Dele Sobowale

Till today, the top twenty countries remain among the most disciplined and have the lowest tolerances for corruption and laxity. Till today no Minister in Japan, or Russia, can promise to add so many megawatts of power and fail to do so without losing his job and being black-listed permanently from public appointment.

By contrast, failure in Nigeria attracts no sanctions; corruption even less. There is simply no way that any group of government officials will draw $13-16 billions from the Chinese public purse to increase power supply and fail to do so and those involved would still be walking the earth and lecturing others.

EDUCATION AND CORRUPTION
Given the imperatives of good and pervasive public education, it is clear that no nation can aspire to double digit GDP growth without iron discipline, sound education and deep patriotism. Certainly, nobody in Japan, or Russia, will get out of jail for corrupt self-enrichment and throw a thanksgiving party. There is a reason.

Contrary to what most Nigerians in public office think, corruption is an economic variable which detracts from the benefits of honest investments and redistributes them in anti-social ways.

For instance the N21 billion allegedly stolen from the Pension office was sufficient money to pay at least one million pensioners, who, if paid, would have spent virtually all of it on food, drinks, transport and personal hygiene. Given the velocity of money, over five million traders and local producers would have benefitted from the expenditure.

Instead, the funds were kept out of circulation in closets and holes in bedrooms where they did the economy no good whatsoever. Since an estimated N4 trillion of public and private funds remain unaccounted for in Nigeria every year, we can only guess at the setback to our economy on account of this.  One thing is certain, however, none of the top 20 economies allows this sort of larceny.

CLUB OF 20 AND ITS CULTURE
Like any entity which wants to join any club must first of all be prepared to accept the culture of that club. The top 20 economies share several attributes in common; too many to discuss this afternoon. Among them are promotion of education, low tolerance for corruption and certain punishment for those found guilty, consistency of economic policy and strategies and social inclusion. They are also nations which have highly developed institutions.

These attributes were developed and upgraded over fifty or more years. Nigeria has yet to develop these attributes and they cannot be developed in seven or eight years – even if we start now. Unfortunately, we have not even started. More worrisome, we have no plans to start.

So, how on earth can we be talking of being a top 20 economy in 2020?

A CHALLENGE
Those who can afford it, among my listeners or readers, should take a trip to any of the top 30 countries; move around for a week and then decide for yourselves if the standards of development they have attained are things we can achieve in seven years from 2013.

Mr Chairman, distinguished alumni, I want to thank you once again for the invitation extended to me to discuss one of the major items on the national agenda. I hope that those who might have thought that government was being unjustly vilified can now understand why. We all have a stake in this matter and we need the truth. To the best of my knowledge, what has been presented here is the truth as best as I can get close to it.

As one of the greatest American journalists had taught us: “A journalist  should be pursuing a fair rendition of truth without regard to popular moods; the journalist should not be swayed by public opinion, only by the pursuit of truth, as close as he or she can get to it. Malvin Kalb, American journalist, 1997 (VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS. p109).

From the first graph, labeled Fig A, based on GDP of $424 billion by the year 2020, we can see for ourselves the implications of the journey our country embarked upon in 2007. In that year Indonesia was in the 20th position with an annual GDP of $424 billion; Nigeria was in the 41st position with a globally recognized GDP of $167 billion. To overtake Indonesia by the year 2020, even if that country, one of the Asian Tigers, had failed to grow would have required a GDP growth rate of 13-15% per annum – without a break in the fourteen years.

If the ambition is to grow our economy to achieve GDP of $900 billion by 2020 the pronouncements have left the realm of reality completely and can only be regarded as bedtime stories – fit only for kids in nursery schools.

That is a record which no nation had ever achieved since economists started recording these aggregates. The only nations which had managed uninterrupted double digit growth for more than ten years in a row were characterized by authoritarian governments, traditionally well-disciplined citizenry and zero tolerance for corruption. Even, some of our military regimes were so tame one was remembered in the Southwest as Owambe government.

Surely, nobody here would describe the Nigerian citizenry as “disciplined”. More to the point, they had detailed plans for their growth programmes – which they executed faithfully. A typical Action Plan for the achievement of their stated goals will be discussed later. By contrast, our VISION 2020:20 is virtually a carbon copy of the VISION 2010 agenda which was just as worthless.

Each graph points to where we are likely to be at the end of 2012 — $177 billion. One Senior Special Adviser of this government was so thrilled by this achievement, that he announced that having moved from the 41st position to 39th position in 2012, he was sure that we are on our way to becoming one of the top 20 by 2020. T

hat shows all of us the quality of advice the President of Nigeria is getting. Please, take a look again at where we are and where we should be, and, you can decide for yourselves if two steps in seven years would guarantee that we will leap nineteen steps in the remaining seven years.

Furthermore, as we all know, the Nigerian economy last grew at double digit during the administration of General Gowon. Since 2007, when this economic fairy tale started, the best we have been able to do was 7.68% in 2011.

The projection for this year is less the 6.5%. Another way of looking at the matter is to figure out the rate of GDP growth since 2007 till date. It would have been less than 6% per annum – far below what we needed when we started out on this journey.

Nobody needs a degree or even a diploma in economics to understand that for each year we have failed to grow at double digit we have increased the annual growth rate in subsequent years if indeed we hope to achieve the goals we set for ourselves.

To be continue with part 4.(2)