When governance is outsourced, the President, his/her Vice or Vices and the Governors and their deputies could be trustees watched over by casualised legislators
Victor C. Ariole
I think we really need to sit down and have a better conversation about growing the economy (…)When I went back as minister of environment the people in my state just said, so all they give you is dustbin lady… Amina Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General.
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Amina expressed what governance still means to most Nigerians; that is, avenue to make money and get back to your State of origin and brag with it. So, it is like the ministry assigned to you informs your people of what to expect as riches to be returned to the State. Amina really feels that they are very ignorant of what environment entails being a well-cultured and travelled person. And I agree with her as I was privy to see some good looking people making a life job out of planting trees in a country and I had, myself, wondered what it portends; but it turned out that it was an activity sponsored for life by some companies and it relates to current issues of climate change.
Every space, in this current worry of climate change, is assessed for sustainability of life and it takes environment experts to decide that as well as money to make it work. Petroleum industry as at today must be placed on the supervision of the Ministry of Environment so as to protect lives and the biodiversity.
Oil blocks are given out to foreign experts or multinationals to exploit without factoring in the environmental problems they create; just as I once said that it is not abnormal to ask an exploiter to balance it with planting trees in the desert encroaching areas of Nigeria. If governance cannot think out how to save Nigerians now and in the future, looking at what the environment could turn out to be, either good or bad, like same governance went to sleep as Lake Chad went drying, then Nigeria’s space must be well charted and be given out for management on outsourcing basis like they do to deprive the poor people from laying claim to job security. If what Nigerians are after is sharing the national cake and not baking it for future sustainability then outsource governance and sit back and watch the exploiter to give back what is expected of them like it seen in the car parks where agberos sit back and just collect tax from drivers and go back drinking ogogoro.
Amina was also worried on such grounds as she cannot understand how her colleague Ngozi managed to exit Nigeria from debt trap that ought to be sustained instead of the current position of Nigeria being warned by IMF of risk of being drowned in debt. By what the just resigned finance minister said that Nigeria is still below the threshold of allowable ratio of 60 or 56% to GDP, one wonders if it is not the same as making mockery of the efforts of Amina and her colleague Ngozi. It is still the same group of ministers who worked hard to rebase the GDP of Nigeria to $400 to $500billion so as to earn the respect of investors that the debt ceiling is far from getting to intolerable level which is now recorded by Kemi Adeosun as within 20% level hence Nigeria could still go borrowing.
Kemi was very transparent in noting that and wanted, according to her, to raise the contribution of Agriculture to the GDP from 25% to a greater percentage with the borrowing by removing cutlass and hoe agriculture mentality in Nigeria which was not quite welcome by those who seem to be benefitting from cutlass and hoe agric mentality. Issues that the legislators would have tackled to reduce the effect of their appropriating to themselves the 25% wealth of Nigeria and its depressive effect on the GDP. Hence the need for them to see why governance needed to be outsourced.
Make legislators and ministers ‘casual workers’ the way they have reduced many Nigerians to as they give their friends all the services and juicy areas of operations and do not see the environment they are degrading as important. How can the human resource worth of no fewer than 10,000 Nigerians gulp 25% of Nigeria’s annual budget when mere 10,000 naira is seen as capable of relieving most Nigerians from abject poverty as the Vice President claims; and he goes on feeling fulfilled in distributing that.
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The Oxbridge group claims that 112 million Nigerians are extremely poor and not the 87 million as announced by another group which Theresa May relied on as she paid visit to Nigeria. Imagine releasing some of the great infrastructure outlay available to the legislators like cars, houses, aids, allowances and generators to the Sokoto women who are now finding hope in the plantation of hanna and finding a way to make hanna exportable in a finished form and see what it translates in value to Nigeria’s GDP. A product that has no degradation effect on the environment so as to reduce the degradation effect of oil on which only 10% of its worth accrue to the GDP even if it makes 90% of government ‘choppable’ if not ‘stealable’ nonrenewable financial resource.
When governance is outsourced, the President, his/her Vice or Vices and the Governors and their deputies could be trustees watched over by casualised legislators who could be the defender of the people and stand firm on keeping the trustees or not depending on their eagle eye watch on the exploiter of the collective resources, material or immaterial ones. Like it is known by the ideas of Tea Party which is part of the style of the current USA governance.
Tea Party is an approach to governance that instill financial discipline on the executive by encouraging lean governance while private sector is allowed to thrive and tax brought down to the minimum.
In effect it is a governance process where the trustees, mostly conservatives, just set the rules and watch the players perform strictly such rules and are booted out if they fail to obey the rules as Trump is doing now and people think that the Tea Party is not applauding him; unlike Ngige expecting to be applauded in this kind of weak return on investment that Nigerians are experiencing.
When governance is outsourced, the dividend is high for the populace as everybody is allowed to get something either as a casual worker like a tree planter or as exploiter of the outsourced business. Most national coaches operate that way; their delivery patterns allow their sustainability or relief of duty for those waiting to take over.
In effect if for almost 1 trillion naira the politicians gulp as salary notwithstanding their claims to pension, they are able to deliver up to 20 trillion naira to the economy by their knowledge power then Nigerians would be rest assured of prosperity and would continue applauding them.
For now it is noted that Nigeria loses up to that amount either by oil pilfering, weak intelligence process that goes with insurgency, or even ill prosecuted court processes that could have been avoided to save time and money. How do we explain almost four year trial of a Senate President only for him to come out to tell Nigerians that he wants to be president so as to show the way?
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