Nigeria's turning
point
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF
Associate since 1991
Comments directly to
JonatPower@aol.com
February 28, 2007
LONDON - The popular mood is mainly sour in Africa’s
largest nation. If President Olusegun Obasanjo were to run again for a
third term in April - which is what he wanted to, but was restrained by
the constitution - he would probably loose. If you are poor in Nigeria
it is hard to appreciate the progress that impresses the businessmen,
the bankers and, most importantly, the International Monetary Fund.
For the man or the woman in the street all that can
be seen is large scale unemployment, rising fuel prices, more erratic
electricity supplies and declining facilities in village health care clinics.
Bravely, the government has decided to increase fuel prices yet again
early this year in an attempt to improve the deficit, but the great mass
of car and motorbike drivers who clog every street in every town are incensed.
Twenty years of misrule by one bad military leader after another left
an indelible mark, and the cumulative degradation of basic facilities
has been hard to turn around in the space of Obasanjo’s eight years
of exhuberant, but demanding, democracy.
It is on the macro level that he has scored and that has only become apparent
in his second term when he has been more free to bring in his own people,
not least the all-woman top team at the finance ministry, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
and Nenadi Usman, who have pruned, kicked and prosecuted until the corrupt
old ways of doing federal business have been reshaped beyond all recognition,
where spending is now carefully controlled, the banking system has been
overhauled and rapacious bankers sent to jail, contracts have been made
honest and the privatization program and the reform of the energy sector
has steamed ahead. Last year Nigeria was removed from the list of non-compliant
countries in the global fight against money-laundering, at which Nigerians
excelled.
The IMF sent in a team in December to examine the economy. They said in
their report that “GDP growth and increases in per capita income
have doubled in the last five years compared with the previous two decades”.
Headline inflation is down to single digits. And reserves rose to $41
billion despite Nigeria repaying all its massive debts. The hedge funds
are investing in Nigerian currency and its credit rating has so improved
that Nigeria is now issuing bonds on the global market. Companies such
as Mittal are beginning to invest, not just in the once moribund steel
sector as one would expect but in the energy sector too. The Chinese are
planning to resuscitate one decaying railroad line and the South Koreans
another. Five years ago the majority of Nigeria’s drugs were faked.
Now the possibility that a drug is a fake has dropped to 17%, according
to the World Health Organization.
Economic growth is consistently around an annual 7% rate, with a surprising
8% growth in the non-oil sector, mainly because of a surge in agricultural
production, which has been sustained through years of both plentiful and
poor rain. Few in the diplomatic community laughed when the central bank
governor in a recent speech said that Nigeria could become the “China
of Africa” with a 10% growth rate within five years. After a few
days spent in the seeming chaos of Lagos, where a city of 20 million appears
to be hyperactive, one senses the desperate urge for economic endeavor.
Now that investors can safely come in, entrepreneurs can more easily get
in and out of the docks and airport (unrecognizable from eight years ago),
and money can be moved easily by Nigeria’s burgeoning e-commerce
system, it must be only a matter of time before Lagos becomes another
Calcutta, or - who dare say no? - Shanghai.
However, there are plenty of people who shake their heads - not just the
rank and file electorate- but diplomats, especially American ones, who
still see the massive problems - the slow arrival of more power stations,
the inadequate electrical grid, the mal- administration, the growing crime
rate, the corruption of the police, the deteriorating roads and schools
and, not least, the fast increase of kidnappings and extortion by armed
gangs in the oil producing Niger delta.
The election is a bitter one. Obasanjo has fallen out with his vice president
who is now running against Obasanjo’s own nominee. The third candidate
is an ex-hard line military dictator. With the popular mood as it is the
race is wide open. But even the severe critics in the American compound
believe, if the election is more or less fair and civil peace continues,
none of the three candidates can turn back the clock and Nigeria will
continue with its reforms, democracy and forward progress.
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan
Power
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Jonathan Power can be
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