He was our president at the time and our overall welfare was in the balance. His failure would be our deepening poverty. Today because he didn’t heed the genuine advice we are faced with a threatening depression.

Let me recall my opening statement.
“No matter who is in power, we must do whatever is in our capacity to do, to steer the nation away from economic woes. The people have suffered too much hardship already”.

I submitted that Nigeria’s economy was indistinguishable from one in the state of a chronic depression.

The contours of the economic challenge facing government must be clearly postulated so that we see the vastness between where we are and where we should be.

The first order of business is fiscal in nature. Do we continue to peg our naira expenditures to our dollar intake or do we affix our domestic expenditure to a measure more apt to grow the economy?

To continue to link the government’s naira expenditure to dollar intake is to allow the decisions of foreign actors to hold undue influence over our fiscal policy. There is no logical necessity that foreigners’ taste for oil must determine our fiscal expenditures.

While no economy is completely independent, this linkage amounts to servitude so restrictive that it is as if the colonial tether was never severed.

Some will say the dollar linkage is fiscal prudent or they defend the practice by asserting this is the way we have always done it. But haven’t we also always fallen short?

The correct perspective is not to mechanistically restrict Naira expenditure to dollar intake. Continuing this peg is tantamount to donning economic blinders then praying that somehow we avoid the pitfall set before us. It points to deflation, recession and worse.

This is not prudence. It is the strange vocation of being pennywise yet pound foolish. Perpetuating this linkage will confine us to the single-commodity economic model in such a manner making us further delude ourselves that we must adhere to this linkage even more. All the while, our national privation will become our main growth industry.

The second order of business has to do with the extent to which government helps direct and encourage private sectors activity. Do we allow ourselves to be slaves to the forces of the market even though we know that the market itself is not free?

Or do we engage in some level of national industrial, infrastructure and employment planning, as has every large and important nation that has ever achieved prosperity – from England, to the United States to China?

Regarding fiscal policy, I advocate the close dollar linkage be explicitly broken. The last I looked, Nigeria operates a Naira-based economy, not a dollar-based one.