The recent removal of the oil subsidy by the Nigerian Government confirms my erstwhile suspicion that the current crop of leaders ruling the biggest country in Africa have yet to come to terms about the best governance strategies.
The recent removal of the oil subsidy by the Nigerian Government confirms my erstwhile suspicion that the current crop of leaders ruling the biggest country in Africa have yet to come to terms about the best governance strategies.
I would simply define disruptive governance as creating more complications in a system that had already been full of problems and ready to explode. Disruptive governance involves abandoning all laid-down procedures for reaching national consensus on a sensitive issue and unilaterally instituting a broadly unpopular national policy.
In Japan where I have lived for some years now, I have watched, with admiration, how the political decision-makers in the country have argued constructively about the issue of sales tax. Each Japanese Prime Minister that has ruled the country since 2005 always opted for the increase in the sales tax as a viable source of generating more revenues for the country. But for the formidable opposition from other political parties and people’s stiff disagreement against the proposition, the sales tax has remained relatively stable at 5% for the past six years. The attempts to double the sales tax from 5% to 10% have often been perceived as an anti-productive step by the Japanese pundits. They knew quite well that such a move will worsen the national economy through multiplier effects, since the service industry sector is one of the largest mainstays of the country, even bigger than the manufacturing sector.
So, if the past Japanese Prime Ministers succeeded in doubling the sales to 10%, the service industry operators and their consumers would have been hit quite badly.
Looking back at the actions of the Nigerian Government these past decades, one could summarily conclude that the Nigerian rulers are systematically out of touch with the harsh realities faced by the Nigerian masses. Edged on by international economic planners, some unproductive and life-demeaning programs have been imposed on the Nigerian populace, starting from Ibrahim Babangida’s SAP to Olusegun Obasanjo’s unsuccessful privatizations and now President Goodluck Jonathan’s fuel subsidy removal. Each time such a hurriedly assessed and unilaterally implemented program has been executed, the unfortunate Nigerian masses have often found themselves at the receiving end with their living standard brutally degraded.
These are some of the questions President Jonathan and his economic team should scramble to find cogent and reasonable answers to: (i) has the fuel subsidy helped stabilize the economic processes within the Nigerian polity before its removal? (ii) will the palliative measures planned by the Federal Government do anything to reduce the full-blown hardships that will be caused by the fuel subsidy removal? (iii) and how will the Government work to fight corruption that will ensue due to the removal of the subsidy?
It is high time Nigerian leaders signed up for management courses before assuming any national posts. As proposed by Professor Wole Soyinka, requesting that our leaders do mental health checks before elections, should not be seen as asking too much of them, because it takes a little madness for one to go against the wellbeing of the others.
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