Collateral registry, informal sector and the place of knowledge

Some of you might say they had read me on this subject before. Well I wasn’t done then. Besides, this issue deserves more than a passing comment, like the one you might have read. This matter is at the heart of poverty alleviation and economic development in our dear country and I am not one to miss that point.

The post war years in Nigeria were followed by considerable socio-economic activism on the part of the federal government. This activitism saw governments take over many responsibilities hitherto borne by the regions. It also led to the foray of the various governments into activities in which they have no business. The result was that private schools were taken over by government and run down.  Others, like banks and other financial institutions,were taken over and also run them down by cronies.

Today, we are aware of the write off our schools have become. Even the poorest families in my village now send their children to private schools! It dawned on me recently that some children on my personal local scholarship were actually not attending the community school in the village. They are in private schools in villages around. The community school, which I attended and following which all doors opened automatically to me, has suddenly become unfit, even for indigent children in the village. My weak effort to renovate the school did not change anything, as other challenges, including lack of tutors, prevailed. The national decay has crystalized in the low or non-ranking of Nigerian schools among others in the world.

One of the legacies of the many years of military rule in Nigeria is the disdain for learning and the learned, indeed, education. This was evident in the treatment of the schools taken over by the federal and state governments. We are still perpetuating that disdain. There is no incentive to learn. It appears easier to succeed as a hustler, praise-singer or errand boy than a scientist, scholar or intellectual. Often the impression is created that once one gets into public office, one can get any of the universities one helped to degrade to give them honorary degrees. Thereafter, one can flaunt the Doctoral award even louder than those who spent many years studying for it.

So much low esteem is attached to learning in Nigeria, perhaps because it has not proved to be a critical success factor. With a third division or even worse School Certificate, once you get into certain critical positions, like any of the legislative houses, one begins to decide who occupies important government position, even if one doesn’t understand what they do in those positions. Worse still, those occupying public office spend more time preventing the public, including researchers, from having access to information on the organizations they run. They are suspicious of every request for data. These institutions unwittingly deprive themselves of the results of quality research that could help them achieve more success. The idea of official secret still dominates the mentality of many public institutions.  The result is that Nigerian intellectuals and the academia are researching mostly with gestimates and wrong data, except for those they primarily generate themselves.

This is why we consider it important to give credit to some of the few learning institutions in the country. At the risk of repetition I like to mention the NDIC and the CBN as leaders in this regard. However, they should promote, even more forcefully, the dying culture of learning in our public institutions. A learning organization is a living institution. Non-learning organizations are a walking dead. It is only a matter of time before they are buried, even if they are propped up by public subventionThat prop lasts only for a while and cannot be sustained. Only learning institutions survive the times because innovation, the critical tonic to growth and development, comes only from learning. Learning institutions not only have maintenance culture, continually protecting their work instruments and equipment, they invest in advances in technology, which help them to stay on top and record more breakthroughs.

As we enter the era of electric cars, many countries have stopped thinking much about oil. They have already set targets for phasing out petrol and diesel engines. Meanwhile, others are busy stalling development in every other sector as they fight over the control pf crude oil. In no distant time, oil will join its estranged cousin, coal, to languish in oblivion. Sadly, all the leaches that have become famous drinking the nation’s crude oil would probably be gone then.

For the same reasons indicated above, ignorance and disdain for knowledge, the recently enacted Moveable Collateral and Credit Registry laws have not received the attention they deserve. Rather they were welcomed by a deafening silence. People are mostly ignorant and information asymmetry still exists. Again, those who know seem uninterested in anything without. Or how else do we explain the graveyard silence that greeted the passage of these two laws, which could promote the success of our poverty reduction efforts, economic growth and development.

If some of the key challenges of the informal sector are finance and the unbankability of its assets, then any event that makes those assets bankable deserves serious attention. I had said elsewhere that my recent interaction with several SME operators showed them mostly unaware of those laws, to say nothing about their contents. I had also appreciated the NDIC for immediately empanelling experts to educate its staff, who will soon be examining institutions implementing those laws. This is the proactivity of a living institution. However, there is much more to be done, by both the NDIC and similar regulatory institutions.

In fact, we need a Blue Ribbon team of specialists need for a nationwide enlightenment campaign on Moveable Collaterals and Credit Registry. It is that important. We are a developing country with a predominantly informal economy and should take that sector very seriously. We seem to be doing that already, given the financing assistance placed at their disposal. However, these efforts may go the way of many Nigerian things, dogged by failure of implementation, if we stop at creating these enabling laws without a process of internalisation. I recommend we educate the public on the nuances of these and laws, and other programmes thatcould change their lives. Actually, we can afford to train the SMEs for free. Their contributions will positively impact our GDP and more than pay back. This is one good way to spend the tax payers’ money and be justified. Besides, we don’t even have to pay for it. There are many people outside Nigeria who will jump at the opportunity to fund such SME development campaign.

Emeka Osuji