After a life time of being disappointed by governments in Africa and their ineffectiveness in lifting Africans out of poverty as done on other continents, I chose to become a libertarian as the foundation of my economic thoughts. I celebrated this by writing an article titled, LIBERTARIANISM NIGERIA’S UNWRITTEN ECONOMIC POLICY. This has been in circulation for a decade but I seem to remain the only libertarian in Nigeria. With the passage of time, I am more than ever convinced that the policies of libertarianism can be used to successfully address the developmental goals and needed transformation of the continent.…
Author: Olugbenga Jaiyesimi
Two weeks ago appeared two interesting articles, the first from a group, Arewa Youth Assembly asking private sector players to join the 2023 presidential race. This is surprising because the call is coming from a region we say have government affairs as its core business. The youth of the region are dropping the toga of government. The second article was by David Pilling of Financial Times of London, quoting him, he wrote about Nigeria “…. some libertarian tech entrepreneurs want the government to withdraw and leave the private sector in charge.” In the article, Late Professor Sam Aluko and I,…
Reading my articles in Punch newspaper and other media outlets, National Economy and The News Chronicle one could ask, who is this unabashed capitalist bourgeoisie? I am happy to inform anyone, I am not only a capitalist, I am a Libertarian and probably Nigeria’s only Libertarian. And who is a Libertarian? A Libertarian is one who hold’s the belief – albeit a strong one – that people should be free to think and more importantly do what they want without government involvement. A Libertarian is not an anarchist, he just resents undue government control of the lives of the people…
Nigeria was grouped with trillion dollar economies; Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey in the acronym MINT. Buoyed by oil prices Nigeria’s GDP approached 0.6 trillion dollars in 2014. However, for the past seven years hopes that Nigeria would cross that milestone of a trillion dollars have been dashed. There is no talk of Nigeria becoming one of the twenty largest economies in the world. The international communitiy is not talking about it neither is the Nigerian intelligentsia. Yet it is a trillion dollar plus economy that will pay for human capital development, infrastructure and directly lift a hundred million people out…
Last week I wrote on the Petroleun Industry Act (PIA) being a sectoral Act expected not to address issues of the larger economy. Coming on the heels of the PIA is the Medium Term Nigerian Development Plan(MTNDP) 2021-2025 to address the economy and ‘plan’ to the year 2025. To this writer the PIA was a disappointment lacking in real transformative vision for the oil and gas sector. There was period in the seventies when the oil sector contributed close to 40% to Nigerian GDP for many years. With diversification spanning the years oil contributes around 10% to GDP. There ends…
Punch newspapers editorial opinion of 29th November 2021 stated, “Continuing to rely on oil revenues to run unproductive, dependent territories is no longer tenable. The future of oil is fragile, and Nigeria must act now to avoid much worse hardship than the current adversity.” Reading through the new PIA can one reach the conclusion that the PIA adequately addressed the fears raised in the editorial opinion? There was chest thumping congratulatory poise of government officials after President Muhammadu Buhari signed the Petroleum Industry Bill. However, one can consider this celebratory position misplaced considering the dire circumstances the editorial highlighted for…
Nigerian economic development has swung from adopting strong doses of Statism to sprinkles of Liberalism. On attainment of self-government from early 1950s all the regional governments of the day and the central government embarked on development plans to transform the economy. None of the governments went out of their way to empower indigenous business men in the private sector. Rather they set up parastatals like Western Nigeria Development Corporation, much unlike the private Chaebols promoted in South Korea. Though Nigeria claimed operating a mixed economy there was a lot of socialism in the air that lingers to this very day.…
It is sixty years Africans took back their continent from colonial masters. Ethiopia and Liberia have ran their national affairs for longer. Yet few African nations have broken the poverty shackles or found the elixir of wealth creation. Seychelles, Mauritius and Botswana being the countries that have bucked the trend. Kwame Nkrumah did say, ‘’obtain ye first political freedom, independence, and other things shall be added”. This his saying has not come to pass. The Atlantic slave trade, colonisation, post independence neocolonisation, military interventions, the cold war, and world economic order are some of the reasons given for this state…
In an earlier write up I gave reasons infrastructure spending was not working for the Nigerian economy. In this article I turn the searchlight on the much acclaimed improvements in the Ease Of Doing Business(EDB) ranking attained by Nigeria. Nigeria has been gaining on the world index of EDB. From 145th position in 2019 it dropped to 131st in 2020. This improvement has been well flaunted by the government as ‘ACHIEVEMENTS’. There has been a consistent progress in our ratings over the last six years considering we were ranked 169 and 170 in the years 2015 and 2014 respectively. However,…
Formal Western education as introduced by our colonial masters and missionaries had always been geared towards a purpose. Missionary education was to produce catechists and ultimately gave us Bishop Ajayi Crowther. Early colonial education produced middle-level manpower for the budding civil service and ultimately the late Simeon Adebo. Independence demanded more professionals, more engineers, more doctors, more administrators, etc so universities were set up to provide them. Also, technical schools and polytechnics provided personnel with technical skills. There have been constant reviews of the school curriculum. We have had the 6-3-3-4, now 9-3-4. Despite these reviews, the golden era of…
