Chief Philip Asiodu was once the Chief Economic Adviser to the former Prident, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. In this interview, the one time Super Permanent Secretary journeys into a familiar terrain – economic development – literally tearing through the country’s golden era, down to the last eight years of misplaced priorities, and aportioned blames appropriately. He, more interestingly, prescribes recipes that could lead to the reversal of the lost opportunities for the country.
Excerpts:

What is your assessment of the present government?
Well, I think you have to be a little more specific, but the general impression is that the president, Umaru Yar’Adua, is serious with the issues which we are all concerned about and has indicated a willingness to do something about it.
But there is still the fact that there is with election petition at the tribunal against the president himself. The case is still on. They have not pronounced definitively and so in many ways, everybody has to be cautious initiating prompt changes.

Having said that, there are certain things, which cannot wait. He has been very positive in his attitude towards trying to have credible elections because nothing mocks a country more than to be undemocratic.
We have had in the past elections conducted not in fully transparent manner in such a way as to put confidence in the people.
Democratic elections cannot be performed in the spirit of do or die. There should be a willingness to accept that you may win or lose. For this, there has to be a question of changing the electoral rules, it is important .There is also a serious constitutional question on what we have chosen, the arrangement we have chosen for selecting our office bearers, is it not too expensive?

Do people have the kind of money from honest means to prosecute our elections? Are the conditions such that they are forced to do things to ensure that they win? It is a problem.
The second problem is that the parties themselves, not in a classic sense, real political parties, start with the preparation of a vision for a society, then you construct a definite work programme manifesto. Now, if my vision and manifesto is that am going there to further my nest, to loot the treasury, I cannot get supporters. So, it must be based on a work programme which says am going to move our society from this stage of development to a better one. It is on the basis of this that you then recruit followers and on the basis of which you then go into elections.

But this process takes time and each time the military, like in the last occasion, have gone away, they have left less than eleven months for you to start new parties, select new leaders, know yourselves and have a tradition and a discipline to continue. We have had this handicap. So in seeking to address them and in appealing to people, I think this is very positive because we have to begin somewhere. Then of course, President Yar’Adua’s commitment to the rule of law. There must be predictability. You cannot be capricious in the use of governmental powers. It must be controlled and defined by laws, which exist and those laws must exist; must be known to us and not the laws you make after the event and find people guilty.

So, it is basic to the society that you have a set of laws, which everybody is bound by, and that there is a judiciary that is independent and interprets them and that you can go there and ultimately get justice. This is very important and he has been stressing it and I think this is positive.
Of course, there is more to do in our system because things are delayed too much. They say that justice delayed is justice denied. We must have a quicker way of doing our things through the courts. And I think that there has to be an appeal to lawyers, you know you can exploit technicalities, delays and all that, but it is not in the interest of justice and good governance.

Having said all these, and they are very positive, one recognizes that the president came many years after the deterioration of the quality of governance. The destruction of the civil service in 1975 left us not with the bold non-partisan, prestigious civil service, as it were, but a group of people who feel so insecure that they can be hired or fired at the whim of a minister. They have no prestige, no real authority and not even challenged to play roles.

Now, unfortunately in a developing country in particular and in fact in any country, the duty of your civil service, their competence, effectiveness, impartiality, willingness to act as facilitators to good governance, people do not have it here again.
We have destroyed the old processes of structured advice where, before a government policy came out, everybody who needs to be consulted is consulted. The Permanent Secretary co-ordinates all the inputs, distails them into policy options, the Minister then decides what to take to cabinet and in the cabinet, the policy is decided. But from the moment policy is decided, it is easy to implement because all those who would participate in various ministries would have known about it. For instance, if I want to build a school, it is not just enough to say ‘I want to build a school with so many classrooms’.

You will ask - where is the money coming from? - Ministry of Finance; who is going to survey the land? - Ministry of Works; who is going to help me select the contractors? - still Ministry of Works; is it in the capital programme? - Ministry of Planning.
In the old days, no Permanent Secretary will allow anything like that to go to this minister without first of all consulting his colleagues. This is so that by the time it goes to Council, the advice I give to my Minister of Education is coherent with the advice, which the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance is giving to his minister, which the planning minister gets from his permanent secretary and the works minister. So, it is easy that way to have policy decided and implemented in that process and all that. All that, we have lost and requires painful restructuring. So, in assessing the performance of President Yar’Adua, the first thing is a will to do good. Another thing is what instruments you have to translate that will into well considered, sequenced, focused programme for the people.

You were at a time the Chief Economic Adviser to President Obasanjo. How far do you think our economy has faired since 1999 when democracy came on board.
I’m sorry that frankly, I believe that the Nigerian economy is at least for 40 years behind where it should be. You know what the growth rate was, at least in the 70s. It was ten percent per annum before the coups of 1975, which was very destructive of the Public Service.

We had growth going on and we had at that time in the 70s, 74, 75 and 80 National Plans already identified that the economy had to be diversified. We selected the priorities and modern agriculture and agro-allied sector was the first priority and it is still, if we are to develop. Then you talk about adding value to oil and gas, petrochemical industries and then of course adequate emphasis was given on investment in education and manpower development.

The great tragedy of 1975 was not just that they removed Gowon, but that his plans were abandoned. So, the countries with which we were at par like Malaysia, Singapore - Tunisia was below us - have all outpaced us. At that time, we were amongst the top 55 countries, but now we are in the position of 158. This means that about 100 countries have overtaken us in terms of development as reflected in the Human Development Index (HDI). Now, it happened that there was a break in continuity. You had programmes, which were going on and because of the coups, they abandoned them. And the economy started sliding. As we were going about the growth rate of 10 per cent in 70 and 75, throughout the period from 76 and particularly after 79 to about 1990, we grew at an average of about two percent.
But our population is growing at 2.8 percent plus. So, that shows that in terms of per capita, we are growing poorer, relatively.

What happens? Whereas at independence in 1960, may be less than 40 percent of Nigerians were described as living in absolute poverty, in 1999, the figure was around 70 percent.
And I’m afraid that today, seriously speaking, it is still that way and that is when you take normal definition as measured in our Vision report 2010 when we calculated it, what it will take a man to have a minimum of 2500 calories of food intake and be able to send his children to school and all that.
We now calculated that in 1997, that we required then about N2,200 minimum wage. Then if you were to project the inflation which has occurred from then till now, you will know that if you will be talking about per capita, you will be talking about N10,000 or more.

We find that after the eight years of Obasanjo’s government, that about the same 70 percent of people are still poor. And it will not change until we do something to restructure the economy.
We had stable Naira and all that in the last six or eight years only because of the unprecedented increase in the oil price. We are still exporters of primary commodities, crude oil and gas with no value added.
Except you begin to add value to your primary products, you will remain poorer and poorer in relative terms. There is a very simple example which I like to give people who are not bothered with fine calculations in economics. I was buying my first car in 1957 and that was Peugeot 403, it was a nice car and what was the price? It was £650.

That price was equivalent to one ton of cocoa, now about $1000. Today, equivalent car like that will be 406 or 405 and you have to spend about $25,000. And what is that price of cocoa today, it is still about $1000 a ton. So, I now have 50 years later to sell 25 times as much cocoa as I sold in 1957 to buy the same type of car manufactured this year but who drinks 25 times more cocoa. They do not, they will still drink the same amount they drank in 1957 and this shows how much we have gone backwards in relative terms. Terms of trade will almost and always relentlessly grow against primary producers but if you, through processing, manufacturing, transformation add value like the Chinese and Indians are doing, then you are selling to the world things which they themselves will rather produce but you are producing it cheaper. So, they cannot price it much less than what they pay for it there, and so your terms of trade and relative income improve.

So, except we begin to restructure our economy, we will continue to grope in the dark. But what has happened even by the middle 80s with all the waste and delay to invest in pulp and paper plants? Shagari commissioned one and one was also commissioned in Akwa Ibom. Where are they today? They were completely abandoned and ran down. Here is a basic agro-allied industry in which we have comparative advantage. It takes about 20 to 25 years for a tree to mature to be turned into pulp in Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden and Denmark). These trees we grow here which, within five to seven years, are ready for pulping. We should be selling pulp to the world. But we abandoned all those projects. What about petrochemicals? We had these plants. Eventually we built Eleme Petrochemicals two years later because in 1973 we had a very good project, which we abandoned in political manoeuvers. It took us much, much longer to get a similar project to produce 300,000 tons of Ethylene.

While I was briefly again in government in 1992 to August 1993, I went to that place twice. I released money to them to make sure they finished. Luckily, they were then commissioned two years later. But what did we do? The excellent boys well trained, we starved them of money.
That Petrochemical Plant gives us polypropylene and polyethylene and in phase two, we were to do the raw materials for detergent industries, pharmaceuticals and in phase three, we begin to do things which will use artificial fibre for textiles.

If we had continued on that Plan, we should be exporting plastics and not importing them. We should be fabricating and exporting to America, which is now too advanced to do that and hearing what China, Korea and so are doing now. We had the manpower, did we support it? No!
What did we do in the last eight years? In the convoluted theory of privatization, we sold all those things away for a song and we did not bring them up to be growing concerns as it were.

So, I think frankly that we have lost a lot of time, but it is absolutely necessary for us now not to be carried away that we manage to earn some unprecedented money from oil, which we share every month. We should know that oil is a wasting asset that was recognized in 1975 Plan. Go again into agriculture, modernize it and it requires action in various forms. There are excellent discoveries of new seedlings and technologies in the tropical products institute in Ibadan. We cannot continue to educate boys to work like their grandfathers on half an acre or one acre. What income can they generate with a hoe?
So, we must envisage a situation where an average farmer will at least have ten acres to work, with some mechanization and we will be able to introduce some efficiency. That is one department. But even now, with what we produce, more than 40 percent is lost after harvest to rodents, weevils and deterioration because we do not help the farmers quickly to harvest, dry and store.

So, it’s not just what we do - get fertilizers and distribute them to farmers - we have to now help them with post harvest services. Then collect the grains in time or whatever you are harvesting, clean them, store them properly and this gives you the basis to attract people to process. They do not want to go from farm to farm buying one bag or two of maize there and 10 bags there. But if you have this post-harvest arrangement, which you can do by introducing a buyer of last resort, at least government will have the money to say ‘this is the minimum price per ton of maize’. If a farmer cannot sell it, then you buy and now have an organization which buys up the surplus harvest they cannot dispose.

These organizations are now in a position to promise the processor 100 tons or 500 tons of it. There should be emphasis on the agro-allied industries. Like prior to oil, when many were farming, and foreign exchange was mainly from the export of farm products, thousands of farmers involved were getting the income direct from their efforts. So, you are empowering people in thousand whereas allowing big multinationals to extract oil, then once a month, you come and share the revenue and no attempt to add value to create refineries, petrochemicals and so on. The situation is that we have armies of boys who come out of school and no work to do, with the result that they turn into armed robbers, drug peddlers and all that. So, once you emphasize the farming sector and modernized it, going into processing and luckily these days there is an emphasis on organic foods.

There is a taste now for tropical foods and we have a lot of people in the Diaspora. You now create a new group of people who package food products for export and they will be commanding the prices obtainable abroad and there will be higher income. This will go not just for one tycoon or two, but to hundreds of co-operatives in which you could have organized the farmers. And this in fact goes to reinforce the middle class which seems to have disappeared. The more people are empowered to be comfortable, the less they are amenable to electoral malpractices - take a bag of rice and stuff ballot boxes with papers and all that.

So, that is the first emphasis. And the second is of course obvious - things which can add value like we have oil and gas. Ask yourself, why should we be importing oil? That is absolute nonsense! With great determination, we have the people and if you allow those capable to do what they are capable of doing and not looking for sycophants all about and without corruption, those refineries will be functioning within 18 months, maximum. There is no magic because they are not old. There are places where refineries are built for 100 years and all you do is continuous maintenance and so on and forth.

The Eleme Petrochemical should have been multiplied by now, nitrogen fertilizers from our gas are things which we would have had multiplied and producing, exporting and would have prevented us from importing those things. In fact, if the trajectory of growth and original plan of diversification is not being disrupted, by now oil revenue would have been what they are today, but they will be less than 50 percent of our export earnings. And you can imagine if we are earning as much as we do, not by two or more multinational companies paying taxes quietly to the government but by millions and thousands of small and medium scale industries employing Nigerians.

The whole atmosphere and situation in the country would have been far better. Again, I must say that we did not significantly at all diversify the Nigerian economy. We have been doing some reforms, deregulation, applying them sometimes properly and sometimes not, which is good.

We have talked about privatization, which is also good, but there are certain important preconditions the government must satisfy before anything meaningful can be achieved. These are in the areas of education and in proper reoriented public service, which are facilitators of development. But as it is, frankly, one is not despondent.

Nigerians elsewhere have shown that given the same conditions as other people in Europe and America, they will excel. You see them as Heads of various institutions. My hope had been - when I went into government in 1999 - that within two years of applying the correct policies and attitude and with the enormous goodwill Nigerians had at the beginning of Obasanjo’s administration and his undoubted international prestige at the time, if we did the right things - we would have created the enabling environment for investments to start flowing in for at least $10billion per annum.

Now, when this foreign investment is coming - like it started few years ago - my calculation was that unlike in the past, they will not come with many white managers. So, these companies seeing opportunities which are enormous here will seek to invest and will recruit those who have proved themselves abroad. My hope then was that they will come in sufficient numbers to form a new critical mass of people with different approaches to management and administration and who will then lift us up from our depression of the last 30 years.

Just like we were prepared in the 1960s to take over from the British when they departed, unfortunately we have not succeeded in creating the right atmosphere; we have not succeeded in doing the minimum in infrastructure, energy, water in particular and transportation to make it competitive for people to invest here. If they have to come here, and because they have to come here, they are not only investing in their productive plant, they have to invest in power, in water production and security, then there is a problem. Go out there to China, Singapore or even now in the Middle East where the infrastructure is there, the deep water harbours are there, gas, services and power uninterrupted. So, we have to replicate these favourable conditions and do it quickly.

Would you like to rate the last administration under Obasanjo?
I do not want to add to this sort of scoring. All I would say is that there is a lot we could have gone into, but certain reforms have been put in place, which are irreversible even with mistakes here and there. The message is that government is not going to run industrial enterprises efficiently. The private sector is going to be the engine of growth. Look at the consolidation of the banking sector, it has been very successful. Also, the other instruments now in place, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other related matters Commission (ICPC) are also good. Though people may have said there were some obvious cases which were not investigated, but those institutions are there, and can now be used in a less selective basis. These are positive developments.

But the failure to rebuild the public service and challenge them with proper positive roles, the refusal to re-institute the process of structured advice whereby before government policies are made public, all the necessary investigations, consultations and options are looked at, all the agencies likely to be involved are consulted, issues are debated before a final decision is taken, and that has not helped us. It has led to the policy reversal we are seeing today. If structured procedures were taken, without corruption and done disinterestedly, it will be clear what the purpose is, it will be clear what the reason were for choosing what we chose. In that process, you build a constituency in debt for what you are doing and reversals in that case are not likely.

What is your take on the seeming impasse in the Niger-Delta?
Well, in terms of the Niger-Delta, I think there is adequate analyses and information on the consequences of neglect of the region over the last 50 years. There is enough evidence that the ecology has been severely degraded. And it should be clear that action has to be taken. There is a lot of talk on the NDDC Master Plan, and as far as I’m concerned, it is good in terms of realizing what is wrong and what needs to be done. We have to go back and re-institute this approach.

It has not helped Nigeria that each time a government comes, there is a great deal of rejection of what the one before it had done. People, instead of building on foundations they found, go to construct new ones. And the builder who every four years is laying a new foundation will never reach the rooftop. Nothing happens overnight and it is only by painstakingly going step-by-step and building on the foundation which were properly laid that we can make progress.
But in terms of having identified right projects, studied them, decided the magnitude of investment, target date, there is a lot of work to be done. There are certain obvious things - dozens of them - which could be done in terms of infrastructure.

We have one, two, three east, west, and north-south roads which we can start building with full international speculations and not the sort of things I see happening between Port-Harcourt and the airport there. There, the road is meandering on flat land and people are pouring bitumen on sand practically. If it will take ten times the cost per kilometer to build a modern highway in the Delta region as it takes in the upland, it should be done. So, these things must be specified and well designed. At the same time, people depend much on water transportation, take hours meandering round the creeks. We can start two or three major transportation trunk lines which require dredging the channels. We can use the massive reclamation to create new modern settlements in every local government, lay them out properly, better houses, places for fish farming, schools and so on.

Why should we, for instance, have shortages of petroleum products in Port-Harcourt, which alone in the state you have about 245,000-barrels refineries?
By the way, the problem with Nigeria is not inadequate refining capacities but because the capacities are not being adequately utilized.