By Pat Utomi
I was thrilled to read Sunday Dare’s response to my views on how the economy is being managed. Take away a bit of incivility it would have been great contribution to the necessary conversation to make for a good market place of ideas, the very essence of Democracy.
I know Sunday Dare well. Many years back he was usually the one who welcomed me at the door of the Tinubu residence on Bourdillon. I rate him as more polished than the group quick to descend into ad hominem barbs and insults.
Still I do not mind the name calling and attempt at insult. It goes with the territory in Nigeria. But he provides opportunity for better information on the important ideas of economic management by in our country. Too many lives depend on an honest and intelligent discussion of the matter.
Before the main issue, let me put aside some attempt at disinformation.
I am grateful to God that people who mean to be nasty cannot seem to find anything from a public life of about 50 years but the trite reference to the fact that I worked at VWoN and served as None- Executive Director on the Board of BankPHB.
Notice that nobody who mentions Volkswagen as evidence of my failing, ever points to what I did wrong there. Just innuendo and insinuation that a company I worked for failed at a later point in its history. It is like accusing Bola Tinubu of responsibility for Mobil giving up in Nigeria. I would never say anything that stupid. But it is said by his friends of me any time they feel incapable of reasoned response to what I have said.
All the Motor Assenbly plants failed in Nigeria. Even if we are so uncharitable to blame those on whose watch an industrialization strategy failed, it is noteworthy that two German MDs, Piech and Bublitz and a Nigerian, ran the company after I left of my own.
My thoughts about the company before and immediately after I joined are fully documented, including in a This Week magazine piece I wrote when I was challenged to take up the position at VWoN after I had recommended someone else for the position when head hunters came for me in 1985.. This is why I described my move to VWON in my book To Serve is Live as the result of being Whitemailed.
It is interesting that in 30 years of trying to find ways of insulting me no one has ever pointed to 10 Naira infraction or any abuse of trust. I thank God for being in this exclusive club because only few can make that league in Nigeria.
As for BankPHB where I was none executive director, on leave of absence for long periods to run for public office, it is interesting that no one uses that journey to smear the actual chairman of the board, Kola Abiola or people like Akin Kekere Ekun or other directors. Such is the desperation to find something unpleasant about those who speak truth to power.
Other directors who were more involved have gone on to bigger roles in the industry so it could not be that governance was poor.
It must be that these people can really not find any thing on me. It takes grace to operate in the way I seem to have done. To God be the glory.
Back to economic management. What seems to have got under Sunday Dare’s skin is my referring to Economic stabilization reforms as Ponzi schemes of sorts.
It must be that Sunday forgets easily. If I recall I believe he was in a progrmme Alim Abubakar organized at Oxford University more than a dozen years ago. I was on the faculty and if he was in class in all my presentations he would have heard me use same words bank then.
I supported the Washington consensus SAP back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The promise,back then, was that the benefits would come after the pain. I even used the the J curve to explain the lag between policy and result. The reality was that I watched some people get rich from financial sector reforms and privatization but sustainable growth did not follow.
Reading Nobel Prize winning American Evonomist Joseph Stiglitz criticism of the role of the IMF as debt collector for Wall Street Banks that made poor loan decisions, and watching SAP damage our education and health care systems, the bedrocks of growth, I began to question the promise of SAP stabilization policies. I considered such outcomes more or less like a Ponzi scheme. It freed up frozen lines of credit and made it seem like markets were about to work and make things great. But little was offered as entrepreneurship stimulation and guidelines on making markets work. As a personal initiative I began teaching Entrepreneurship at the Lagos Business School and worked with colleagues at the Harvard Business School to design a course on Making Markets work. But Stabilization programmes just assumed markets would naturally follow. They ignored the lessons of Industrial policy in Asia.
We ended up the poverty capital of the world, missing the growth those policies promised. A few months ago BusinessDay published extracts from a book I am currently writing on this.
When the Asian Financial crisis broke out in 1997 I decided to embed myself in Malaysia and Indonesia.and was at the World Bank Annual meetings in Hong Kong in 1997 where the issues came to a head.
My Oped piece in the Guardian written from Jarkata in October 1997 on ‘the end of Anwar Ibrahim’ should still be available for those who care to educate themselves.
People like our dear Professor Bayo Olukoshi and Prof Akpan Ekpo were more skeptical about SAP. I would confess to them later that their views were more appropriate. I bet Sunday Dare will be even more shaken if he reads the South Korean born Cambridge University Economist Ha Joon Chang in the ‘ Bad Samaitans’
For me to be alive and watch Nigeria make the same mistake again has been painful. To see people like Sunday who have the background to better interrogate ideas turn to abuse instead of learning, discourages one about where Nigeria is bound.
Having made the basic point I want to say that I welcome a debate anywhere with anybody on the matter.
I promise I will turn the other cheek to anyone who insults. Freeing our children from the road to serfdom is worth being insulted for.
Pat Utomi
Founder,
Centre For Values in Leadership
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