Nigeria’s debt and posterity

BY CHRIS ANYOKWU  

Chris Anyokwu, PhD, a dramatist, poet, fiction writer, speaker, rights activist and public intellectual, is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and has joined Business a.m.’s growing list of informed editorial commentators to write on Politics & Society. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com

Few can match his aristocratic chutzpah, his patrician hauteur and his royal gravitas.  Indeed, very few possess his searingly penetrating insight into the arcane workings of realpolitik, the sheer poise and panache of his well-chiselled lithe physique that seems to mock and defy the cruelties of Time.  Love him or hate him, when he speaks, he speaks with the authority of experience and the experience of authority.  He is, evidently, cut from a different cloth, a class act all by himself.  To be sure, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi is universally acknowledged to love to speak truth to power.  A rebel with a cause, Sanusi in his most recent public outing drew public attention to a most worrisome and deeply troubling matter of urgent public concern, namely Nigeria’s debt profile.  Delivering a keynote speech at the seventh edition of KadInvest, an annual event organised by the Kaduna State Investment Promotion Agency, former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and the immediate past Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi described as unbelievable the claim by the NNPC Ltd that Nigeria consumes 66 million litres of fuel daily.

He lamented the bogus amount spent on subsidy payments annually and demanded that the NNPC be unbundled and disbanded, noting also that the company should not continue as a cash cow for few Nigerians (see Channels TV, October 15, 2022).  In what Sanusi described as “the subsidy free-for-all”, he queried thus: “NNPC tells us officially that we are consuming 66 million litres per day… We are consuming more than Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Cote d’Ivoire, more than Kenya. In 2019, officially, we were importing 40 million litres per day.  In 2022, officially, we are importing 66 million per day.  In three years, we have increased our petrol consumption by 50%.  Please tell me, is it the population?  Is it the number of cars?  Just ask yourself if it makes sense that in three years you increase your consumption of petrol by 50%.”  What’s more, Sanusi equally aptly characterised his beleaguered and woe-begone country, Nigeria, as “a rentier state”.  “It does not exist for development but as a sight [site] of rent, and extraction to make those who control the state rich, to turn them into billionaires over-night”.  The ex-CBN governor, who cited data from the Federation Account Committee, said only 50% of states generated enough recurrent revenue to cover their wages, overheads and debt services.  Finally, he delivered the coup de grace: “In other words, debt service is now 108 percent of revenue.  Every naira the Federal Government earns goes to service debt and it is not enough, it has to borrow to service the debt, and then begin to pay salaries, borrow to pay overheads, borrow to build roads.”  Sanusi, then, leaves us with a chilling question that will continue to haunt us and re-echo down our chequered history: “Let me ask you: what do you think we are leaving our children behind (with)?  A mountain of debt.  Every generation wants to leave a legacy so that our children and grandchildren will be praying for us and ask God for mercy on us, not cursing us.  You leave them with a mountain of debt, you have not educated them, money that we should put into their education, into their healthcare, even assuming this fuel subsidy is genuine, we have taken that money to give ourselves cheap petrol.  We are borrowing to enjoy cheap petrol so that our children will pay that debt”.

Given the foregoing situation, it certainly begs the question; will posterity lay curses on this generation of rulers or bless them for a job well done?  To begin with, hasn’t this crop of rulers proven themselves vampirish and buccaneerist enough; haven’t they mortgaged and stolen the future to earn the imprecations and malefic invocations of generations yet unborn?  Former self-styled military president, Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, once compiled his speeches and captioned the volume, For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.  Sidestepping the duplicitous and ironic overtones of this title, ordinarily, we daresay, leadership is supposed to sacrifice its comfort, its privileges and even its rights to lay up treasure for the next generation.  And not the other way round.

Nigeria’s Total Debt Stock does not make happy reading in the slightest.  According to a Press Release published in DMO In The News, Monday 19 September, 2022, “The Total Public Debt Stock, representing the Domestic and External Debt Stocks of the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN), the 36 State Governments and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), was ₦42.84 trillion (USD 103.31 billion) as at June 30, 2022 […] over 58% of the External Debt Stock are concessional and semi-concessional loans from multilateral  lenders such as the World Bank, IMF, Afrexim and African Development Bank and bilateral lenders including Germany, China, Japan, India and France […] the Total Domestic Debt Stock as at June 30, 2022, was ₦26.23 trillion (USD 63.24 billion) due to New Borrowings by the FGN to part-finance the deficit in the 2022 Appropriation (Repeal & Enactment) Act as well as New Borrowings by State Governments and the FCT”.  Then comes the caveat by the DMO: “While the FGN continues to implement revenue-generating initiatives in the non-oil sector and block leakages in the oil sector, Debt Service-to-Revenue Ratio remains high”.

The question we need to ask, again, is: what are the so-called revenue-generating initiatives?  Could these include, for instance, gold mining in states such as Zamfara State, taxation, customs duty, VAT and agriculture?  Beyond paying lip-service to these alternative sources of revenue, has the government ever roused itself to the urgency and necessity of economic diversification?  Again, how is the Federal Government of Nigeria blocking “leakages in the oil sector”? Recently, Nigeria has been reeling and roiling under the heart-stopping gale of discoveries and disclosures of oil theft in the Niger Delta region.  For decades, regime after regime, few fat cats or sacred cows – or you may call them “The Untouchables” – have been stealing our oil in plain sight amid tight security provided by the Nigeria Navy, the DSS, the police and other “security” agencies.  Every day, Nigerians sit ox-jawed and nonplussed before their TV screens, notably on Channels TV and Arise TV, as experts in the oil industry as well as security operatives reel out mind-boggling figures and blood-curdling facts about the never-ending haemorrhaging of Nigeria, aka oil theft!  Few dare-devil investigative reporters and journalists have gone down to the dangerous creeks of the Delta to uncover age-old tell-tale evidence of organised crime in the oil sector.  Hitherto unseen or unknown pipelines conveying our common patrimony to global destinations crisscross the swamps and marshlands of the Niger Delta.  Talk about giving the nanny-goat the household yam to keep; talk about the NNPC and our oil!  When it comes to naming and shaming the Thieves of State (TOS), those shadowy but extremely powerful individuals stealing our oil and growing fat while the country dies by instalment, mum’s the word.  At best, commentators and opinion leaders speak in vague and unfocused generalities, hinting darkly that Nigeria Inc. is in the asphyxiating grip of government officials, multinational oil workers, security agents and other vested interests.  Nigerians, the most pauperised and poorest of earth’s denizens, deserve to know who moved the cheese, who is stealing their today and their tomorrow and their children’s future.  Otherwise this high-level conspiracy of silence shall sire and spawn a culture of brigandage and criminality and, then, where will the government find the courage, the justification to call out the enemy nationals running amok?   As it happened during the Gulf War windfall, it is happening today.  All the OPEC member-states are making a kill from the astronomical hike in oil pricing due to the on-going Russia’s war on Ukraine but only Nigeria (God, have mercy!) is left eating husk in the wilderness of its self-inflicted myopia and has now come a sad cropper.

Truth be told, the time to revoke the licence of all private owners of our oil blocks is NOW!  There is also an urgent need to put the question of the Turn-Around Maintenance (TAM) of our oil infrastructure, especially our major refineries (Warri, Port Harcourt and Kaduna) to some kind of plebiscite. What do we do with this abominable conduit-pipe through which our vital fluids as a nation are drained and we are left hollow, leading a ghostly existence? For how long are we going to be the butt of jokes in the world?  Are we not tired of being a self-deceiving, self-clowning nation in the world? Now, the crux of the matter: oil subsidy payments. What will it take to fix our refineries?  Can’t our refineries operate side by side with Aliko Dangote’s Refinery?  Outgoing President Buhari, in his budget presentation at NASS, asked that oil subsidy be scrapped or discontinued forthwith.  Cold comfort! Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State also said that changing the NNPC to NNPC Limited was, invariably, papering over the cracks; it’s not working. El-Rufai has, thus, called for the disbandment or scrapping of the NNPC Limited.  Now Sanusi Lamido Sanusi has, tellingly, added his voice to the chorus of denunciation of Nigeria’s White Elephant. It does seem the northern establishment is stirring, reading accurately the signs and electing, if symbolically, to be populist, egalitarian and pro-market. Are these auguries of restructuring; of elite consensus on salvaging and saving the limping post-colony?

As part of right-sizing and repositioning Nigeria, we must cut the cost of governance and drastically reduce the NASS perks and perquisites. We must work assiduously to move away from a consumption to a production economy.  In this regard, we must engage our youth in showbiz, or entertainment industry, sport, education, healthcare, tourism, urban renewal, the gentrification of rural dumps, inter alia.  We must also encourage the Buy-and-Sell Made-in-Nigeria business model, just like some Western and Asian nations did in the past. We have to encourage local content in the automobile and tech sectors. Livestock and cash-crop agricultural sub-sectors are crying for attention.  In cocoa production, for example, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana are leading the way.  Where is Nigeria? Doesn’t cocoa grow in our country anymore? How about rubber trees, groundnuts and palm trees?  “Back-to-land” must be the rallying-cry in our country as we look to revitalise and diversify our economy via agricultural activity.  Soft loans must be provided to our youths for start-ups and this will go a long way in helping to curb crime and criminality.

Meanwhile, 2023 is nigh at hand.  Our collective fate as a nation hangs precariously on our choices at the presidential polls. We must vote wisely to usher in a better future, one which posterity will not curse but bless.

• business a.m. commits to publishing a diversity of views, opinions and comments. It, therefore, welcomes your reaction to this and any of our articles via email: comment@businessamlive.com