Posted by By Charles Onunaiju on
At the peak of the two-day vendors' strike to protest their indiscriminate arrest and looting of their wares by the agents of the Abuja Environmental and Protection Board (AEPB) the Minister in the Presidency and Chairman of the Federal Capital Development Territory...
At the peak of the two-day vendors' strike to protest their indiscriminate arrest and looting of their wares by the agents of the Abuja Environmental and Protection Board (AEPB) the Minister in the Presidency and Chairman of the Federal Capital Development Territory (FCT), Mallam Nasir El-Rufai was quoted to have told anxious readers to go to the internet and read all the newspapers, because he has done so himself. Infact, Mallam El-Rufai places advertisement on job vacancies and dates of interviews on the internet. Nobody denies that the internet is not a modern face or rather a sophisticated means of communication or information dissemination. But the fact is that access to it is extremely limited, even among literate people.
Mallam El-Rufai is an arch-type of a totally disconnected, lonely technocrats, aloof to the social fact and even contemptuous of the mass of the people; that formed the core of the current administration bureaucratic elite. The circle of Mallam El-Rufai, Mrs Ngozi Iweala-Okonjo, the Minister of Finance, Charles Soludo, Governor of the Central Bank, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, Minister of Solid Minerals and Mr. Masur Muktar, head of the Debt Management Office and few others claim and parade themselves as the face of the regime's reform agenda. Paradoxically, these are ruthless, neo-liberal technocrats and academics whose poor understanding of liberalism and market fundamentalism has been cruelly transposed to public policy with the buccaneering effect of ballooning poverty and excruciating social crises.
Even in Western Europe and United States where liberalism historically emerged without the constraints of extraneous factors, its breakdown was noticeable and was generously tampered by the Keynesian revolution most exemplified in the 'New Deal" of Franklin Roosevelt in the United States. Kenneth Gilbraith, a leading US economist warned that economic policy is not religion and should not therefore be treated as an article of faith that cannot be subjected to review and change. In an open display of naivety and ignorance, the Governor of the Central Bank, Professor Charles Soludo recently said publicly that South Africa can be the 'Japan" of Africa, while Nigeria can be the 'China" of Africa.
In the first place, China does not have a political party whose chairman as in the case of Nigeria puts his wife and son on the board of public corporations and utilities or a party hierarchy that is constantly 'butchered" at the whims of the president without the due process of party convention or other rules of the party. Even China does not have a central bank governor who doles out public money to a parliamentary committee and call it 'social responsibility".
But more seriously, China has had an average annual growth of nine per cent for more than 20 years, the fastest growth rate in the world and a stable exchange rate for more than 15 years. Infact, recently the Chinese currency, 'the Yuan" was revalued upwards by mere two per cent and China abandoned the 10 years old practice of pegging to the dollar and moved to a managed float of the Yuan against a basket of currencies. Last August, on the 10th, the governor of China's Central Bank, Mr. Zhou Xiaochuan explained the currencies which the basket contains. This is even strange and an unusual openess, because even Singapore which has operated similar system since the 1980s has never taken such steps.
The Chinese Central Bank governor said that the US dollars, Japanese Yen, the euro and South Korean won have the biggest weight but the basket also includes the currencies of Singapore, Britain, Malaysia, Russia, Australia, Thailand and Canada. The varied choice of the currencies according to Mr. Zhou, did not only depend on the pattern of China's trade, but also on the sources of its foreign direct investment (FDI). More importantly, Chinese economic reforms did not compose of selling public utilities to private persons. Most Chinese public companies were far more ailing than even their Nigerian counterparts because of bad debts and poor management or even outright corruption. But they were never turned over to private hands. Their management structures were radically changed making them self-accounting, competitive and profitable.
Largely through debt equity swap, some went under, others were taken over or merged, but none was 'dashed" out to the administration's friends and their boards were not thrown open to compensate political scavengers and party hacks. Infact, if Professor Soludo has the slightest idea of the economy of China and its management, his loud-mouthed comparison wouldn't have been necessary. Nigeria is far more resource endowed than China, but China is a socialist country whose more than two decades of economic reforms have consisted in the gradual use of the market in the sectoral allocation of resources. The country is led by a disciplined party, the Communist Party of China (CPC), which consults extensively with the other eight democratic parties and non-party groups in public policy and have travelled the road of revolution, reconstruction and now, reforms. The party is not a frivolous bunch kept together by a kleptomaniac appetite to loot and scavange public resources for private aggrandizement.
The Chinese communist party has done extensive reforms of itself and nudged the economic modernization drive to produce the most outstanding economic performance that mankind has ever seen. China has the highest volume of foreign direct investment, averaging 1billion US dollar monthly. The country has pulled more people out of poverty in the shortest time in all human history, and among 1.3 billion Chinese, only about 20million is reckoned to be living in poverty. The China's foreign reserve stood at a solid 711.0billion dollars as at last June. China currently drive global commodity prices like oil, steel, iron etc and in-fact, it is widely believed that if Beijing coughs, the entire world would immediately catch cold. And yet this was China which before 1978, gave the world only chairman 'Mao's Red book", revolutionary rhetoric orchestrated by the ‘gang of four' in the notorious cultural revolution. In-fact, professor Soludo's aspiration that Nigeria should be China is misplaced and historically out of context. The truth is that Nigeria can surpass China but only if Nigeria can produce a revolution in which the Soludo's, their political masters both local and abroad are swept out of power, influence and authority.
Mallam Nasir El-Rufai want to be taken serious as a reformer, enforcer and a goal-getter. He is neither. Plainly a dinosaur, who lacks any historical insight, he pursues the geography of city beauty to the utter neglect of a social fact. He does not appreciate that the contradiction of Abuja distorted master plan does not lay in the physical structure which he demolishes with cynical relish but in the nature and structure of public corruption in which the state and its agents are the principal perpetrators. The consequence is what the dimunitive El-Rufai's fights and not the fundamental cause.
The dialectics of this phenomenon would certainly be elusive to a man who auctioned the nations flagship telecom utility to a foreign company with headquarters in an uncompleted building and a bare eight staff members. Mallam el-Rufai certainly lives in the prison walls of his ideas, unrelated to history or social fact, Since his well publicized London taxis arrived Abuja, they roam the streets of the city in full glamour and beauty, but empty. The streets still bristle with the weather beaten buses and commercial motorcyclists, whom the residents have ever relied as the major source of transport in a city literally and gradually been transformed to animal zoo. The minister fences just any space in the name of recreational garden which is now largely patronized by reptiles and rodents. The people are too busy with the struggle of existence to pay attention to el-Rufai gardens and London taxis. People who know him say that the man beats his chest and claim that he is transforming Abuja and Nigeria.
Mrs Ngozi Okonjo Iweala is reported to have stopped her US dollars denominated salary, the reasons, been that she has settled all the dollar wage bill of her family. Now she earns her salary in the Nigerian naira. Well I think her job is done. She has successfully executed the mandate of her principal employer, the world bank and its dominant Paris club owners. Getting Nigeria to cough out 12 billion US dollars in less than a year in payment of dubious debts is unprecedented in history and she would be the only single official at the bank that have persuaded her home country through twists and turn to part with such money.
Among the administration reform shock troops only one enemy is identifiable to them in the distortion and weakness of Nigerian economy; the people. And as a result, the people bear the brunt of their reform hallucinations. However, no any reform is taking place. The fact is that this elements that wear the tag of reformers are positioning the country to the fringe and periphery of neo-capitalist global order, in which her role is essentially to absorb the excess heat and contradiction emanating from the prominent centers of the current global order. These minor gate-keepers here will be rewarded with fat jobs in influential global institutions and generous consultancy services and of course there will always be floating funds to funnel into the NGOs that are related to the clique. Russian reform arrowheads in the early and mid-1990s are having fun in Western Europe and North America now, and their country men and women are cleaning up the mess they left behind. In the next ten years ahead from now, I will ask you where our today 'reformers" are hanging out.
Mr. Onunaiju is a journalist based in Abuja.