Beyond Privatization of National Corporations in Nigeria; We Must Fix Root Issues In the Nation

The broad sentiment: “The Director General of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Segun Ajayi-Kadiri, has intensified calls for the Federal Government to fully privatize Nigeria’s state-owned refineries, describing them as symbols of waste, inefficiency, and entrenched mismanagement: ‘Those four refineries are a pure drain on the Nigerian economy, and it is not fair to the Nigerian people…The government should just sell these refineries. Give them to private sector people who will run them efficiently and be able to deliver. When something belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody.’”

That said, after the outcome we have seen on the privatization of NEPA, the electricity agency, I want the government to be nuanced on the whole construct of privatization in Nigeria.  Russia was a fading country under Boris Yeltsin who was privatizing everything, but when Putin came, and recovered some of those assets, from the private mafia, Russia is a better country today economically. Look at China, governments run things, and they deliver. Some of the largest construction companies in the world are owned by Chinese governments.  Simply, even the public sector can deliver!

What do these countries do differently for their public sectors to be working? Three things: merit, honesty and pragmatism in the leadership system. Those three things work in most systems – democracy, military-cracy or whatever. Because Nigeria does not want to institutionalize those in the system, people can push to be selling everything.  Unfortunately, if you do privatization outside those three tenets, even the privatization regime will fail. In other words, if the privatization process is not based on merit, honesty and pragmatism, the whole process will fail.

The good news for Nigeria is that we’re liberating our economics making it possible for MTN, Airtel and Glo to eat Nitel without having to acquire Nitel. And possibly Dangote Refinery will make the national refineries irrelevant by 2027! But if we want to get into the game as a nation, especially on other areas, we must investigate the root causes of why Nigeria is not getting many things done. If you do not fix the issues, even privatized companies out of them will fade as we have seen with NEPA! In this piece, I share the core anchors of great nations.

Ndubuisi Ekekwe’s “A Greater Nation” Presidential Campaign

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