Kalu Onuma, Public analyst and Administrative Secretary of Ndigbo Lagos, in this interview with Assistant Politics Editor, DANIEL KANU, speaks on the Nigerian condition, challenges and what leadership needs to do.
Your assessment of the Nigerian condition.
The Nigerian economy is wobbling. It is a very large economy; however, it is in a very deep distress. It will be difficult, in a very short discussion as this, to diagnose the problem.But one needs to point out here that when you vote in a government, you expect them to come up with solutions, make policies, give directives and incentives to boast the economy. I believe that government has no business being in business. In other words, the government’s business is to create the enabling environment for the economy to function on its own.
In the present government, one sees a situation where the policies, body language, statements, attitudes, name them, do not give one enough confidence to say that they are on top of the matter. An economy that does not positively impact on the lives of the average individual on the streetshould be re-evaluated.
Nigerian economy has been very monotonous and we need diversification. Past governments said so, yet nothing happened. The present government is saying the same thing.There is so much promises out there on how Nigeria is going to be lessdependent on oil. We need to talk less, make it less acrimonious investing in those areas that Nigeria requires to invest in. That is the solution and not propaganda that will see us through this mess. Nigeria is a country of deep waste. Nigeria is a very loud country, embarrassingly expensive to live in. Expensive in the sense that we copy so much what we see on the screen, what we see happening in developed economies and what we see other people do, without the necessary preparation to live that kind of life. Looking at Nigeria’s economy, for me, is a two-way thing: the way we live our lives and the policies. On both, I score Nigeria very low. There seems to be failure of leadership. We are not doing enough to stop capital flight. However, you want to look at it, the future is very bleak. The government, it seems to me, appears to have no clue.
Let’s leave the economy and delve a bit into politics because Nigeria cannot, as it is now, continue to pretend that things are right. We have created so many things that take money out of the system, and no money is being taken back to the system.
Upon what should we, as a nation of tax-payers, allow the governments to gather every month and distribute money to themselves and do not earn money back to the coffers? Nigeria is in a problem.
Today, the world is shifting slowly to other sources of energy and we are still struggling to generate energy to sustain Lagos and Abuja, because when you get out of these two places, the nation is in darkness.
Today, they are APC; but yesterday they were PDP. All this is just crap. You can’t develop a country like that.
Are you saying that despite the loud rhetoric of diversification by the government, there really is none?
If it’s this same country I am in, for God’s sake, we’ve been seeing all these things. Last week, I bought a bag of rice for N17,500. So, when did that rhetoric start? Nothing is going on. And this is a country where the molue on the street puts N1 on top and tells you why prices don’t come down but go up. This is not a country that the basic average laws of economics – supply and demand – influence anything. It’s a country where everybody wakes up in the morning and decides how he wants to run his business and life.
It’s a country where an elected government would tell you ‘these people didn’t vote for me; so I’m not going to do anything for them’. It gives you a sense of the mind-set we are dealing with.
We did not start these timelines today; take Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) for instance, there was a timeline. Have we been able to feed ourselves?
When I listen to news coming from other parts of the world, I ask myself: how long will these days of grace last? Everything is cosmetic in this country; when will we see the real Nigerians running Nigeria for Nigerians?
Don’t you think your opinion is in conflict with the recent affirmation of Nigeria’s economy as Africa’s biggest by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)?
I don’t know what data was given to IMF and upon what data it is putting that. However, not being an economist but being a Nigerian living within Nigeria and dealing with the Nigerian market, I can simply tell you that this economy has got a whole lot of problems.
Travel to the villages and see how people are suffering.So, if IMF is dealing with all these indices as they affect the average individual and not as they affect the 10 per cent, then that might make sense.But it doesn’t make sense to me with all the hunger and poverty in the land.
I would like IMF to depend its data on the poor 90 percent and then give a projection.
What can you say about the South East, especially the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and the treatment the members are receiving from the government?
The South East, just like any other region and zone within the country, is not finding it funny in this present administration. If this country remains the way it is, we would continue to do what we are doing, running in circles. The truth is simple: whether it is IPOB or MASSOB (Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra) or Egbesu boys, Avengers or Boko Haram, name any reactionary group, emanates from the point that the system is wrong. And for me, it is a problem of structure and governance.
Nigeria is badly structured. When people hear about restructuring and all that, they think about it from a very sarcastic point of view. It is as simple as that: 36-statestructure is not viable, not with what we are doing.
It is not about the money you put in the South East, though such money, as long as it goes to other regions, should come to us.But it is when you create a level-playing ground where everybody can function within his own abilities and at his own pace that things will begin to change.
Where is it written that the centre will come and take everything I have and then decide what it gives me? It is not done and it can’t continue like that.
You cannot create a nation by fiat. A nation is an evolving organism, and if you’re not prepared to evolve with it, then you belong to the dustbin of history because that’s how history will remember you. We need to restructure Nigeria. We need to put this country back to the people.
We need statesmen, nation-builders to fix this country. Each time we specifically say we want devolution of power, restructuring of the country, independence and autonomy and all sorts of things, they think that we don’t have a stake in Nigeria; that we want to get out of Nigeria. There is no better Nigerian than the Igbo man. There is no one that has more stakes in Nigeria than the Igbo. We are the rubber bands that hold Nigeria; that is why we are everywhere.
We have come to understand Nigeria as something that is not properly put together.One day, mark my word, it will implode.
