Governor Mohammed Badaru Abubakar of Jigawa State explains why the economic policies of President Buhari must be supported. He also said that the past administration of Goodluck Jonathan handed over Nigeria to Buhari on a stretcher.
He stated this in an interview he granted to Daily Trust
Excerpts:
How would you describe the socio-economic policies of the federal government so far? Would you say they are in the right direction?
Well, I believe the federal government has done remarkably well considering the situation we found ourselves after we were sworn in on May 29th 2015. People tend to forget that the economic downturn actually started manifesting in 2014, due to a growing mismatch between the profligate and reckless spending by the previous government, fueled by high oil prices and the resultant shock to the system when prices started to fall. Nigeria’s case was worsened by the fact that with the falling oil prices, our production targets were affected by militant activities in the Niger Delta and outright theft of the nation’s crude oil on a massive scale, perpetrated with the full backing of government officials.
By 2015, the country’s economy was on life support and was literally handed over to the APC government on a stretcher. If you bother to add up all the billions that were stolen in the name of security and the rot in the oil sector, you will appreciate the fact that these people were not running a government in the last eight years but simply supervising the organized sharing of public funds amongst themselves. It is actually a miracle that the Buhari administration has been able to come this far without a complete collapse of the economy and the government, such as we are seeing in Venezuela, which had the same toxic combination of a collapsing mono economy and an uncaring administration.
Without the massive operation to plug the leakages in the system, and sending a signal that it’s no longer business as usual, Nigeria would not have lasted up to July 2016 with a 70% drop in revenue and the unsustainable recurrent expenditure that continues to take the lions share. President Buhari has very few options with the hand that he was dealt with, and the inevitable road to economic diversification that he is leading the country is the silver lining on the Nigerian economic cloud. This is because, even if oil prices rebound subsequently, the commodity will only be one of the several pillars of a decentralized economic model.
It has not been easy and nobody is pretending that it will be, but Nigerians have to understand that we must pass through this very difficult phase before things get better, and macroeconomics is no respecter of persons or regimes. It took President Obama the whole of his first term to reverse the tide of the economic downturn brought about by the fiscal recklessness of the Bush administration to fund the Iraq war; and the global recession, and it was only halfway through his second term that the outlook turned positive.
Even when people talk about the falling naira, exchange rates are largely a reflection of the confidence people have in any particular currency, and rates are not dependent on what President Buhari or the CBN governor decrees them to be. The indices are your foreign exchange reserves, your trade balance or imbalance and the perception of future outlook. So, there is no way to support a N160 to the dollar rate that was prevalent in a $110 per dollar oil price regimen, and $60 billion reserve scenario with what we have at the moment.
We need to diversify our economy and push towards a basket of exportcommodities that will shore up foreign earnings while concurrently weaning ourselves off foreign non-essential consumer goods that continuously put pressure on the naira, otherwise demand, dollar supply and perception will continue to hold sway in rate determination.
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