what you can see or touch, in some cases, there is no doubt that there is more disunity now than there was before, particularly in terms of economic hardship, in terms of decline in jobs, in terms of more strife and employment opportunities and distribution of positions.
At other times, you get the impression that things have not collapsed badly, and in some instances you find that there is still that camaraderie among the various groups. Even as we complain, there are more marriages among ethnic groups, and people speaking different languages in addition to theirs.
By and large, your question is addressing a very real problem, and unless we are able to provide better leadership that problem will remain there. So, leadership has always constituted the major problem in Nigeria.
Many countries are heterogeneous contraction of many ethnic nationalities, but if we can get a leadership… look at Rwanda, in spite of what they passed through, with the right leadership who have managed to get the various groups together, they are forging ahead.
If you can get a leader who can demonstrate and mobilize the best so that you can create opportunities maximally, then you we are getting our problem solved. When you are creating opportunities you are also reducing the potential for centrifugal infighting and people pulling from different directions.
First is leadership, second is creation of commensurate growth in opportunities so that the cake-sharing mentality can be in a way that it contributes to more growth.
My fear is that unless we get the leadership that can demonstrate obvious fairness to all, we are not going anywhere. This is not easy because everybody seems to be in a hurry.
You talked about creating fairness and opportunities, a situation where different criteria are used for different people into offices or admissions, won’t these put pressures on the centre?
We are different peoples. We received westernization at different levels. The speed with which we receive it is not a blessing or a curse.
However, we have the resources and with the right leadership, if well spent we will progressively be bringing everybody up to the same standard, but we misused it by trying to slowdown and append a ridiculous cut off marks for different sections. Those are not the right policies.
In an interview with Sunday Sun recently, Prof AngoAbdullahi, said the North was ready to break away from Nigeria, are the Igbo ready?
In 1966, the North was ready to breakaway. They were persuaded that it was not the right thing to do, rather a distinct opportunity… how can you do that when you have a whole territory that you can play with, and you wanted to run away from it?
The West had its own anthem; I have heard it sang here and there. I grew up in this part and I knew they would not take it so lightly and it depends on so many factors.
For the East, for 80 years, we have been shedding our blood, our sweat, we have been striving and we have been building all over this country.
When it came to strife that was imposed, of course there was no other option but to resist it.
My position is that what we have is a dearth of political, a dearth of rule of law, and a dearth of the mobilization of the right leadership. This is where our people should be focusing on until we sufficiently explore how we can change the situation for the advantage of everybody.
It will be superficial to say that we just want to breakaway. When it came for us to go, we didn’t need to discuss it. There was a representative government and it took the decision and forced the hand of the person who was at the top, and the evidence was there for everybody to see. Never mind that the other people didn’t like the idea. Many didn’t see the gravity of the crime that was committed; the enormity of the carnage, the pogrom, the killings. We have to see this thing from its proper context.
Look around the world, this is the way other countries passed through the hot crucible and they became modern nations. We should give it that shot and resist the temptation to break it up. When the time came to do so, we didn’t take to debating it. The situation now is very different from what happened in 1966. The circumstances

Nigeria not coming out of recession soon – Idika Kalu

Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu, a two-time minister, and Chairman of the Institute for Policy and Economic Development is at home with issues relating to the nation’s economy. In an interview with VINCENT KALU, he said Nigeria is not coming out of recession soon, and urged government to stop giving the citizens false hope that the recession will end this year.
According to him, anyone having such impression lacks understanding of the kind of recession the country faces. He also cautioned Igbo politicians against jumping into the fray because former President Olusegun Obasanjo told them that the time is ripe for them to produce the nation’s president. He however, highlighted how to achieve Igbo presidency.
The country is in recession, how can she get out of it?
From a professional standpoint, recession refers to a situation where capital structures are in place, but the means to sustain the recurrent expenditures that keep those structures working decline because of sudden change in taste and price.
It is wrong for us to think that we are merely in a recession. There is a drop in current receipts from oil and from other exports; we also have a sharp drop in our terms of trade, that is, the import prices weigh higher than export prices, and total revenues are a fraction of what we used to have.
So, we have a big gap in our current revenues, big gap in our balance of payments (the different between imports and exports), therefore, a sharp drop in the ability of our public finance to meet with the needs of government at various levels.
But it is worse than that because it has just exposed that we are not just at lower current incomes, but the capital structures are not even there to raise financing and get them working again.
Here, we still need to build roads, power, rails, mining structures, processing plants etc.
We don’t have the structures, if we had, it is just for us to borrow and get the idle power and others working again.
What is more serious indication of the depression we are in now is that even the manpower is not there. If for instance we got money to have modern high-speed rail, where are the people who are going to operate them? You need along time to bring them.
You need to put so much money into capital structures in order to create the employment facilities before the economy can begin to work again.
You look at the driving tools – the palm tree, cashew nuts, cotton field, ground nuts fields, cocoa farms, all of these are at different levels of disrepair and abandonment. They require large sums of money to restructure them before you can begin to operate them and come back to the previous revenues that you have attained.
We delude ourselves when we don’t realize that this is more than just a classical recession. It is a shortfall in revenues that have now exposed very deep structural problems within the economy. So, we have to address it from that standpoint; it is not a short-term phenomenon.
It is not just a question of what can we do to get the economy running again? A lot of these things require a minimum of one year. Talking about paper, it takes a very long period of gestation to plant the trees to produce papers. Palm trees take time to produce oil, and you have manage the farms the way they do in Malaysia, a country that came here and took away palm oil seedlings but is now exporting 30 times what Nigeria exports. We also import palm oil from them.
We have to acknowledge that this is more than a recession, which means that the entire economy has to be rebuilt properly.
Talking about rebuilding, the dearth of manpower, technical, and scientific management skill is another problem area. Universities of Technology, Colleges of Technology have to be properly staffed and equipped to bring out the type of people who can addressed the issues as I have just outlined. Farming is no more hoe and cutlass issue. It requires a lot of machinery and know-how.
We are more than in a recession because over the years, we didn’t plough back our resources deeply enough. We expended them on finished goods from other countries. We are still talking about assembly plants. The assembling we are doing today is worse than what had in the past.
At Peugeot plant, we were aiming at meeting 70 per cent of the content and the 30 percent imported, but today the reverse is the case, and this present 30 per cent includes labour.
Government is assuring Nigerians that in the third or last quarter of the year, Nigeria will come out of recession…
That is rubbish. It is nonsense for anybody to tell you that we are coming out of recession in the third or the last quarter of the year . They should stop giving us projections. They should tell us the concrete policies, resources they are mobilizing, the training they are doing, the restitution of the productive sector that is taking place. That is what the answer should be, not touching your lips and putting it into the air and telling us in three months or that you will come out of recession.
That is rubbish. If they are making those projections based on what I said, it is a different thing.
This is not an ephemeral recession of just improving liquidity and getting things going. We were in recession before the end of the last administration. The new administration is almost two years.
To define recession as two negative consecutive growth rates is what applies in advanced countries like Germany, US etc.
In our own economy, you have to go beyond that to underscore why you are having these negative consecutive growth rates. It goes beyond liquidity or foreign exchange shortage. It goes to address the real critical productive sectors of agriculture, non-agriculture, and mining, and even the tertiary services sector.
Look at what is happening in the aviation for instance. All of a sudden, Arik has to be taken over; at first we thought they were operating poorly because the clientele has fallen, as people don’t have the lush funds to fly up and down.
Where are the railways that should have been there to take up this slack; where are the roads; where is the security for more road travellers? As you go down the list, you find that these are not in place. They are critical issues.
They should stop giving us projections based on whims and caprices to make people feel happy. We all will be here, and the second, third and fourth quarter will come and another year will come. We better begin to address the real issues that have brought down the large sludge in unemployment. First, we always had large underemployment. By the time you put unemployment to underemployment, the rate of employment by comparison with industrialised countries must be a very small fraction.
It is best to define our problems in concrete terms, that is the way we can come out with concrete policies to solve our problems.
Acting President Osinbajo recently set up a taskforce to bring down the prices of foodstuff to ameliorate the suffering of the citizens. What is your view on this?
You will assume that these are all highly educated people in various fields, and you must also assume that after so many plans, so many budgets, so many high sounding development programmes, and we know that what determines a price is a function of what happens to the supply of the goods and the demands that register in the market.
The only way you can effect any change in the price is by going back to address those issues. Those issues are not what you set up committees to do. This is the whole point of planning, project development, policy-making and investment planning and plan implementation.
It is not something for which you would set up a committee to go to the market and find out why prices are high and bring them down.
There is no way you can bring down prices unless you address the short, medium and long-term factors that affect supply and demand.
No task force and no battalion that can force down the price, you would only end up creating more distortions in the price.
I will be surprised if this works. It may just be to give a sense of activities in motion.
The economy is in shambles, is this a function or the lack of expertise of the economic management team?
It is a function of everybody. I know it took a long time for people to accept that there was an economic management team. Most people thought there wasn’t any. It took a while for people to realize that there might have been an Economic Adviser when the cabinet was set up. It took a while for people to realise that there were other people who were recruited to join the cabinet to form the Economic management team.
Team or not, as they say, ‘the taste of the pudding is in the eating’. The results you expect from the Economic Management Team will be reflected in the qualities of the policies being implemented and how those policies are geared towards solving the problems identified.
For professional economists, you would assume may be, there is economic management team so far, in terms of resource mobilization, in terms of foreign exchange management, in terms of price management, in terms of growth of the real sector, in terms of improvement in infrastructures and other indicators, even though some of these require time to jell, at least you should be able to see the tendencies in the amplification of the capacity being created and the quality and well being in the lives of people as reflected.
I won’t take any comfort from the projection of coming out of recession in the third or last quarter.
Independently of that, as I said our problems are more structural than passing, and they are more deep rooted. So, any attempt to keep or make the people happy will be counter productive, and create so much cynicism that if at the end of the projected third quarter or last quarter, conditions are worse than even the first quarter; even when the government had come up with policies that may have some impacts that would need the cooperation of the populace, people would have been so disdainful to feel that they have any role to play to assist the government to achieve results.
Recently, former President OlusegunObasanjo advocated that the Igbo to produce the president in 2019. This has elicited mixed reactions. Some bought into the idea, while some were of the opinion that it’s restructuring that would benefit the Igbo. What is your position on these?
It was Chief Obasanjo’s right and privilege as a Nigerian and former president, as a politician to say what he likes.
Why should anybody spend time getting all worked up because Obasanjo said it?
Why should Ndigbo or any other section of the country need any individual from wherever to come and say such a thing? They should know that leadership should go round.
We should get a president by and large, whether from large or small group, somebody who can address these issues we are discussing; somebody who can do the job.
There is nothing that says we can’t get somebody from the Southeast to do the job. You don’t just pick somebody from the street and say that he is the president of Igbo extraction. The president is the president of Nigeria, who happens to come from one area. He happens to be the person at that material point in time, who can get the job done.
I have said it before to our people; we have to change through these problems and change through our reactions. It is parties that put up presidents and not ethnic groups.
For you to get one of your own to be president, that constituency must be involved in the political process. This connotes that people from the South-East should get off this penchant of not wanting to play in the big party, yet expecting to get the presidency. Common sense dictates that you must be involved in the major party. That is real politics.
We don’t need an Obasanjo to tell us, it is evident. The west has had it, the north and the South-South. Why shouldn’t the South-East have it? Also, it doesn’t mean that you run to Enugu and grab somebody and say we have got our own president.
The political class in the constituency has to work with their counterparts in other places; this requires political synergy, and networking. That is what we should be discussing, not whether it is a good idea or not.
It is about time that people from this area are given the chance to produce the president, even looking at it from a tripod arrangement.
It cannot be allocated; it has to be truly synergy and networking. I have always encouraged our people to get actively involved with the big parties.
Is it against the reason of getting actively involved in the big party that has led to the influx of many prominent Igbo politicians into APC?
It doesn’t matter for whatever reason they are doing that. I don’t think that is the reason. Why are they not going into the PDP? It is the Nigerian factor. They think that party is on the upswing, while the other one is on the downswing.
I certainly encouraged them even before the alliances were formed that we should have the simple political sense to make sure that we do the right political calculations, that if we do the wrong calculations we have nobody else, but ourselves to blame.
After we have done the wrong calculations, we are still going around beating our chests that we did the right thing. That is not very smart; that is not very truthful to us.
If you have any problem with Igbo politicians flocking into APC or other party I don’t. think that is what they should do. I could also be that they are responding, as some of us have actually been encouraging that, because we need to exploit the talent all over the country, we can’t allow it to be seen as if it is only one side or two sides that can supply the requisite quality of leadership that solves Nigeria’s mega problems.
So, we should be encouraging them to get involved, it is not only those who want to go for office, but the grassroots and the constituencies.
If you get involved and elect people at the state level or at the national level, you are able to hold them to explain their performance.
So far, we have had a very dismal record of calling people to account. You don’t call them to account when you are walking to your farm or to your shop. You hold them to account when you attend the local meetings, and your presence alone would demand hearing.
I have been encouraging our people to get involved not just at the election time, but long before the election to make sure that they prune the right people to represent them.
What is your fear for the nation, where ethnic organisations are pulling away from the centre towards their sides; more so, where you have self determination groups, which are making Nigeria not to emerge as a nation state, 56 years after independence?
Unless we call ourselves to order, we cannot blame providence or the colonial power.
We have tried to adduce all kinds of selfish motives in the way the structures were put in place. There were young men from various universities or high schools in Europe, who came here to manage the empire for their monarchs.
You would think that 56 years after that, we will not be blaming them for what they gave to us. Yet we are complaining that the quality of education they handed over to us have dropped; the quality of this has dropped, the quality of that has dropped.
At the minimum, we should have continued to improve on what was left for us. That already undermines this argument.
Depending on where you are and what you can see or touch, in some cases, there is no doubt that there is more disunity now than there was before, particularly in terms of economic hardship, in terms of decline in jobs, in terms of more strife and employment opportunities and distribution of positions.
At other times, you get the impression that things have not collapsed badly, and in some instances you find that there is still that camaraderie among the various groups. Even as we complain, there are more marriages among ethnic groups, and people speaking different languages in addition to theirs.
By and large, your question is addressing a very real problem, and unless we are able to provide better leadership that problem will remain there. So, leadership has always constituted the major problem in Nigeria.
Many countries are heterogeneous contraction of many ethnic nationalities, but if we can get a leadership… look at Rwanda, in spite of what they passed through, with the right leadership who have managed to get the various groups together, they are forging ahead.
If you can get a leader who can demonstrate and mobilize the best so that you can create opportunities maximally, then you we are getting our problem solved. When you are creating opportunities you are also reducing the potential for centrifugal infighting and people pulling from different directions.
First is leadership, second is creation of commensurate growth in opportunities so that the cake-sharing mentality can be in a way that it contributes to more growth.
My fear is that unless we get the leadership that can demonstrate obvious fairness to all, we are not going anywhere. This is not easy because everybody seems to be in a hurry.
You talked about creating fairness and opportunities, a situation where different criteria are used for different people into offices or admissions, won’t these put pressures on the centre?
We are different peoples. We received westernization at different levels. The speed with which we receive it is not a blessing or a curse.
However, we have the resources and with the right leadership, if well spent we will progressively be bringing everybody up to the same standard, but we misused it by trying to slowdown and append a ridiculous cut off marks for different sections. Those are not the right policies.
In an interview with Sunday Sun recently, Prof AngoAbdullahi, said the North was ready to break away from Nigeria, are the Igbo ready?
In 1966, the North was ready to breakaway. They were persuaded that it was not the right thing to do, rather a distinct opportunity… how can you do that when you have a whole territory that you can play with, and you wanted to run away from it?
The West had its own anthem; I have heard it sang here and there. I grew up in this part and I knew they would not take it so lightly and it depends on so many factors.
For the East, for 80 years, we have been shedding our blood, our sweat, we have been striving and we have been building all over this country.
When it came to strife that was imposed, of course there was no other option but to resist it.
My position is that what we have is a dearth of political, a dearth of rule of law, and a dearth of the mobilization of the right leadership. This is where our people should be focusing on until we sufficiently explore how we can change the situation for the advantage of everybody.
It will be superficial to say that we just want to breakaway. When it came for us to go, we didn’t need to discuss it. There was a representative government and it took the decision and forced the hand of the person who was at the top, and the evidence was there for everybody to see. Never mind that the other people didn’t like the idea. Many didn’t see the gravity of the crime that was committed; the enormity of the carnage, the pogrom, the killings. We have to see this thing from its proper context.
Look around the world, this is the way other countries passed through the hot crucible and they became modern nations. We should give it that shot and resist the temptation to break it up. When the time came to do so, we didn’t take to debating it. The situation now is very different from what happened in 1966. The circumstances

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu comments on reactions to Orji Uzo Kalu's visit to Nnamdi Kanu at Kuje prisons.

...... Not according Nnamdi Kanu his due legal rights and fundamental habeas corpus is " criminal and judicial incompetence" in the first instance! However, Nnamdi Kanu and partners miscalculated the context of the agitation! Ndigbo and other Nigerians went into the Biafran struggle by the inexorable force of the circumstances of the day! If those circumstances are repeated today, Ndigbo and other Nigerians would not need any single individual or band to force the issue!

Today we face all manner of poor governance at every conceivable level in virtually all institutions across every state in the land. . that is the crux of the logic for restructuring. . from the local government to a central government , with circumscribed powers!

All this romantic talk and presumed palliatives cannot ignore the real feelings of the ordinary citizens of this bewildered realm wherever they may live! We had better screw on our heads right to face the real existential issues all Nigerians are confronted with on a daily basis!

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu endorses Orji Uzo Kalu's joining of APC

I wish to unreservedly add my voice of total approval and support to all who have hailed the decision of His Excellency, Dr Orji Uzor Kalu, to join the APC, along with many of his friends and associates. My statement of support should not come as a surprise to all those who are aware of my position from the formative phase of the alliances that culminated in the emergence of the APC. It is my opinion that Orji Uzo Kalu's joining of APC is based on the strategic political interest of Ndigbo, an indisputable part of the tripod that holds together Nigeria's political firmament.

For long we have side-stepped this rightful position by ending up, inadvertently, adopting a minority posture in Nigerian politics to the dismay of our people and many of our neighbors and other Nigerians who remember the great legacy of our past heroes in the struggle for Nigerian and African independence! By this move, others who are still hibernating in other small formations should take queue . They should at the minimum seek a merger to belong to the future of power sharing in viable political parties that are truly alternative power blocs in Nigeria .

When APGA was established, we the foundation members set out , dissatisfied with the way the new PDP was evolving, to create an alternative " national" party! These moves are without prejudice to the continuous struggle to have a more perfect federal union . .or else! As long as we are still part and parcel of this imperfect union Nigeria, Ndigbo cannot continue to patch in a corner to ask for this or that . We must build squarely back into the High Table where the major decisions are taken.

This is the real politik behind this move!.The move by Gov OUK is in strategic synch with broader Igbo long term objectives to reject Igbo irrelevance that many are assigning to Ndigbo in spite of our continued dominance in other national demographics! It should be applauded and emulated.Let's organize for our numbers and implicit strength to count maximally! Let's play smart politics and reserve emotions for our essentially non - political conclaves.

Igbo is too big, too critically strategic to play in the sidelines. We must re - enter the main bowl of political contestation from viable national parties. We should play a positive role to evolve a strong two alternative party framework that helps to promote a healthy and even playing field that suits Igbo temperament and prediletions from our history. Let's play smart politics for a change.

In the meantime, the Alaigbo Development Foundation, along with other Igbo development subgroups was supposed to rebuilding Igbo economy, traditions and culture of responsible community governance to support the renewed engagement in national politics. It is the Igbo who are most fitted to undertake this task. . Just think about it. So we should get the Orji Uzor's and others with their polyglot and long reach to get on with the job. knowing that it is in the long term strategic interests of Ndigbo.

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu endorses Orji Uzo Kalu's joining of APC

I wish to unreservedly add my voice of total approval and support to all who have hailed the decision of His Excellency, Dr Orji Uzor Kalu, to join the APC, along with many of his friends and associates. My statement of support should not come as a surprise to all those who are aware of my position from the formative phase of the alliances that culminated in the emergence of the APC. It is my opinion that Orji Uzo Kalu's joining of APC is based on the strategic political interest of Ndigbo, an indisputable part of the tripod that holds together Nigeria's political firmament.

For long we have side-stepped this rightful position by ending up, inadvertently, adopting a minority posture in Nigerian politics to the dismay of our people and many of our neighbors and other Nigerians who remember the great legacy of our past heroes in the struggle for Nigerian and African independence! By this move, others who are still hibernating in other small formations should take queue . They should at the minimum seek a merger to belong to the future of power sharing in viable political parties that are truly alternative power blocs in Nigeria .

When APGA was established, we the foundation members set out , dissatisfied with the way the new PDP was evolving, to create an alternative " national" party! These moves are without prejudice to the continuous struggle to have a more perfect federal union . .or else! As long as we are still part and parcel of this imperfect union Nigeria, Ndigbo cannot continue to patch in a corner to ask for this or that . We must build squarely back into the High Table where the major decisions are taken.

This is the real politik behind this move!.The move by Gov OUK is in strategic synch with broader Igbo long term objectives to reject Igbo irrelevance that many are assigning to Ndigbo in spite of our continued dominance in other national demographics! It should be applauded and emulated.Let's organize for our numbers and implicit strength to count maximally! Let's play smart politics and reserve emotions for our essentially non - political conclaves.

Igbo is too big, too critically strategic to play in the sidelines. We must re - enter the main bowl of political contestation from viable national parties. We should play a positive role to evolve a strong two alternative party framework that helps to promote a healthy and even playing field that suits Igbo temperament and prediletions from our history. Let's play smart politics for a change.

In the meantime, the Alaigbo Development Foundation, along with other Igbo development subgroups was supposed to rebuilding Igbo economy, traditions and culture of responsible community governance to support the renewed engagement in national politics. It is the Igbo who are most fitted to undertake this task. . Just think about it. So we should get the Orji Uzor's and others with their polyglot and long reach to get on with the job. knowing that it is in the long term strategic interests of Ndigbo.

Dr Kalu Idika Kalu