For this government to speak of austerity is to further enrich the affluent while casting the average Nigerian into greater hardship and deeper socio-economic depression. As with the Euro zone the past five years since the global financial crisis, austerity has not solved the dire economic weakness of the nations that employed this sickening remedy. All austerity has done is tighten the grip of the wealthy on the economy while weakening the position of the middle class and the poor.

Austerity weakens aggregate demand, deflating an economy already fatigued and against the ropes. Those with hefty portfolios, profit as the value of their holdings appreciates by the very dynamics of deflation. Those who don’t have, find money even dearer to come by. Jobs and commerce disappear. Debt climbs. Deflation turns a noble but poor household into a committee of beggars and street urchins. The austerity that the current Administration offers is an insensitive, myopic policy that lends primacy of favour to meaningless accounting figures instead of to the material well-being of the people. Austerity undermines our economic pillars and breaks the spirit of the people. Austerity is the merchant of pessimism and hopeless futility. If you desire a nation of thralls, by all means continue this bleak path. If we want a nation of prosperity and economic justice, a different course is our due.

Listen carefully to the position of the Jonathan Administration as articulated by the finance minister and you shall collide into the barricades of illogic and its weighty consequences. The claim is that government is low on funds because the lower price of oil means fewer dollars are being collected from oil sales. This sounds logical but for one fundamental point. The dollar intake is basically irrelevant to determining the amount of naira the government commands and places into the political economy. This fundamental point reveals the government’s position to be the antiquated relic of a past era. It is the way of the gold standard which ceased to exist over forty years ago. As such, government’s stance is based more on superstition than on the actual functioning of modern economy with a sovereign fiat currency of its own.

The last I looked, Nigeria operates a Naira-based economy not a dollar-based one. There is no legal or moral restriction strictly limiting the amount of Naira in the system to match the amount of dollars collected via oil sales. More importantly, there is no economic justification for the close linkage implied by the government. If we take its position at face value, the Jonathan Administration is advocating that we effectively place the Naira and thus our fiscal policy on a “dollar standard.” The world jettisoned the gold standard in 1971 because it proved unworkable, reducing the policy space in which governments could pursue fiscal programs promoting full employment and social welfare. We should likewise reject this government’s imposition of a dollar standard on our nation’s fiscal operations.

Our government persists that it must limit fiscal outlays to the amount of dollars the nation holds. Similar to the operation of the discarded gold standard, following this path is to strap ourselves to austerity and the chronic deflation austerity produces.

Under the gold standard, a national government took pains not to incur budgetary deficits that exceeded the dimensions of its gold reserves. This was because the currency had no value by itself. Its value was based on the convention that the currency was backed by the nation’s gold holdings. Those governments that ran deficits had to pay those debts in gold. Given that gold supplies were always and everywhere finite and exhaustible, a nation had to keep its deficits within the confines of its ability to pay debts in gold. Because of this straitjacketing effect, nations would abandon the gold standard during harsh economic times in order to give them the fiscal freedom to rejuvenate their economies. This was the case during the Great Depression with the major economic powers. This should be the case with Nigeria today since the bulk of our people live in conditions redolent of the Great Depression or any other depression for that matter.

Our government persists that it must limit fiscal outlays to the amount of dollars the nation holds. Similar to the operation of the discarded gold standard, following this path is to strap ourselves to austerity and the chronic deflation austerity produces. Worse, it serves to enthral the fiscal policy of our sovereign nation to the monetary policy of another country. That nation plies monetary policy to serve its interests and not the economic interests of Nigeria. I am baffled why this government would give such power over the fate of our economic wellbeing to another nation that does not incorporate our interests into its decisional processes. This government makes our nation the economic servant of another so that government may turn about to make the Nigerian people its economic servant. While there is a certain logic to this dynamic, it is a perverse and debilitating one.