AT a recent gathering of so-called stakeholders of the Nigerian economy at the Lagos Business School, a Deputy Director of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, Catherine Patillo, remarked that the reforms made in the last 18 months of the Bola Tinubu administration are not working.

This claim was made with neither sympathy nor concern for both the hapless Nigerian population that has endured the extremely harsh realities of the reforms and the beleaguered administration that has had the unenviable task of force-feeding Nigerians with the bitter pills of the reforms, which by the way did not fall from the sky but are in fact the outcome of the direct implementation of the prescriptions of the IMF.

Drawn from different sectors of the economy, the Nigerian stakeholders appeared to have taken their cue from the visiting IMF mouthpiece. Virtually every one of them sounded awe-stricken and bitten by the bug of bad news which they shared freely with one another and proceeded to retail to the wider Nigerian public through media reportage. It all looked like a festival of lamentation.

What better place is there to trade in this cheap jeremiad than the local hunting ground of some of the most rabid Nigerian supporters and lackeys of the IMF, the Lagos Business School. Prominent members of the LBS are well-known apologists of free market economy even if they are now quick to distance themselves from the Tinubu administration’s implementation of the liberal policies of the IMF.  

The event at which the stakeholders spoke was actually an occasion for the IMF to present its economic outlook for sub-Sahara Africa. As a collective, there are fewer spewers and more eloquent advocates of the neo-liberal policies of Western development/financial organisations than economists of the LBS. Like their international principal, the IMF, the LBS often offers its platform for the hawking of many of the noxious economic policies of the West that are disguised as homegrown solutions.

But they are also fast at criticising the outcome of the policies or the way they have been implemented by Nigeria’s rentier administrations in their eagerness to satisfy their foreign masters. Following its damning verdict about the unworkable reforms of the Tinubu government, what does the IMF think is the way out for the government? You guessed right: more bitter doses of the same reforms it seems to disavow in its pretentious projections about the economy.

In its latest report, the IMF calls on the Tinubu government as are other governments across Africa, to “mobilize support for large, deep reforms”. The question to ask then is: what does the IMF want from Nigeria? What more does it want the Tinubu administration to demand of the Nigerian people? Mass annihilation? Given the harsh consequences of the reforms the administration has so far imposed on Nigerians, given how unpopular and loathsome these reforms have made the present government and its managers, what will satisfy the IMF and their lackeys? Are they working for the realisation of that apocalyptic picture of mass death across Africa, the very same Bill Gates predicted about a post-COVID Africa, this time on a national scale? Is it scenarios of chaos and Armageddon like this that will put a smile on the face of Catherine Pelloni? 

There is something deeply aggravating about the prescriptions of the IMF as far as Nigeria is concerned at this present time. It is not as if the IMF has such a wonderful image in the global South where its often-pernicious policies have served to sustain the historical advantages of the economies of the global North. It is not that this body has had a good image in the past. The fact, however, is that the activities of the IMF have become increasingly alarming and dangerous for good governance if swallowed whole as the Tinubu government seems determined to.

They deserve to be viewed with grave suspicion for the very fact that the IMF never takes responsibility for its activities. The latest intervention of the IMF through its surrogates at the LBS is the third the organisation will be making about the Nigerian economy since last month. Yet, it continues to speak from both sides of the mouth like a practised liar, denying its complicity in the nature of the reforms being made by the Tinubu administration or the implications of their negative impact. 

What it praises with one side of the mouth, it denies and slams with the other. It was in the middle of October, just last month I repeat, that the IMF’s Vice President and Chief Economist, Indermit Gill, came visiting with a shopping list of prescriptions for the Nigerian economy. He was careful to heap praises on both President Tinubu and Yemi Cardoso, the CBN Governor, for the very reforms that their regional outlook report is telling us now are not working. This has effectively made fulsome the praises showered on Tinubu and Cardoso. It has opened another floodgate of criticisms from different quarters, not the least, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, a perpetual stirrer of mass discontent who sometimes appears to see himself as the only Nigerian patriot.  

While praising Tinubu and Cardoso, Mr. Gill didn’t forget to urge Nigerians to be patient with their administration, for as he went on to conclude, Nigeria cannot expect to see the positive outcomes of the ongoing reforms (reforms on to poverty or death?) for another 15 years. I addressed that issue in this space on October 16 in a piece titled “Tinubu, the IMF and the Nigerian economy’’. 

Barely two weeks after Mr. Gill’s blend of praise and cautious optimism, another African mouthpiece of the IMF, Abebe Selassie, was at an annual meeting of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington washing IMF’s hands off any of the reforms being made by the Tinubu government like Pontius Pilate. As far as Selassie was concerned, such highlights of the Tinubu reforms like the removal of the subsidy on fuel, the harmonisation of the currency market and increase in electricity tariffs, were based on the domestic decision of the government.

Yes, it was Tinubu who within minutes of being sworn-in as president announced to the world that “subsidy is gone”. He took responsibility for that decision. But who does not know that position has been canvassed on successive Nigerian governments since the mid-1980s. That’s about four decades before Tinubu ever said Emi lokan. 

What was the essence of the entire IMF loan debate of the Ibrahim Babangida regime and the Structural Adjustment Programme spawned? Why was the IMF full of praises for the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, a pro-IMF reform administration that featured prominent Nigerian-born actors trained in the Bretton Woods institutions brand of policy-making?