Just when it looked like Nigerians were condemned to listening to barren debates on non-issues in the run-up to the February 14 presidential and federal legislative elections, former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, waded in on January 25 with a bombshell that ought to force those seeking for our votes to debate the real issues that concern us.
Soludo’s roughly 6,000-word article, “Buhari versus Jonathan: Beyond the Elections,” may yet fail in achieving his apparent objective but after his piece, which was essentially about President Goodluck’s management – the former CBN Governor himself called it mismanagement – of our economy, no one can say there has been no attempt to put an end to the manipulation and exploitation of primordial sentiments by politicians to win our votes.
In this respect, it was good that Soludo’s piece provoked a very rapid response the very next day from our Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, through her Special Adviser, Paul Nwabuikwu. The very headline of Nwabuikwu’s roughly 3,220-word reply to Soludo which was a parody of sorts of the title of Soludo’s piece – “Beyond Belief: Soludo’s Self-Serving article on Economic Management is Deficit in Facts, Logic and Honour” – spoke volumes about the anger his article must have provoked in Abuja.
First, Soludo said in his article, at the time of oil boom Nigeria had gone on a consumption spree “such that the budgets of the last five years can best be described as ‘consumption budgets.’” Second, he said, not one penny was added to the stock of foreign reserves at a period Nigeria earned hundreds of billions from oil.
Third, the country, he said, went on a borrowing binge such that “the rate of public debt accumulation at a time of unprecedented boom had no parallel in the world…
“In sum, the mismanagement of our economy has brought us once more to the brink.”
Neither the government nor the opposition, he said, have so far come up with any credible economic policies on how to bring the country back from that brink.
Not surprisingly, his harsh criticism of government greatly angered the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Finance Minister. “It is totally remarkable” she said in the rather uncharitable opening paragraphs of her reply through Nwabuikwu, “that Professor Charles Chukwuma Soludo, the man who presided over the worst mismanagement of Nigeria’s banking sector as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria between May 2004 and May 2009, can write about the mismanagement of the economy.”
Her concluding paragraph was even less charitable of the former CBN Governor.
“It is a sad day for Nigeria and the economics profession,” she said, “that someone like Soludo, a former CBN governor should write such an article. If Soludo wants to regain respect, he should return to the path of professionalism. He certainly needs something to improve his image from that of someone whose sojourn into National Economic Management ended in disaster for the banking sector, his sojourn in politics, ended in overwhelming rejection by the electorate, and more recently, his sojourn abroad, has put him out of touch with the reality of the Nigerian economy.”
Soludo, obviously spoiling for a fight, fired back an even more damaging charge of economic mismanagement against the minister. “Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala And The Missing Trillions (1)” he entitled his roughly 6,500-word rejoinder to her rejoinder. This time he accused the minister, more or less, of criminal negligence in carrying out her brief as a double-minister.
“My earlier article,” he said, “stated that the minimum forex reserves should have been at least $90 billion by now and you did not challenge it. Rather it is about $30 billion, meaning that gross mismanagement has denied the country some $60 billion or another N12.6 trillion.
“Now add the ‘missing’ $20 billion from the NNPC. You promised a forensic audit report ‘soon’, and more than a year later the Report itself is still ‘missing’. This is over N4 trillion, and we don’t know how much more has ‘missed’ since Sanusi cried out.”
Soludo then proceeded to challenge her to a three-way debate between the government and the leading opposition party, with himself as a third party on any economic topic of her choice. The debate, he suggested, should also include the way out of our economic mess and should take place by February 12.
I doubt that the minister will pick up Soludo’s gauntlet. But even if she did it is doubtful that a debate at this time will make any difference because, as Soludo himself said in his first article, most Nigerians have pretty much made up their minds who to vote for on considerations other than the record of performance and dispositions of the contestants.
Even then I still believe Soludo deserves commendation for trying to pull us away from the useless debates on non-issues that have so far characterised the campaigns.
Soludo’s articles may have been self-serving. Certainly his record as CBN Governor is hardly as glorious as he has tried to paint it. True, his creation of 25 mega-banks out of the hitherto existing 89 transformed Nigeria’s financial sector like no other reform before it, but it did not achieve its principal objectives. It did stop the banking sector, in which 11 banks were already seriously ailing, from an imminent collapse. However, the mergers did not stop some of them from remaining family piggybanks, nor did they improve transparency and good governance, a failure which forced his successor, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, to do a massive cleaning up pretty early in his tenure. Nor still did the mega banks finance the so-called “real sector” – agriculture, manufacturing and even services – more than marginally better than the smaller banks.
However, I believe it is rather disingenuous of our double-minister to try and isolate what she calls Soludo’s failure from what she says was the wonderful performance of the economy during her first sojourn as Finance Minister on leave from the World Bank. First, as she very well knew, if Soludo failed to supervise the new mega-banks closely it was because the chief executives of some of the banks had an even easier access to the top hierarchy of government than Soludo himself. Soludo simply knew his limits and wisely refrained from crossing them.
Second, she was merely the first among equals in President Olusegun Obasanjo’s Economic Management Team and several of its ideas came from others, not least of all from Soludo as, first, Obasanjo’s Economic Adviser, and then CBN Governor.
The problem with our double-minister, I believe, is, first, that all too often she wants to eat her cake and still have it; she likes to take credit for government’s achievements and distant herself from its failures. She has, for example, been quick to take credit for the country’s debt relief in 2005 and yet decline responsibility for the fact that the relief translated into little or no benefit for ordinary Nigerians.
More recently she has been quick to take credit for the so-called rebasing of the country’s economy which has made it Africa’s number one, well ahead of the wealthier South African’s, the continent’s hitherto number one. But while quick in taking credit for Nigeria’s phantom economic growth she is reticent, to say the least, about the fact that the country’s human development index is worse today than it was before the rebasing. Worse, she has been even more reticent about the incredible degree of corruption in the land.
Second, our double-minister likes to talk about the sacrifices she has made in leaving her job at the World Bank to come back home and serve. What you never hear from her is what benefits she has derived from coming home to serve including her high profile projections abroad and enviable physical assets at home.
This, of course, is natural. But it is also the very reason why she should spare us her sermons on her self-sacrifice.
In an interview with Will Ross, BBC’s Lagos Correspondent, on March 12 last year, for example, she seemed angry when he asked her if Nigeria was serious about fighting corruption. He had pointed to her that there seemed to be a huge gap between government’s declaration of war on corruption and its actions, notably the unprecedented suspension of the CBN governor, Malam Sanusi, for raising an alarm over huge sums missing from the Federation Account .
Didn’t she think, Ross asked, her reputation was at stake?
“I don’t think my reputation is under threat and to imply otherwise is distinctly wrong. I know what I’m doing. I know why I’m here. It would be very easy for me to sit at the World Bank and earn a nice salary and criticise. I gave up a comfortable career to come here and do my bit because I recognise that nobody but us Nigerians can clean it up.”
Fine words, indeed. Trouble is, doing her own bit has not been any more glorious and more beneficial to ordinary Nigerians than that of Soludo, her new-found pet-hate. Nor has her doing her own bit been all sacrifices and no benefits.
