Laundering Nigeria’s image: a misplaced priority
Last Thursday, Nigerian media carried news about the bomb blast in Abuja, the explosion at a tank farm in Apapa, Lagos and Nigeria’s qualification for the second round of the World Cup. Pictures of scorched cars and Ahmed Musa, the two goal hero in the match Nigeria lost to Argentina, accompanied the headlines.
The events paint a familiar image of Nigeria: resilient but risky. When Nigeria is focused and work as a team it succeeds but we are increasingly vulnerable to unforced errors, man-made mistakes. Selfishness and wickedness are a threat to our unity.
Decades of injustice have caused an insurgency in the northeast. The missing Chibok girls (it’s been 77 days since they were separated from their families) and the abduction of 90 more people continue to put Nigeria in the spotlight.
Negative reports aside, genuine interest in Nigeria is not in short supply. Other than concerns about the location of insecurity, bureaucratic bottlenecks and inconsistent policies, non-Nigerians are willing to take calculated risks. A decade of good economic governance – fiscal and monetary policy – coupled with the rebasing of the GDP in April have made Nigeria a top destination for foreign direct invest (FDI). Investors are guaranteed 35 to 40 percent returns on investments, making Nigeria among the best globally.
Charles Robertson, chief economist at RenCap, an investment bank, puts this contradiction: investment commitments despite incessant terrorist attacks (a civil war) and corruption, down to the strong growth of Nigeria “in a low growth world, great demographics in ageing world and good debt metrics in an over-indebted world”.
A similar situation elsewhere confirms this viewpoint: oil exploration and production continues in Kurdistan, an autonomous region in Iraq, despite an insurgency by forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). Rising oil prices due to the crisis has benefited Nigeria. And the US, formerly the largest buyer of Nigeria’s crude oil, has been replaced by India. While it’s not clear India will buy has much oil as the US, finding a new market ensures that oil receipts won’t dwindle drastically and, as a result, it won’t cripple the country’s foreign reserves.
What is worrisome, however, is that the good news is remote from ordinary Nigerians as the sun is from the earth. For instance, 26 percent of the 8.2 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in 2013 were Nigerians, according to the United Nations. IDPs are “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalised violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognised state border.”
Even more worrying is government’s willingness to spend millions of dollars to hire a public relations firm to burnish its image. A glaring confirmation of President Goodluck Jonathan’s priority: how he and his government are perceived abroad. The number of positive headlines, organized by paid spinmeisters, won’t bring back the girls. It is misleading and myopic. President Jonathan needs to pay more attention finding the girls and ending the scourge of the psychopathic Boko Haram.
No amount of packaged good news will deter foreign investors who know there’s more to Nigeria than mainstream bad news. One of the eye-openers of the revised GDP was the 23 trillion naira change in the contribution of seven sectors: information and communication, trade, manufacturing, real estate, crop production, public administration and professional, scientific and technical services. An additional option would be to spend the money to improve our performance on the Doing Business ranking.