Enyeribe Ejiogu
Like most Nigerians, President of the International Church Growth Ministry and mentor to numerous Pentecostal pastors, Dr. Bola Akin-John, is bothered by the parlous state of the economy, which is affecting youths, deepening the unemployment problem and creating other social vices. In this interview, he urges President Muhammadu Buhari to focus his second term on just achieving one single objective, which is to give Nigerians electricity on demand, 24/7, year round, to enable micro, small and medium scale enterprises (MSMEs) to take off and rapidly grow the economy.
The unemployment situation is worsening. How can the Church be relevant in this regard without losing focus of its primary mandate?
I believe that what the church should do is to teach, train and empower people to create employment for themselves and others. There is a need for everybody to realize that God deposited something in them which they need to identify, develop and work on it to turn it into an employment generating venture. Look at our country, there is too much focus on university education. I believe more in technical education. In the most successful economies overseas, they have technical schools, which produce the technicians and artisans that are vitally needed to drive the economy. But if you look at our own country, it is not so. The artisans and technicians that do house wiring, plumbing, tiling and even masonry services at construction sites in addition to repairs and maintenance works are mostly foreigners from West African countries – mainly from Benin and Togo. Our own people are not involved in these areas. We put too much emphasis on university education. The government must seriously work towards reviving and equipping our technical schools. The skills acquired by students from such schools will enable them to go into self-employment. There are other services that provide employment opportunities, but our people tend to look down on these things. They would rather be commercial motorcyclists and spend hours playing Baba Ijebu and betting on European premiership matches, all because they want quick money without putting in any hard work or rigourous effort towards generating income. If you engage them to do handle a contract work for you, they are unserious and unfaithful. They just want to have the money without the requisite hard work. Nobody should be jobless. If you discover the innate talent that God has deposited in you and develop it, you will never be jobless. God has promised that He will bless the works of your hands. God has to first of all see the works of your hands before the blessing will come. The church must begin to teach the value and dignity of labour. Churches can even set up technical schools to equip young people with life skills. The churches must stop preaching about prosperity that cannot be supported with dignified, righteous effort.
The government signed the Executive Order on the Ease of Doing Business. How do you feel about the implementation so far?
Our country certainly needs the participation of foreign investors in the development and growth of the Nigerian economy. When we invite foreign investors, we should allow them to thrive. But when you have multiple taxation, terrible social infrastructure, kidnapping and reluctance of state governors to sign certificate of occupancy, etc, these things are contrary to the intent of Ease of Doing Business policy. In the past we had the policy of giving foreign investors who establish industrial projects a tax holiday for a certain number of years. If the policy is still in operation, the government must necessarily ensure that the companies employ Nigerians into executive positions. It not should be a situation where the new companies will import executives and other categories of workers by claiming that they are technical experts.
Looking at the policy mix of the government, are you confident that the government would be able to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years?
The government needs to create the enabling environment that would allow micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) to thrive. If the government does it, a lot of businesses will take off. You need the right economic policies to achieve the goal. Our government needs to do what the Asian Tigers did: they revolutionized their energy sector, which made electricity abundantly available and cheap. This made it possible for industrial manufacturing to kick off and grow rapidly. This was also what Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader, did when he came to power. The government focused on providing very cheap power and cheap labour. Both of these attracted foreign companies to set up manufacturing subsidiaries in China. Within a short time, China became the largest contract-manufacturing centre in the world. Today, it is a net exporter of goods and it is enjoying balance of payments surplus with almost all the countries in the world. It eventually dethroned Japan to become the second largest economy in the world, after the United States.
To get Nigerians out of poverty, you must accept that the governance infrastructure is over-bloated. In fact it is obese and must drastically slim down. The cost of running the government is exorbitant. Take one small example: the office of the Head of Service was recently embroiled in a scandal involving over N3 billion allegedly spent on tour duty allowance paid to civil servants. Yet universities lack funds to buy chemicals, equip libraries and conduct research. Look at what the people in the National Assembly are doing and the horrendous salaries and allowances they pay themselves. Each senator gets about N13.5 million every month as direct salary and allowances. This does not include all the other surplus money they get from the ministries, departments and agencies for doing oversight work as chairmen, deputy chairmen and members of various committees. What of constituency projects funds? Conservatively, each senator earns over N300 million a year. Recently, the newspapers reported that the National Assembly planned to spend N5.5 billion to buy new SUVs. These same people got brand new SUVs between 2015 and 2019. At the Presidency, the expenditure on various frivolous items is so enormous and mind-blowing, yet the same government keeps putting more burdens on the poor; the healthcare system is not well funded, basic and necessary medical equipment are not available in public hospitals, infrastructure in public universities have broken down. When Buhari was campaigning in 2015, he said that he would sell off the airplanes in the presidential fleet because of the exorbitant cost of maintaining them. Has he done so? The planes came from different manufacturers with different maintenance contracts which are very costly. The problems are legion. It saddens me to enumerate them. If we really want to get Nigeria out of poverty, we must start from drastically cutting down the cost of governance. There is mind-blowing waste going on in government circles. The money that should have helped the country is being wasted every day and the country continues to pile up debts from foreign borrowing. The leaders do not have the interest of the people at heart. We should not wait for 10 years; we must start taking some steps right now. The first is to do radical surgery on the cost of governance. If companies spend money on non-productive things the way the government does, they will go into bankruptcy and collapse. I dare say that President Buhari will write his name in gold if he drastically reduces the cost of governance and restructures the country, to create economic development competition between the federating units.
This will not detract from preaching the gospel; it is more like wetting the ground for the gospel. It is part of spreading the gospel, because the bible said that “Jesus went about doing good.” He fed the people and healed their infirmities in addition to preaching the gospel to them. So churches should go back to doing good works; that is a sure way to take territories for Christ. Churches need to sow seeds of good works in communities. It is a process that may take awhile before the door of their hearts will open. They must invest the time, resources and effort needed to build bridges in communities. Then the people would be able to walk across the bridge, to come into the church and be won into God’s kingdom.