Bring
Back Our Girls campaigner, Oby Ezekwesili has blamed the current
economic recession on the president and immediate past administration.
Oby Ezekwesili
A former Minister of Solid Minerals, Mrs. Obi Ezekwesili, has said
the administrations of former President Goodluck Jonathan and that of
the incumbent, Muhammadu Buhari, led the nation’s economy into recession
by failing to adopt the right policies to deal with the crash in crude
oil prices, which began in mid-2014.
Ezekwesili noted that while Jonathan’s administration failed to do
something about the impending recession before leaving office, the
current administration also failed to launch a comprehensive fiscal
stabilisation programme on assumption of office in May 2015.
She spoke as the guest speaker at the inaugural Business Lecture of the Lagos Country Club in Lagos on Thursday night.
According to her, the economic policies of the present
administration have worsened the matter, because they are not the right
policies.
She said, “The parlous state of the Nigerian economy by the
29th of May, 2015 should have instructed an incisive and urgent
macroeconomic stabilisation programme to realign the price levels in the
economy. By May 2015, we knew we were already in trouble. As a matter
of fact, we were already in trouble in 2014. That was the first time
that growth collapsed to 3.8 per cent. The incoming administration
should not have been told that we were weak and vulnerable.
“Had the government made quick and necessary adjustment that
corresponded close enough to the level of impact of the 40 per cent
decline in oil revenue, our story could have been different today. We
would never have lost growth.”
Ezekwesili, a former Vice-President of the World Bank, further stated,
“There is a new level that our post-2014 oil shock economy needed to
find for stability. We needed a policy response that could have enabled
that adjustment to happen immediately. That response could have helped
the economy to absorb the shock. It could have reassured the investors.
It could have reassured the consumers. It could have helped us to
reasonably retain investor confidence in the economy, but that did not
happen.
She stated, “The attendant fiscal pressure and the delayed
right policy responses were severe enough that by 2015, economic growth
had sharply declined from 3.8 to 2.7 per cent. And then began the
sharper loss of growth into negative growth rate by 2016. It was a major
mistake that the economy did not get timely and right type of policies
that could have helped us avoid the calamitous collapse into negative
growth in the last three quarters of 2016.
“The economic preferences did in fact worsened matters and set
off a wave of uncertainties that dented investors’ confidence in the
economy. So, it is accurate to conclude that both the preceding and
successor governments conspired by their actions and inactions to throw
the Nigerian economy into the deep throes of economic recession of which
it must be rescued in order to avoid social implosion.”
The former minister, therefore, urged Nigerians to place a demand
on the government to retrace its step and implement the right policies.
She said, “The record of the government today for timely and
right actions on the economy is, however, so far not encouraging at all.
For almost one year, the government delayed prime action on the fuel
subsidy regime despite its aggravating import on fiscal imbalance.
“Over the same period, it delayed the right action on the
exchange rate policy despite the deleterious effects that it was having
on foreign reserves, the value of the naira, as well as on inflation.
Before the government came on board, inflation level was nine per cent;
today, inflation has doubled to more than 18 per cent. The greatest
enemy of the poor is inflation. The greatest enemy of business is
inflation. All you need in order to destroy the poor is total unstable
price levels in an economy”
On how to restore the economy to the path of growth, Ezekwesili added, “The citizens must place a demand on the government to implement right economic policies.
“As long as we continue on the path of wrong economic
prescriptions for the economy, the situation will to worsen. The more
these indicators deteriorate, the harder it will be for growth to
resume. The macroeconomic stability that poor choice of economic
policies helped to unravel within one year took many years of work
“It is therefore critical for citizens to convict the federal
government to urgently retrace its steps back to what it failed to do on
May 29, 2015. We swore to allow the market economy to adjust itself
without command and control. The government failed to launch a deep
fiscal consolidation programme. Recession is nothing new in the
countries.”
Source: Punch
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