By Festus Ogunseitan
Definitely, everything keeps booming, yet people nag about high borrowings.
How can development of the current magnitude be sustained in a Third World country like ours without sources of capital to expend in reviving a consuming and entitlement economy that had ailed beyond redemption?
We all know the zero level of capital budgets in a typical Third World country, mostly spent on debt servicing as political leaders focus on personal aggrandisement, looting, and corruption in cycles.
But it usually comes to a time in the history of any nation when a Messiah would be needed to the rescue—to change the narrative and take dangerous steps at reviving the precarious state of Third World nations, characterised by unpaid salaries, contracts, bills, poor power supplies, bad road networks, insecurity, poor legal systems and denial of justice, poverty, dilapidated structures in health, schools, social and public services sectors, abandoned refineries, high levels of youth crime, and corruption in all places of leadership—not excluding apprehensions and fears of uncertainties in their communities.
The abuse of oil reserves, which often form the core revenues, wasted on false payments of subsidies of various kinds—up to dollar exchange for a few influential elites—executive recklessness, and fraud in high places on uneven distribution of products and services go a long way in derailing true democracy.
Corruption by the high, powerful, mighty, and cabals in government keeps revolving and rotating around the corridors of power, slowing down true democracy as the common man suffers endlessly.
Stopping these could be as parlous as facing a moving train because corruption would always fight back—and hard too—but a bold government that takes bold steps can risk the inherent catastrophe, very dangerous to handle, and still survive it.
History has recorded many African leaders who took bold steps to change the narrative of corruption but ended up being assassinated—like Murtala Mohammed of Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, etc.
A good leader will help African nations greatly in revamping the ailing economies of Africa because Africa is a virgin economy that remains untapped due to poor technological awareness, prioritising tradition and religion over Western culture, and slow civilisation.
A case of Nigeria is such that, since the new administration of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a lot of efforts have been geared towards mitigating long-time developmental issues and minimising perennial frauds in government. In a very short time, IMF foreign debts and loans of decades have been paid off up to 75 percent.
Decades of stories of unpaid salaries, grants, bills, and other financial inadequacies to cater for the local governments in all the states are now met with adequate planning, and autonomy of local governments has been made possible amidst sufficient provisions.
More infrastructure developments were made in community healthcare, security provision, and food production, as sufficient funds were allocated to all states without stress.
Farmers were assisted with subventions for fertilisers and storage facilities to boost production across the nation and to end total dependence on the North for food supply, as if other parts of the nation were orphans to the oligarchs.
The civil service became reformed with a sufficient pool of resources, and provisions were made for staff training, payments of wages, salaries, and allowances for effective administration.
Development of the security network—both at national, state, and community levels—became a solution for free flow of human and vehicular movements within and outside the states. Borders were secured relatively more than ever before; farmers began to return to their farms; businesses and lifestyles returned to normal.
The government also floated the naira exchange to encourage productivity, ending the era of dichotomy in the financial sector of the economy. Roads, water, air, and rail networks did not lag in the process of transformation, as many regions hitherto cut off from the national grid were reconnected for easy, unhindered, and unrestricted supplies to the centre, thus boosting commerce for the common wealth of the nation. This excluded no region.
There were developments in the power sector, with opportunities for competition among generation providers to remove the traditional monopoly of PHCN and to make for price stability—an advantage for the near future. The same went for petroleum supplies across the nation as refineries were revived after decades of tales of irrecoverability, notwithstanding the billions of dollars gulped into them during the OBJ/GEJ administrations.
Resuscitation of the industrial hub of the economy, like the Ajaokuta Rolling Steel Mills, Zamfara and Ilesha Itagunmodi gold mines, etc., came to life from their graves and helped recruit young job seekers back into the labour market, with a plan towards reviving the manufacturing economy from the state of disrepair that had caused our factories to be taken over by religious marketing places where youths idly wait on miracles while the world moves fast industrially.
Education became sustained with more financial aid, while emphasis was placed on science and technological advancement, sustained through timely payments of bursaries to special schools and issuing of awards to excellent students. Free education and feeding allowances were given to all students of federal science and technical colleges across the nation, with the promise of employing them for gainful employment after graduation in established industries.
Lastly, it became a time for zero tolerance for corruption, as series of investigations were carried out into past and present activities of public civil servants, and lots of corruption were unveiled—including that of Emefiele, an individual with over 750 flats in choice areas of Abuja. Diezani and others are also being investigated and losing their stolen assets to the government.
The whole of these transformations were made possible through the deliberate choice of a working team in the Asiwaju cabinet in government—a team with outstanding spirit of patriotism, loyalty, and national development, comprising erudite and articulate individuals across ethnic and religious divides.
