IBB, Casino Capitalism and National Security By Adagbo Onoja   Newsdiaryonline Tue Jan 31,2012

IBB

Nigeria is pregnant with change and the only way purposeless and unproductive violence will not be the midwife of that change is if something drastic is done and quickly too. It is to this extent that we must take note of the national security implications of General Babangida’s idea that capitalism is a settled issue as Nigeria’s model of development. He said so while speaking as Chairman of the 9th Media Trust Dialogue on January 26th, 2012 in Abuja.  

Before doing so, we must, however, commend General Babangida’s indication of a personal readiness to get in to army uniform again to fight a war to preserve the nation at the same occasion. The statement was timely. It has a great psychological import and all others in his category are supposed to do same. By that statement, the General has effectively taken himself out of the list of those that may find themselves at the Hague should any tragedy in the form of ethnocide befall Nigeria or any part thereof, particularly those applying possessive, exclusionary pronouns to the president. It ought to be clear to all by now that the British did not assemble Nigeria as an afterthought. They considered so many options before opting for amalgamation. Something could happen profoundly challenging the amalgamation but nothing like that has happened yet. So far, there are only headaches which panadol extra can still cure.

Focusing on the pronouncement in respect of capitalism is warranted by the fact that anyone doubting that IBB is the most conscious right wing intellectual to come out of the Nigerian military to date does so at his or her own risk. Notwithstanding my limited interaction with that establishment, I can hardly be challenged on this to the extent that the other formidable and conscious intellectuals therefrom are of different flavours of conservatism. Their leader must be General T. Y Danjuma whom I chanced upon recently reading Nail Ferguson’s monumental “Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World”. The author of the equally monumental “The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World” remains the reference authority on the modern world being one of the few Historians who survived self-reversal in that area of specialisation. General Danjuma was not only reading the text, he also has a critique of a portion of it. I am not ignorant of the intellectual robustness of the training and orientation in the military but I certainly wasn’t expecting that level from anyone of them. May I be forgiven! 

It is in the right wing nature of IBB’s own intellectualism that differentiates him and makes him and his utterances the gauge of the ideological warfare in this country today. In saying so, I take note of his well advertised advocacy for the MIC, (Military-Industrial-Complex) approach to social transformation in Nigeria many years before he barged into power.  I do not know of now but the typical African military during the Cold War saw itself as a bulwark against Communism, thereby ending up essentially as conveyor belt or transmission lines for foreign interests. That MIC advocacy fitted perfectly in to that even though the Nigerian military has got this lovely anti-imperialist strain in them as demonstrated by Murtala/OBJ, Buhari, (whose regime said that IMF/World Bank conditionalities “aroused the indignation of all-self respecting and patriotic Nigerians”) and, to a great extent, Abacha. Only IBB continue to profess right wing consciousness, for whatever reasons. So, when he says that the capitalist path of development is a settled issue, it cannot just be understood as his personal opinion or a question of right of opinion but a decisive intervention from an interested party in the make or mar debate on the direction and survival of this country.

Before IBB’s arrival in power in 1985, the question of a model that can bring about rapid social change and the re-birth of the Nigerian state was the debate on the ground. IBB commendably wasted no time in intervening. But in the two national debates he organised within his first year in power, i.e. the IMF/World Bank loan debate and the debate on the report of the Politburo, Nigerians voted for state led development strategy. The believers in free wheeling capitalism were roundly and comprehensively defeated.  

In fact, it was discovered that “workers, market women, students, religious leaders and associations, youth organisations, professional groups including university lecturers as well as roadsides mechanics, the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) and even elements of the armed forces such as the men of the 82 Airborne Battalion openly voiced their opposition to the Fund and its conditionality clauses”.  

Even before these debates, all previous ones that took place particularly at the level of informed societies like the Nigerian Economic Society, the bureaucracy and the Constitution Drafting Committee all decided for state interventionism and these are all on records. Above all, the leading politicians at Independence such as Zik, Awo and Aminu Kano were socialists of one variant or another or, in the case of Ahmadu Bello, a bourgeois nationalist. That is the first problem with IBB’s strange wisdom that capitalism is a settled issue in Nigerian politics. Who settled it, where and when?

The compromise had been the Mixed Economy model which is more in tandem with comparative global experience since neither Capitalism nor Socialism has ever been a one-size-for-everyone kind of theory or practice. That is why capitalism in the United States of America can be vastly different from capitalism in Germany or Switzerland or France or in the Scandinavian countries, Japan, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Egypt or post Apartheid South Africa. While some like the Americans tolerate vast income inequality, German capitalism is sensitive to high unemployment statistics while the Scandinavian countries privilege social safety nets along which ‘our great party’, (the PDP) was modeled but decapitated before anybody could even mention safety net.  

Tragically, the capitalism re-enforced by Structural Adjustment Programme, (SAP), in 1986 and which subsequent governments in Nigeria have wrong headedly implemented is out and out of place in the context of the history and cultural realities of Nigeria. While it is true that Nigerians are enterprising, it is even truer that Nigeria, as Professor Akin Mabogunje said, is but a society trying to emerge from being a collection of kinsmen and/or subjects of some potentates to becoming citizens of a liberal and modernizing nation-state. In all societies like this, the most pervasive actor across the society is the state. Hence the fallacy of ‘government has no business in business’ mouthed by spoilt Nigerian ‘capitalists’.

To make matters worse, liberalisation/deregulation in Nigeria has been deliberately misconstrued to mean auctioning State Owned Enterprises, (SOEs) whereas it simply means allowing other operators to invest, to set up enterprises and make profit thereby breaking state monopoly of the business space. It is the competition therefrom that would have even made the government companies to sit up. But, instead of doing that, all we have done since 1986 is to sell off government companies, not only at give away prices but to the least competent cronies, people who are no investors at all, foreign or domestic as most of them are foreign only to the extent of the color of their skin, (white, brown, yellow and rarely blacks) having generated the money from Nigerian banks to strip existing companies of their assets and either disappear or dig in. What was foreign investment there? 

The reduction of liberalisation or capitalism in Nigeria to a matter of auctioning government businesses on the basis of no clear criteria beyond the whims of privatisers is what has given capitalism in Nigeria a casino character, particularly from the late 1990s. It must be the extra wonder of the modern world that the power elite in Nigeria was not deterred from its auctioning spree by the economic foolishness of selling one’s assets at a time of world economic recession when prices are down. 

Why did our own experience of privatisation exclude national security in its politics? For, how could a country develop power generating stations at Kainji, Egbin, Shiroro, Mambilla, Sapele and then wake up one day and decide to sell them? For what reasons? What about the national unity arising from common ownership of power stations, oil pipelines, railways, roads, telecommunication transmission lines and cables? What do we then own in common that makes breaking the country difficult?

If the concept of commanding heights of the economy is now inoperative, have the nation states whose bulk of electricity supply comes from nuclear energy privatized them? Is it not the case that an American President cancelled a bidding in recent years because it was won by some Arabs, pleading national security?

And, seen from the point of view of public and popular interests, how do you create demand if you accept advice to cut public spending/public works? How is Nigeria supposed to resolve crisis of low quality education and youth unemployment if there are to be no state run mega plants, state farms or cooperatives?

Courtesy of a thoughtless privatisation racketeering, Nigeria is today the only one out of the African giants such as Egypt, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa which does not have a national airline. A national airline has been reduced to a cash and carry issue.

Yet, apart from funny financial NGOs of the western world rating and applauding growth which did not reflect jobs or infrastructure standards, the economy remains hopeless. And this is after nearly three decades of privatisation. 

The truth we are confronted with is that Nigeria is not working and democracy has largely been a show here. All manner of rescue formula are being suggested, ranging from a theocratic state, a confederation, restructuring, (whatever that means), the SNC, capitalism, etc. I have not the wisdom to endorse or condemn any one of the above. All I know is that a fundamental answer lies in ending the current economic regime. State capitalism is not dead and all those who have eyes would have seen creative state capitalism at work from the first to the last word of Obama’s last ‘State of the Union’ address.

That address accords very well with Professor Sam Aluko’s unique concept of “Guided Deregulation”  within which he rightly argued for state intervention in the major sectors of the economy in order to promote a self-reliant and dynamic economy in agriculture, industry and commerce, in monetary and fiscal policies, in education, sciences, and technology, at home and abroad. It has nothing to do with whether we like his face or name or tribe or religion. It is about saving Nigeria before something begins to give sooner or later.

In this, the presidency and the President must give leadership. The president in particular needs to be more forceful in doing so. It is not difficult and it is not dictatorship. It is still within the ambit of the rule of law. The current reality whereby investible funds earned within the country are transferred and kept outside the country is contradictory. Those who do so should face the first law of economic nationalism, whether local or foreign investor. The Nigerian state is not about protecting one bourgeoisie but about guaranteeing the security of the bourgeois democratic order.

People must be tied to the country. People who have difficulty in believing in Nigeria should find it difficult in breaking the country with their silly sentiments or acts of economic sabotage via cruel repatriation, for example. In all cases, it is our local investment and investors that would work better and faster for us. We are in an emergency and we need to get out of it if only to avert 70 year old Generals wearing Khaki and returning to war to preserve Nigeria. War is a dangerous thing.

Mr. Onoja is currently of the UI