By Charles Onunaiju

SPEAKING at her Senate screening for ministerial post, former World Bank managing director, Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala put the unemployment rate at between 14 and 16 per cent and defined the basic challenge of Nigeria's economy as job creation, ostensibly targeting her estimated percentage of unemployment rate.



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According to her, the task of job creation is even now simpler, since she would only need to design fiscal policies that would "be supportive of sectors that will create jobs, because we now have growth, but we need to translate that growth into jobs".

Mrs Okonjo-Iweala, minister of finance and head of the regime's economic team has shown a total unfamiliarity to Nigeria's real economic condition, or at best has  ideological views of the economy from the classical prism of extant neo-liberalism. This kind of neo-liberal classical world view was extensively deployed in her first engagement with the Nigerian economy under former President Olusegun Obasanjo and the result was further distortion and disarticulation of the economy.

She escaped with an unprecedented capital flight, never known in the history of any developing economy, by negotiating curious debt repayment that gulped a whopping 12.4 billion U.S dollars, promising that the accruable benefit of the cancelled debt would usher in, a certain eldorado. Of course, she stumbled into personal fortune for her effort, returning to her former work place not as medium cadre officer, which she was, before the forage into Nigeria's government, but as a top level management staff.

High unemployment is one consequence of the structural distortion of Nigeria's economy and therefore not necessarily its foremost challenge.  However, her estimate of unemployment rate is totally misleading. The most crucible of Nigeria's economic challenge is to build an integrated economy in which primary, secondary and tertiary sectors are integrated. This would not be possible without developing the agricultural sector and linking it up with a secondary sector that processes the inputs of the essentially agricultural sector. A critical policy implication of the above is the deliberate capital allocation through credits and grants.

The history of the colonial economy was essentially the stimulation of extensive primary produce given impetus by deliberate capital allocation and enabling infrastructure like railways and other rural road network, linking to the sea-port for onward transfer to the metropolitan markets of the colonial masters. This worked well, sucking in excess local labour, which also created domestic market for surplus, which could not readily be absorbed by the metropolitan market.

While this pattern of economic activities did not optimally benefit the local economy, since it did not create the secondary sectors of industrial processing, it could however, in the context of current condition provide a virtuous circle of a performing economy. While Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala talks about job creation, it is difficult to imagine the category of the employed that she had in mind. If she means the army of young graduates freshly churned out from school, or the laid back middle cadre skilled manpower, that was flushed out in her previous economic management team inspired 'down sizing'  or the army of lumpen proletariat, that do not posses any skill and therefore would not fit into any formal employment description. Any economic management strategy that leaves out the huge population of this non-skilled manpower would be attending to a very negligible proportion of the nation's job sector and therefore would leave combustible social vacuum whose consequence would be seized by crimes, militancy and even terrorism. Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala economic perspective is too formal and narrow to accommodate the full range of the nation's economic crises. She parades an orthodox; classical neo-liberal economics that has long failed in every corner of the developing world. Her economic baggage is a poor resuscitation of the Washington neo-liberal exports that so tormented the countries of South America in the 1980s. The invasion of Chile under General Augusto Pinochet, by the 'Chicago boys', the neo-liberal economic clones of Milton Friedman, triggered unprecedented shrink of the economy, with a consequence of high-handed repression by the regime. From Chile to Brazil, Argentina to Venezuela, the bankruptcy of neo-liberal economic management bore fruits in massive social exclusion; heighten armed insurgency and almost near political extinction of right wing regimes that collaborated with the World Bank and IMF to foist the policies.

Since the early 1990s, up to date, the region of South America had in backlash to the Washington inspired neo-liberal economic reforms, elected left wing regimes that have addressed itself to alternative economic management methods and have produced outstanding economic results, with a consequence of social inclusion, integrated economic and political development. Brazil and Argentina, the giants of the region have produced outstanding economic results. Under the former President Lula's workers party, Brazil has reduced poverty by over 50 per cent in the last eight years, with a social programmed 'Bolsa Familia'. Mr. Lula's successor, Mrs. Dilma Rouseff has vowed to expand the social policy that sucks in those caught on the margins of the formal economy. Brazil with extensive social policy integrated in her economic management has targeted the huge populations that are never previously accommodated in economic management and has made huge progress in all fronts of economic performance.

Brazil is a founding member of the BRICS, the emerging global economic power house, comprising Russia, India, China and South-Africa, for whom the century is said to belong both in economic category and other indices of global influence.

Throughout, the Senate hearing, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala, made denials of any ideological complicity a cardinal watchword of her presentation. In  as much as the Senate chamber, she confronts have very little truck with ideology; her implacable denials were quite curious. Knowing where, she was coming from; the denials were the standard affirmation of the ideological faithful.

Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala first coming with her team of Malam el-Rufai, Charles Soludo, Oby Ezekwesili, inflicted massive hemorrhage on the economy, created a mafia economy seized by the regime's henchmen, leaving out the majority of Nigerians in the cold, in a manner reminiscence of Boris Yeltsin's Russia, where the Washington/Brussels axies nurtured a few tribe of oligarchs, who accumulated public assets at give away prices. It took the heavy hand of former president and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to reset the economy and recover it from the stranglehold of the powerful oligarchs. Mr. Yegor Gaider, Boris Nemstov and the several of their likes are struggling on the margins of Russian politics with very little prospects, but egged on by western media. Both Russia and Brazil did not attain their current world outstanding economic status, by the neo-liberal economic therapy that evidently emasculated them in the past.

Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala, besides her formalistic economics that has no practical application in our clime is plainly over-rated. Her insight is quite unimaginative even in the context economic liberalism. Her concern for traditional economic tools of fiscal and monetary measures leaves her in a strait jacket. The core issues in Nigeria's contemporary economy is the trend of de-industrialization, collapse of agriculture and the rural economy and the excessive and non-applicable labour in the informal sector, which in reality is the dominant sector. Except for influence peddling and other such activity largely unhelpful to the Nigeria's economy, it is difficult to understand the second coming of Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

A dull, drab and blank regime with no original and home-grown idea on how to tackle the country's myriads of  economic and social problems needed alibi to sub-let economic management to a third party and this has just happened and the result would drive us further in the woods.http://odili.net/news/source/2011/aug/9/12.html

Ngozi economics is exactly wat Nigeria needs right now. No Doubt. Dat is excellent fiscal management and monetary control, with the incentive for inward investment.

Don't mind these text book copier. The book he copied those things from may have been what madam Ngozi used in her 100 level development economics class. Give them the position now and they will start throwing owambe party

chamber2:

Don't mind these text book copier. The book he copied those things from may have been what madam Ngozi used in her 100 level development economics class. Give them the position now and they will start throwing owambe party

Dat is very true. Wat, i know is dat each time madam Ngozi comes into the system in Nigeria something good always happens for the Nigeria economy. ie IMF Debt forgiveness for Nigeria and Information and Technology revolution in Nigeria amongst many other things. 

They just want her position so they can loot the economy and institute cronyism. Award contracts to their family business and all the other fraudulent activities madam Ngozi wouldn't do.  We Nigerians no longer want such and are desperate for the type of progress Dr Okonjo stands for.