Odia Ofeimun

The core issue, after ‘dont borrow and dont devalue’ is to reduce frivolous expenditures, dont waste, don’t overspend, don’t frighten investors and spenders. All these don’ts were liberally wronged by Buhari as a result of his many delays, and anti-corruption quest which still doesn’t look like an anti corruption war to me. Having already presented Nigeria to the world as the most corrupt nation in the world, he needed to build confidence in a trader’s economy. Building schemas to attract trust to an economy is not easy. Since there was no immediate programme to produce goods for domestic consumption, it meant that you had to let some looseness at the exchange points for imports. Not only for fuel but several commodities. To put a clamp precipitately was scary in a trader’s economy. At a time when most state governments were unable to pay salaries, it was a case of tight money at both ends of the supply and demand chain. It can be depressing for all, making investors wonder what is coming next.

For that matter, if the minders of monetary policy didn’t begin to go back to all those projects of a failed yesterday of a many-tiered foreign exchange market, which took the corruption of the cabals in the oil sector to the money laundering in the banking sector, the mixture of market forces and heavy-handed human agents, would not have been so disturbing. Emir Sanusi has explained how it works. When he was CBN governor, he turned the whole of Kano into a Bureau de change. That was like begging money off-shore. I had thought as CBN Governor, he would goad the monetary system to one that makes it possible for the factories that closed down in Kano and across the country to come back to stream. The fact that with all his stubbornness and loud-mouthedness Sanusi could not do it is one of the most disappointing things, most tragic things that has happened to Nigeria in the past so many years.

The parlous state of our infrastructure has a lot to do with it, right?

Talking infrastructure, in general, across several parts of Nigeria, there is quite some need for regional coordination. What is the point of building a very big beautiful hospital which won’t have state of the art equipment. The kind of health tourism that we are having for instance demands such careful coordination. If we must build for long term, then do it properly. The Chinese were building 5 star hotels, marble palaces as universities when they were still rationing khaki for people to wear. I got to Huangshaun to discover this. They didn’t want to do makeshift things; they wanted real universities. If you don’t build to last, you are always having to return to scratch. Come to think of it, one of Tinubu’s good deeds when he was governor was building to last. Not roads that the next rainy season would wash away or threaten. They ramped and ramped the roads to yield decades of endurance. That is the way to build for the future.