By Tabia Princewill
Everything (in Africa)     from cornflakes to kettles is imported from Europe or Asia. Africa boosters say that the fall in commodity prices is a dose of nasty but necessary medicine. The way they see it, falling currencies will drive up the cost of imports, and governments will have to open up to investment and reduce regulation and corruption in order to increase tax revenue. Yet this scenario is far too rosy.” (The Economist, April 2016).

AS an “Africa booster” myself, or someone who passionately believes in Africa, even when faced with the most ridiculous decisions taken by our leaders or some of the most depressing news, I am one of those who see the current recession as a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to fix the socio-economic issues which have been plaguing us for years.

However, news of the N4.9 billion military uniforms import raises many questions as to our desire to truly diversify our economy and get out of the current recession. Besides attracting foreign investment, what are the plans to grow and boost our local economy and exports?

No country on earth has ever fully developed without seriously pursuing a manufacturing policy. Why couldn’t local manufacturers produce those uniforms? The North once had a garment industry; we need serious plans to revive it and to make it competitive.

While conducting some research for this article, I happened to fall on the “Make In India” website, created by the Indian government to encourage local manufacturing and to detail their trade and industry policies. There is a lot to be sad about in Nigeria.

One of the “Make in India” campaign slogans reads: “Intent to action, ideals to results, red tape to red carpet” and features a comprehensive list of clear policies and milestones ranging from the automobile sector, electronics, food processing, IT, leather, textiles, media and entertainment, mining, pharmaceuticals, tourism and hospitality, wellness, etc.

One cannot but conclude that it is the will to do right by Nigerians, rather than the knowledge of how to go about it, that is continuously lacking in Nigeria. Nobody asks that governments reinvent the wheel when so many other developing nations are taking leaps and bounds towards modernisation and innovation. The Indian manufacturing policy is a multi-facetted one which covers everything from infrastructure, regulation, skill development, availability of finance, all geared towards the production of a 100 million jobs by 2022.  Here in Nigeria we congratulate governors for giving out 50 tricycles and training 200 women to manually sew buttons. There is a lot to be angry about in Nigeria.

The Indian manufacturing policy is aimed at providing rural migrants (as well as the urban poor) with skills, as inclusive growth is the only real sort of growth—unlike what we seem to believe in Nigeria.

Our services sectors, which impact mostly the rich, have been our focus and wrongly so. We need to industrialise and we need to do it now. We have the right mix of population (a young workforce), urban centres to support and buy goods, this could lead us out of poverty if government implements certain policy instruments.

We are yet to fully focus on growing “employment-intensive industries” such as textiles and garments or even food processing. Slippers produced in Nigeria should be worn all over the West coast and beyond.

Where are our own equivalents of the Indian National Investment & Manufacturing Zones? Conceived as “giant industrial townships” (the smallest is 5000 hectares), the idea is to get the whole of India to work. Costs are split between Federal and state governments in India, where the idea of restructuring isn’t so central to public debate because they have competent governors who come to power with the capability to earn revenue for their states.

When people are gainfully employed and live a life of purpose, there is much less time for ethno-religious squabbles and the various medieval ills plaguing our society. A solid manufacturing policy could fundamentally redress and transform the Nigerian identity, finally enabling us to create a nation with common goals and objectives.

At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, we are a nation of hypocrites. We continuously, especially at the state level, elect individuals with neither the track record nor the ideas to move us forward and wonder why things keep going wrong.

More than the president, it is our governors whose responsibility it is to ensure growth and development in each of the states. For 56 years, the vast majority of said governors have betrayed their mandate.

Yet, their mediocrity has been celebrated and excused by everyone from the media to the average man on the street. The huge amounts budgeted for the past 56 years could have transformed this country, if we were not, ourselves, the Nigerian people, myopic and too willing to compromise.

Personal  businesses

Corruption in India or in China is perhaps just as prevalent as in Nigeria. Yet, their political and business elite realise that if the masses are empowered with purchasing power their own personal businesses will prosper.

Their leaders are not necessarily more educated than ours but they love their country, they believe in its potential, they believe their countries have a role to play on the world stage. We need not have an angel, or a saint as President, merely someone who knows that a country where things work is profitable.

We need a leader who won’t be swayed by ethnic/family ties, who’ll remember who put him or her in office.Someone who’ll be brave enough to make sure the best man gets the political appointment. To put it simply, we need to realise that when it comes to policymaking only 1+1=2. We can’t continue to take the wrong decisions and expect good results.

Asiwaju Bola Tinubu

The All Progressives Congress national leader argues history should be reintroduced into Nigerian school curriculums. How were we ever going to create a nation of common ideals without studying and understanding our history?

We continuously repeat the same mistakes because we are unaware of our history, forgetting that many of the tortuous paths we walk have already been tested and seen to fail.

Perhaps neglecting history was deliberate, a way of severing the Nigerian mind from the ability to self-critique, all in favour of the political cabal which prefers an unenlightened citizenry as they  can’t hold them to account.

Tinubu might not be perfect (hardly anyone is) but he understands political modernity. If the other 35 states of the Federation could accomplish what Lagos has, Nigeria wouldn’t be such a bad place.

Dino Melaye

He was quoted as saying: “I sincerely want to recommend that Mr. President grant presidential amnesty or pardon to all those who looted our treasury provided they return all proceeds of their loot to the government within six months of the declaration of the amnesty.

This, I believe will encourage the voluntary return of the looted funds.” What next, the pardon of all other murderers and rapists? It is only in Nigeria where wrong doing, evil in short, finds willing defendants who hide behind would be pragmatism to seemingly push an agenda with disastrous long term consequences.

What is to stop the next set of looters? Where are the institutional reforms to stop them from re-looting? Such reforms certainly don’t emanate from the Senate—although they should. There are paths out of this recession and we needn’t look very far. We borrow money from China but we need to borrow policy lessons.

Only concrete actions will end the recession, not lip service to reform or strange ideas about pardoning the people who by raping this country and its resources, led us into recession in the first place. Corruption, by becoming a way of life, by making us consumers of foreign goods rather than producers of goods for export, led to this recession. We can’t pardon the feeble minds responsible for this; Nigerians need strong examples in order to see that change begins with law and order.