Nigeria has become a nation where people are encouraged to lose their heads. Men and women of little substance are hoisted on pedestals and declared deities. And then the rest of the populace is invited to worship the questionable deities and to grovel around their empty shrines. Such is the case with the improbable career of the man who presides over Nigeria’s Central Bank.
From our days as undergraduate and post-graduate students at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, during the early and up until the late 1980s, I knew Chukwuma Charles Soludo quite well. We even had mutual friends until his erstwhile and present engagements as Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s economic adviser and Central Bank Governor. His strongest personality trait has always been to sell a different version of himself to people whom he presumes to lack adequate knowledge of him and his antecedents. That trait has served him quite well, especially in those situations when his targeted audience is non-discerning.
It seems like only yesterday, that balmy Manifesto Night in the Margaret Ekpo Refectory in 1982 when he stood boldly before his fellow undergraduates and tried to claim that he was innocent of the allegation that he peddled water for the now-defunct National Party of Nigeria, NPN. Whatever went on in his mind that night; one’s guess is that not many in the audience that saw him still remembered him impersonate a fictitious Tony Ike on NTA Channel 9 Enugu, in a staged “Up-NPN” walk-up interview with Mr. Chika Ubaka on a busy junction in Enugu, somewhere around the make-shift Murtala Muhammed Park a few months before then. He couldn’t get away with that, because his fellow undergraduates knew more about him than he presumed. They disregarded his charming baritone voice and promptly booed him off the state as an NPN Stooge!
There’s no doubt that he must have tapped into that same trait to dazzle Mr. Obasanjo and win his confidence to land himself the previous and present jobs as his economic advisor and CBN Governor. I doubt that the truth would have made any difference to Mr. Obasanjo, but I suspect that he was unaware of Soludo’s not-so-impeccable record as a lecturer at UNN and an external examiner to some Economics departments in the country.
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One does not imply that it is a crime to cultivate and deploy the traits of a confidence man. For me, questions become pertinent when confidence tricks are extended and used in the commonwealth arena to subvert reality. Those who have followed Soludo’s carriage in public life would recognize the CBN Governor’s persistent deployment of confidence tricks. He has tried to off-load his personal success as Professor and Governor of the CBN on the public as an end in itself. Such a posture deserves condemnation particularly because it sustains the dysfunctional culture of cynicism and ineptitude in the land. The sad thing about his smooth-sailing “success”, judging by what transpires in the media, is that many, including journalists, have willingly lent themselves as tools to the central banker. The other day one pundit recycled Soludo’s campaign slogan from his failed bid for Students’ Union Secretary-General at Nsukka to dub him the ‘solution.’ This hagiographer had bought into the idea that Soludo is doing a heck of a job cleaning up the banking sector. The praise is consistent with the governor’s self projection, but it flies in the face of evidence. Any Attentive observer knows that Nigerian banks are hardly on the commanding height of the economy. Nobody has raised germane questions about the effect of the so-called clean up in making banks more central to the concern of the vast majority of Nigerians.
We all seem to have swallowed the fiction of Soludo’s genius. Impressed by his own inflated image, the nation’s banker has been spouting unverifiable economic myths. Wherever you turn, all you hear is the clatter of Professor Soludo, “the brilliant insider,” dishing it out forcefully: “Our democracy is unparalleled”, “The poverty rate in Nigeria declined from 70 per cent in 1999 to 54 per cent in 2004.” Nigeria is alleged to be one of the ten fastest growing economies in the world: its per capita income is said to be on the rise. But when you look around, there’s hardly any concrete evidence of any of that. Many Nigerians may not know that a World Bank report released in New York a few weeks after the CBN Governor proclaimed those intentions indicted the falseness of Soludo’s rosy picture. Thereafter, the Central Bank governor waxed lyrical to journalists that in “15 to 20 years…. Nigeria will be the China of Africa and South Africa may be the Japan.”
I do not know why any of those journalists couldn’t ask Soludo there and then how he intends to conjure up a Chinese-type economic transformation given the abject paucity of spatial-fix pre-conditions. I’ll return to this anon. After reading Soludo’s lyrics and the World Bank report, a student in one of my classes last semester who happens to be conversant with Nigeria because of her Ghanaian parentage, came to my office to specifically ask me where Soludo gets his numbers.
Shouldn’t any econometrician – that’s what Soludo is – know that the kind of economic transformation going in China and maybe South Africa, which went on in Japan some years ago, depends on a ‘built environment of facilities’ – roads, airports, ports, cable networks, railways, pipelines, fibre-optic systems, electricity grids, water and sewage systems, housing, factories, offices, schools, and hospitals, and the like? It’s the obligation of every responsible state to commit and fix (embed) these “physical infrastructures in its territorial space (land)’: Once in place, they will constitute part of the pre-condition that attracts capital ‘in all its physically mobile forms, to actually move over’ other non-conducive spaces, to settle and proceed with the task of maximizing profit, which could then translate to economic transformation. Perhaps Soludo was unaware of that when he advised his boss to skip the much-needed task of governance at home and spend his first term instead on junkets around the globe on the conviction that receptions and cocktails in foreign capitals would attract foreign investment.
This process has been unfolding and entrenching itself in China in the last several years. In the five years that ended last year, China built 6,000 kilometres of railways, up-graded 3,000 kilometres of her existing tracks to the double category, and electrified 5,000 more. The total length of China’s rail tracks stands at 75,000 kilometres. Twenty thousand kilometers of roads, including 10,000 kilometres of super-highways, are in place. Additionally, China has 141 deep-water berths in place – 50 of them are container berths, three are ore terminals, and another three are oil terminals. China’s cargo handling capacity stands at 260 million tonnes now as a result. The handling capacity of its waterways was increased to 25 million tonnes following the harnessing of 3,350 kilometres of its major rivers for transportation. One hundred and fifty airports – including three international-standard aviation hubs in three provincial cities, three stand-by and 40 lateral airports, 13 large airports – were either built or renovated. Its gas pipelines have been extended to 40,000 kilometres; its major cities have 300,000 buses and one million taxis plying their 180,000 kilometres of good all-season roads. Its total remote western provinces are billed to receive 40 per cent of its total rail investments to acquire 18,000 kilometres of tracks, and several additional lines are on the drawing boards. These include the Qinghai-tibet railway, that stand on a terrain which is 4,757 metres high in some places and reputed to be one of the world’s highest rail lines, which will be complete in June this year. One could go on and on.
What China is currently doing to fix and embed capital inside its space is far larger than even what the US did in the 1950s and 1960s, which has been driving its economic growth even today. For the Chinese, the immediate and potential capacity of what is being put into place to absorb profit-seeking foreign capital is enormous. Does one require consulting a seer to infer that any comparison of China and Nigeria in these regards will amount to the comparison of day and night? Nigeria’s balance sheet on spatio-temporal fix is filled with ‘crumbling’, ‘deterioration’, ‘not-in-place’, ‘archaic’, dysfunctional’, and other superlative negatives. China’s poor liberal democratic credentials aside, unlike Nigeria, state building in china is a settled question, and the bona fide of the Chinese State is not being contested. I’m privy to the frustration of two friends whose efforts to convince two US-based firms to support franchise outlets in Nigeria are stymied by the firms’ conviction that Nigeria lacks the infrastructure and political environment for their operations.
Over-seeing the collation and tabulation of crude oil sales – that, is exactly the job of the CBN Governor and everything else that he does or says boils down to confidence tricks – does not a Chinese-type economic transformation make. Some have already hailed him for the reformation of the banking sector, even when it’s clear that banking is far from being in the bracket of those sectors that create or attract economy-transformation capital. Like the illusion that Obasanjo’s peripatetic first term would attract foreign investment, the current side-shows from the CBN Governor will come to naught for a basket-case economy even as it buoys his exaggerated sense of personal accomplishment.
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-This piece was first published in The News magazine of May 29, 2006 by Dr. E.C Ejiogu.
- E.C. Ejiogu Ph.D., teaches sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He’s President/CEO of Ikenga Associates, a security, strategic, and public health consultancy that specializes in political and social risks assessment for corporations, individuals, and NGOs that operate in Africa, Asia, and Mideeast. He can be reached at [email protected].
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