At the conclusion of the 2012 IMF/World Bank Group Annual Meetings in October, the Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, decried the dollarization of the Nigerian economy to some Nigerian journalists, who were sponsored to that event in Japan. According to the Governor, his anxiety was equally shared by President Goodluck Jonathan.

One of the decisions taken by the National Assembly before the Christmas break was the appropriation of an additional sum of N161.6bn to augment the initial N888.1bn voted for subsidy in the budget of the outgoing year. This would bring total fuel subsidy claims for 2012 to over N1.05tn; i.e. the equivalent of over 20% of the 2012 expenditure budget of N4.7tn. The budget allocation of over N500bn for interest and service charges for domestic debt comes a distant second to fuel subsidy.

The other day, a friend narrated a story, which I found stranger than fiction; the story related to the travails of a family who lost a successful and illustrious breadwinner, who, incidentally, died without a Will. The family’s elders were consequently entrusted with the responsibility of efficiently managing the estate of the deceased.

The primary underlying principle in a social contract in a modern democratic dispensation is that of equality of all persons.

Instructively, the higher the degree of social inequity, the greater also will be the level of national instability, and the more restrained will be that nation’s economic growth trajectory. Consequently, it becomes inexplicable that some government policies and initiatives facilitate the prosperity of a favoured sub-group at the expense of the vast majority.

At the Second Annual Capital Market Retreat in Warri, the CBN Governor, Lamido Sanusi, made a strong case against the current dedication of about 70% of national income to purely consumption by civil servants and politicians, who comprise less than 1% out of our population of over 160 million.