The United States and Europe today have no commitment to the development of nations. It is not an overstatement to say that governments in the west are utterly opposed to building up the physical economic capacity of developing nations, much less their own, due to their slavish, obsequious bowing at the altar of Wall Street and the City of London with their quadrillions of dollars in worthless derivatives.
By Lawrence Freeman, Dir. Africa Desk, Executive Intelligence Review-EIR.
Without a doubt, Nigeria’s March 28 Federal election for President, Senate, and House of Representatives was an historic accomplishment of the Nigerian people, and the single most important political event in Nigeria since it achieved independence from the British Empire in 1960.
It will benefit Africa and the world. This election—free, fair, transparent, and unhampered by ethnic or religious violence—is special for the Nigerian people, who demonstrated they would no longer accept having their leaders imposed on them without their consent and participation.
A spirit of freedom, such as the poet Percy Shelley described in his “Defense of Poetry,” helped guide the Nigerian people to act in this unprecedented manner.
However, given the woeful economic conditions of this country, the most populous in Africa with 177 million people, the challenges facing the new government of President Elect General Muhammadu Buhari, who will be sworn in on May 29, are daunting, but not insurmountable.
Of 68.9 million registered voters, 29.4 million turned out to vote (42.8%). General Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) received 15.4 million votes to the 12.9 million for incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan of the People’s Democratic Party.
Gen. Buhari’s defeat of President Jonathan by a margin of more than 2.5 million votes, 54% to 45%, and winning in 21 of Nigeria’s 36 states, is a clear mandate for change.
Some longtime Nigeria watchers are also calling it a referendum on the incumbent’s six years as the nation’s chief executive.
Until this election, only PDP candidates have won the Presidency and the PDP has maintained a majority in all elected bodies since the end of military rule in 1999.
With the March 28 vote, the APC is the majority party in the Senate and the House. Similarly, the APC won a large majority in the April 11 gubernatorial and state house elections.
The rejection of the ruling PDP and President Jonathan was driven by the population’s extreme frustration and rage in response to years of failed policies that have made even simple daily existence a challenge.
–Nigeria’s Underdevelopment Must Be Addressed-
It is clear to any thoughtful observer that Nigeria has not progressed significantly in more than a decade and an half of “democratic” rule.
In some of the major cities, road infrastructure has improved and there is a considerable amount of new housing in Abuja, but the fundamental, underlying conditions of life for the majority of Nigerians remain abysmal.
Nigeria’s rich agricultural potential remains underdeveloped. The minimum monthly wage for civil servants is 20,000 Naira, equal to about $100.
More than 100 million Nigerians live on $1 to $2 a day, and the lack of jobs and misemployment plague the country.
Unemployment for youth runs as high as 90%; for college graduates it is 45%. The informal economy, as it is called, is a cancer destroying the productivity of the economy.
Youth line the roads, selling every imaginable consumer commodity by running in traffic alongside moving cars, retrieving their money from drivers who dangle it from their car windows.
Able-bodied young men, who should be working to build the country’s infrastructure, are instead selling chewing gum to passing cars.
A complete waste of creative labor power! Human beings constitute the only known species capable of discovering new principles in the universe.
It is this “creative spark” that makes human beings in the image of the Creator. To degrade Africans to a bestial existence is to deny the sacredness of human life.
The egregious failure of this and previous administrations is reflected in the utter paucity of electrical power for Africa’s most populous nation of almost 180 million.
Imagine, only 2,500 megawatts (MW) of electric power out of a maximum of 4,000 MW capacity is available from the national grid each day, leaving Nigerians to fend for themselves, the better-off having expensive personal generators and home batteries that are used to store the electricity when power is provided.
At night one can hear the hum of residential generators that collectively generate several tens of thousands of additional megawatts above that supplied by the national grid. There is no Nigerian household or small business that does not experience a blackout at least once every day and usually several times a day, forcing citizens to operate in the dark and without air conditioning, despite the extreme heat.
If Nigerians were to live at a U.S. standard of living, consuming 1.4 kilowatts per capita, Nigeria would require 250,000 megawatts, or 250 gigawatts– several orders of magnitude more than what is available today.
Despite the deadly presence of Boko Haram—which has created an extraordinarily dangerous security situation for northeastern Nigeria, especially in Borno State—the state of the economy, the difficulty in just finding the means to survive and provide for one’s family, remained the number-one issue motivating Nigerians to oust the incumbent President.
The single most important task for the next President, in reviving Nigeria’s undeveloped economy, is to provide plentiful, accessible electrical power.
President Elect Buhari is not unaware of the causal relationship between poverty and security.
Concern about security is not just about terrorist attacks. Robberies, murders, and kidnapping for ransom are also part of daily life in Nigeria.
-Western Governments Oppose Development-
The United States and Europe today have no commitment to the development of nations. It is not an overstatement to say that governments in the west are utterly opposed to building up the physical economic capacity of developing nations, much less their own, due to their slavish, obsequious bowing at the altar of Wall Street and the City of London with their quadrillions of dollars in worthless derivatives.
President Obama has made abundantly clear to all what the U.S. government’s policy towards Africa is with his expression, “we don’t do infrastructure.”
The only U.S. institution that provides credit for infrastructure projects, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, is so restrictive in its contracts and so limited ($1–2 billion a year for small-scale water, sanitation, and power projects), that it fails to actually help countries expand their agro-industrial sectors sufficiently to provide for their populations.
We have to go back more than a half century, to the Presidency of John F. Kennedy, to find a period in which the United States engaged with African leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, to foster physical growth, not merely monetary values.
Africa needs hundreds of billions of dollars in the form of credits to build regional and transcontinental infrastructure, especially railroads, electric power, water management, and healthcare, to overcome the genocidal effects of decades of deficits in these crucial categories of investment that are absolutely essential to foster economic growth.
Today there is a new world dynamic no longer dominated by the pessimism and geo-political outlook of the West.
Through the emerging leadership of the BRICS configuration and its New Development Bank, and China’s “One Belt and One Road” commitment to extending the Silk Road around the globe and into space, nations have an opportunity to work together for a common purpose—to raise the physical productivity of their economies and improve the living conditions of their citizens.
China, Russia, and India are leading the world in the construction of nuclear energy plants, high-speed rail lines, and water projects.
The process is already leading Africa to closer collaboration with the BRICS nations. In April, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Atomic Energy Commission discussed with Russia’s Rosatom the possibility of building four 1200 MW nuclear power plants at a cost of $20 billion, with the first one scheduled to be operational in 2025.
In collaboration with BRICS nations, Nigeria signed a $12 billion agreement with a Chinese company to build a railroad around the southern rim of the country last November, in what was China’s biggest-ever overseas construction deal.
A subsidiary of the china Railway Construction Company has signed a $3.5 billion contract to build a 334 kilometer long inter-city railway project in Ogun State.
On April 14, the president of the African Development Bank, in which Nigeria has a significant role, welcomed the new, China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank-AIIB, saying he hoped the two institutions could work together to plug the funding gap for infrastructure in African countries.
The new AIIB credit bank, with 57 prospective founding member nations is expected to have its charter signed in June.
While Europe and the United States remain obsessed with attempting to protect purely meaningless, monetary values that are actually destructive to the real economy, Africa is turning to this new alliance for progress.
All the Africans that I have known over many years are expecting Nigeria to play a leadership role in this new global movement for development. In fact, for its own survival, it has no choice.
-Transaqua’s Time Has Come-
Boko Haram is at war with the four nations that border Lake Chad, the founding members of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC)—Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon.
The 40 million Africans living in the Lake Chad Basin are suffering from the shrinking of the lake, which is reported to have shrunk by approximately 90% from its 1963 size of 25,000 square kilometers.
Increasing poverty among the fisherman and farmers facilitates recruitment to Boko Haram, which pays the poor, alienated youth from this region more money than they can otherwise hope to make off the land.
In northern Cameroon, underemployment of all ages is a least 75%, according IRIN humanitarian news.
IRIN reports that Boko Haram takes advantage of the extreme poverty and lack of opportunities in the region.
Those young men are “faced with the choice of joining Boko Haram and securing their financial future or sitting at home with nothing to do as their families struggle to afford enough food to eat.”
One youth told IRIN that Boko Haram is willing to pay recruits $600 to $800 per month, where the monthly minimum wage for those who can find jobs is $72.
President Elect, Buhari has already stated that he intends to use the full power of the government to defeat Boko Haram.
With his military experience and longstanding relations with Nigeria’s armed forces, Nigerians expect to see results.
Over recent months, there has been a growing realization that an effective counter terrorism strategy requires more than just military deployments, and that alleviating the poverty in the region is also a crucial ingredient to countering violent extremism.
This has led to an interest in Transaqua, the great water project, designed by Dr. Marcello Vichi of the Bonifica engineering firm over 30 years ago to replenish the shrinking lake.
The proposal is to transport 5% of the water from the Congo River Basin north across the Central Africa Republic through a 2,400 kilometer canal to the Chari River that empties into Lake Chad. This idea is also being promoted by Nigerian engineer Sanusi Abdullahi, Executive Secretary of the LCBC (see {EIR} December 5, 2014).
In discussions with this author, President Elect Buhari, who has been following the condition of Lake Chad since the days when he was the Governor of Northeast Nigeria, showed concern for the lake and interest in such a water transfer project.
Transaqua is a transformative infrastructure project that would create a development corridor from the Great Lakes Region to the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, affecting the economies of a dozen African states. The donor countries and multilateral institutions that fund the LCBC have flatly rejected transferring water to refill Lake Chad.
The U.S. government has also officially shown no interest in this potentially revolutionary project for Africa.
If the Nigerian government were to take the leadership in spearheading the campaign for Transaqua, it would have a profound effect for all of Africa.
However, since Transaqua is of such great importance in preventing the southward march of the desert and developing such a large portion of the continent, the African Union, representing all African nations, should make this water transfer project a primary goal.
-Nigeria at a Turning Point-
Winning the election was a necessary step, but now the Nigerian people are rightfully expecting a major up-shift in the functioning of their government and an improvement in their lives.
During the election campaign, Buhari highlighted his commitment to dealing with the security crisis in Nigeria.
In a column in the {New York Times} on April 14, he declared that his first act will be to defeat Boko Haram militarily.
He recognized that Boko Haram is alluring: “They offer impressionable young people money and the promise of food, while the group’s mentors twist their minds with fanaticism.”
He also promised to end corruption, create jobs, and build needed infrastructure. The new government will be given a short honeymoon with expectations understandably sky high.
General Buhari is well known for his integrity and incorruptibility from his time as the military leader of Nigeria, from January 1984 until August 1985.
Oil is at the heart of corruption in Nigeria. Having failed to build functioning oil refineries, Nigeria—one of the top ten oil producing countries in the world—has to import fuel.
It is the daily buying and selling of fuel on the international markets that creates the conditions for corruption and outright theft of Nigeria’s natural wealth through collusion between the major international oil companies and their Nigerian criminal allies.
Since Royal Dutch Shell moved into Nigeria over a half century ago, the nation has never fully freed itself from its control and manipulation.
The new government will have to find a way to break the back of this nefarious cabal.
To deal with Nigeria’s dysfunctional economy, Buhari and his team will need to initiate a set of radically new policies to unite a country that is divided along ethnic, religious, and geographic lines, around an economic nation-building program much like that of U.S.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s “First 100 Days.” When Roosevelt took office in 1933, the country was gripped with fear and despair, with 25% of the labor force unemployed, and a bankrupt financial system.
On his first day in office, having prepared in advance, he launched a set of policies to get the country functioning and lift the American people out of the suffering of the 1930s great economic depression, by creating a new economic platform.
For Nigeria to realize the full potential of its enormous human capital and vast natural resources, it should apply the Rooseveltian-Hamiltonian principle.
By that I mean President Roosevelt’s top down approach to rapidly employing millions of unemployed men to build dams, roads, and waterways—new infrastructure that electrified entire sections of the United States—exemplified by the federal government’s creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, then the grandest infrastructure project in the world.
Roosevelt was himself a student of Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington, who united the colonies into one nation through the establishment of a national credit bank.
Roosevelt, upon assuming office, lawfully issued new government credit to restart the moribund U.S. economy in accordance with the sovereign responsibility of a government to provide for the “general welfare” of its citizens.
Roosevelt was too smart and too much of a patriot to allow the future of the United States to depend on the “money-changers” as he called them.
Buhari has a history of resisting the interference of the global financial institutions. When he came to power in 1984, he rejected a new $2 billion loan from the World Bank, designed to drive Nigeria further into debt.
He refused to accept the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Program, whose demands included curtailing spending, freezing wages, removing fuel subsidies, reducing tariffs, raising interest rates by 30%, and a minimum 60% devaluation of the Naira, which would have massively increased the price of Nigeria’s imports and significantly reduced revenues from the export of its oil.
Buhari’s refusal to accept the IMF-ordered destruction of Nigeria earned him the enmity of especially the Anglo-American political-financial establishment.
There is little doubt that General Buhari’s principled stand in defense of his nation against the financial oligarchy was a motivating factor in his removal from office.
Following the coup against him in 1985, the floodgates were opened for the destructive IMF Structural Adjustment Program, from which Nigeria has never recovered (see documentation).
Now, 30 years after his first period as the nation’s leader, General Buhari returns as President of Nigeria with the future of the nation resting heavily on his shoulders.
DOCUMENTATION
Excerpted here are remarks by Major General Muhammadu Buhari at the Fourth Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Lecture in Kaduna, Nigeria, on May 15, 1998, under the subhead “Economy,” paragraphs 5–11.
“…There came the introduction of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) after the collapse of the resistance to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And instead of a graduated 60% devaluation of the Naira, the national currency experienced its greatest humiliation. Henceforth, disaster descended on the Nigerian people. (1)
“The new value of the naira—unrealistic, indefensible and the result of utter lack of patriotism is perhaps the most enduring act of official recklessness and lack of regard for the economic well being of Nigerians.
“With one announcement the government pauperized the majority of the people of this country. In a way the devaluation of the Naira occasioned by SAP has contributed more than any single measure in destroying the moral fibre of Nigerians. Beside its direct effect on people’s savings and purchasing power, the devaluation of the Naira has had more far-reaching effects on the economy.
“From 1986 to 1992 inflation grew nine-fold. Even though the GDP grew by 5.4% per annum during the same period, its rate of growth declined to just a little over the pre-86 level of 2%. But for the people there was deterioration in their standards of living as real wages continued to decline.
“…If our future leadership wishes to be and remain relevant, people must be the focus and beneficiaries of all government activities. {Henceforth, therefore the question of growth and economic development must be linked to the changes in the objective conditions of the people of the country and not by an impressive array of mere figures or other economic indicators.} [emphasis in the original]
“As one development economist said, the questions to ask about a country’s development are three: what has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If all these three have declined from higher to lower levels, then beyond doubt this has been a period of development for the country concerned.
“But poverty in Nigeria has for the past decades been increasing and is now pervasive; unemployment has reached record levels as thousands of our university graduates roam the towns without work to do, and inequality resulting from several distortions has been deepening. The middle classes have all but been wiped out.”
- It is worth noting that when Gen Buhari was head of the military government, the Naira was worth more than the dollar, reaching a high of 1 Naira equal to $1.34, before he was toppled and the IMF took control of Nigeria’s economy. In the period leading up to this year’s election, $1 was trading for N225.
Lawrence Freeman is Director, Africa Desk, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) who witnessed Nigeria’s election and observed conditions in the country during his stay in Abuja from March 24 to April 3, 2015. He has been involved in Nigeria for almost 25 years. He can be reached at lkfreeman@prodigy.net
