In Retrospect: Those worthless letters
By
THE current debate on deregulation took me to my library in search of a copy of Letters to my Countrymen. I had had the eleven letters published in book form in 1993 under the title of Reflections on Letters to My Countrymen. In reflecting on the letters, I had discovered that many of the things done for Nigeria to take off had been undone because Nigerians have never wanted to make sacrifices. They have always wanted to enjoy today, but refused or were unwilling to endure the consequences of eating today the yams they ought to have planted to give the yield that would have prevented the starvation of tomorrow. Watching what has been going on since the debate on deregulation the oil sector began to gather momentum, I went in search of the letters because the same arguments are being pushed by the same people or institutions, and we shall end the way we have ended - pushing the day of sacrifices and suffering to the future, to generations that ought to have been grateful to us for a future we built for them, but which should curse us for eating their share before they were born.
As long as the debate lasts, I intend to revisit those letters and proffer the arguments I pushed then. Many thought I was writing to defend Babangida, but in putting across the arguments I made then, I should leave out those areas where I addressed what the government was doing. If at the end of the day we refuse to give the future a chance, then posterity will judge those who have always been too willing to strangle Nigerians through emotional gimmicks that draw support only from hired praise singers whose loud piping is the tune dictated by those who paid them.
Let me share with you part of the letter on SAP. It deals with the Road If not taken. I said that the hue and cry about the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was emotional, not reasoned. Those asking for dismantling the structures put up to implement the SAP were those who gained by dismantling the structures or those who were ignorant and had remained ignorant about why structural adjustment was undertaken. Those genuinely against SAP were students and they had been made to move against it because they were informed that it was imposed from the world outside, that the IMF and the World Bank were the puppet masters of capitalists. Labour was also against SAP, but when all the chips were down, they accepted it but asked that it be implemented with a human face.
I said that those who were arguing against SAP to the extent of questioning it as a philosophy of our national life did not mean well for the country. However, sophisticated and educated they were, they were, to me, looking at the crescent of the moon. Their vested interests would not let them see the full moon. Yes, they could question the operation of the Foreign Exchange Market, the setbacks of the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructures and the Directorate of Employment. They could be angered by the shortcomings of MAMSER, the abuses in the operation of the new tariff structures. They could see as most unsettling, the despicable behaviour of operatives at the ports who had been sent there to let the goods being exported flow but had become the clog in the wheel of the flow. All those had to do with manning the road taken. But do you take the operation of a system for the system? Do you abandon capitalism as a system because it is poorly operated or jettison socialism as a system because of some of the failings of its operatives? I argued that if we abandoned SAP, we were asking that the ban on rice, maize, flour and malt barley should be lifted. We would then be spending no less than a fifth of all our foreign exchange earnings on paying for food we could grow. So that instead of America paying for our oil in dollars, we would in effect be collecting wheat and rice; yet we have our superior staples. If we abandoned SAP, we were asking that the foreign exchange market should be shut down, that licensing of every imported item should return, which would see everyone going to the ministry of trade for a paper to import of pin; that commodity boards should come back; that export promotion should go, that locational approvals for industries should be restored, and that the hundreds of government-promoted industries that were waste pipes should be propped up with tax-payers’ money. "In one burst of activity, we would have restored the very structures that encouraged, nurtured, promoted and sustained corruption in high places". I saw SAP, not as a Strike At the Poor, but a Strike at Poverty.
The letter on SAP, the Road not Taken was written in June, 1988. Today, are we not back full circle in doing those things that urgently dictated the need for restructuring? Government is not a businessman and has never been. Those who want government to be involved in any form of business must be investigated because they must either be innocent victims of fraudulent manipulators of the system or they are part of the plan to corner the resources of the people for their pockets. Is it not these controls that have led to billions of Naira disappearing into foreign bank accounts?
Deregulation as pushed by various governments in this country has been too limited. You cannot give with one hand and take with the other. You cannot commercialize an outfit and bring to bear on that same outfit the drunken ways of officialdom. You cannot ask Nigeria Airways to earn its keep and divert the aircraft from its routes to clear pilgrims stranded in Jedda. If the airline was that dependable, why was the contract of lifting pilgrims not given to it? When it did it in the past, were there these many hitches?
Deregulation should be physical, mental and spiritual. Government should be in charge of providing the enabling environment for the political, economic, social and cultural manifestations of life to blossom. It has no business running anything, including importing and selling fuel. Who gains or loses if any arm of government ceases having anything to do with the importation and distribution of fuel, the generation and distribution of power, and the installation and marketing of telephones?
Why would the Federal Government retain all the powers of the Federation and donate crumbs to the federating units? Why would there be so many states and so many local governments and such a large army of operatives at the federal, state and local government levels? Have we sat down to look at the cost of government, or governance? Why would our lawmakers want to buy eight aircraft simply because the President wanted an aircraft for the vice-president? So many questions crying for answers. Yet we refuse to sit down and talk. I am feeling more uncomfortable than at any other time in recent times.
Prince Momoh is a former Minister of Information