International goodwill for the one-week-old Muhammadu Buhari administration has been pouring in. The leaders of France and Germany, among others, have dispatched their requests to him for state visits. But the biggest of them all is the G7 invitation to its three-day meeting in Berlin, Germany, beginning on Sunday. Besides, the group asked him to come along with a blueprint of its possible assistance to Nigeria. This gesture is reassuring; and he should seize it with both hands. A country in need, such as ours, can ill-afford to mismanage an offer from the world’s strongest economic and political leaders.
Nigeria is haemorrhaging from years of misrule and predatory governance by successive administrations; signposted in mind-boggling corruption, Boko Haram insurgency, unemployment, fuel scarcity, lack of electricity and other critical infrastructure. Altering this shameful course illuminated Buhari’s inaugural speech on May 29. He said, “Insecurity, pervasive corruption, the hitherto unending and seemingly impossible fuel and power shortages are the immediate concern.”
Going by his recent visit to Chad and Niger Republic, his first international outing to strengthen our neighbours’ military assistance to Nigeria in the fight against terrorism, it is obvious that insecurity is Buhari’s topmost priority. The Boko Haram insurgency, since 2009, has led to the death of over 20,000 innocent Nigerians and rendered our military prostrate, just as the country’s leadership appeared hopeless on how to rescue the over 219 schoolgirls of Chibok still in Boko Haram captivity after their abduction on April 14, 2014.
We believe that a collective deal from the G7 in dealing with this security conundrum will be the biggest foreign bargain since the mayhem began. G7 is a grouping of the Finance Ministers and central bank governors of seven major advanced economies. Nigeria, under Goodluck Jonathan’s presidency, late last year, cancelled a United States training of our soldiers to fight Boko Haram, a pointer to the ruptured relations between the two nations. “At the request of the Nigerian government, the United States will discontinue its training of a Nigerian Army battalion,” the US Embassy had stated in Abuja.
Undoubtedly, the terror war cannot be won without overhauling our military in terms of personnel training, especially in intelligence gathering and sharing and supply of sophisticated equipment. Fighting terrorism, as crises in the Middle East show, is a high-tech engagement. The deployment of drones and satellites for military surveillance is what the G7 can offer Nigeria. These would help a lot in changing the prevailing disorder in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.
But some help, like military hardware procurement, will have to be paid for. Where will the Buhari government get the funds to do this, when the Federal Government borrowed N473 billion in the first quarter of the year to meet its recurrent charges? There is a lifeline in recovering our looted funds.
For decades, our public officials have been stashing looted funds abroad. It is our view that the G7 nations – the US, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Italy − some of which serve as havens for these ill-gotten wealth, can help tremendously in tracing and recovering these funds. Above all, the looters, some of whom live abroad, should be extradited once the government can establish a case against any of them. Nigeria should engage these countries immediately in the creation of legal protocols that will trigger action on this score.
The UK Secretary for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Philip Hammond, who attended Buhari’s inauguration, offered a ray of hope when he said, “In particular, we agreed with President Buhari’s top priorities: tackling corruption…and stabilising the economy in the face of low oil prices. We also stand ready to help where we can with the government’s priority of tackling the diversion and leakage of money so that Nigeria’s wealth can be spent for the benefit of all.”
Britain should walk its talk. Switzerland, the safest haven for looters, is redeeming itself by refusing anymore to warehouse suspicious cash in its banks. The country’s ambassador to Nigeria, Hans Rudolf Hodel, recently said, “But now, before you deposit money in any Swiss bank, you have to prove that you have earned that money legally.” Buhari should task the G7 nations on the need to buy into the Swiss model. This will ultimately stem illicit cash flights away from Nigeria.
Excluding the period 2010-2015 − the Jonathan years − which recorded the highest revenue receipts, and the most reckless expenditure, the Global Financial Integrity, a US-based group, says that $182 billion was stolen from Nigeria, and laundered offshore between 2000 and 2009. It relied on data from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in its assessment.
Indeed, in the last 16 years, the country has seen the worst pillaging of its oil wealth, underscored by the N2.5 trillion fuel subsidy of 2011, for which nobody has been held to account; and the unaccountable public finance management template of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.
The inability to account for crude oil proceeds is as much a problem as oil theft. The immediate past Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, once declared that “400,000 barrels of crude oil are lost on a daily basis due to illegal bunkering, vandalism and product shut-in.” This illegality thrives because there is a huge European market for it. This can be stopped.
African, Caribbean, Pacific Parliaments and their EU counterparts pointed the way forward during their 2013 Abuja meeting when they decided that only oil backed with certificate of origin should be sold in European markets. Mitchell Rivasi, a co-President ACP-EU parliamentary summit, had observed: “The bunkering tankers are better equipped than the Nigerian Navy. This is a huge internationally organised crime. We did it with diamond; we can also do it with oil.” Buhari should impress it on the G7 leaders to turn this rhetoric into action.
However, no matter how rich Buhari’s wish-list to the G7 might be, his benefactors’ commitment will be only to the extent of his own success on the domestic front. Nigeria missed the opportunity to stimulate rapid economic turnaround when its corruption-driven electricity privatisation drove away foreign investors with capital and capacity from participating. Similarly, the stifled operation of the $520 million privately-owned Geometric power plant at Aba, which USAID is a part investor, for two years now, because of the Jonathan presidency’s disregard for contractual obligations, is another monument of disincentive to foreign investments.
With a sense of urgency, Buhari should, therefore, turn these tidal waves against foreign capital inflows into the economy through swift and decisive policy actions. Certainly, most foreign investors will not ignore the 2015 report on the Ease of Doing Business in Nigeria released by the World Bank Group. According to the report, the country is ranked 187 out of the 189 countries surveyed in getting electricity; 185 in registering property; and 140 in enforcing contract, among others.
Indeed, these barricades to our national development can be dismantled, only if we properly harness the help aplenty from our friends abroad, who kept us at bay because of the misadventure that was the Jonathan leadership.
