Nigeria Content Online

There were two
interesting headlines in the local papers last week. The first,
‘Nigeria needs N23 trillion for oil exploration’, was all about the
sums required as investment in exploration and development in the
upstream sector of the oil and gas industry, if the country is to
achieve its oil output targets over the next five years. What struck me
most about all the reports on this particular story was that you had to
be close to the end of each one before the initial sense, in the
screaming headlines that somehow it was in the power and responsibility
of the managers of the public accounts to find the US$150 billion
(N22.5 trillion), which the oil industry would be needing, was
dispelled. Obviously, the larger portion of this investment will have
to come from non-public sources, if these targets are to be met.

The other story,
‘Lekki residents protest planned road toll’, concerned the hoopla over
the host communities’ response to the poster child of the Lagos State
government’s public private partnership (PPP) scheme. Apparently
worried over plans by the state government to permit a private
developer toll vehicles plying a 24km stretch of the Lekki-Epe
expressway, residents of Eti-Osa east and west local councils in Lagos,
blocked traffic on the road. The immediate toll was on commuters along
that narrow corridor. But there are, in addition, other far-reaching
and more disturbing costs.

Seemingly
unrelated, these two stories tell of Nigeria’s modern day struggle with
the task of development. At one level, a rapidly growing population and
its needs have put a strain on a public sector budget still stranded in
the dynamics of the 1970’s, when new oil wealth augmented the national
purse. In the absence of much intelligent work at growing the public
sector’s revenue sources over the years, it has become fashionable to
argue that alone on its own, that sector can no more bear the burden of
national development. At several removes, a number of us have argued as
well that the main development concern might not be with dwindling
public sector revenues. Ignore clear evidence of defalcation and sticky
fingers in public offices, and it is increasingly clear that as society
gets more sophisticated, and needs multiply, the efforts (however
well-intended) of a few eggheads in the economic planning ministries of
government cannot help individuals, let alone whole communities reach
optimum solutions. In our case, we have also seen how cack-handed
government can be, even in the management of the projects it has
identified as priorities in its efforts at driving economic development.

However, to the
argument that government ought to hand over the economy to private
sector operators, except “in those cases where the cost to the private
operator of providing goods/services results in benefits to consumers
for which the provider cannot fully charge”, one encounters the
counter-question, “Which government?” For this requirement presupposes
a public sector that is capable, once it has privatised the “commanding
heights of the economy”, of arbitrating fairly between private
commercial interests, to the material advantage of the “electorate as
consumers”.

This is one
assignment that is so palpably beyond the ken of our governments as
presently constituted. It simultaneously calls for corrections to
governance structures that allow government decisions to better reflect
the aggregate of society’s choices along all the dimensions of our
lives. More crucially, it also requires capacity building in the
non-political arm of government, which properly done, should put the
bureaucracy in a better position to create conditions that will lead to
the implementation of this aggregate of society’s choices.

Without all of
this, the decisions about which sectors of the economy require private
sector funding as a necessary condition for going forward, and how much
such investment will be needed over successive plan horizons, will
remain guesstimates. That these are likely to be over- or
under-estimates is the least of the problems here. The more worrisome
consideration is the possibility that as a consequence, we end up
duplicating across the economy, the current stasis in the downstream
sector of our oil industry.

Still, the decision
as to where to let private sector spending take over from the public
sector is slightly less important than the governance arrangements
“pre-” and “post-” these decisions. This is the main lesson from the
unfolding debacle in the Lekki corridor: in all of this, the people
matter!