@GenBuhari
Exactly what I was thinking about!

We are lucky crude oil is still very much in demand in the global market. We should use the prevailing demand for crude oil to our advantage rather than tout ourselves and our resources as commodities for sale!

Barter Agreements between nations is the way to go rather than depending on global banks who don't have the interest of any nation at heart.

On the issue of fuel subsidy removal,

We need to craft a way of drastically reducing our dependence on international organizations like the IMF, WTO and World Bank.
Removal of most subsidies are fundamental rules in the IMF and WTO, can you imagine!!!

the hard truth is that the IMF and WTO are run at the behest of a few global corporations and any country that values the well being of its citizens should be almost independent of these organizations, that doesn't mean we won't trade.

We have to come up with a more humane and democratic version of Col. Ghadaffi's ideologies. It may be hard, but nothing worthwhile in life comes easy,
That's what brillant Nigerian political economists together with political and economic professors should be working on non-stop day and night!

The reformation of the constitution has to start from the Academia not just some copy and paste from the constitutions of the other countries but a look at the history and culture of all the different ethnic groups in Nigeria to come up with a fundamental premise on which to build our democracy.

Our engineering professors together with business and finance professors should be focused day and night on how to stimulate our manufaturing and energy industries in a way that brings the most returns to average Nigerians,

People who do the above should be the ones getting National honours rather than just anyone who has enough visibility!

A document similar to the declaration of independence by America's founding fathers that captures the spirit of Nigeria's democracy.
This document will be binding on every Nigerian including all elected officials.
The document will have to be explained to and ratified by every ethnic group leader in Nigeria.
Every king, chief, or other traditional ruler will ratify and sign the document.
The document will have to be publicised much more than the Justice UWAIS panel report.
The document will proscribe some sort of Sovereign National Conference which states will have excluding the right of secession.

The document will not try to solve all problems, it will just prescribe a general philosophy on which our democracy will be built on.

We need a document such as the above so that our elected officials will not be able to legally hold us to ransom like they currently do.
The constitution of Nigeria, is too big to fulfill this need. Another point to note is that the first constitution was not ratified by everyone. It was created by Nigerians that were selected by the british.

Widespread and far reaching debates among intellectuals and academics will have to be done to facilitate this kind of project.

Funding for the project will only come from Nigerians and will be published on the website,
Detailed Spending will also be published on the website.
All contributions and debates will also be published on the website

Creation of this document is a project to be carried out by civil societies in Nigeria. Enough is Enough.

When this document is finally created, we will need some system to make it Law. This means we will have to sensitize ordinary Nigerians to compel their senators to pass the document as LAW.
Nigerians should organize protests to hold the National Assembly to ransom until they pass the document as LAW.

On point ekt_bear

We have too many states, 6 regions instead of 36 states is the way to go,
It's as if you read my mind,
This morning I was thinking about a system where states can merge into bigger states, for example states like ekiti have no business being states, they are almost totally dependent on FG allocation.

We need an Infrastructure database where everyone can upload pictures and videos of the state of the infrastructure so that the government can take appropriate action against the perpetrators of crimes like shoddy workmanship et cetera.

Buhari's logic seems to be flawless!

The house of representatives should summon the petroleum minister to explain to Nigerians how and most importantly WHY the government is subsidizing petroleum products.

If she cannot give a satisfactory answer and it is hard to imagine how she can, she should be removed immediately and replaced with someone else who knows how to run the petroleum industry.

I think Protests on the planned fuel subsidy removal should have 3 demands,

1. Immediate removal of the petroleum minister
2. Immediate suspension of the fuel subsidy removal
3. Elected government officials' pay should be slashed to 1/4th the current value.

for more suggestions on how to make Nigeria better check out the thread @ https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-764430.32.html

I believe that Nigeria and indeed Africa's greatest problem is the culture of showing off that is deeply entrenched in our psyche. That's what leads to corruption, disregard for rules, lack of patriotism et cetera. It stems from a deeply rooted poverty mentality!

Nigeria has so many problems and knowing the problems is an essential step to correcting them.

However, stopping at the problems is not enough, we must engage ourselves in meaningful discourse on ways to fix those problems.

Check out the topic "Suggestions to make Nigeria better" to view suggestions by various people on ways to solve our nation's problems.
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-764430.32.html

Why do we need a financial sector? Wouter den Haan 24 October 2011

This column launches a new Vox Debate titled “Why do we need a financial sector and how much should we pay for it”. The column argues standard measures of the financial sector’s economic contribution overestimate its true value to a modern economy. As such, regulation that makes it more difficult for the sector to perform some activities is not necessarily a bad thing.

This column is a Lead Commentary on VoxEU's debate on Why do we need a financial sector?
Join the debate

According to national-income account data, financial institutions are responsible for an important fraction of what countries produce each year. A standard way to measure a sector’s contribution to GDP is to calculate its value added, that is, the difference between the value of the products produced minus the value of the products used in production.

This “value added” is distributed as income or reinvested in the financial sector.
•Figure 1 displays the fraction of US GDP produced by the financial and insurance sector. During the post-war period this fraction increased from 2% to 8%.
•The UK’s financial sector generated 9% of total British value added in the last quarter of 2008; this was only 5% in 1970.1

Figure1. Value added of the finance and insurance sectors in the US (% of GDP)



Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

An increase in inputs (capital and labour) is only part of the story. Value added per worker has also increased substantially. Weale (2009) reports that earnings per employee in the UK financial sector were 2.1 times average earnings in 2007. In Philippon and Reshef (2008), it is shown that the rise in the relative financial wage is related to financial deregulation.

The elevated position of the financial sector is even more obvious when we take a look at corporate profits.
•In the first couple of decades following the Second World War, profits in the financial sector were around 1.5% of total profits;
•Recently, this number was as high as 15%.

Pay versus output

Without doubt, these numbers indicate that the stakeholders in the financial sector (employees and investors) receive a substantial chunk of GDP. But the numbers do not necessarily imply that the sector produces this much. Nor do they imply that the actual value of what the sector produces has gone up a lot during the post-war period.

To understand why there could be a difference between the income received and the value of what is being produced, consider the basis of this deduction. In a competitive economy, the price of a good equals its marginal cost, and consumers buy it up to the point where their marginal benefit equals the price. If it is an intermediate good, the price equals the value of the good’s marginal productivity to the purchasers. Thus, the value of output works well as a measure of both the cost and the benefit to society. That’s the magic of the market.

However, if the sector is imperfectly competitive, the price will exceed the social marginal cost and we’ll see value added being artificially transferred between sectors. As the financial sector is very concentrated, this is one reason we should expect the payments to factors in banking to exceed the value created – taking, as a base case, the prices that would be observed if the sector were competitive.

A second wedge between wage and value arises from the implicit insurance that the financial sector gets. As financial service providers do not pay for the “moral hazard” they create, the true value of financial services is systematically less than the payment to factors. Curry and Shibut (2000) calculate that the fiscal cost, net of recoveries, of the 1980s US Savings and Loan Crisis was $124 billion, or roughly 3% of GDP. This cost ignores other costs such as output losses, and this was a relatively mild crisis. Laeven and Valencia (2008) consider 42 crisis episodes and find an average net fiscal cost of 13.3%.2 It would not be fair to attribute these losses solely to the financial sector, but the magnitudes of the numbers suggest that this wedge could quantitatively be very important.

A third wedge comes from negative spillovers. The financial sector may provide services that are useful to a client, but not to society as a whole. For example, a financial institution may help to structure a firm’s financing in such a way that the firm pays less taxes. Such a transaction would not increase production, unless lower taxes help the firm to produce more. Nevertheless, such transactions will count as value added generated by the financial sector. A rather stark analogy could be drawn with the cigarette industry, where it is quite clear that the payments to factors do not really measure social value added since the cost of smoking-induced health problems falls on the taxpayer (in most nations).

Although the sector’s contribution is not easy to measure, there are some things we do know.
•First, the financial sector provides useful services. That is, the sector’s value added should be positive.
•Second, financial-sector value added reported in the national income accounts was probably overvalued in the years leading up to Great Recession.

The financial sector extracted huge fees from the rest of the economy to construct opaque securities that were so complex that only a few understood how risky they were.3 If fees (prices) had accurately reflected the true value of the products, then some of these fees should have been negative, since many such products were not beneficial to the buyer or to society as a whole.

Several important questions need answers.
•What are the reasons for the observed substantial increase in the share of GDP received by the financial sector?
•What are the services that the financial sector in today’s world does (or should) provide that increase the production of things we care about?
•What is the value of these services? This is a tough question for the type of products delivered by the financial sector, because the nature of the services changes over time. For products like computers, we can measure characteristics such as speed and memory and measure how much computing power you get. If a bank becomes better at preventing default, then it provides more “financial services” for each unit of loans issued. But how can we correct for such changes in risk exposure? One possibility to measure the effectiveness of the services provided is to investigate how differences in financial sectors across countries are related to valuable characteristics such as smaller business cycles, better life-time consumption patterns, and innovative firms not facing financing constraints.4

What is the value of modern finance versus traditional finance?

Although the financial sector has been in the limelight since the outbreak of the crisis, these questions have received little attention. There is a substantial academic literature investigating the positive (and negative) effects of the presence of developed financial markets on long-term growth.5 But there is not that much research done on the question of which aspects of the current financial system are important for today’s economies.

One would think that it is essential to fully understand what contributions the financial sector, and especially banks, can offer before engaging in a discussion on how to regulate this sector. If the key aspects of the financial sector that foster growth are relatively simple, then we would not have to worry that, say, increased capital requirements would have negative impacts on the economy. Then it would make more sense to worry about there being enough competition, so that we do not pay a lot for relatively simple activities. But if sustained economic growth requires a creative financial sector capable of performing complex tasks, then we should worry that regulation is not going to debilitate this sector.

It is surprising that these questions currently get so little attention. In an abstract sense, we know what roles financial institutions fulfil. In particular, (i) financial institutions avoid duplication both when monitoring loans and collecting information, (ii) they help to smooth consumption, and (iii) they provide liquidity.6 There are many enjoyable descriptions of some activities enacted in the financial sector that seem hard to reconcile with the laudable tasks thought of by economists. Moreover, knowing what the tasks of the financial sector are in theory does not tell us whether those tasks are fulfilled efficiently and at the right price. Nor does it tell us why the income earned by the financial sector has increased so much. As pointed out by Philippon (2008), in the 1960s outstanding economic growth was achieved with a small financial sector. Has it become more difficult to obtain information so that we now need to allocate more resources to the financial sector?

Some articles in the literature address the questions posed here. Chari and Kehoe (2009) use US firm-level data and find that the amount spent on investment exceeds the amount of internally-available funds (revenues minus wages minus material costs minus interest payments minus taxes) for only 16% of all firms considered. If investment could in principal be done using the firms’ own funds, then the role for financial intermediaries is obviously diminished. Haldane (2010) discusses in detail the earnings of the financial sector and concludes that “risk illusion, rather than a productivity miracle, appears to have driven high returns to finance”. Philippon and Reshef (2008) study wages earned in the financial sector and conclude that a large part of the observed wage differential between the financial sector and the rest of the economy cannot be explained by observables like skill differences, but is likely to be due to the presence of rents. Philippon (2008) argues that an increase in the types of firms that invest (young firms) can explain part of the increased income share of the financial sector; the increase in the last decade remains puzzling.

A similar view is expressed by Popov and Smets (2011), who argue that deeper financial markets in the US relative to those of the European continent are, to a large extent, responsible for the larger increases in productivity and faster pace of industrial innovation. One piece of evidence supporting this view is the empirical study of Popov and Roosenboom (2009), who find that better access to private equity and venture capital have a positive impact on the number of patents. Den Haan and Sterk (2011) reconsider the popular hypothesis that innovations in financial markets should make it easier for financial institutions to smooth business cycles. The idea of this hypothesis is that better access to bank finance ensures that consumers and firms do not have to make decisions that are bad for the economy as a whole, such as firing workers or postponing purchases which in turn could trigger additional layoffs. Den Haan and Sterk (2011) analyse in detail the behaviour of consumer loans and real activity, and find that there is no evidence that supports the hypothesis that financial innovations dampened business cycles, even when the recent crisis is excluded. Lozej (2011) addresses the same question using firm loans. Although the evidence presented by Lozej (2011) is a bit more mixed, there is at best weak evidence that the changes in the financial sector contributed to smaller business cycles during the period before the recent crisis.

Conclusion

The literature indicates that some tasks of the financial sector are beneficial, some attributes of financial institutions matter, and others matter less so or not at all. The recent publication of the Vickers report is a good occasion to investigate what activities of the financial sector are beneficial for today’s way of life, and whether they are affected by proposed regulation. Without doubt, various proposed changes in regulation will be costly for the financial sector and make it more difficult for the sector to perform some activities. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. If a change would cost the financial sector, say, one billion a year but does not affect the total amount being produced, then it just means that there is an extra billion for the other sectors.

Article culled from http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/7149

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

-Elizabeth Warren

@donguutti
Yeah, planning is easier than implementation but at least we can suggest ways on how we can imlement successfully.

@GenBuhari
I agree wholesale. One of the greatest problems we have is ethnic intolerance

Nigeria’s federal structure exists only in the official name of our nation. Years of maladministration by the military with their tendency towards centralization has created an imbalance in our federalism. This is crying for correction which can only begin if recognized by our prospective leaders. We must raise this debate on federal imbalance to put on hold the senseless quest for the creation of more states, demand the legislation of state and Federal crimes and cause the amendment of our Constitution to enable States and Local Government establish police forces to address our disparate internal security needs. We must encourage inter-state competition by devolving more powers and responsibilities to lower tiers of government and reducing the scope and scale of Federal intervention in the daily lives of our citizens.

- El Rufai

When you see that trading is done, not by[i] consent[/i], but by compulsion
When you see that[b] in order to produce[/b], you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing
When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors.
When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you
When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed

- Ayn rand

The world needs more men who do not have a price at which they can be bought; who do not borrow from integrity to pay for expediency; who have their priorities straight and in proper order; whose handshake is an ironclad contract; who are not afraid of taking risks to advance what is right; and who are honest in small matters as they are in large ones.

The world needs more men whose ambitions are big enough to include others; who know how to win with grace and lose with dignity; who do not believe that shrewdness and cunning and ruthlessness are the three keys to success; who still have friends they made twenty years ago; who put principle and consistency above politics or personal advancement; and who are not afraid to go against the grain of popular opinion.

The world needs more men who do not forsake what is right just to get consensus because it makes them look good; who know how important it is to lead by example, not by barking orders; who would not have you do something they would not do themselves; who work to turn even the most adverse circumstances into opportunities to learn and improve; and who love even those who have done some injustice or unfairness to them.

The world, in other words, needs more true leaders.

Lawrence W. Reed

keynote Speech by Pulitzer winner, Dele Olojede at the NLNG Grand Award Night, Lagos, Oct. 8, 2005

"To place anyone above the law is to debase the law itself, and invite the creation of a locust culture, where the swarm of the political elite is engaged only in plundering as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and for as long as possible."


A Honor System


Recently I went home to Modakeke to visit with my father, who is 91 years old. He had given us quite a scare a couple of weeks earlier, when he seemed suddenly to have lost his memory and power of cognition, as well as his sight. But he quickly recovered and by the time I visited, he was strong enough of mind and of spirit to be able to share his favorite scotch with me on a pleasant afternoon. He said, only half in jest, that he was now ready to go meet his ancestors, and if I promised to bring his granddaughters to visit before year’s end, why, he would even hang around for them.


As my father slips deeper into the autumn of his life, and he prepares to welcome the gathering darkness with his customary good cheer, I think more and more of the lives that he and his friends—the people of his generation—lived.


When one considers the state of our country today, my father’s generation has to be thankful that they at least led a purposeful life, where honor mattered, where a real effort in the service of others was routine, and where it was still a matter of course that one’s life was constructed around the simple notion that you shall do nothing to bring the family name into disrepute.


My father and his friends built a community for us to grow up in, where it mattered little if you came from a different clan or belonged to a different faith. Their town needed a high school, so they simply built one. They needed a lawyer, so they pooled money together to send a bright youngster to study the law in England, come back home and hang up a shingle: Attorney-At-Law. They were men of faith but they did not wear their religion on their sleeves. If a neighbor’s crop failed, they found a way to keep his children in school. They worked together to do their best for their community, because in their eyes all that mattered was the common good, from which all goodness flowed. It was by no means an idyll, but at least they had honor, and it was an article of faith that if you had no honor left, then what had you?


This is a story, I would wager, that is familiar in at least its broad outlines to most of you here tonight, my father’s people. And of course, our inquiry would not begin to gather momentum unless I could somehow find a golf analogy to explain its contours.


As avid golfers know, golf is constructed around an honor system. There are no referees, no supervision, no scorekeeper. The game relies entirely on the players’ integrity, to penalize themselves when their balls sail out of bounds; to not improve an unfavorable lie even though no one is looking; to declare their score though they are the only ones who know what that score is. In short, golf is played according to a set of rules fully understood and subscribed to by the players, who then are trusted to police themselves and do the right thing.


The environment constructed by my parents and their peers, in which we grew up, was founded substantially on such an honor system. You do what must be done in the way that reflects well on you and your family. You pay for produce stacked by the roadside even if the seller is nowhere in sight. You keep an eye on the neighbor’s child as diligently as on your own. And if you stray, you accept the penalty for your transgressions. That was the natural order of things.


Trust is the lifeblood of any society. The lack thereof manifests itself quickly in the simple exchanges of our everyday lives. If you can’t persuade your bank to lend you anything other than an ultra-short-term facility, it’s because the bank does not trust you to take your repayment obligations seriously. The landlord who demands two years’ rent in advance is acting out of the fear that there may be no tomorrow, and that you cannot be trusted to pay your rent diligently once you occupy the premises.


And so we must ask: What constitutes the good society? Your answer may include words such as democracy, prosperity, equality, community, education, justice, law and order, ambition, liberty, honesty, values, prosperity, diversity, selflessness. In some societies this has been boiled down in their constitution—their social contract—in the ringing tones of the French Revolution: “liberte, equalite, fraternite.” Or the Americans later on, as they tried to set an ambitious agenda for their emerging nation: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Probably most of us in this hall, and most people outside, will have no disagreement with these words and phrases, even if some would emphasize one over another.


Then we may ask also, is Nigeria such a country? And if not, how can it be made into such a country?


This, ladies and gentlemen, is the nature of our inquiry tonight.


The Challenge of Facts:


A debilitating lack of self-confidence, I think, characterizes today’s Nigerian, having seen his country go down the tubes whilst in the custody of rapacious rulers, and with his own active connivance or apathy. This condition sometimes manifests itself in a prickly defensiveness. I often have friends of mine lapse into such grand statements as, “that’s because you don’t live here,” as an all-purpose dismissal of an argument whose uncomfortable truths they cannot logically avoid. It is manifested in the irrational xenophobia exhibited by many against, for example, South Africans doing business successfully in Nigeria.


But this defensiveness cannot conceal the facts of Nigeria’s condition today. By all objective measures, the country is far poorer-- $350 billion in oil revenues later—than it was 40 years ago. Its moral foundations have cracked wide open, a society whose core values matter far less today than they did four decades ago. Its schools and hospitals 40 years ago were far superior to its schools and hospitals today. Its bureaucracy was more meritorious and far more efficient than it is today. Its elite was far more self-sacrificing, certainly, than today’s elite, whose behavioral patterns bear striking resemblance, if I may be direct, to a swarm of locusts. Nigeria in 1960, as we all know by now, was ahead on the development curve than Singapore or Malaysia or the Philippines or South Korea. Nigeria’s life expectancy has fallen—FALLEN!!— a full decade since the early 1970s, to just 43 years, according to the latest edition of the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures these things. What this means is that I have already lived longer at my age than the average citizen of this nation can fairly be expected to live. The average Nigerian now lives only half as long as the average Chinese or Japanese. We have become a poster child worldwide for fraud and corruption. We are clearly traveling down an escalator that is going up.


The road to recovery is paved with these uncomfortable facts. Confronting them, rather than avoidance and obfuscation, is a necessary condition for our renewal.


A Hobbesian Jungle


I was at a seminar on leadership recently in the South African bush, and in preparing for it I was obliged to read Hobbes’ Leviathan again. A wiser and older friend remarked to me once that philosophy is lost on youth. Re-reading Hobbes after so many years, and with the advantage of thinning hair and the wisdom acquired from the slings and arrows of middle age, made me realize that my friend was indeed a good and wise man.


You cannot read Leviathan and not feel that Hobbes, who wrote in the 17th century, was in fact musing about Nigerian society today. We live in a Hobbesian jungle, where everyman is for himself and the concept of the common good has become totally alien. We blatantly expropriate public property for private use, so long as it is possible to get away with it, and it often is. This applies equally to the elite who divide up public parks among themselves to build private monstrosities behind 10-foot walls, and the very poor who take over highway medians and overpasses to make building blocks or set up trading kiosks or tap directly into street lamps for their electricity.


In such a state, there is no law that anyone is willing to obey. The state itself is considered illegitimate. Force and fraud are the two driving forces. Individuals arrange for their own security, their own electricity, their own water; every home is like a private local government. What we need we take, in complete disregard of any rules. Hobbes calls this chaotic free-for-all a state of war, the very heart of our darkness. It is an entirely unpredictable place, and everyone plans only for the short term.


Let us listen to Hobbes: “In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and the danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”


Now the language of the 17th Century transplanted to today may sound a tad melodramatic. But I think that, in its essentials, it offers a useful way of understanding the underlying forces that have made Nigeria such a chaotic society, to wit: a virtual absence of a legitimate authority that governs the country’s affairs primarily for the common good, as opposed to catering to the wretched excess of the elite and its elaborate rituals of pompous self-importance.


The Good Society


Earlier we touched briefly on the words that might represent for most of us the idea of a good society, such as liberty, equality, justice, morality, modesty, self-sacrifice, honesty, and so forth.


I think it is quite clear that any attempt to construct a good society must of necessity start with the citizens coming together to determine for themselves their rules of engagement. What kind of a country do we, the people, want to have? How shall we be governed? How do we collect and allocate revenue? How do we educate our children?


I don’t think anyone can reasonably claim that our current arrangement works—or is even seen to be legitimate by most citizens. Without legitimacy, a state cannot serve as the pillar of the good society. The legitimate state is one where the individual components have willingly surrendered their natural rights—from the primitive state of every man for himself— to a duly constituted state, in exchange for the more orderly and more efficient system of managing the common affairs, including security, laws in respect of property, and dispute resolution.


We are not called upon to reinvent the wheel; simply to recognize, as Rousseau does in “The Social Contract,” that “each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody,” and enjoys the same rights and privileges as do others in society. And if the citizen should breach this covenant, it is clear that the state has legitimate coercive powers that it can be reasonably expected to deploy.


To say that the rule of law, rather than of the Big Man, is central to the smooth functioning of the good society is to state the obvious. Therefore, the relevant question should never be whether someone in Abuja is conspiring to get the governor of Bayelsa state arrested on money laundering charges; rather, it should be, is the governor of Bayelsa state involved in money laundering, and if so, how can we use established laws, where the alleged crime is committed, to bring him to book?


Law and order in a legitimate state are predicated on the sovereign having the authority, within a system of checks and balances, to enforce the agreed rules of engagement. The punishment must always be greater than the reward that the lawbreaker expects from breaking the law. There also must be a high likelihood that a transgressor will be caught and punished. It’s no use having laws imposing fines for running the red light at an intersection, when a potential transgressor knows that the state has no capacity to impose punishment. Similarly, a state governor or a local government chairman has no incentive to refrain from looting the treasury when chances of being caught are not only minimal, but we have offered constitutional protection against accountability. We are indeed a special breed of people!


The necessity of creating a true Commonwealth in our country cannot be overstated. And its legitimacy is conditional on the citizens having come together to devise the rules of engagement. We can already see one of the most appalling consequences of an imposed constitution, one that places a class of politicians above the law of the land and basically grants them blanket immunity, even when they brazenly steal the family silver. To place anyone above the law is to debase the law itself, and invite the creation of a locust culture, where the swarm of the political elite is engaged only in plundering as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and for as long as possible.


This is why, though a prophet I am not, I would take a bet that we will eventually get around to instituting a genuine national conference, one whose members are not substantially appointed by the current governments at federal and state levels, to chart a new way forward.


The illegitimacy of the current state is at the heart of our more egregious problems. The culture of impunity—a total lack of accountability that is prevalent at all levels of society—can be traced directly to it. So can corruption, election rigging, law breaking, even widespread poverty.


Between Memory and Forgetting


In our headlong rush into a future we have not planned for, we have mastered the dangerous art of willful forgetfulness. If a people have no memory, how can they measure progress? If memory is deliberately erased, what is the evidence that we ever existed? Can there be justice without memory? Can we, without memory, seriously pursue the more equal, more just, more prosperous, more moral society that we seek? Milan Kundera, the Czech author, goes so far as to say that freedom itself is unattainable without the aid of memory, that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”


And so today we are expected to forget the heinous crimes of some of our past dictators, including state-sponsored murder, institutionalized corruption, the abortion of our democratic experiment, and our eventual delivery into the claws of Sani Abacha. Some of these past dictators have even returned, with a degree of flamboyance and utter brazenness, to put themselves forward as the next rulers of our country in the post-Obasanjo era! Not only that, some of our fellow citizens, including some who pretend to respectability, have come forward to support this insult to our collective intelligence! So total is our memory failure that some of our close friends have even wondered aloud, on occasion, whether things were not better under Abacha than they are now.


Need I say more about the danger of forgetting?


Almost 40 years ago our nation underwent a violent convulsion. The image of the grotesquely malnourished child, with distended stomach, spindly legs, large head and unseeing eyes became the lasting imagery of the Biafra War. One million of our children, our mothers and fathers, our fellow citizens, perished in the war. Many thousands of women were raped and villages and towns pillaged.


I often raise this issue with my wife, whose family was trapped in the inferno for a while before they were all evacuated to England. Now and then, some forbidden story from the extended family will surface—an aunt who was raped, a man who disappeared, the constant struggle by many to find food, the acts of heroism and cowardice and depredation, of fetching tenderness, extreme coarseness, and betrayal.


All this has been erased from the national memory, though it no doubt continues to exist in the interior lives of many. No monuments mark the war’s high points or low. No register of those who died fighting on both sides exists anywhere that I know. No acknowledgement of loss or pain or suffering. Nothing at all as we race headlong into our opaque future, afraid of a backward glance lest we be turned, like Lot, into pillars of salt.


The case of the forgotten war illustrates for me very vividly the unreality of the Nigerian state. We have apparently decided that we are a people without a past, and it stands to reason that we should be darting this way and that in confusion, not at all sure what direction we should be heading. It stands to reason that, if we have no past, we have no future.


The Challenge of Leadership


One of our most glaring failures has been in the area of leadership. By and large we operate on the insane principle that it is not necessary to put our best foot forward. This accounts for the fact that those who rise to leadership positions in all spheres of our national life include a large number of gangsters, shady businessmen, hustlers—even accused murders and ex-convicts. It is not an accident that, since independence, Nigeria has not managed to have a single president with a university education. Ten heads of state and counting, and not one has a college degree in the one country in Africa that has produced the highest number of highly educated people! Now one cannot sensibly claim that a college degree is a guarantee of efficient and inspired leadership. But surely it should be no disqualification either.


In other societies, inspired leadership has galvanized the population toward positive change and modernization. Lee Kwan Yu, Singapore’s founding father, willed an island backwater into perhaps the world’s most efficient and best-educated state—and also one of the most prosperous—in the short span of 30 years. On our own continent we have the awe-inspiring example of Nelson Mandela, the very personification of the self-sacrificial leader, who, at his moment of triumph, decided that wisdom was just as important as righteousness, and that his own time on the national stage should be brief, so that a new generation of leaders could be allowed to take the country into the 21st Century. Unlike the disappointing Robert Mugabe, Mandela did not believe in the infallibility of iconic leaders. Julius Nyerere, no matter the failure of his economic policies, was nevertheless a deeply honorable and modest leader, who shunned personal gratification and worked tirelessly at trying to uplift his poor country.


What did these men have in common? They believed in certain fundamental values—service, sacrifice, honor, freedom, human progress—on which they anchored their lifelong labors. Which brings us to this central point, which I borrow almost verbatim from Keith Berwick, the historian and teacher of leaders:


Leadership, values-based leadership, is indispensable if we are to successfully tackle the daunting problems that confront us.


So far, our national conversation exists mainly at the level of the cave man, showing no seriousness or urgency that might reasonably be expected from a society trying to deal with the myriad challenges posed by a 21st Century world. Various ethnic groups are clamoring for the next president (or the next governor, or local government chairman) to come from their area. As far as we are concerned geography is destiny. It matters little if the next president is a scoundrel, an incompetent or a fool, so long as he hails from the right “geopolitical zone,” to borrow from the tendentious language of our national politics. Thus the argument right now is whether the “north-north” must produce the next president, or perhaps it should be the “south-south” or some other such artificial contraption.


From the foregoing we can see that the quality of our national conversation is of an abysmal standard.


We are stuck firmly in the era of Big Man politics, a politics founded entirely on personality. We have done this for 50 years already, and even a child, having burned her finger by the flickering flame of the candle, quickly realizes that a repeat misadventure is easily avoided.


Karl Popper, the Viennese philosopher, argues that a society’s best bet is to create institutions of state, properly balanced in their authority and scope, as a more profitable way of insuring good governance, rather than the moon shot of hoping for a wise and decent leader.


“… it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely,” Popper argues. “If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best.”


In other words, the focus should not be on getting the next Wise Chief, the benevolent Big Man who shall magically solve our problems—they almost never do, at least in Nigeria’s experience. Rather, Popper says, “how can we so organize political institutions that bad and incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?”


I would agree with Popper that leaders of the quality of Mandela, or Gandhi, or Lee, or Lincoln, are exceptionally rare; that “rulers have rarely been above average, either morally or intellectually, and often below it.” It is far more likely that a country, particularly a country like Nigeria, will get a below average leader, so that “it is reasonable to adopt, in politics, the principle of preparing for the worst, as well as we can, though we should, of course, at the same time try to obtain the best.”


In this vein, it stands to reason that we must adhere strictly to term limits, even at the risk of getting a less competent or even less honorable leader. The value of predictable transitions far outweighs the faint hope that an extended tenure for any particular leader will yield the benefits of that good society that we seek.


Of Pets and Men


In addition to a focus on leadership, we must understand that our best efforts will be defeated if we do not create the conditions for a more equal society, and that begins first and foremost with fighting poverty. I will not bore you with the numbers, except to keep in mind just one: about 70 percent of our population—that’s right, 70 percent—subsists on less than one dollar a day. This extreme poverty in the world’s seventh-largest oil producer is a stain on our national conscience, though it’s still debatable if we have any conscience at all.


The evidence is all around us: the destitute fill the streets of our cities. Rather than being in school, thousands of children beg for food from the highway median, their noses pressed to the windows of our limousines while we pretend to busily read the newspaper. We avert our eyes and we do nothing, condemning a large proportion of our fellow citizens to lives of serfdom. We build high walls to keep them out, but they will not be denied. We withdraw behind 10-foot gates in Ikoyi and Victoria Island but they set up roadside stalls as vulcanizers and guguru sellers in our residential neighborhoods. We retreat to gated communities on the Lekki Peninsula but they clog our roads and turn the sidewalks into brick making factories and auto spare part shacks.


The inescapable fact is that we cannot build a modern state, in which we have the rule of law and enjoy the fruits of liberty, in the face of such overwhelming poverty. Poverty, after all, is entirely manmade. It is not an act of God or the will of the ancestors. Starvation and dignity—or starvation and democracy, for that matter—do not mix. Arthur Okun, the economist, arguing for a mitigation of the excesses of the free market, says we must avoid a system that allows “the big winners to feed their pets better than the losers can feed their children.”


Again, we need not reinvent the wheel. The most profound lessons are already around us, often embedded deep in our culture. Ubuntu, umuntu, agamutu, say the people of South Africa. People are people through other people. Or, in plain English: I am my brother’s keeper. What is good for the community is good for me. When the Alsatians and the Dobermans of the elite receive better medical care than the children of the poor, it’s time to change direction.


Those Who Walk Away from Omelas


If you are a member of this privileged elite, as many of you in this hall tonight are, one must acknowledge that it is not easy to surrender a perceived advantage, to fold your cards when you know you have aces and kings. But experience teaches us that there is no better time to surrender the mere pursuit of personal gratification, to walk away from Omelas, as in the title of the magnificent moral dilemma written by Ursula le Guin.


The writer introduces us to the blissful surroundings of Omelas, a small town where everyone is happy and prosperous; the sheer physical beauty of it; the view of the bay and the mountains, the scent of jasmine and the blaze of chrysanthemums and the bloom of crabapple. Even the sex enjoyed by the residents appeals to our most wonderful fantasies, for orgies are permitted unselfconsciously. A drug, called drooz, provides euphoria without aftereffects or the pain of addiction. What could be more perfect?


There is only one cost: for the community to exist in this paradiseland, its members must accept the abominable suffering of a single child locked up in a basement.


Most try very hard to avert their gaze from the suffering child, because they feel they are having a lot of fun living in their idyllic town of Omelas. Those who walk away are few and far between. They have moral integrity and a troublesome conscience. But their passage is a lonely one.


Life in Omelas could roughly be compared to the hedonism of the Nigerian super-elite, which lives in overwhelming abundance and even blithe excess. The super-elite announces funeral arrangements on billboards. They drive in Hummers with tinted and bulletproof windows, albeit over flooded and garbage-strewn streets. The cost of their wretched excess is not limited to the “abominable suffering” of one child, though, but of the rest of the population.


To say that we fight for, and not merely talk about, a just society is not to be against seeking a good life for ourselves. The tension between egalitarianism and personal gratification can be reasonably balanced. Right now, it seems there is room only for unlimited personal gratification. Aristotle describes a life devoted singularly to the pursuit of enjoyment as vulgar, a “life suitable only to cattle.” Surely we can do better. If we do not do a course correction, and soon, we are doomed to remain at the bottom of the well.


The task before us is to fix a failed state. The government does not work for a vast majority of the people. We must recognize that the consequences of a failed state already afflict us—already destabilize us. The rise of gangsters in the marshes and creeks of the Niger Delta, in fact, the increasingly insistent demands for resource control, all are symptoms of the loss of faith in the capacity of government to do right by the citizens. Likewise the mad scramble for loot at all levels, the demand that positions of leadership be allocated according to ethnicity, and the lack of identification with anything Nigerian save the national soccer team.


False Prophets


The fastest growing industry in Nigeria today—faster growing than even the telecom sector, and perhaps just as profitable—is the faith industry, which feeds off the misery of the people and appeals to their worst instincts and propensity to superstition, illogic and unreason. The mushroom churches are particularly in love, it would seem from the billboards around our benighted city, with words such as fire and damnation, as well as promises of wealth—a kind of money-doubler trickery.


We do not necessarily have to agree with Marx that religion is the “opium of the people” to recognize the destructive power of mindless faith, which eschews self help and sacrifice and instead asks you to trust in God, who will magically provide everything for you.


This unquestioning faith has adopted and perverted one of the tools of modern management, which is the concept of outsourcing non-core competencies to others. In this case, our prophets simply ask us to outsource everything to God. Of course, the prophets live spectacularly well off the backs of the foolish multitudes. The faith trade is largely the abode of charlatans and rogues, characters straight out of Wole Soyinka’s “The Trials of Brother Jero.” Recently I was thumbing through one of these glossy magazines that are established for the purpose of singing the praise of our moneyed class. It featured one of the most popular prophets in the land, showing off his collection of six or seven luxury cars, all in his favorite color black, with the clear implication that anyone who follows him will of course be similarly blessed!


I do not by this mean to single out Christians at all; I think the same is largely true, perhaps even more so, in the other major religions. But our country right now is in a desperate state, a time that calls for clear thinking and rationality, not magical solutions and a reliance on divine intervention. Life is grim and hard, and it should not be obscured by the sentimental philosophy of the pulpit, where everything is outsourced to God and people are encouraged to believe that the just and the good will somehow result from some deity reaching down through the clouds to sweep all our sorrows away. To quote the rationalist William Graham Sumner, to do so “is to spread an easy optimism, under the influence of which people spare themselves labor and trouble, reflection and forethought, pains and caution—all of which are hard things, and to admit the necessity for which would be to admit that the world is not all made smooth and easy, for us to pass through it surrounded by love, music, and flowers.”


We may consider a slight alteration to the famous passage in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, and say, my fellow countrymen and women: Ask not what God can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.


The good society of which we speak will be built, as it has been built elsewhere, by men and women who act, who take it upon themselves to sacrifice a little bit of their individual pursuits for the common good. The new society will be built by teachers who teach, doctors who actually treat, lawyers who fight for justice and the rule of law, bureaucrats who manage efficiently the commonwealth all the while resisting the lure of the easy money, leaders who actually lead, and do not expect that a criminal is worthy of being protected from the law by some perverted notion of executive immunity. And yes, this good society will in large part be built by citizens who understand and accept the responsibilities of citizenship.


We. The People


As we speak of the challenge of leadership as a catalyst for transformation, so must we examine the nature of today’s Nigerian, whose deep and self-destructive cynicism, as we have seen, is perhaps the greatest obstacle to change.


Many Nigerians today continue to deny the obvious—that a potentially wide-ranging transformation is under way, needing only their buy-in for the process to gain momentum. It is undeniable that the Obasanjo government is toying with the idea of a radical transformation. Without a doubt this is the best macro-economic environment we’ve ever had, in which the process has begun to disentangle the government from the economy and, perhaps in time, return it to its best role as a regulatory agency. We can all plainly see the value of deregulation in the telecom sector. And now for the first time in a long time banks will return to being banks. An attempt is being made, unevenly and often unpredictably, to fight corruption. The deal to wipe off Nigeria’s debilitating debt, and spare our children from the pain of our profligacy, is perhaps this government’s most important achievement. But even that, in our poisonous environment, is dismissed by some as insignificant. On account of our long disappointment with politics and government, could it be that we no longer have the capacity to recognize the possibility of progress?


Perhaps because the attempt at reform is at the moment uneven, that the fight against corruption might even sometimes appear to be a selective one, and that the fruits of a generally sound macro-economic environment are not as yet readily apparent, many of our fellow citizens still look upon the current situation with suspicion, if not outright cynicism or hostility.


After years of corrosive military dictatorships and their attendant caprice, as well as the general dissolution and greed of a thieving political class, the Nigerian today feels so battered and bruised that he appears to have lost all sense of how to be a citizen. I have been following with some interest a simple but important exercise by the Ministry of Finance, which uncharacteristically for a Nigerian government agency actually is promoting transparency. The ministry periodically publishes in the newspapers a complete list of revenues allotted from the federation account to every single state and local government throughout the country. So if you live in, say, Isukwato-Okigwe local government area of Abia State, you can tell from the newspapers that your local government received 500 million naira last month for the administration of its affairs.


The question that faces us is, how many residents actually take the trouble to demand that their councilors account for how the money was spent? Did it go toward fixing the broken windows in local schools? Or paving the rutted neighborhood roads? Or reactivating a long dormant waterworks? Or purchasing supplies for the local health dispensary? My guess is that many citizens do not bother, thus signaling their leaders that they do not have to be accountable at all.


The same is true in virtually every important respect. Most parents do not get involved in their children’s schools or hold teachers and school administrators accountable for the proper education of their children. They ask not why our highways are death traps. They witness fellow citizens illegally expropriating public property for private use and they consider it normal, or at least acceptable. They appear to believe, in fact, that rulers have an entirely free hand to do anything whatever, including commit grievous crimes and recognize no difference between public funds and their private spending. The rulers—we must of necessity avoid the term leader, which connotes purpose and service—have naturally taken as much liberty as the citizens are willing to give them, and then some.


The citizen has become praise singer and court jester, obsequious, slavish, bowing only to wealth and position. We have become Fela’s parody of the “government chicken boy.” Our praise singing culture has reached new depths of perversion, with music extolling the supremacy of anyone with money no matter how accumulated, with newspapers and magazines dedicated only to the chronicling of the comings and goings of the elite, with our so-called kings and paramount chiefs bestowing chieftaincy titles on anyone ready to pay-- with such feverish abandon, in fact, that one of our big men apparently has more than 600 of them! The age of Simply Mr., which The Guardian newspaper so valiantly sought to champion more than 20 years ago, has passed into oblivion. We forget that the number of chieftaincy titles we acquire does not in any way equate living the good and useful life. To quote Aristotle, “honor seems to depend on those who confer it rather than on him who receives it, whereas our guess is that the good is a man’s own possession which cannot easily be taken away from him.”


We are ruled no longer by poorly educated men with guns, but the Nigerian remains wary of his freedom. To paraphrase Rousseau, freedom is like a lovely meal of pounded yam and edikai-ekong, but very difficult to digest. That the citizen in Nigeria today lives in relative freedom does not mean he knows what to do with it. In fact, one often gets the impression that many Nigerians would rather not be free, scared as they are of freedom’s responsibilities. They grumble and complain about the flagrant inequities and outright robbery that unfold daily in full view, and they shrug and hope for some divine intervention, and fail to act to shape their own destiny.


I have been looking out of the window in hopes of catching sight of this divine intervention, but perhaps my sight is poor. There is no cavalry out there riding to our rescue, ladies and gentlemen. We must face the cold hard fact that the world owes us nothing, and those who are not prepared to function in it will fall farther behind and become slaves to other races of men. It is neither fair nor unfair; it is just the way it is. As the line goes in the Merchant of Venice, “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano…”


The task before us, then, is not only simply to reform our political system, but fundamentally to learn how to be citizens all over again. Simon Bolivar, el libertador, said the main task facing the leaders of the newly freed Spanish colonies of South America, early in the 19th century, was nothing less than the creation of a new kind of citizen. The new political leaders, he said, “have to reform men perverted by the illusions of error and unhealthy desire.”


We must recognize that it is not necessarily a sure thing that citizens will do the right thing when given the chance. As in the allegory of the chained men in a cave in Plato’s Republic, people do not necessarily want to see the light. The sunlight is bright and can be momentarily blinding, though it soon opens up the vista to our imagination. Freedom tastes great, though it is hard to digest.


The Americans have this wonderful preamble to their constitution, a statement of their ambitions as a nation. Its phrasing is elegant and soaring. It rallies the citizens around a common purpose. “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…” That’s right, a more perfect union, a recognition that the task of improvement is never concluded, that a society must constantly strive towards the goal of insuring the common good.


Are we the people here gathered, and those beyond these walls, pledged to end the culture of greed and avarice that we have allowed to grow, like cancer, on our nation’s soul?


Are we the people here assembled ready to take charge of our own destiny, set our shoulders against that boulder, and start the hard tasking of rolling it uphill?


We the people, are we pledged to forsake purely personal advantage and hedonism, and seek ye first the common good?


We the people, are we prepared to work tirelessly for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?


Are we, the people, willing to set ourselves high standards, rather than constantly seeking the lowest common denominator? Are we willing to create the republic of ambition?


Let us close our exploration tonight by turning for inspiration to Anna Akhmatova, perhaps the greatest of the 20th-Century Russian poets, whose exhortations to sacrifice speak loudly to us today:


“Your heart must have no earthly consolation.


“You must not cling to either wife or home.


“Take the bread out of your own child’s mouth


and give it to a man you do not know.


“You must be the most humble servant


of the man who was your desperate enemy


and call the forest beast your brother.


“Above all, never ask God for anything.”

I have posted this in other threads but I think more people ought to see or hear this.

Starting from 18th century britain through to late 19th century US, germany and sweden down to late 20th century france, finland, japan and south-korea, virtually all of today's rich countries became rich through the use of trade protection, government subsidies and regulation rather than free trade, free market policies.

Professor Ha-Joon Chang. Professor of development Economics, University of Cambridge.

Removal of subsidies only paves the way for absolute capitalism which will increase the already gaping inequality in the nigerian economy!
If the government says a cabal is getting most of the benefits of the subsidy then they should deal with the cabal directly, that's why Jonathan is the Commander In Chief of the Armed Forces!
We cannot afford to throw away the baby with the bath water!

Absolute deregulation and unfettered capitalism will destroy any country! Look at what is happening in america and in many parts of Europe! Unfettered capitalism and totally deregulated markets have plunged the world into one financial crisis after another. The real problem is that Global corporations supported by the IMF are in charge of the economies of most nations and are pushing policies that favor less than 1% of the world's population over the 99%.

This is the basis for the Occupy Wall Street protests going on in the US currently. If the US with all its laws can still be overrun by unfettered capitalism, Nigeria stands NO CHANCE.

Removal of the fuel subsidy will just increase the already gaping inequality we have in Nigeria.

All the paper economists who have learnt in school that deregulation is the key to economic development should realise that they have been lied to as there is NO developing economy that has experienced up to 10 years continuous economic development through deregulation.

Ask Malaysia, indonesia and the other so called Asian Miracle of the late 90s, they have been totally destroyed and will likely not be able to recover for a very long time.

It is pertinent to note that the policies of Okonjo Iweala and her other paper economists are directly responsible for the current global financial crisis!

For more suggestions on how to improve the economy check out the thread at https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-764430.0.html

Starting from 18th century britain through to late 19th century US, germany and sweden down to late 20th century france, finland, japan and south-korea, virtually all of today's rich countries became rich through the use of trade protection, government subsidies and regulation rather than free trade, free market policies.

Professor Ha-Joon Chang. Professor of development Economics, University of Cambridge.

Removal of subsidies only paves the way for absolute capitalism which will increase the already gaping inequality in the nigerian economy!
If the government says a cabal is getting most of the benefits of the subsidy then they should deal with the cabal directly, that's why Jonathan is the Commander In Chief of the Armed Forces!
We cannot afford to throw away the baby with the bath water!

For more suggestions on how to improve the economy check out the thread at https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-764430.0.html

Starting from 18th century britain through to late 19th century US, germany and sweden down to late 20th century france, finland, japan and south-korea, virtually all of today's rich countries became rich through the use of trade protection, government subsidies and regulation rather than free trade, free market policies.

Professor Ha-Joon Chang. Professor of development Economics, University of Cambridge.

Removal of subsidies only paves the way for absolute capitalism which will increase the already gaping inequality in the nigerian economy!
If the government says a cabal is getting most of the benefits of the subsidy then they should deal with the cabal directly, that's why Jonathan is the Commander In Chief of the Armed Forces!
We cannot afford to throw away the baby with the bath water!

For more suggestions on how to improve the economy check out the thread at https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-764430.0.html

IMF policies have failed in ALL the countries they have been implemented. They do not have a single success story yet paper economists like Okonjo Iweala continue to follow the same principles over and over again.

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, ForMemRS, FBA, (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists" and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz argues that what are often called "developing economies" are, in fact, not developing at all, and puts much of the blame on the IMF.

Stiglitz complains bitterly that the IMF has done great damage through the economic policies it has prescribed that countries must follow in order to qualify for IMF loans, or for loans from banks and other private-sector lenders that look to the IMF to indicate whether a borrower is creditworthy. The organization and its officials, he argues, have ignored the implications of incomplete information, inadequate markets, and unworkable institutions—all of which are especially characteristic of newly developing countries. As a result, Stiglitz argues, the IMF has often called for policies that conform to textbook economics but do not make sense for the countries to which the IMF is recommending them. Stiglitz seeks to show that these policies have been disastrous for the countries that have followed them.

Starting from 18th century britain through to late 19th century US, germany and sweden down to late 20th century france, finland, japan and south-korea, virtually all of today's rich countries became rich through the use of trade protection, government subsidies and regulation rather than free trade, free market policies.

Professor Ha-Joon Chang. Professor of development Economics, University of Cambridge.

We need to start thinking in Nigeria!
We must create a shadow government that provides alternative solutions to the failed and failing policies of Okonjo Iweala and her fellow paper economists whose theories and practices have plunged the world into one financial crisis after another!

For more suggestions on how to make Nigeria better check out the thread at
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-764430.0.html

@aresenefc
If the tests ONLY required the students to answer five algorithm questions in 4 hours then the students are only fit for large software development projects like the ones at IBM

What we need in Nigeria is not complex algorithms. We need fairly simlpe solutions to everyday problems.

thanks for not lambasting me. lol
I take my previous statement back.

@ekt_bear
I doubt that Ogun state has the capacity to do anything.
At most, they'll probably just give the students state recognition and some money which will most likely disappear within a few years.

I think it's up to us as citizens to fix our problems through enterprise and economic and political activism!

A lot of posts on the thread at https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-764430.0.html will get us started as a nation on the path towards greatness!

The cynicism on Nairaland is legendary but expected given the terrible state of Nigeria's economy.

Electric power cannot be fixed by a wave of the hand, it will take at least 2 - 4 years (and that's a very optimistic projection).

What we need in Nigeria is strategic economic and political policy changes.

1. Start a gradual process of banning the importation of all goods that can be produced in Nigeria.
2. Get the most skilled Electric Power Engineers into a room WITH ME to fashion out a plan that will allow us to build our power sector by ourselves with all resources from materials to labour sourced locally. This will kill 2 birds with one stone as we'll create millions of new jobs, create a technological revolution and fix our power problem in the long run.

for other suggestions and ideas check out the following thread.

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-764430.0.html

@aresenefc
You obviously don't understand software development!

Unlike normal tests, Knowing the QUESTION does not change anything!
And in most cases, software development competitions do not involve any questions.

A good analogy is a fashion design competition!

Skepticism is good only in moderation. Let's give Nigeria (ourselves not necessarily the government) a shot!

The pertinent question is how we can convert the programming skills of those students into a viable enterprise.

Converting software development into an enterprise requires serious business skills especially in a terrain like Nigeria

We need a paradigm shift from regional and ethnic discussions to discussions about making Nigeria as a whole better.

@ekt_bear, Unfortunately, no matter how you say what you want to say, people can still change it into a tribal warfare because their brains have been trained to do just that. I think you should only reply if a few times when you think the risk of your message being lost due to people's baseless accusations is high.

Please check out the topic "Suggestions to make Nigeria better" at

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-764430.0.html

Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the sole recipient for 2008. This prize includes an award of about $1.4 million and was given to Krugman for his work associated with New Trade Theory and the New Economic Geography.[71] In the words of the prize committee, "By having integrated economies of scale into explicit general equilibrium models, Paul Krugman has deepened our understanding of the determinants of trade and the location of economic activity.

New Trade Theory (NTT) is a collection of economic models in international trade which focuses on the role of increasing returns to scale and network effects, which were developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

New Trade theorists relaxed the assumption of constant returns to scale, and some argue that using protectionist measures to build up a huge industrial base in certain industries will then allow those sectors to dominate the world market.

Less quantitative forms of a similar "infant industry" argument against totally free trade have been advanced by trade theorists since at least 1848


Although there was nothing particularly 'new' about the idea of protecting 'infant industries' (an idea offered in theory since the 18th century, and in trade policy since the 1880s) what was new in "New Trade Theory" was the rigour of the mathematical economics used to model the increasing returns to scale, and especially the use of the network effect to argue that the formation of important industries was path dependent in a way which industrial planning and judicious tariffs might control.

The previous post was culled from wikipedia - Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, ForMemRS, FBA, (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Stiglitz is an exception to the general pro-globalization view of professional economists, according to economist Martin Wolf. Stiglitz argues that economic opportunities are not widely enough available, that financial crises are too costly and too frequent, and that the rich countries have done too little to address these problems.

In Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz argues that what are often called "developing economies" are, in fact, not developing at all, and puts much of the blame on the IMF.

Stiglitz complains bitterly that the IMF has done great damage through the economic policies it has prescribed that countries must follow in order to qualify for IMF loans, or for loans from banks and other private-sector lenders that look to the IMF to indicate whether a borrower is creditworthy. The organization and its officials, he argues, have ignored the implications of incomplete information, inadequate markets, and unworkable institutions—all of which are especially characteristic of newly developing countries. As a result, Stiglitz argues, the IMF has often called for policies that conform to textbook economics but do not make sense for the countries to which the IMF is recommending them. Stiglitz seeks to show that these policies have been disastrous for the countries that have followed them.

Starting from 18th century britain through to late 19th century US, germany and sweden down to late 20th century france, finland, japan and south-korea, virtually all of today's rich countries became rich through the use of trade protection, government subsidies and regulation rather than free trade, free market policies.

23 things they don't tell you about capitalism
Professor Ha-Joon Chang. Professor of development Economics, University of Cambridge

"Representative institutions are of little value, and may be a mere instrument of tyranny or intrigue, when the generality of electors are not sufficiently interested in their own government to give their vote, or, if they vote at all, do not bestow their suffrages on public grounds, but sell them for money, or vote at the beck of some one who has control over them, or whom for private reasons they desire to propitiate. Popular election thus practiced, instead of a security against misgovernment, is but an additional wheel in its machinery."

--John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government

First, any reform strategy must begin with the political logic that led governments to create the subsidy. Fixing the subsidy
problem requires a political strategy that compensates powerful interests that consent to a change in policy—
or finds a way to inoculate policy reforms against their opposition.
Second, an effective political strategy usually benefits from transparency in the cost and purpose of the
subsidy. Many subsidies—especially the indirect, covert subsidies that appear to be particularly large and
pernicious—survive because the parties that carry the burden are unaware of the cost they are paying and
because opacity makes it difficult to pursue an informed debate over the legitimate purposes of the subsidy.
Third, where subsidies are unavoidable—either because they are rooted in an unwavering political calculus
or because they serve legitimate public purposes—then better subsidy design can usually help reduce any
pernicious effects of the subsidies and also ease the task of reforming them in the future.
Fourth, and finally, subsidy reformers can have more success when governments have better administrative
tools in their arsenal. Broad-spectrum subsidies are blunt instruments that are nonetheless popular because
governments often have few choices. And the path dependence that is evident in their use makes it additionally
difficult for a government to find an incentive to build alternative administrative tools.

Culled from "The politics of Fossil-fuel subsidies" by Dr. David Victor (2009)

Market Theory starting with Adam smith assumed that firms are locally owned by persons who work in them and live in the community in which they are located.
They are full stakeholders in a way that absentee owners rarely are.

“Great men are true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary— they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.”
- Henri-Frédéric Amiel