…Says only only leaders who can solve security and economic issues should rule Nigeria
…Prices of oil and subsidy payment will continue to go up until we refine petroleum products locally
Exclusive, 2023: Elect leaders who are knowledgeable about economy and security- Okeke
As a former Chief Economist of the top rated Zenith Bank,he knows his onions and indeed the nitty gritty of the nations monetary and fiscal policies.
Besides,as a top flight business editor of leading newspapers in Nigeria,for over two decades,he has the depth of knowledge to understand the state of the nations economy and impact of government policies on the citizenry.
Marcel Okeke needs no further introduction.
Digitalisation crucial to survival of economy – Okeke
He answers questions and proffer solutions to Nigerias socio political crisis and why the political environment has not done much to improve the life of the citizenry and deepen democracy.
He spoke in an interview with Newdawnngr.com team led by Editor,Tunde Abatan.
Excerpts:
What would you regard as the main issues confronting Nigeria today ?
They are two major issues. The two major challenges that Nigeria has at present is insecurity and dead economy.
Even if I’m sitting before the Incumbent President, I will call the economy a dead economy and I can defend it that it is dead.
When people are weeping over sentiments, talking about religion, who they would vote for, they are missing the mark. The point is who do you think has the capacity to deal with the current level of insecurity in the land?
And then be knowledgeable enough to know what to do so that the whole country can experience a turnaround very quickly so that you can stimulate the economic recovery and then jump start the economy because the economy is dead.
So who among these persons has the capacity to do that and these should be the major concerns and no other thing.
It is not in my duty to say who among the presidential candidates now that can do it, it’s meant for the electorates to decide. There’s something the General overseer of RCCG ,Pastor Enoch Adeboye preached sometime, and I bought it and it will continue to work for me. He said age or ageing will not be a barrier to accomplish your destiny and I pocketed it since that time.
You know what that means is that even these people who are regarded as old in Nigeria, if it is their destiny to emerge as our president, it doesn’t also mean the person would not function.
In the United States of America,Barrack Obama completed two term at the age of 54 or thereabout and the person that took over from him, Trump, took over at the age of 71 and the man that succeeded Trump took over at the age of 78.
Over 20 million Nigerian youths are unemployed – Okeke
I’m not campaigning for anybody. Until you are in the position where the buck stop at your desk as President, one cannot be blamed for the failure of any government they are serving in any other loyal capacity.
You can’t blame them for the country not working well, the person you need to blame is the president and commander in chief. The buck stops at his table.
I am saying this because you can’t blame the economist.
For example, people blame economist like us or advisers. Once you call someone Adviser, he’s an adviser. It is either you take the advice or you don’t take it.
Even the Presidential Economic Advisory council that was set up, it turned out to be a PR stunt because what do you attribute to them now – poor success or what can you ascribe to them that they have achieved.
When he picked all the ‘who is who’ with great names like that. Even the guy at LBS that the President Muhammadu Buhari picked as Economic Adviser,Dr Doyin Salami. Since he picked Salami till now, have you heard anything from Salami, the chief Economic Adviser or what is he going to say?
The buck stops at the President’s desk. So it is what the President want to do that he will do.
The money he gave Vice President, Yemi Osibanjo , to distribute to market women, in economics we call that transfer payment.
Transfer payment is not backed up by any productivity and when money is dashed, it goes to increase the volume of money in circulation and has a way of driving inflation up. Because the people you’ve given the money have not done anything to earn it. It is an unearned money and you call it a loan, why was the loan processed to be sure that they will pay back at the end of the day.
Who do you think will emerge winner among all the contestants?
It is a tough question. Where we go from here is that whoever wins the election should do the needful and that needful is to put security architecture that will remove arms and ammunitions from unauthorized persons and quarters. Immediately, he must have security architecture and strategy that must remove this arms from unauthorized people.
Once that is done, the other one is social side where you have an army of unemployed persons.
They are so many, the government should quickly do something to meaningfully, that word meaningfully should be underlined,
to meaningfully tackle unemployment.
And that’s a clause to the economy because it is the economy that will create a job.
Government must realistically create a favorable economic environment for businesses to be attracted and for them to strive in this economy, not this lip service you are having now.
You say you are doing economic improvement but insecurity will destroy the whole thing, because for you to engage in any meaningful economic engagement, you have to be alive and that’s why I said the issue of arms and ammunition has to be dealt with first and foremost, when it is dealt with, it will now come to the issue of identifying how this arms and ammunitions are coming in, it should not be beyond us as a country.
Question:Would you say the country is in recession?
We won’t say we are in recession because technically we are still reporting positive level of gross domestic growth in GDP.
We can only say we have gone into recession when it is negative like it was in the year 2016 and year 2020 but the challenge is that our GDP growth rate even now is below our population growth rate.
Despite the everyday killings, our population growth rate is higher than our economic growth rate. And let me also tell you, whether the GDP or whatever, we are only looking at figures, they don’t talk about the well-being or welfare of the people.
What realistically talks about the well-being of the people is the Human Development Index (HDI). That’s what measures very well, and when it comes to HDI, Nigeria will rank one of the lowest, that’s where we have problem.
Look at the price of fuel, how it has gone up, look at how the price of diesel has gone up, look at how the tariff of NEPA has gone up.
How would you describe the sharing of dollars as incentive to delegates during the primaries of the two major political parties?
Those primaries they are conducting contributed in killing the country further because the economy was dollarised. If you check the exchange rate, the CBN lost control.
The CBN will want it to be at #410 or below but as we speak, it has gone to #420 and at black market it has crossed #600, which means if you have #1000 note now it cannot make $2, you can get only one.
That is what they have succeeded in doing and such exchange rate has a way of having a ripple effect on all other sectors of the economy.
People who now genuinely want to use dollar to bring in raw materials or machineries, how will they be able to compete with politicians who are desperately looking for delegates with dollars. When you hear 20 thousand dollars to one person, that is what they are competing with.
This one will give 20 and the other one will say 25 and people like Osibanjo that was alleged to have giving $5000 and nobody wants to look at him and as small as that is, it is still up to some millions.
And that has killed the economy. Look at our situation, we have problem with oil production. And to that problem with oil production to it, add it to the issue of crude oil theft.
What is the meaning of crude oil theft?
It means that when government produces the oil we are supposed to export, so much of it is stolen. So now we have a small quantity to export. Meaning that the quota that OPEC has given Nigeria as a member of OPEC, the quota, we are not meeting it. And yet the official figure that we produce or we are supposed to produce is so high but Nigeria is unable to meet the production quota or export quota allocated to her by OPEC as we speak. The price of oil has gone through the roof which is either 120 or 130 dollars per barrel which to Nigeria was supposed to be good fortune but it is not good for us. Why? Because whatever is gotten from this export of oil, almost everything goes into buying of refined product.
As we speak now,we don’t have any refinery that produces even 1 litre. So all the vehicle or machines that used fuel were all imported meaning that when we export the crude, the people that buys the crude from us because the price has gone up, they consider the rising price of crude into their production and export to us at higher price.
So the price at which we import what they refine or produce will be high. As the price of oil is going up in global market, then the price of the refined product will be going up. What we are importing, the price is going up wiping off whatever we are supposed to gain and that brings locally to us here the problem of subsidy.
The price of what we are bringing in is #500 per litre. If we start selling it to Nigerians at that price, it will be too high for them. So let the government absorb #400 and sell it at #100 per litre and that is what is called subsidy.
The government is shielding the people from feeling the impact of that high price fuel that is coming in.
So who caused the problem of subsidy?
Is it not government that should refine our oil here and have our local oil? We won’t talk about subsidy and people in good position will be saying remove subsidy without talking about refining the things here.
It is not doing any good about this economy and I regard this person as an enemy.
If we go back to the basics, how did we get into this dilemma? It is because of the shutdown of all the refineries. Four major refineries were shut down and all we talk about is Dangote. And if we have government, why didn’t the government privatize these refineries long time ago when they were decaying.
We move forward, we cover one mile and move back two miles or three and that’s the problem. If they had disposed it off at that time and people that bought it started running it as business we won’t be in this mess today.
Do you know #4 trillion naira is now budgeted for subsidy this year. When you add that to the money for debt servicing, how much is left to develop this economy and that’s why the government is bent on continuing to borrow.
They now talk about some useless tax when the business environment is killing.
