President Muhammadu Buhari gave interviews last week where he sought to defend his administration’s record. As usual, the response from social media was deafening and mostly negative based on my reading. But the man also has his defenders. Sometimes I play the Devil’s Advocate and try to find the good in generally dark subjects. But I have been unable to succeed with His Excellency: a seemingly morally upright man who takes refuge in blaming others for bad outcomes.
Agriculture is one of the President’s most revered subjects. He has preached, consistently for years, that young Nigerians should return to the farm. It’s not exactly a ludicrous idea. Agriculture formed the basis of East Asia’s economic miracles.
States beginning their economic development never have enough foreign exchange, and one of the easiest ways to fritter it away is to spend more than is necessary on imported food. This erodes a country’s capacity to import the technology - usually, machines for making things - that is essential to development and learning.
- How Asia Works, Joe Studwell
Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan all had to undergo significant land reforms at the beginning of their economic journies and their governments worked to provide adequate supporting infrastructure for smallholder farmers. The proceeds from surplus agricultural output (read: exports) were used to, in part, finance later stages of economic developments such as manufacturing.
So when the President talks about Nigerians returning back to the land, it is understandable. What rankles is why he’s preaching. That’s what clerics do. Six years into his Presidency, it is not clear that the agriculture sector has been more productive than he met it. Instead, food prices have shot up. And we don’t have the surplus, still.
My preliminary conclusion about the President is that he knows very little (if anything) about how to govern a poor state into prosperity. Take, for example, how Nigeria is rebuilding its rail network. We went cap in hand to the Chinese, took out cheap loans, then handed over the construction to the same Chinese. In contrast, when South Korea decided to build its Pohang steel plant with Japanese money and technology, POSCO, the firm set up for the purpose, went to the Australian mining firm BHP to review all the Japanese engineering reports and to provide independent advice on equipment procurement. An ethnic Korean steel specialist who lived in Japan was then asked to review the reports of both the Japanese advisers and BHP.
Meanwhile, the most important question - what are we learning? - remains unanswered. Apparently the Chinese are building a University of Transportation in Daura and training Nigerian engineers who will one day take over the running of the trains or maybe even build high-speed trains in the future. I love the Chinese, but we can’t actually expect them to transfer hard-won technology because of love. I’m yet to see such a romantic story in all my reading of economic history. Usually, you take it, buy it and steal it.
It’s past seven o’clock on a Monday morning and I’m aware this is turning into a ramble, so I’ll end it here. But don’t forget that we elected a President with little understanding of economic history. Great guy, maybe, but countries aren’t run on integrity and morality alone. In fact, if you account for the deaths and destruction this administration’s incompetence has enabled, then the integrity and morality in question is a dirty, nebulous thing - to be discarded in a trash basket.