How Nigeria Signed Poverty Register With World Bank -Ani

Dr. Okey Ani, is a renowned World Bank consultant. In this exclusive interview with MMS Plus, he analyzed the Nigerian economic policies and development plans in relation to the President Buhari’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP), taking into cognizance the attitudinal features and implementation strategies of government in tandem with international best practices. This interview was done during the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), Lagos Mainland and District Society (LMDS) presidential dinner, last week in Lagos where Dr. Ani delivered a lecture on the topic “Impact of Multilateral Institutions’ Support To Developing Economies: World Bank Experience In Nigeria”  .

How strategic is your presentation to the development of the Nigeria and other African states’ economy?
Perhaps, I will give you a copy of the lecture to make your extractions that will be more helpful because I treated it deeply there. You see, before now, on the four development plans of Nigeria, there are reasons binding the reels, what and what happened and lessons to be drawn from there. And then the present administration’s economic recovery plan is a review of the failure of most of the previous programmes and the fill up of gaps created in the structure of governance which wants to take the low score Nigeria enjoys in good governance recently released by transparency international and you know that these things are not done the same year but the beauty of these two programmes Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) and these last one inaugurated yesterday on food security council had done the deal. The next line of action should be publicity and public enlightenment that’s all. Then, the consolidation without policy summersault is now left for those that will come after this administration and if continuity is guaranteed by the people in the democracy then we take it to the next level and more funds would be approved by world bank in their budget for Nigeria, approaching near the population and need of Nigeria and that also will lessen the burden of world bank in analytical work. You see the effort coming from  the bureau of statistics, they are now working and things are stabilizing. It is expected that national planning office will continue in this direction without going back and if it so happens, Nigeria is in good stead and then with corruption checkmated, we are already there.

Most ideas and blue prints suffer implementation in Nigeria, How do we guide against the recurrence of such in future?

That is the headache before now but you will see that the tasks are being tightened. It is that culture of corruption that is eroding it. If you don’t checkmate corrupt tendencies, it will permeate and erode the system like erosion and then you will wake up one day and not see the framework again, that is what caused the failure of all these things. These are the problems that are there. See, it is not the ghosts that will make it happen, it is Nigerians. Immediately they have paradigm shift in attitude and approach, corruption would be checkmated. I am not talking about cleaning of corruption here, you have to curtail and now begin to erode it, just like you are fighting poverty, you don’t just come and poverty goes and nobody would wipe out the whole Nigerians including myself, and you can’t  say you want to start a new group from Nigeria. You can’t wipe a whole society in the name of fighting corruption; you just have to draw out a framework, deduce the strategy and then begin to block all the corners that are having some gaps.   Just like orthopedic, you are doing bone and at certain stage they say the bone cannot heal but it can to make the person limb when it’s growing and over time, the orthopedic surgery will fit in. so that is it and I am happy about what I am seeing now and what all of us are seeing that is causing some pains is the house cleaning exercise that is going on whereby corruption is being identified where it is prominent. Although the corruption that is being addressed is not the whole areas of corruption, it is the ones being identified in segmented and specific areas and are being contained as the case may be.

On the leakages, you don’t fill up the leakages one time, I think you know and that are the process ongoing. Hopefully, if there is no policy summersault, we will not go back to where we were and then we will be able to collect our rates, have money and probably we wouldn’t be borrowing again but unfortunately we have not been able to get that done. We have a lot of money uncollected. If we collect all the money, Nigeria will not be borrowing, infrastructures wouldn’t have been dilapidated and on Capacity building, money would have been available for training. Until then but it is actually in the pipeline. We will get somewhere before the change of administration or the expiration of the present administration. So these are the issues that are here.

Are you referring to our external reserves or what money are you saying Nigeria hasn’t collected?

No! I am talking about internally. There are lots of corruption; .fraudulence, misappropriation, concealment, embezzlement, stealing and others by few.

But people often blame these on institutions in place in Nigeria and sometimes ago, economic experts predicted global economic recession between 2014 and 2018 and the Nigerian policy makers were put on the alert, yet we fell victim. Why?

Yes! They wouldn’t have done anything better then because they didn’t start from the fundamental. They built without foundation, and then it looks as if it is a culture of Nigerians but corruption is not Nigerian culture. It was an imported culture and then it is allowed to grow and that is how it is. That is why today, in Education, Health and overall societal values, people are now focused in materialism. They want to go to heaven but they don’t want to die. They don’t want to do anything tangible to improve themselves to be a productive economy. Then, where do you now think that manner would fall from? If you didn’t sow, how can you harvest?  For those that are religious and go to different churches, when they sow seed, chances are that when you sow seed, it will germinate and you will harvest and you go to give thanksgiving during the harvest period. But if you don’t sow seed, is it my own yam that you will come and take if I am a farmer? When you decided not to plant and planted cocoyam, it will not be possible to come and take my own yam for thanksgiving. I have to do yam giving while you do cocoyam giving and if you didn’t plant anything, come empty handed.

The performance benchmark of 2017 budget was placed on 17% and it is said to be a replication of 2016 budget and the same thing is repeated in 2018.

The difference is that the 2017 budget was anticipated to have an escalated figure/percentage in capital project but in actual performance it was only one time release before the closing of the books. And the reason is tactical and deliberate to conserve more money and try to forcibly, persuasively and coercively change psyche and practice of majority of Nigerians to depart from consumption index reduction by increment to production and perseverance. If I may use the scriptural illustration, fasting because when you fast, the doors of heaven will open for you but when you don’t fast, you cannot receive certain favors. That’s how we now grew our external reserves but if we don’t do that our external reserve wouldn’t grow.

During your lecture, you mentioned that Nigeria seem to register for poverty at World Bank. Can you recap that please?

If Nigeria wants to resign the register of poverty, the opportunity is there. However, the problem is that the professionals are now looking elsewhere and leaving politicians who because of their short life-span in office feel that it is not their business to do the job of the professionals. Professionals will leave their business and when they now enter into the arena of politics they get focused on politics. So, until Nigeria does the needful they would have signed the register of poverty in the global world but I think they don’t want to sign that if by election or by choice Nigeria will not do that. So you can see that by zeal that people don’t like poverty in Nigeria. You can see it and you can feel it on the street that they will welcome anything that will grow their economy and would make them happy.

So it is all about leadership, accountability and practicability of the framework of governance directly from the leadership. And you see, it is not a tea party. It is going to be a long journey and kind of tedious. We just have to get there, that is the truth. There is no better time than now that Nigerians will imbibe that culture. It is one time suffering, just like injection, the pain is sharp but it goes there to address the issue.