Once again unsavoury economic news was received in Nigeria. Last time it was that 133 million Nigerians lived in MultiDimensional Poverty, recent news is that it would require a mind boggling 300 years for Nigeria to bridge the gap and have the necessary infrastructure to function as a modern economy. This is coming from the country economist of the World Bank WB attached to Nigeria, but to the discerning mind it is no less obvious. This avalanche of bad economic news has not always been the case.
Nigeria used to be part of the emerging and rising Africa, the new economic frontier. Nigeria became the largest economy in Africa and was destined to be one of twenty largest economies in the world by 2020. Nigerians were the happiest people in the world for some years, I doubt we are still the happiest people as our youths cannot wait to leave the country.
In infrastructure acquisition we shocked the world with the revolution in having new communication technology delivered to the country. Nigeria successfully adopted wireless communication in GSM and leapfrogged fibre optical technology. Recently we have achieved successes in rail infrastructure with coming into operations of standard gauge rail between Abuja and Kaduna, later between Lagos and Ibadan. Then the World Bank WB doused the euphoria.
Some have received the World Bank position negatively feeling 300 years is an exaggeration. A friend wrote “…. the World Bank thesis is self-serving and paternalistic…serving the interest of the United States” Others submit that the objective of the WB with the statement is to create a wedge between Nigeria and infrastructure providing China thus creating opportunities for the US to step back in.
Wasn’t the WB stating the obvious? Do we need external organisations to point out these things? Where are our economic planners and managers? A simple back of the envelope calculation will reveal the truth in what the WB raised. The 320 km Lagos Ibadan double track standard gauge rail was laid over five years, averaging 60 kms per year. The National Rail backbone of Lagos to Kano, Lagos to Calabar and Calabar to Maiduguri is a total of about 9000 kilometres of expected standard gauge rail. At an average of 60 km per year, the backbone will be completed in 150 years, connections to other towns and cities another 100 years. Meanwhile work has effectively stopped as Chinese loans have been suspended.
Power generation; for the last twenty years we have been stuck at delivering 5000 megawatts to Nigerians, averaging 250 megawatts per year. Conservatively, Nigerians needs 60,000 megawatts being Africa’s largest economy. At current rate that makes it 240 years to deliver power for today’s national needs, pretty close to WB calculations.
Delivering paved roads up to our doorsteps, paved roads that will not be cosmetic but solid like in other climes, is virtually an impossible task as most Nigerians make do with appalling roads after main artery roads into towns. Having High Speed Rail HSR or driving Electric Vehicles EVs as they come of age in next twenty years is not thinkable at the rate we are going. The WB submission was never an exaggeration, it was given in good faith because we are celebrating some belated pieces of infrastructure constructed by this administration. After these baby steps a lull will set in as has happened in the past.
The Chinese have done right by suspending loans for financing these projects. These paltry loans when placed against the realistic finance figures in trillions of dollars is weighing heavily on government finance and revenues. Some things are not adding up and a serious rethink is needed. All expectations have not been met, rather public debt and extreme poverty is on the rise.
Once again, we should go back to learn from history, history of countries who have closed developmental gaps as Nigeria is experiencing. On the US gaining independence from England the English did all they could to keep the new country a source of raw materials especially cotton for the textile mills in England. They forbade the sharing of cotton milling technology with the USA, checking luggage to make sure the drawings were not exported. A gentleman Samuel Slater Esq, bucked the system by having the design stored in his head and sailed to the US to download it and reproduce the first industrial Loom in the US. This was 1789, hundred years later the US economy was bigger than the British economy.
Japan was lagging behind the West and did a rethink from the 1850s under the Meiji dynasty. Within a span of fifty years Japan was able to take on the West, aircraft carrier for aircraft carrier in the second World War. You don’t rely on others to do these for you. There is the Chinese lesson in High-Speed Rail HSR. The Chinese, though late comers to HSR, laid 40,000 kms of HSR tracks within fifteen years, ten times the length laid by first developers France and Japan. I don’t believe Nigerians don’t have it in them to reproduce such feats if we lay our hearts to it.
All our political parties write lavishly on infrastructure projects in their manifestos. So too documents as the Mid Term National Development Plan MTNDP. However, none seem to have identified our failings at infrastructure acquisition the way the WB has done. None have addressed closing the infrastructure gap within a generation or two, without placing the nation in perpetual debt.
We need to identify what is being done amiss and rectify it, after all we have had faculties of engineering churning out engineers for decades yet foreign engineers and firms dominate our construction space in mega projects. We never developed capacity in rail construction either in these faculties or polytechnics. This is borne out by the fact that a University of Transportation is part of package given by the Chinese laying our rail tracks.
Our task is cut out for us. Nigerians have to acquire the capabilities to build quality infrastructure build fast and build ourselves. Not rebuilding a major highway Lagos Ibadan for almost a decade. Elsewhere I have written “…we have to totally nairanise and indigenise our infrastructure acquisition.” Meaning we have to eliminate hard currencies from our infrastructure acquisition as much as possible. By indigenising and nairanising infrastructure acquisition we can build roads lay rail tracks to our hearts delight like the Chinese do.
We have to stop being just consumers of infrastructure but providers of infrastructure like the Chinese, participating in the full value chain of the infrastructure ecosystem. How do we get this done? By harnessing and having in-country all construction materials used in infrastructure, from cement to iron rods, from steel to aggregates to bitumen etc. So many bridges and flyovers have been built in the country that it is a shame we still need foreigners for their construction.
The WB put a $3 trillion dollar price on Nigeria’s infrastructure inadequacies. This presents us with opportunities to wipe out poverty from the land as armies of Nigerian construction workers go to various project sites once this dollar tag is nairanised. CBN can print the naira to its heart’s delight to cover the cost of each project. That is how China does it, that is how Joe Biden’s USA will do it to renew its aging infrastructure, why not Nigeria?
The $3 trillion dollar price tag is not for the Nigerian government alone, it is for Nigerians both individuals and organised private sector who should identify business opportunities therein and shoulder the main burden of providing this infrastructure profitably. There are further add on benefits for Nigeria as we become the preferred infrastructure provider for Africa and the world at large in partnership with others. This is what is regarded as operating in the full value chain of infrastructure from being a consuming nation to becoming a provider nation. Nigeria has been operating in the consumer end of infrastructure value chain believing this will ultimately deliver economic growth and development but it does not. What it delivers is humongous loans owed to foreigners and the minimum transformative growth and development.
Olugbenga Jaiyesimi jerry3jaiye@gmail.com
