The hollow rituals of marketing Nigeria, By Dan Agbese
President Bola Tinubu is energetically marketing the country to foreign countries and their businessmen. He has showcased the refurbished face of an investor-friendly country to the Arabs, the Germans, and the French, among others.
Their yes to his invitation to invest in the country has been hailed by his supporters and party men back home as evidence that the rest of the world is responding positively to a new country under his watch.
The bad news is that the president is merely walking along the same path trudged by his predecessors in office. He is doing nothing unusual or special. It is important for us to understand this in order to moderate the anticipated gains of his sales pitch. Every Nigerian leader before him saw the merit in attracting foreign investments to the country. Each man went for it by wooing foreign investors. It would have been unthinkable if Tinubu had acted differently or ignored the invitation to walk along the same path with his predecessors for the same reasons. It should not be difficult to see that if all the potential investors wooed by his predecessors had done better than a polite response to their sales pitch, this country would be the biggest investor haven in the world today. Check. What do you see?
Attracting direct or indirect foreign capital inflow has become an important ritual faithfully observed by all our presidents. Foreign capital inflow, like foreign loans, is an accepted part of the strategy for managing the national economy. Other people’s money has an attractive smell. It is easy money too. Taking other people’s money, through investments or loans, is based on the principle of mutually, to wit, no nation can go it along. Those who have will have much more if they help the have-nots to have a little more than they have now. Chalk it up as the logic of human interdependence at work.
It is good to attract foreign investments, more so in these parlous and challenging times for the lumbering African giant, our national economy, and the people. More money coming in will help to ease our self-inflicted economic pains. It may not bring down the price of rice, gari or local vegetables, but it will have a salutary psychological effect on the populace. It is worth the price of fuelling the presidential jet for the president’s junketing.
There are, of course, problems with putting our faith in other people’s money as the solution to our economic problems. Nigeria fosters its own dependence on other nations and verily believes that it has the right to remain the nation that never grows up. This deepens our frustrations with the failures of political leaders to get the management of our nation economy right. If Nigeria does not get the economy right, it will continue in the foreseeable future to be clothed in the rags of being potentially great; and the new garment of being great will remain out of reach.
The problem with marketing Nigeria is that the country is a difficult commodity to market. The sales pitch is at variance with the facts that make our marketability as a nation rather difficult. A foreign investor who seeks an opportunity for investment in our country is not doing us a favour. He is putting his money where he believes it will grow exponentially and make him much richer. He does not need to be wooed. If the conditions for investments in the country are right, he will know and he will beat the path to our door. But if the conditions are not right, he will also know, and distance himself from our shores.
The ritual of marketing our country is weakened by the undeniable fact that our success in words and our failure in deeds have not made the conditions for investments attractive to those who may wish to bring their money here. Nature marketed our country from its birth, thanks to Lord Lugard, by blessing it with incredible human and natural resources. These are the wealth of every nation. But we have systematically squandered those riches. Marketing our country by every federal administration has failed to plug the depth of the wealth squandered and the wealth still being squandered.
If our country were a product offered for sale to our political leaders, I wonder how of them would agree to buy it. A new administration represents, in some fundamental ways, the renewal of hope in the country. But it does not represent a solution to the myriads of problems that our country historically carries on its back. Nothing has reduced our size as the giant of Africa but by dishonest and cynical acts of omission and commission, this giant now has the strides of a midget among African nations.
How can we talk of the conditions for investments being right when we are unable to get one of the critical engines of industrial and economic development right? Epileptic power supply forced some multi-nation companies that had been here since almost the dawn of our independence, to relocate to other African countries where the conditions are much better than here. Our expenditures in energy are opaque but the failure is transparent.
From ECN to NEPA and thence to Power Holding Company, it has been a long search for the magic formula that will empower Nigeria to say, let there be light and there is light. Getting our energy right has proved elusive. There are more generators here than in the rest of the world put together. Pardon the slight exaggeration here. Investors are shrewd men and women. None of them will jump at the sales pitch of the president when he knows that power here is at best epileptic and he will be required to invest in power for his factory and his home. We have the capacity to generate 22,000 megawatts of power but we generate only 4,594 megawatts for a country of more than 200 million people. If an investor has to choose between Nigeria which generates 4,594 megawatts and Egypt which generates 60,000 megawatts, his option will be no brainer.
The world knows that Nigeria is in the major league in OPEC. It also knows that we have four oil refineries. It knows too that none of them is working. It knows that an oi-producing nation is at peace with itself with what would qualify in other countries as a huge scandal, to wit, an oil producing nation with four moribund oil refineries importing petroleum products. A potential investor knows that the biggest economic problem in the country was, and remains, fair domestic prices for our petroleum resources. Every step taken to put this right has enriched a few but impoverished the many. An investor knows that in bringing his money here, he will be embroiled in the cauldron of the volatility in the system. He will not pay the same pump price for petrol every week, thus making nonsense of his budget.
To be fair to the rest of the world, foreign investors have always seen the potentials in investment opportunities in our country. Their hope in the future of our country in its social, economic, and industrial development, brought us vehicle assembly plants – Peugeot, Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, etc. We let the opportunity for moving to the next level in domesticating the assembly plants slip through our fingers. Brazil and India had the same opportunities. They turned their assembly plants into domestic industrial giants. See what they have made of the challenges the assembly plants represented. We turned our defence industry into a furniture factory.
The Nigerian Enterprises Promotion decree of 1972 and amended in 1977, sought to put Nigerians in the driving seat of our economic and industrial development “to reduce the power of control of the economy by foreigners.” Both decrees were systematically sabotaged by our political leaders in khaki and agbada. The driving seat has been largely left empty but for a few brave men who see the future when others prefer to worship mediocre leadership, Wooing foreign investors is a continuation of that sabotage.
The wooing of foreign investors ought to begin with getting the conditions right and making them transparently attractive. Let’s fix our security, show evidence of a positive and focused shift in our national development paradigm, make power steady, fix our refineries, and end fuel importation in order to end the volatility in the pump prices of petroleum products, chain the rogue of corruption in how we do business among ourselves and with foreigners and commit to making our country the economic and investment hub of the West African sub-region.
