‘We must swallow our pride, go to IMF and lay bare our fiscal weakness’

Levi Oguike is a chartered quantity surveyor, fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors of UK; he reached the pinnacle of his career as a quantity surveyor before going to the House of Representatives for Owerri Federal Constituency, Imo State, 1999-2003. He spoke to SABY ELEMBA on the current move to sell some national assets by the Federal Government to tackle Nigeria’s economic recession. Excerpts:

With your wealth of experience on national issues, what is your opinion on the call to sell national assets to tackle the recession?

The issue of selling the national assets to boost our foreign reserve, I think is a self-centered call; it would not serve our purpose. The foreign reserve is to back up import and foreign reserve is not used for capital development.

So, if we are selling our national assets to finance import that would be the silliest thing to do, from economic point of view is prodigal. Nobody in his right mind would want to sell his father’s house to rent a property, so at the end of your tenure what do you do, the land lord will eject you and you become homeless. Our asset is like a sinking fund, is what we can fall back on.

There was a time a call was made during former President Musa Yar’Adua when the price of crude oil was more than one hundred dollars per barrel. A friend of mine suggested that we sell 25 percent of our stake in the oil industry. At that time the value of the 25 percent was to fetch about 250 and he suggested that we 100 billion dollars in Sovereign Wealth Fund and use 150 billion dollars to tackle infrastructure – railway, aviation, health, road. Those who were very close to Yar’Adua said the young man was mad and the idea was dropped.

But whenever we talked about privatisation in my tenure in the House, I was completely against it. I remember I saved FSB Bank when the Bureau for Privatisation wanted to take it over. I said you cannot takeover an entity that is efficient, you only takeover an entity that is moribund because you have to revive it.

I moved a motion of urgent national importance on the floor of the House and called that thing to order, the bank was saved. I knew the managing director but I never had any contact with him. I did it as a patriotic intervention. So if we are now talking of selling our national assets because rich and wealthy people have said we should sell our national assets, we should look back on what we have done in the past.

If you look at the lawmakers (magazine) September 15, 2001, my position on privatisation was very clear. I said that privatisation would produce domestic imperialism and that is what we are now suffering. And what do I mean by domestic imperialism? When you have rich Nigerians owing a conglomerate as it were, you find out the first thing, the son will be the managing director, the man will be the chairman, the wife will be a director and the in-law will be the secretary and at the end of the day it becomes a family enterprise.

Is there any problem in it?

Privatisation is the cause of this problem, it is the cause of the unemployment we have in Nigeria today. Go to big organisations that have offices in all the states, check NICON Insurance, where is it today? NICON Insurance facilitated NICON Hilton; it used to be NICON NOGA Hilton before it became NICON Hilton. And it became Hilton because of my own report on that project. So today we are dealing with domestic imperialists. Those domestic imperialists would want to buy off the national assets so that we become their subjects. They will be now the domestic masters and not colonial masters, we now have Nigerian masters who are making others slaves in their own country.

It is very unpatriotic for any Nigerian to suggest that we should sell off national assets to fund import.

What do we do now that we are into recession?

Ghana was into recession sometime ago. Today Nigerian government, because of receipts from oil, we become pompous. If Nigeria had gone to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for Budget Support, it could have been a different thing. There is a difference between Budget Support and Project Support.

Nigeria had been in Project Support for a very long time and that is why all the Aids and Grants come through the National Planning Commission.

Now they have made it Ministry of Budget and National Planning that is unlawful. The National Planning Commission was set up with an Act and the Minister is the Deputy Chairman, the Vice President is the Chairman.

They are supposed to have about four commissioners and then the secretary is supposed to be the equivalent of a permanent secretary.

So the National Planning is the secretariat of National Economic Council. All the ministries are coordinated from the National Planning Commission. It was outrageous for the former President, Jonathan to have made Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala the coordinating minister from the ministry of finance. It is never done.

The ministry of finance is like a cashier; Okonjo-Iweala should have been in National Planning Commission to coordinate the other ministers because it is the minister of National Planning Commission and deputy chairman of National Planning Commission the only minister that sits in the national economic council with the governors, so it is the highest minister.

So these people just turned things upside down. It started with Jonathan, if they had not made Okonjo-Iweala the coordinating minister from the ministry of finance, they would not have taken budget. Budget naturally belongs to planning. So all along we have been planning without budgeting and budgeting without planning. That is why we have all this confusion.

And they also created Director of Budget, what is director of budget? The National planning used to be the Bureau of Statistics, before it was a parastatal under National Planning Commission, Centre for Management Development is a parastatal under national planning commission, NISER in Ibadan is also.

So this commission cannot come under a ministry because there is a law regulating it. The chairman is the vice president and I am surprised that the vice president is a lawyer, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and he couldn’t advise on these things and that the ministry of national planning and budget is an anomaly.

So bringing budget to planning, budget used to be planning at the beginning but it was one smart and powerful minister they made minister of finance that took budget along with him. So they have started the right thing now by brining budget back to planning but they should look at the national planning Act and then revive it so that the national planning minister will be the deputy chairman of the commission and then things would begin to function.

There was a rascal they brought there some time ago; he was assistant director in the ministry, he came with one of these World Bank experts and he wangled his way and became executive secretary. There was no provision for executive secretary in the national planning commission. During his tenure, he scattered the place. He goes about calling himself a professor and people know he is not a Professor and the system covered him. So we need to expose some of these things.

And when you speak at times, they think you are scornful but the time has come to expose these domestic imperialists. Tell me the billionaire in Nigeria that his money did not come from the national treasury, you are distributing fertilizer, it is still from the treasury and you later diversified it is still from the treasury and the backing is still from the treasury.

So we budget trillion but at the end of the day you don’t see it and it goes into the bank, they pay themselves, huge bonuses and each one of them is a billionaire from depositors’ money. As I was saying, when you go to IMF and lay bare your fiscal weaknesses they will give you conditionality to help you revive your economy, so that is what we call budget support.

In the Budget Support they will give you experts, that was how Chu Okongwu came to Nigeria as a World Bank expert.

They will send their experts into the ministry of planning or national planning commission and into the ministry of finance and monitor the money they are injecting into the system and help you to manage your economy.

The only thing that will save Nigeria is to swallow our pride, go to IMF to lay bare our fiscal weakness and say we need help and they will come and some of these people masquerading as experts will disappear.