By Owei Lakemfa
FORMER Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Professor Charles Chukwuma Soludo,CFR, has in the past weeks, like an ill-trained riot policeman, been shooting indiscriminately at the economic policies  of the Jonathan administration.

His latest strategy  is to take out the Minister of Finance, Mr Olusegun Aganga. I do not care whether Aganga is out and Soludo in,  but the noise  from Soludo’s economic dane gun  is constituting an environmental nuisance and  distracting the attention of Nigerians who are the victims of Soludo’s ineptitude as CBN governor.

Now Soludo is asking for “a two to three-hour televised national debate”. So why does Soludo assume that Nigerians have nothing better to do than sit for hours watching two technocrats engage in a blame game and  spewing economic jargon?

How will a Soludo-Aganga ‘debate’ benefit Nigerians? How will it bring down the prices of food or create jobs? If a wounded technocrat wants to take on a rising colleague, how does that become the problem of ordinary Nigerians? If we listen to them for three hours, for how long shall we listen to the presidential debates?

In any case, what are the fundamental differences between the Obasanjo and Yar’Adua administrations Soludo served, and that of Jonathan? To me, I do not see any. They do not defer  on so-called market forces, on the private sector  controlling the economy.

The threesome run the same mono-cultural economy, believe in  the deregulation gambit and allow the domination and control of our oil wealth by foreigners whose primary motive is profit. Their industrial, housing and education  policies carry the same DNA. So  why threaten the populace with sterile debates that would be nothing more than ego tripping?

Soludo came to limelight by regurgitating the worn out route the International Monetary Fund (IMF)had imposed on hapless Africans in the name of structural adjustment. Dr Kalu Idika Kalu had been good at such recitals, but had grown old and a little bit disgruntled, so it was good for the IMF and the  World Bank to have found a worthy replacement.

The West was impressed that a young Nigerian professor could  mouth such garbage even after the IMF had apologised for the disaster this programme caused. For this, it would have  put in a word for the struggling university teacher who ran an NGO on the sidelines to make ends meet.  Subsequently, President Olusegun Obasanjo appointed him Economic Adviser, then CBN governor.

Today, Soludo’s claim to  fame is the “banking revolution” he claimed to have carried out which was nothing more than asking banks to increase their capital base; a routine policy implemented  in the past by various military regimes. It is this basic economic policy  that Soludo’s well-oiled public relations contractors presented as the  “Soludo Revolution”. He followed this with a brain wave: to delete two digits to the left of  the Naira like Ghana did to its Cedis. This was easily defeated.

It did not take long for the unsinkable titanic banks he claimed to have built, to hit the ice berg, and only a quick intervention in the immediate post-Soludo era, saved banks like Union Bank, AFRIBANK, Bank PHB, Intercontinental Bank  and Oceanic Bank from sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

Soludo  is young, but tired; his disastrous foray into politics where he was imposed as a gubernatorial candidate before being roundly defeated  in the Anambra State elections further weakened him. Now, largely ignored, he seeks attention. He also has a hubris in arrogance; no human being is infallible,  a man like Soludo whose criminally inept advice  led  the Yar’Adua government to declare that Nigeria is immuned to the economic global crisis and therefore should lose no sleep over it, ought to apologise to Nigerians.

But pride will not allow him; rather, he takes an advert of some five thousand words to rationalise  his gross ineptitude. He wrote: “Like a pilot of an aeroplane that experiences an unprecedented turbulence, what you say to passengers and how  you say it might largely determine whether or not some passengers will pass out or die of frightful shock before you navigate  through the turbulence and stabilize  the plane to reach your destination”.  What does Soludo take Nigerians to be, fools?

Unfortunately, many Nigerians, especially the middle class who gave ear to Soludo’s professorial analysis and advice lost their live investments.

As usual, Soludo’s advert was one long ego trip; he compared himself with the cerebral  American, Alan Greenspan and great people  who “tried to undertake  revolutions in history” before making a child-like pronouncement: “Obviously, I am not God…”. Is that not self evident?

Then he continued his self acclaim: “After gallivanting around the world for a decade as an itinerant scholar and consultant  to 18 international institutions, I returned toward the end of 2000 to serve my country”.  What a super patriot! Then he turned on Aganga whom he said confirmed  a “palpable lack of capacity to understand, let alone  take steps to move the economy forward”.

To me, Aganga deserves the insult. How can he have the boldness to challenge a professor and “itinerant (international) scholar”? Soludo also exposed Aganga’s poor arithmetic background. “Hon Minister, seven years before 2010  is 2003-2009, and NOT 2004-2009; so your figures are wrong, sir”. Is this the type of debate Soludo wants to foist on the country for hours?

Soludo also claimed to be “the  most vocal public official “ to make a link between the Nigerian economy and the global economic crisis. Wasn’t the link basic and obvious? If Soludo had digested the works of true international scholars like Walter Rodney, G. Frank, Samir Amir and Claude Ake in his undergraduate days,  he would have known  that  whatever economic crisis hits the centres of capitalism like America and the West, must impact negatively on the peripheries like Nigeria.

He also itemised his “agenda” for Nigeria, including single digit inflation and making the Naira “the de facto currency for West Africa” but unfortunately, he claimed, the global crisis aborted all the plans. That is the much Soludo  was prepared to admit his failure in office.