Ifeanyi Uddin

What is your take on the debate going on, whether or not to sell the national assets?

Well, this reminds me of something I put on my Facebook wall recently. Essentially, when governance is poor, then “a ko t’ile ta” (which is a major put down in Yoruba) becomes a time of endearment.

You see, even in your business when revenues fall, you have to cut costs, reducing staff, outlets, etc. When this fail, you may have to sell assets too. Now I am also a small government person. I believe that government’s business is not business. Government’s business is to create an environment that is conducive for business to thrive and pay taxes. So you could sell the entire upstream and downstream oil and gas sector.

That way you remove the burden of having to meet annual joint venture cash calls. But it also means that the private sector is then free to meet those financing needs. Government may then simply tax and regulate. Most important is the transparency and openness of the process by which we move public assets into private hands. One error is to move a public monopoly and allow become a private monopoly. Once you sell you should ensure proper regulation, ensure competition, free exit and entry so that prices are set at levels that the market clears.

Ifeanyi Uddin

We have instances where industrial policy here has meant that Nigerians buy the resulting produce for multiples of what these commodities sell elsewhere. Now, that’s a tax on the people imposed by government on behalf of a private business. The worst way to sell national assets is for government through such process to pass on money from pockets of its people to the various private businesses.

Unfortunately, we have often done that in the name of supporting a domestic champion

Though you have mentioned some of these as we are talking, what other things the governments are going to do to revive this economy?.

This is a difficult question because we don’t have enough money to do much. That’s the first thing, we don’t have money. We are a N94 -N95 trillion economy, last budget was six point something trillion naira. There is only so much you can do in a N95 trillion economy with a N6 trillion budget. There is only so much, especially when 70 per cent of that budget is for salaries.

So if we are going to spend enough to push the growth or development needle, we will have to rely on foreign monies coming into this country. We cannot do much about it. The economy is too big for a government this small to push. What it has got to do now is to make it easy, again too, when we talk we say, we are going to make it easy for foreign money to come in, but I am mind to disagree.

That’s putting the cart before the horse, a 95 trillion-naira economy of 170 million people. Of the 170, about 78 million are economically active. The latter number I think it is larger than the UK’s population. Accordingly, there is huge domestic market. So how about we improve the conditions for domestic entrepreneurs to thrive, and we support a culture of innovation?

The same conditions that would make local entrepreneurs thrive are the same conditions that foreign capital requires to come in. If we focus on making this space conducive, to local investors, then foreign money will come in. Most times, though, we turn the logic upside-down and say it is easier for foreign money to come in. There is a lot of domestic need that foreign money will not solve so.

The problem is that much of what is got to be done is already behind us. The government has spent a year and six months now on its haunches. We have allowed the rot to get too bad that all the low hanging fruits rotted and dropped off. Now the structural reforms that we need are of a medium-term nature, so if we started today you will be seeing the result in 3 to 5 years’ time. If we had gone for the low-hanging fruits earlier on, we ought to have dividends today from those efforts.

Ifeanyi Uddin

We can pray. We are always praying. We are a prayerful people. I don’t know seriously. For the most part like I said, 70 per cent of salaries and employment in the country is in the public sector. The Nigerian salaryman is not an entrepreneur. You need a shift in paradigm and mindset to get this people ready to take part in a private sector-led economy, so you find that the salaries are not paid and there’s not so much that they can do because there is not so much that they have been asked to do up to this point. For most people it is to be more prudent, and try to see if we can string income along without inflation wiping out both savings and current spending. I really don’t know what we can do individually.