**It’s difficult to solve our problems without paying attention lower strata

**To present new book The Centrist Manifesto, next Tuesday in Lagos

By Clifford Ndujihe, Politics Editor

TO surmount the deluge of socio-economic challenges burdening Nigeria, policy makers and all stakeholders must apart from the government pay attention to what happens at lower level such as companies and individual economic behaviour, erudite author, Uchenna Nwankwo, has said.

Nwankwo, in his latest book, The Centrist Manifesto, that will be launched next Tuesday, in Lagos, his study shows that “Nigeria’s commercial, professional and industrial leaderships have not been as visionary and as creative as they ought to be. To a large extent, it is the economic collapses which occur within their scope of operation and influence, at the micro-levels, that manifest at the national scale and have largely led to the persistent cycles of massive corruption and economic stagnation that have become the norm of the Nigerian system for quite some time.”

The 202-page book, which will be presented at the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs, is geared towards addressing the hydra-headed socio-economic and political problems militating against mankind, in general, and Nigeria, in particular.

Renowned Economist and Management Consultant, Mr. Victor Mbamalu, will chair the event with Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State as special guest of honour.

Nigeria’s socio-economic challenges

Examining Nigeria’s socio-economic challenges in Part 1 of the Three-part book, Nwankwo wrote:  “Most often analysis of Nigeria’s social, economic and political conditions or lack of well-being focuses almost entirely on the role or contribution of government and political leaderships to that state of affairs. We generally tend to lose sight of the crippling input made by other forms of leadership to the nation’s socio-economic and socio-political failures.

“I am talking about the contribution of the nation’s captains of industry, pioneers and leading entrepreneurs, etc. to the malady. A close examination readily reveals that the extent to which the national economy is compromised at these lower levels is indeed enormous and ought to be taken into consideration by any genuine attempt at analysing, resolving and reversing the trends that have brought the society and economy to their present sorry past.

“Indeed, in so far as macroeconomic aggregates subsume the aggregation of decisions and activities at the micro-level, any pretensions at solving or proffering solutions to Nigeria’s problems without paying adequate attention to the occurrences at the lower strata, at the level of companies and individual economic behaviour will completely miss the target.

“Our study shows that Nigeria’s commercial, professional and industrial leaderships have not been as visionary and as creative as they ought to be. To a large extent, it is the economic collapses which occur within their scope of operation and influence, at the micro-levels, that manifest at the national scale and have largely led to the persistent cycles of massive corruption and economic stagnation that have become the lot of the Nigerian system for quite some time.

“The contribution of the private sector of the Nigerian establishment to the dismal performance of the economy is best analysed using the professionals or professional groupings as index. We are referring to the style and modus operandi of our doctors, architects, engineers, accountants, pharmacists, lawyers, etc. It is noteworthy that one of the chief characteristics of Nigerian professionals is the trend towards fragmentation and the establishment of one-man practices. In Nigeria today, virtually every qualified professional architect, engineer, pharmacist, lawyers, etc., is a firm by himself.

“This should be contrasted with the trend in most other parts of the world where it is common to find professional firms with very large pools of professional men and women making up each firm or corporate practice. In virtually all the developed economies, emerging markets and the seriously upwardly mobile developing countries most professional groups or firms usually consist of upwards of scores and hundreds of professionals. You would find, for instance, big law firms with up to one thousand or more lawyers, all working together and under one single corporate leadership; ditto for architects, engineers, etc.

The advantage of the latter kind of set-up, collocation or clustering together is that there is synergy, specialisation even within the profession, cross fertilisation of ideas, research and economy of scale. This is a recipe for efficiency, optimum performance and progress. Indeed, this is what organisation is all about! It is well known that usually each professional man tends to be very good in particular branches of the profession and not so good in some others. There are really very few all- rounders.

Thus, some architects, for instance, are either good in design, detailing, presentation, site works or supervision, contract management or job letting, etc., or a combination of a number of these or other aspects of the professional duties of the architect. Large professional architectural firms thus have the potential of being made up of ‘experts’ in virtually all the branches and aspects of the professional calling. On the face of it therefore, the large firm is in a better position to handle a professional job and assignment more efficiently and successfully than a small group or one-man firm.

“It is these successes that are recorded at the micro- levels, at the level of companies and firms by such large and organised groups that translate into the economic success and development that manifest at the macro-level, at the level of society and nation. In contrast, the presumed failures, handicaps or inefficiency and poorly conceived and shoddily executed projects that characterise small professional groups or one-man firms, translate to dismal economic performances that seem to have become part and parcel of ‘unorganised’ societies and countries like Nigeria.

“Have you stopped to imagine or contemplate how the many one-doctor clinics and hospitals that dot the Nigerian landscape and healthcare delivery system manage – say, during surgery? Well, the picture is that you would in a generality of cases, have the single in-house doctor perform diverse roles – acting the part of the surgeon and perhaps those of a number of these: the aesthetician, technician or controller of the oxygen cans and other equipment, bio- chemist, pharmacist, administrator of all the myriad operations that go with surgery – all by himself, and perhaps with the aid of a few ill-qualified, ill-motivated and inexperienced nurses. With that kind of scenario, does it surprise anybody that these one-doctor clinics and hospitals have very few successful operations or surgery; that they indeed constitute slaughter houses in which innumerable patients get butchered every now and then?

So to recap, the failures and collapses recorded by these outfits constitute part of the drawbacks that have kept Nigeria’s healthcare delivery system in the doldrums.

It can equally be shown that the picture painted above of the one-man architectural firm or the one-doctor hospital in Nigeria  could  be  replicated and  likened  to  some  of  the operations  of  the  other  numerous  one-man  professional outfits in Nigeria, be it in engineering practice and some of the ill-network of roads, public drains or other line-systems some of them design and supervise; in accountancy and some of the shoddy and fraudulent audit reports that emanate from that sector; in law practice and some of the innumerable un- researched ill-conceived advocacies some of them proffer; and the rest of them. It is all a catalogue of dismal failures at the micro-levels that have ultimately translated to collapses at the macro-level or the level of nation and society.

“It is not only that these small practices do not have the right depth of staff to generate the right professional advice and work, they also cannot muster the right resources to acquire the needed tools and equipment, books, professional journals, etc. that should keep them in line with the latest developments and new concepts in any of the professional callings. Little wonder then that they can hardly perform, help themselves  and  make  the  requisite  contribution expected from them to our social, economic, technological, and even political progress.

“What are the unique factors that have tended to detract the Nigerian professionals from the corporate track commonly trodden by their counterparts in other parts of the world? What are those peculiarities of the Nigerian professionals that seemingly make them so different from professionals from other lands? Again, we prefer to seek the answers from the micro-levels. The truth is that historically the Nigerian pioneer and leading professionals who more or less took over from the expatriate professional firms did not take care of the younger generation of (Nigerian) professionals that came later or that served under them.

“In their general drive to ‘maximise’ profit, the pioneers and leading professionals threw the standards established by white men or the colonialist expatriates they replaced, overboard and began to appropriate virtually all incomes made by the new firms to themselves, leaving peanuts for the retinue of employed fellow professionals and other sundrystaff that worked under them even when these employees worked on multi-million dollar projects which attract huge fees for the firm.

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“In fact, matters did degenerate to a point where the corporate leaders began to determine the salaries of their employees based on the notion that they should and would be collecting huge sums of money as ‘gifts’ from whatever contractor or companies they supervise or superintend over. This generally forces the younger professional to depend on the contractors’ hand-outs for virtually all his livelihood. And being thus compromised, the project suffers, for as the saying goes, there is no free lunch. It is this kind of in-built corruption that account for shoddy jobs and the lowering of standards that is so commonplace in Nigeria. The scenario is also typified in the civil service where too many people are employed but paid such mean salaries that they become permanently and perpetually corruption-prone.

“It is in fact woe betide thee for any of these young professionals or employees that refuses to toe the line; to feed from the filthy lucre offered by those individuals or companies he superintends over, for it is his colleagues, bosses, even relatives and ‘friends’ that will bury him alive and dance on top of his grave for his mere non- compliance with the subsisting system in operation – to say nothing about the excruciating impact of the poor salary and wages on which he is signed on. Yet we all moan about corruption and make believe that we detest its negative impact on the country! And that we would want it eradicated from society.

Given that scenario, it can be said that in Nigeria, corruption is compelling, and will remain so for as long as the status quo persists. The above scenario should be contrasted with what obtains among some internationally-linked business outfits where some level of prudence and fairness in distributive standards – the so-called ‘international standards of ethics’ – prevail. We are talking about what is witnessed among some of the foreign oil companies and suchlike that do

 business in Nigeria. Here, different rules appear to operate. We find that in generality of cases, many Nigerians who work for such companies refuse to accept hand-outs from contractors and professional groups that work for them or handle their consultancy briefs. But this, as many of such individuals would say, is because they are well paid by the companies they work for and therefore do not need to ‘palm’ such ‘gifts’ or ‘hand-out’. We agree that this might well be due largely to the monitoring mechanisms inherent in most of these multinational companies. But these are Nigerians nonetheless!

Therefore, it is safe to conclude that what makes the difference is the system. And that the persistence of corruption as witnessed in the earlier scenario is patently systemic. The average Nigerian young professional is therefore more of a victim of the system than the happy exploiter of it. Indeed, many feel quite humiliated by the status quo, and some do try to extricate themselves from that system of values and livelihood; to shorn a beggarly existence and perpetual manipulation by (or collusion with) contractors, or clients in the case of accountants, auditors, etc.

Movement of Individualism & Enthronement of Anarchy

Historically, the above subsisting Nigerian system has led to bad blood and fragmentation of professional firms across the board as well as a gross lowering of professional ethics and standards. For being thus humiliated and short- changed by the system, most of the younger Nigerian professionals predictably move out from the established firms to seek solace in the establishment of smaller groups and/or one-man outfits. Before you knew it, a pattern emerged in which younger Nigerian professionals generally moved on or were expected to establish their own professional firms as soon as they pass their professional practice exams or immediately after pupillage. Hence the emergence of the unique degenerate Nigerian system and fractured or compromised professional ethics or culture discussed above, in which virtually every qualified professional becomes a firm of his own. That culture is one of incipient disorganisation and anarchy, which has inextricably affected the larger society for the worse.

It is now clear that what happened was that as the number of firms in any one professional group mushroomed, the practitioners were inevitably forced by the cut-throat competition that became the order of the day to begin to undercut one another in order to remain afloat. The rules of professional conduct and all the extant regulation that were set up to regulate and guide professional practice were virtually jettisoned and compromised by the day.

In Nigeria today, we have degenerated to severe underhanded practices; to a level where, for instance, a professional firm could, in collusion with government officials steal a proposal submitted to government by another professional group, erase the name of that firm from the document, affix his own imprint, resubmit same, collect the contract and smile to the banks without any repercussion for such a dastardly unprofessional conduct. In Nigeria today, integrity hardly counts, nor is professional competence of much consequence. All these have in turn ravaged the professions leading to paralysis and the collapses of many professional groups, large or small.

Meanwhile, the predictably derisory services offered by the inadequately staffed, ill-funded and withering local firms and companies became manifest and unbearable. The trend has partially created the loophole for foreign professional groups and companies to recapture the commanding heights of professional practice in the country. It has reasserted the “only-white-hand-can-do-it” syndrome in virtually all areas of professional practice in the country, be it in engineering design and construction, accountancy and architecture.

Thus many key projects or contracts are now being let out as turn-key projects in which foreign groups and companies handle everything from design to construction and even furnishing and interior decor. Examples abound and include the refurbishment and standardisation of the nation’s Railway, the multi-billion naira Abuja National Stadium Complex and of course innumerable important projects in the private sector, especially in the nation’s fledgling oil industry.

The Nigerian medical system with its many ill-staffed, ill-equipped hospitals and clinics, public or private, is side- tracked by those who can afford to go abroad for even the slightest of afflictions. But for the expected insurmountable difficulties the nation’s judicial and legal systems pose for the foreigner or the uninitiated, foreign lawyers and legal practitioners would have invaded and taken over legal advocacies offered by the lucrative litigation-prone Nigerian environment. Did the Federal Government of Nigeria not hire a team of foreign lawyers to research into and represent her at the World Court in our then dispute with Cameroun over the ownership of the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula?

Obviously, one of the reasons for that action was that no local legal firm was thought to possess the manpower and research capability and resources to corner such a lucrative contract or brief. In the same vein, it would appear, no local accounting firm is thought large and strong enough to possess the capacity to audit big government parastatals like the NNPC. The pre-shipment inspection agents that inspect imports coming into the fatherland at about one per cent of the value of these imports as fee must not be Nigerians, if for no other reason, because Nigerian professionals and businessmen have not been able to show capacity and capability by building any agency or firms that can boast of the staffing and other resources to undertake such assignments. So, we have to pay huge scarce foreign exchange resources to get foreigners to perform these otherwise simple tasks for us.

One obvious and damaging consequence of the above trend is that government’s presumed attempts to reflate the economy by the award of huge road construction and other contracts have ended up being dismal failures because the multi-national companies that get these contracts repatriate virtually all the disproportionately large proceeds while their local counterparts similarly siphon whatever they get abroad for savings and investment in the more stable economies of the Western world. Under the prevailing system where no form of protection is offered to workers, they get away with paying the local labourers and employees that work under their supervision just enough to keep body and soul together.

This then obviates and obstructs the trickle-down effect that should have put more money into the hands of Nigerians through the quantum of solid and substantial earnings expected to accrue to the skilled and unskilled workers in the nation’s construction or service sector in general. The effect is to prolong the economic depression that has been with us for so long by stagnating consumer purchasing power and disposable incomes of the masses of Nigerian citizens.

Indeed, in recent times, many leading Nigerian professional architects and engineers have turned into portfolio consultants. They no longer maintain offices and staff nor do they bother to make use of (younger) Nigerian professionals and draughtsmen as employees in the execution of lucrative design schemes and briefs that come their way. Rather, the practice today is to hop over to Ghana where they engage Ghanaian consultants and professional groups in the execution, design, detailing and drafting of the assigned projects, and of course pay cheaply in grossly devalued cedi, the Ghanaian currency.

In the meantime, many young Nigerian graduate- professionals are left without work and avenues to imbibe needed professional ethos and practical training. It is clear that if this trend continues, then in the near future, the professional   instincts   of   jobless   Nigerian   graduate-professionals will atrophy; many will turn to trading and crime, and national professional and technological know- how will be the worse for it.

It is regrettable that some senior Nigerian professionals who have been exposed and are knowledgeable about developments and professional practice in the more advanced countries of the world could allow themselves to embrace the odd notion that there are too many professionally trained people in Nigeria. Trained architects in Nigeria for instance number less than a few tens of thousands! In some of the developed economies, that number could make up just about three or four architectural firms. Sadly, in Nigeria, they would represent thousands of firms. Mark you; we are not saying that small or one-man practices are native to Nigeria alone. No, developed countries equally have them but their proportion in such climes are not as large as what we have!

The picture in other professions conforms to the above model. But rather than see the problem in the available number of firms, many Nigerian professional leaders prefer or pretend to see the problem in terms of the available number of individual professionals! Thus instead of devising measures to mollify the alienated younger professionals, they cast off in the opposite direction and adopt measures that further alienate and frustrate the younger members of the professions, creating chaos and untold upheavals and declines in the social and economic aesthetics of the nation.

But the above synthesis is not limited to the professions. The model is applicable to all private sector players and operators in the Nigerian economy, be they in the commercial, industrial or agricultural sectors. The winner- takes-all syndrome painted for professionals above is noticeable in the myriad trading, manufacturing, agricultural and other establishments or sectors of the economy. There is a systemic process and abiding general propensity for those at the helm to consistently corner a disproportionate size of company incomes or added-value to themselves and leave a

pittance to the mass of hired hands and labourers that are used in running these outfits, companies and organisations.

A survey of factor-shares in Nigeria’s quoted or public liability companies clearly underscores this point. Many of these companies devote very low proportions of their added- value to the payment of salaries and wages and general staff welfare. This is to say nothing of undeclared incomes that do not come under the purview of distribution between the relevant and requisite factors of production – Labour and Capital.

The situation is even worse in the private or limited liability companies and in the so-called informal sector where generally speaking one man represents or functions both as chairman and managing director of a company as well as its board of directors. Here anything goes, and really nobody is there to call the chief executive officer, CEO, to account for anything, either in terms of taking good care of employees, paying adequate salaries and wages or even in terms of paying commensurate tax to state coffers, and over-indulgence.

When these occurrences are put down in a generalised fashion, people might and do get the impression that the situation is exaggerated. But we have come across several instances of this discouraging practice on the part of some Nigerian business organisations that could startle anybody.

About ten years ago, we came across a letter of employment emanating from a renowned law firm in which a qualified lawyer and university graduate of nearly ten years’ postgraduate experience was being offered a basic salary of N3,000.00 a month with various allowances making up a total of N10,000.00 gross monthly pay package, to work six-days a week in the company.

Many graduate school teachers earn less than N6,000.00 per month, all-found, to teach in many of the growing number of private schools that actually make a killing in their line of business; that derive fantastic revenues from the army of Nigerian parents and guardians that are so eager to pull their wards out of the deteriorating Nigerian public schools. This is at a time when the stipulated minimum wage in the country was put at N18,000.00 per month for unskilled workers.

Indeed, Governments’ attempts to bolster the take- home pay of workers through the praxis or stipulation of minimum wage have been less than effective for a number of reasons. One, such stipulations usually do not go far enough. Two, the stipulations are hardly adhered to in the private sector. Three, in the areas where such is respected and upheld, like the civil service and the big firms, these pegged rates are usually quickly overtaken over time by developments in the economy, especially in times of galloping inflation and as a result of stiff increases in national income or productivity.

Now if the above salary offer, in our above example of a company which offered a pittance to a university graduate it wanted to employ, was coming from some low-level company battling to stay afloat, the offer would not cause any consternation or surprise anybody. But the Law firm alluded to above and its subsidiaries were leaders in the industry and were known to be making a killing in the field. Its proprietor was one of the nation’s leading lights, a social and human rights crusader who ought to know the overall impact and implication of this kind of salary structure on the economic and other rights of the recipient and the Nigerian economy as a whole.

As a highly successful firm, the company could afford to pay a lot more than it was offering. But the instinct to maximise profit in an environment with a glut of qualified applicants and job-seekers appears to be the restraining factor. With this scenario, it appears that the hope of reflating the Nigerian economy via the so-called trickle-down effect, (in which large firms and/or generous recipients of high incomes and government fat contracts are expected to better the earnings of their employees) will never come about.

In the Nigerian informal sector, the notorious one-man business syndrome is most pronounced. Take the traders and the array of semi-skilled artisans, welders, plumbers, motor mechanics, for instance. There is little effort on the part of this social category to forge medium or large-scale organisations, to build economies of scale, trading conglomerates and such like; structures that can muster the resources that would ensure sustainable and promising future and leverage for the company, and that would cushion its members against risks and unforeseen bad times and hence enhance the quality of life of its members.

Rather, what we see is the same propensity on the part of leading members of this group to build one-man empires, short-change their employees, associates and appropriate virtually every income to themselves. Again, the result has been the kind of fragmentation prevalent among the professionals. It is a situation that, for the traders, produces honeycomb market structures and myriad tiny squalid windowless market stalls where these traders display their odd wares and engage in cut-throat competition and petty frauds. This should be contrasted with the modern emergent mega-shopping facilities and department stores that have become a permanent and endearing feature of progressive nations of the world.

In all the more progressive states of the world, what we see or what transpires virtually by the day are mergers of giant corporations to produce even larger groups and combines. The new emergent mega-companies are then able to pool together more resources to carry out new and intricate research, patent new inventions and create new wealth and fantastic fortunes. In Nigeria on the other hand, the general trend is towards ruptures and disintegration into smaller ineffective and unproductive groups.

Conversely, Nigeria’s pinnacle of wealth is not populated by men that have patented any inventions nor even earned their riches through copyright in artistic or any other form of intellectual work. Rather the majority of the country’s men of riches are people who made their money through government either as contractors, suppliers or through dubious deals and swindling, grand larceny and outright embezzlements. It is a process that impoverishes the masses and breeds more and more corruption, indolence, and dependence on crude petroleum resources that Nigerians do not even tap or mine by themselves. This truncates societal values and work-ethic, erodes and whittles the authority of those in government to the extent that there is such acute erosion of authority that they virtually fall back to naked force to get anything done.

Parlous Economy & Social Disintegration

The cumulative effect of the above build-ups can be easily enumerated. First, there is a mammoth concentration of national resources in fewer and fewer hands that have practically wiped off the middle class in the country. (Nigeria is now said to have one of the world’s highest levels of inequality; its Gini coefficient, which is a measure of the level of inequality in the system, is put as high as 0.6. Of course with such a high level of inequality most people are untouched by economic development as most increases in income accrue to those who are already rich).

Secondly, there is a dangerously depreciating disposable income and purchasing power for a large proportion of the populace. Thirdly, mass unemployment and a process of internal marginalisation that has been grinding away the foundations of society are evident everywhere. Fourthly, public life is marked by financial indiscipline at the workplace and a concomitant endemic corruption in high and low places. Fifthly, the crime waves keep rising.

These then are some of the main factors or manifestations that shape the decidedly parlous Nigerian economy. The low and depreciating purchasing power of consumers has been responsible for poor sales on the part of manufacturers and producers in general, leading as it were to overflow inventory in company warehouses, cut-backs in production, retrenchments and general business collapses.

Another remarkable dysfunctional feature of the Nigerian economy is the tendency on the part of owners and captains of industry to import wholesale foreign-built industrial plants and machinery. There is little attempt to have Nigerians design and fabricate machinery and manufacturing plants locally. The persistent attempt by our industry captains to rely solely on foreign technology for Nigeria’s industrial production purposes has indeed had a very profound and negative impact on the economy.

In the first place, because these imported technological artefacts are too sophisticated for our stage of development and call for continuous and steady supply of spare parts from the original producers, they constitute a permanent drain of the nation’s scarce resources. Even so, Nigerian technicians often have great difficulty in providing the kind of maintenance demanded by these machines and production plants. Invariably, the plants break down and have to be discarded and replaced with new and even more sophisticated newer models.

Alternatively, foreign engineers and technicians are imported at great cost to fix or repair them. It has in fact been calculated that the cost incurred by Nigerians in importing, repairing and replacing these plants generally outstrip the net value added to the economy by these artefacts. Conversely, the indiscriminate wholesale importation and employment of foreign technology or alien machines and production plants contribute more in the impoverishment of Nigerians than in the economic development of the country we target.

A case in point is the unending turn-around- maintenance of Nigeria’s foreign-built state-owned oil refineries. The project which again is being handled by foreign technical experts is said to have gulped, in the last thirty years, over N5.5 billion (about US$3 billion dollars), an amount that could quite easily have built new refineries for the country, especially, if handled by local engineers and technicians, for some of these foreign-built refineries are not better than the Biafran-built Amandugba petroleum refinery now of yore. It is truly arguable whether the actual values added to the nation’s economy by these foreign-built refineries are anywhere near the total cost paid by Nigeria for their construction and maintenance over the years.

Secondly, the wholesale employment of foreign technological artefacts by Nigerian manufacturers, construction firms, etc., tends to de-emphasise and discourage the use of labour-intensive modes of production as well as whittle labour incomes. It alienates the masses of abundant and capable human labour resources in the country from the workplace and creates what is generally termed technological unemployment. This adds to the massive unemployment situation in the country and helps swell the rank of retail traders milling around in every nook and cranny of the country virtually stampeding or choking the economy by its sheer size. For what we have is a situation where a disproportionate size of young men and women who should be working in factories, farms, etc., roam the streets all day long in the name of trading or business.

Indeed, in the last few decades, Nigeria has witnessed a geometric rise in the proportion of its populace engaged in the retail trading sub-sector while the proportion of those that could be regarded as producers of any kind of goods have shrunk to a point where Nigeria could be derisively referred to as largely a nation of traders – traders of mainly imported goods. This is a minus for the country, for no great economy can be built through low production at home and a propensity for a great majority of its citizens to turn into importers and sellers of foreign goods.

The third consequence of Nigeria’s over-dependence on foreign technological artefacts is that local initiative at the creation of an indigenous technological culture is dampened and permanently stifled. The Biafran revolution had aptly

demonstrated that an indigenous black technological civilisation is possible and achievable around here. The absence of such a civilisation in Nigeria today is therefore clearly not inherent in the quality of mankind that inhabit the geographical space called Nigeria, but definitely on the way the country has been managed or mismanaged since the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war.

Weak and visionless political leadership

Our analysis in the foregoing has tended, on the face of it, to blame the dismal performance of the economy on the actions of company managers, captains of industry and leading members of the business community. The analysis may have given the impression that the problem of efficient and sound national economic management is further complicated by the fact that actors and managers in the economy are many and diverse, pursuing multiple and often mutually opposing objectives. It is not by any means so.

The operators and managers mentioned above only deal at the micro-levels of the economy. National economic management deals with the issues at the macro-level, at the level of national political leadership. It is thus the general duty of government, at the national level, to give overall direction in all matters of economic development. It is the duty of the Federal Government of Nigeria to manipulate the macro-economic variables in such a way as to check any dysfunctional and economically oppressive attitudes and enactments at the micro-levels, to provide overall health to the national economy. But how well has this vital role of government been handled over the years?

The answer to that question is of course located in the perceived and actual state of well-being of the economy itself. Accordingly, it is obvious that governments’ efforts in this direction have been less than assiduous and efficacious.