I have a cousin, John. He is the ultimate survivor and I use him to measure the season in Nigeria.
My cousin, John, was built to survive all seasons. But like Mark Anthony, the vicissitudes of time do register on his body, but not his soul. When Biafra was about to sink and outright extermination of the Igbo race was feared, he was one of those that were selected and sent to Gabon. They were to be the remnants that would form the nucleus of a new Igbo race.
At the end of the war, he was one of those that were brought back – not all came back. John remembered his surname and the name of his town.
Back home, he enrolled in school, but didn’t go too far. While in secondary school, he visited his elder brother during a long vacation and decided to join him in trading.
By 1984, he had finished his apprenticeship and was ‘settled’ by his brother and master. Within one year of being on his own, he had become a success. He bought himself a brand new Volkswagen Passat before age 20.
He wasn’t a show-off. He needed a vehicle for his trade and decided on one that gave him both pleasure and utility. John was hard work personified. About three times in a week, he would make trips from Lagos to Ado-Ekiti to buy stationary, which was his item of trade. Nigeria was relatively industrialized, and Omolayo manufactured stationary at Ado. John was one of his main customers.
There were also the government-owned giant paper mill at Jebba, and the Oku Iboku newsprint mill was to join in 1986. Of course, the Passat that my cousin bought was made in Nigeria by Volkswagen at Badagry Expressway. There was also a Peugeot at Kaduna, and the cars made by these two companies were booked ahead. The military government of Olusegun Obasanjo made them Nigerian cars, also used by the head of state.
Though corruption was high in the management of these state firms, they provided jobs for Nigerians, at least, and the import substitution philosophy on which the idea was hinged was a limited success.
After President Shehu Shagari’s Austerity Programme, following massive corruption which ended with his overthrow on the last day of 1983, the Buhari/Idiagbon military government restored hope. It took out the food shortages and rampaging inflation through its trademark counter trade midwifed by General Ike Nwachukwu. They succeeded in staunching the bleeding underbelly of Nigeria without exacting great pain. It was within this period that John bought his Passat, at a sum of about N13,000! Yes, this very naira had value. For a sum that can’t buy 10 litres of fuel today, one bought a trending posh car.
General Ibrahim Babangida overthrew Buhari in 1985, introduced the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programme in 1986, and Nigeria’s unrelenting descent started, till date.
Under Babangida, the naira moved from a near par with the dollar, to double digits. It meant that industrial spare parts and raw materials required multiples of their original naira costs to import. And the consumer public, whose purchasing power moved in the opposite direction, couldn’t buy. Overnight, the local industries died out. The badly managed government industries died first. But they were quickly followed by the better-run private ones. Omolayo stationery manufacturers died too. No amount of microeconomic management can cover macroeconomic gaps. That was how Nigeria underwent industrial denudation.
The only benefit of SAP was that it replaced the opaque import-licensing regime for access to foreign exchange with the more transparent bidding system. Under the import licensing regime, those that wanted to import would apply to the Central Bank for an import licence as well as foreign exchange for the import. The process of getting both was mired in deep corruption. But under SAP, those who need foreign exchange simply had to apply to the CBN through the deposit money banks and make bids for available foreign exchange.
This SAP foreign exchange system has run for 38 years and what do we have to show for it?
Yes, it has a seemingly more transparent allocation method by open bidding. But in reality, what have we got? In place of CBN staff milking the system under the import license regime, we have had a 38-year long bazaar of deposit money bank managers doing the same under the SAP regime till today.
The SAP regime has promoted speculation against the naira by the deposit money banks through sundry means, particularly round tripping. It doesn’t require intelligence to do, and mediocre money managers have become super rich by this singular act.
Now, isn’t it like replacing stomach ache with stomach cancer?
The Passat was the only brand new car that John bought. When it dawned on him that the Passat may be the best car he would buy, he tried to extend its life. He bought a Volkswagen bus with which he did the shuttles to Ado. It cost him close to a million naira to buy this fairly-used bus, whereas he had bought his brand new Passat for less than N13,000! The governments of Nigeria have practically buried this man in whom they had invested next to nothing.
John is 60 now, and though his strength and enterprise remain constant, the output has been moving in an almost reverse direction. Nigeria wasted much of his youth and energy and he is not likely to retire, for he has no pension. His only chance at rest is if his children whom he trained through the university make good and put him on a family pension. Otherwise, this strong man who followed the straight and narrow path since his youth will struggle at his shop till his last day. Nigeria happened to him, as we say these days.
For his children, their only chance is for them to find a way out of Nigeria – join the japa train. But even if the visa were free, how would they pay for the flight ticket? Their father’s shop can’t buy a single flight ticket now. Forty years ago, their father could have bought return tickets for all five of them at the same time without a jolt to his capital. Ah Nigeria!
