Still waiting for Buhari’s cabinet

Nearly eight months after his election, and over five months since he was sworn in, President Muhammadu Buhari is yet to inaugurate a cabinet, a sad development that has not only impacted negatively on the nation’s economy, but has also created an impression that the new administration was not ready for the huge job of governance in the first place.

Nigerians heaved a sigh of relief when, after a long wait, the president recently sent the list of the ministerial nominees, in two batches, to the Senate. The screening of the nominees is over, and the Senate has promptly sent the list of approved candidates to the president, but it appears that Nigerians may wait a little longer as the president has continued to carry on with his sole administration style of governance.

And while the cabinet is yet to be constituted, President Buhari has been going from one country to the other in the name of investment drive. When he visited the US with party loyalists on the invitation of President Barack Obama, analysts had at the time pointed out that the opportunity the visit afforded was lost as it would have been more beneficial had the cabinet been in place and specific ministers made the journey.

While the whole nation and the investing public wait for Buhari and his ministers, the country, which lags behind peers in infrastructural and human capital development, is further taking a backseat in the comity of developed economies in the world, the touted rebasing of its gross domestic product (GDP) notwithstanding.

As has since been pointed out by some experts, Buhari’s dawdling in matters of governance is already taking a huge toll on the country. Ministers are not in place and, therefore, important domestic and foreign engagements cannot be properly managed.

It is also unfortunate that the nation’s economy is daily taking a turn for the worse, as shown by the level of job losses and frightening unemployment rate. No sector is spared!

The tight forex regime imposed by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has since broken many banks’ back. An estimated N500 billion was milked out of the money deposit banks when the Federal Government, through the CBN, implemented the treasury single account (TSA) in September.

Today, headcount in most of the nation’s banks is changing. Branch expansion is impaired. Many, if not all, are beginning to or have already outsourced a number of job functions. Besides, pay cut is the new order for some who fear the wrath of workers’ unions. An estimated 10,000 jobs have so far been lost in the financial sector since Q4 2014. All of these hard measures were to guard against rising costs, which could in the end greatly harm their bottomline.

The same scenario in the banking system is playing out across all sectors of the economy.

The textile industry in Nigeria at one point was employing about 320,000 Nigerians. But today, the same industry employs less than 30,000 people and the factories operate below capacity or they are completely closed. Across the media industry, it is ‘bloody situation’. Many media houses are already having a 30 percent job cut as well as pay cuts.

The manufacturing sector has already shed 40,000 jobs due to challenges manufacturers face in accessing foreign exchange with which to import factory inputs, among other problems. As Ayo Teriba, partner, KPMG, said at a recent LCCI Industrial Group annual seminar held in Lagos, “Once many industries exhaust their inventory, there will likely be massive job cuts.”

Many small businesses have gone or are going bust and all their employees rendered jobless. The oil sector has taken some of the biggest job shaves in memory with close to 200,000 job losses between January 2014 and Q2 2015. Another 500,000 Nigerians risk job losses in the telecoms sector, which was largely viewed as one very efficient captive sector, by the end of this year. The FMCGs reported not only hundreds of thousands of job losses due to security and regulatory regimes but also losses in revenue due to fast falling purchasing income.

Sadly, it appears to us that the Buhari administration is not reading the handwriting on the wall or does not see the danger signals that are all over the place. The president must act now to save the Nigerian economy from imminent collapse!