The absence of relevant surveys makes commenting on so many aspects of life in Nigeria that much harder. By how much has the incidence of inflation since the Tinubu government came into office hurt consumer spending in the country? By how much has shrinking fare on dinning tables worsened domestic distemper? Does the grouchiness that we increasingly encounter on the streets (and which a growing number of commentators attribute to falling living standards) threaten our social fabric — and how? Boosters of the incumbent government at the centre and its critics could bicker over the niceties of these questions ad infinitum — and they nearly always do. Yet, beneath the more obvious loud “Yes!” and “No!” responses that would pepper their disagreements are myriad shades of “buts” and “maybes”.
Beyond question, though, is that large numbers of Nigerians struggle, today, with the same levels of ennui that threatened to overwhelm the country as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) doggedly went about its ill-advised currency exchange programme, last year. A general lassitude and a sense of helplessness is the (probably unintended consequence, at least, today) of policies whose endgames few can see, and whose outcomes most agree might not be beneficial. If, under Mr. Godwin Ifeanyichukwu Emefiele’s CBN, the communication of policy intent was clear (the man wished heart attacks on the markets), today, politics is what is failing — especially the preferred method of communicating the policies on which this politics is constructed.
The Tinubu government has admirably (but in an unhelpful manner) owned policies that were forced on it by the state of the economy. By refusing to describe in sufficient detail to the people the lousy state of the economy it inherited, however, the federal government continues to fuel the sense that there are alternatives to its major policies that could be both cheaper and no less efficient. At certain levels, the Tinubu government’s preference for market-based solutions (freer price discovery regimes across sectors of the economy, for instance) could be included in a conversation on morals. Besides, the way the government has gone about its husbandry of the economy has successfully raised the dander of opponents of “neoliberal economics.” Is the Tinubu administration as anti-people (because it is freeing prices across the economy) as this cohort of its opponents would have us believe?
There is a much more important case for efficiency that could be effortlessly made from the incumbent federal government’s decision to free prices than the moral nature of the current arguments around the matter suggests. From the import licensing regimes of the 1980s to the CBN’s allocation of dollars over the last 10 years, the biggest problem is not what arbitrageurs in the respective sectors of the economy get up to. The temptations offered by the presence of two price regimes for the same good or service in a market where barriers to taking advantage of these price differentials are non-existent is indescribable — and well-nigh impossible to resist. But in making sense of this side of the conversation, a bigger question by far is how the eventual arbitrageur gets access to the scarce resource that s/he then goes on to sell for a monopolist’s gain. In the absence of transparent auctions, nearly always, the “how” is the result of what is referred to in the local argot as “man know man”.
In all of this, though, the burden of an efficient economy is to get resources (and they are never that abundant) to sectors that can most efficiently use them. To glad-hand these resources to any other segments of society is invariably to waste them. Without the fabled “philosopher-kings” in charge, the moral argument against markets is a poorly marshalled defence of inefficiency. That the Tinubu argument has struggled to make this argument reflects poorly on its politics. That it will not tell the people that the levels of economic health and welfare that they aspire to is not possible without wrenching reforms to the current structure of our economy reflects abjectly on its ability to communicate.
And, lo! Has this federal government communicated poorly? Its policy flip-flops are well nigh unprecedented, as we are wont to say, “in the annals of the country”. We could debate, again endlessly, whether the frequency with which the Tinubu government eats its own vomit is because it is not hard of hearing. But what these policy acrobatics do is raise questions as to the government’s understanding of its task. If freer prices improve the efficiency of domestic resource allocation, then we get more mileage by improving the space within which resources are allocated in the economy. In other words, the test of policy (both extant and proposed) ought to be the degree to which it will reduce the cost of doing business (indeed, of even just staying alive) in the country.
The recent cybersecurity act (and its levy on bank transactions) — enacted, and then, apparently resiled — is thus significant in the degree to which it failed this test. But in its way, it was a test of the integrity of the Tinubu government’s weltanschauung on the economy. A test, which the government, alas, again failed equally dismally.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
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