09012021 - Nigeria must stop paying ransom to kidnappers

Executive capitalism,
the path to Nigeria’s
prosperity
By Dr Omaghomi Ofioritse
Global competition for the earth’s scarce
resources gets increasingly frenetic,
with each passing day. This continuous
struggle between available resources and
yearning global needs, has resulted in a new
approach to governance, that better guarantees
continuous prosperity. We shall call this style
of governance, executive capitalism, which is
partly a win win symbiotic arrangement,
where private capitalist companies are in
close relationship with the Chief
Executives / governments of their
respective countries. The companies
get unlimited government money,
intelligence, and patronage;
resulting in bigger, more profitable
companies that are better able to
employ more of the country’s
nationals. The companies are also
better able to pay proportionately
larger taxes to the government.
The resultant more buoyant
governments are in turn more
equipped to assist new sets of private
companies, the end result being a
continuous circle of financial growth for the
government, industries and capitalist
entrepreneurs.
Executive capitalism as described above is
practiced almost to perfection in China. The
growth of the Chinese economy is a testimony
to the effectiveness of executive capitalism as
a pathway for wealth creation and this
governance style is practiced to a lesser degree
by the present American administration,
through stimulus packages, bail outs and
protection of American businesses from unfair
global practices. This leadership style is the
unifying cement in the European Union’s
strong economic hedge that accounts for a fifth
of global trade. It’s time the Nigerian
leadership changes to this style of governance.
But first how did Nigeria and indeed the
world get here?
The Earth has moved from a world where
countries inherit the wealth they need to survive
simply because they occupy portions of the
earth’s crust /surface, to the present situation,
where a country’s chances of prosperity will
be slim if it adopts the laid back approach of
tax and render services.
The reality is that the world has changed
since 1945 when there were only about 51
independent nations, to the present restless,
crowded, global struggle of 193 independent
nations.
Another factor of note, is that the world’s
population was three (3) billion in 1960, but
within four decades to the year 2000, the world
population doubled to six (6) billion people.
This no doubt increases global strain, due to
increased need for food, clothing and housing.
Another issue of particular importance to
Nigeria, is the global clamour for reduction in
the use of fossil fuel, which the world sees as
an effective means of combating global
warming but sadly for us, fossil fuel still
constitute at least 90% of Nigeria’s export
earnings.
Nigeria can therefore be likened to a child
stuck at infancy! Or Arrested Development,
owing to the fact that, we are still clinging to an
archaic leadership style.
In today’s world, where most women’s rights
groups, are advocating that housewives live
more fulfilled lives; by not being limited to
housekeeping roles, it is therefore worrisome
to see the opposite scenario play out in Nigeria
where men bribe, fight and maim on their way
to becoming mere housekeepers!
These housekeepers adopt the name and
style of; their excellencies, our executive
leaders. They collect allocations and monies,
taxes from workers, businesses and citizens
alike.
The collected monies are used for the
construction of roads, bridges, houses and
hospitals, they also pay salaries, maintain the
judiciary, police and military amongst other
housekeeping duties. Hence, we call this
method of governance, which has been
prevalent in Nigeria since independence, as
the executive housekeeping style of
leadership.
This governance system doesn’t aim to create
o r
generate
wealth for the
nation. The
m a j o r
assumption here
is that once a
territory is called a
country, that
automatically it must have money to take care
of itself. Nigeria as a nation must discard this
false and destructive assumption of abundant
wealth and come to terms with our today’s
reality, of not enough money to run Nigeria!
We must understand that Nigeria is a broke
country whose problems far exceed available
resources and that it is the serious poverty of
the Nigerian nation, that is manifesting as a
“failure to thrive” in its citizens, businesses
and government.
The Chinese are aware of this dangerous end
result of governance by executive
housekeeping, hence they veered from it by
setting up a think tank, called the Chinese
Communist Party ( CCP ). The CCP is basically
a group of patriotic, nationalistic eggheads who
analyse, preempt and formulate forward
looking policies.
The Communist party searched for present
and future fault lines in their culture, practices
and policies with the clear aim of creating an
enabling environment for their economic
emergence. First they had to
decide the location where
they wanted the Chinese
people to have the good life
in: Communist China had a
straight choice between
providing its people with
paradise on earth or paradise
in heaven.
They decided that the duty
of government was to provide
its citizens with a better life
on earth as against in heaven,
due to the danger inherent
when there are multiple
pathways to heavenly
paradise. They realise that
diverse faiths could divide a
country along lines of beliefs.
To avoid this obvious source
of disunity and discord, the
Chinese decided to build
their country along lines of
reason rather than on
spirituality or clairvoyance.
The second enabling
environment to ensure
success for the Chinese, was
to prevent looting of the
country’s wealth by those
who are supposed to
safeguard the country’s
wealth, so they put corruption in the list of
criminal offences with severe punishments.
The Chinese have shown great resolve, by
ensuring strict enforcement of anti corruption
laws across all strata of government, serving as
Nigeria can
therefore be
likened to a child
stuck at infancy! Or
A r r e s t e d
Development,
owing to the fact
that, we are still
clinging to an
archaic leadership
style
a n
effective deterrent
against plundering of the
Chinese treasury.
The Communist think tank
also reasoned that a galloping
population growth could
dampen economic growth in a
future, where machines, robots and
Artificial Intelligence ( AI ), would do most
of the work!
Added to the above, they saw illiteracy as an
obstacle in the wheel of economic progress.
The Chinese tenaciously tackled the twin
problems of rapid population growth and
illiteracy. The resultant effect is the present
day reality where China is less densely
populated than Nigeria; if a football field holds
20 people in China, then that same area of land
in Nigeria has 30 persons.
With regards to education the Chinese are
now so educated that their citizens have moved
away from unproductive courses to futuristic
areas of knowledge like artificial intelligence
( AI ), robotic, super specialty medical fields,
space technology and genetics (Agriculture,
Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals).
The Chinese think tank then carefully
developed a five-point agenda to capture a
leadership position in the global economy. The
results became obvious in the half century from
1970 to 2020 when they quickly moved from
outside the world’s 20 largest exporters in the
early 1970s to becoming the world’s 13th largest
export nation in 1995 to
presently, the world’s largest
export nation from the year
2016 till date. If you add
exports from their Hong Kong
territory, then China now
exports nearly twice as much
as the world’s second largest
export nation: the United
States of America. Even at that,
it should be noted that the
immense exports from the
Taiwan Republic of China
wasn’t included in the figure
above.
The Chinese five point
agenda are:
*They decided to copy the
wheel, with a proviso that they
would reproduce the wheels
of the modern world at a
cheaper price! The wheel here,
being goods without patency
rights like say Singer sewing
machines. This policy became
an instant success because of
the deep human weakness and
urge to have more goods for
less price, what we call the
auction/promo appeal (buy
two and get one free)
*They also acquire
technologies from all over the world; while
some people may call this action, theft of
patency, but when looked at from the stand
point of a people who want a product that the
seller fixes an unsustainable price for, clearly
SATURDAY Vanguard, JANUARY 9, 2021—13
one cannot stop them from copying available
products. Surely, we cannot expect them to fold
their arms when they can now make the goods
at cheaper prices themselves.
The Chinese have also grabbed any and all
knowledge worldwide on their way to owning
the future.
*Empowered with their newly found wealth,
they are setting up more research centres,
expanding the frontiers of knowledge, to the
present day reality, where China is the first
and only country to patent 5G
telecommunication technology.
*The Chinese government also decided and
went into a win win partnership with their
private sector to give Chinese companies
unlimited access to government money,
research findings and intelligence network,
making it easier for Chinese firms to attain
increasingly more dominant positions in the
capitalist world of today!
*Chinese government may also go the extra
mile to achieve national economic success.
With the above policies, the Chinese have;
*An empowered think tank, that also
deliberate on ways of financing their
solutions; a trait that is
absent in Nigerian
think tanks;
*Four(4) enabling
environments for
economic growth
and
*Five (5)
specific
success
p l a n s
resulting in the
Chinese prosperity
story of today; from the
Chinese restaurant in the
street corner of Ikoyi,
through the furniture factory
and bakery in Victoria Island,
to global IT companies like
Alibaba and Tik Tok.
This is what the rest of the world
describes as the unfair advantage
of Chinese companies, they
genuinely fear a future capitalist
world where Chinese companies could
eventually buy over / swallow global
competition, resulting in a capitalist world
of Chinese monopolies.
The above leadership approach by the
Chinese government is now the new standard
for modern capitalism. This is the method of
governance that we are advocating for Nigeria
as we march into the year 2021. The Nigerian
leadership should jettison the laid back 1960
Executive Housekeeping, “we have crude oil
money mentality” and adopt this practical and
realistic Chinese novelty, that involves:
*The setting up of a perennial think tank that
looks for solutions, devises means of funding
these solutions while having the constitutional
powers to execute its deliberations.
* We should try and douse religious division
and promote patriotism by making religion
less visible in government.
* We should also discourage dishonest people
from governance by limiting the glamour and
monetary perks of public offices while ensuring
that water tight laws are rigorously enforced
across board.
* We should also keep our population growth
in check
*We should put priority on technical skills,
inventions and innovations rather than mere
memory building education. We want our
citizens, not only to be libraries of knowledge
but more importantly, they should be inventors
of products. The government should also
sponsor large pool of our citizens in futuristic
fields.
*The government should actively bankroll
centres whose sole aim is to disassemble foreign
products with a view to copying and mass
producing them at very cheap price tags,
common goods like bicycles, rotors, gear boxes
and locomotive engines. Aba is begging to get
a boost, special funds for its entrepreneurs and
inventors should be on the table.
*The government should fund research
facilities that would eventually make Nigerian
companies globally competitive.
* The government should also identity
futuristics companies and other viable
enterprises and give them access to
government finances and research.
Now to a few specific examples;
The think tank should promote a review of
our graduate and postgraduate curriculum and
align them with current and future global
needs. This will require collaboration with
diaspora professionals who have competence
in these emerging fields. Furthermore, the
government should consciously promote
transfer of knowledge to our engineers who
work in places like smart phones assembly
plants, as was done in the oil and gas industry.
This should include company sponsored
trainings abroad.
Apple and many companies who are mass
producing in China and India have directly
contributed to having a large chunk of
competent hands that were later useful to these
countries’ indigenous manufacturing base.
We should ensure that government
sponsored scholarships align with growth areas
identified by our think tank. Graduates of
identified growth areas should on return from
abroad have clearly defined roles to play and
not be frustrated by federal character, party
politics or any other policy that removes the
enabling environment for national growth and
wealth.
The above will no doubt make the Nigerian
manufacturing sector and indeed our economy
to be much more productive and prosperous.