Nigeria’s wealth of nation, which is mainly sourced from revenues derived from the exploitation and export of its huge deposits of oil mineral resources, has become substantially depleted in recent times. As the tenth oil producer in the world, Nigeria’s average output of 2.2 million barrels per day of the black gold can no longer adequately sustain the socio-economic needs of its nearly 200 million people. Ranked as the poverty capital of the world with more than half of its population living in hunger and misery, Nigeria’s socio-economic problems are made manifestly intractable by a warped political leadership structure resulting from an equally defective structure of the state, which is adverse to known principles of a functional modern nation in the contemporary world.
The reasons for existence of modern nation state must be more economic than political, as they are essentially well managed corporate entities for the purpose competitiveness for global resources. Fundamentally, the operational structure of a modern nation state is geo-economic in nature and form, which allows for the conversion of the enormous potential energies of its constituent peoples into an externally generating revenue capacity through competiveness in overseas trade and investment. A modern nation state is driven by a political leadership vision is fixated on the global stage with a mission to unite their constituent peoples around a nationalist socio-economic agenda to compete with other nations for global resources.
Unity of purpose, which is a condition preceding socio-economic development is achieved through an organic structure of state that allows for integration and assimilation of its constituents peoples around geo-economic clusters where there individual talents are most relevant with limitless political as well as economic rights as citizens of the state. For such modern nation states as The United States of America, Great Britain, China and Japan, economy defines everything including politics, foreign and national security policy as well as immigration as they are determinant factors in securing an advantageous share of global resources for their respective countries.
However, this is not the case with Nigeria. The largest Black Country on earth is in a primitive state of nature as its operational structure is rigidly carved around ethno-geographic fault lines and not around integrated geo-economic centres as obtainable in a modern state. A rigid structure of ethno-geographic fault lines as federating units, which is made inorganic by the near absence of seamless mechanism of assimilation and integration of its constituent peoples wherever they may choose to reside outside their places of origin, has created out of Nigeria a country of indigenes and not nation of citizens.
As a country of indigenes, Nigeria is a collection of various micro-ethno-geographic entities that are divided and often locked-horns over the struggle over the control of its meagre internal oil mineral resources. In the ensuing struggle, primordial sentiments of ethnicity, geography and religion are solidly crystalized in a divisive form of identity politics as a legitimate tool of power negotiation to secure an advantageous slice of the national cake by the contending constituents’ peoples of Nigeria. Unlike a modern nation state Nigeria exists more on political expediency of internal resources sharing than on the economics of global competitiveness for external resources through overseas trade and investment.
Through a dubious elite consensus of Nigeria’s ruling political class, the principles of rotation of presidential power and zoning of top government leadership positions has deepened Nigeria’s primitive state of affairs with prospects of perpetuity. Arising from this sorry state of affairs has been the steady degeneration of Nigeria’s political process into a criminal franchise of power purchase for self service through an elaborately corrupt patronage system at the expense of public treasury.
President Muhammadu Buhari, a man of high provincial proclivity whose stoic stand against the corrupt practices of his opponents was mistaken for integrity by many has now emerged the champion of identity politics and the living patron saint of state patronage as the only reward accordingly. To underscore this reality, President Buhari has not only increased the size of his government exponentially in times of financial difficulties but has also constituted a cabinet of partisan politicians whose only qualifications were their immense contribution to the unprecedented electoral heist of 2019 in a clear case of patronage at the expense of the common wealth.
With a political leadership that is overtly preoccupied by the politics of resource sharing instead of the economics of resource growing, Nigeria’s hyper unproductivity in recent times has pushed this country of 200 million to the edge of fiscal disaster. In addition to a diminished excess crude account from 2.4 billion dollars to about 600 million dollars, rising by 11.77 billion dollars from 10.32 billion dollars as at June 2015, Nigeria’s external debt profile stood at 22.08 billion dollars as at June 2018. The government of Nigeria has not been able to meet up its most basic responsibilities of payment of salaries and provision of basic social infrastructure without borrowing at a pace that external receipts from crude oil exports can’t sustain.
To satisfy the insatiable want for state resources of Nigeria’s glutinous political leadership, President Buhari’s unproductive cabinet has come up with the most unimaginatively lazy strategy of more borrowing and tax raise. Having exhausted all avenues of revenue by plundering the public purse in reckless orgy of financial debauchery, Nigeria’s political class has once again resorted to feasting on the impoverished masses of Nigeria. If the proposal to borrow 1.6 trillion naira to finance some components of the 2019 fiscal year is most likely to be frittered away in a fantastically corrupt procurement process that has become an enabler of state capture by Nigeria’s political leadership, with the burden of repayment placed on future generations, the increase in Value Added Tax by 50% from 5% to 7.5% is akin to reverse Robin Hood.
This proposed increase in VAT will only serve the interest of Nigeria’s political leadership class. Revenues from VAT like others accruing to the federation account is usually distributed among the three tiers of government. And for a warped governance structure that serves the interest of the- privileged to be in government few-to the exclusion of the-under privileged not to be in government vast majority-translates to money being taken from the poor and given to the rich. At the this rate of Nigeria’s unproductive leadership, the poor will continue to toil in sweat and blood as the Biblical ‘’hewers of wood and fetchers of water’’ in discomfort for the comfort of their rulers by an ad infinitum increase in taxes.
Dahiru, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja and can be reached through dahirumajeed@gmail.com
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Sky Daily
