Is Nigeria really a giant? I do not understand the basis of that illusion! These days I have stopped using South Africa in my speeches because many told me that it was not a fair comparison. So, I switched to Angola, and no one has explained why Angola budgets $45 billion for 33 million people when Nigeria can only manage $35 billion for 210 million with most of that $35 billion borrowed.
Fellow citizens, Angola is an oil nation. How can we retire all these men who have been running Nigeria since 1999 since whatever they are doing is not working? I mean we are severely underperforming as a nation across major metrics.
Sure, Angola may be running a unitary government which means most of its spending is concentrated at the federal level; Nigeria runs a federal system with states having their own budgets. Yet, that does not change the underperformance of Nigeria. Except Lagos with $2.3 billion and Rivers state with $1 billion, many of the states in Nigeria spend really not much; Zamfara is around $300 million. That noted, even if you add all the states in Nigeria, on per capita income, Angola does better than Nigeria.
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Nigeria vs South Africa budget, 2019
Notice after the post:
Good People, I have received dozens of inmails asking for the source of my Angolan budget. But one from a Director-General in one of our government agencies is driving this notice. Possibly, there are many people asking for the same thing. Typically, anything I post here has an extended copy in my blog (next time, just go to tekedia as I archive all posts there).
But in summary, I relied on the Oct 2021 Lagos Business School presentation by Nigeria’s smartest financial analyst, Bismarck Rewane, CEO of Financial Derivatives Company Ltd. On page 25 of that presentation, he has this plot on the left. He is certainly a smarter man than yours truly that anything he puts out there must be correct. In short, he put the budget of Nigeria at $28.75 billion when I was gracious to put it at $35 billion. He is certainly right considering that our budget execution is never 100%.
But just to be sure it was not a typo, I also checked Wikipedia and saw the public expense at $45 billion. With that, I entered that number for Angola.
This is the full piece https://www.tekedia.com/even-angola-budgets-more-than-nigeria/ where I also noted the unitary structure of the Angolan budgetary system. But despite all, the trajectory is evident.
(I cannot share Mr Rewane’s 115-page document due to copyright issues. But you can go to LBS library for the Oct edition)
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Nigeria is never a giant, it’s ignorance that makes people here to believe that there’s plenty money in the system, yet if you ask them to explain what the numbers say, nobody will tell you anything meaningful.
Even if you are the greatest resource manager of all time, you can only do very little to service over 200 million people with $35 billion, there is no miracle there. The country needs growth more than anything else.
This economy has never grown above $500 billion, but many somewhat believe it’s enough to do wonders, because they do not understand numbers and size; anything short of atleast $2 trillion with budget in the neighborhood of $300 billion, everyone should just forget about greatness and get to work.
There should not even be national holidays or anyone taking leave off work, because the productivity is very low, such that you will be wondering if people are working at all.
Call any artisan or technician to come fix something for you, and he could waste the whole day, why? Because to him, once he serves two customers per day and makes some money, anything else is disturbance. There is too much laziness in this economy, both at formal and informal level, and no economy becomes great without high work ethic.
I’ll give you a small hint Dr. Oguaju: 1) Why don’t you try and identify all the precious raw materials that lie under your grounds in Nigeria, and try to evaluate how much the right prospection and treatment will represent per year for Nigeria. I did it for some items, some twenty years ago, in Nigeria, and even exported some containers for vey satisfactory prices to Europe and to the USA.
Why, then do these precious products lie unmined and untreated in the ground in your country, or worse are illegally exported, and their proceeds stashed abroad instead of returning to the mother country???? By the way I do not say this on my own! One of the highest economic experts in the UK say the same thing, and calls it prudently “unrecorded trade”!!!!
Do we even need further explanation and analysis? Every normal person with decent knowledge of numbers knows that Nigeria is grossly underperforming, so it’s not something we need to waste time questioning if it’s true or not.
We have been spending more on security but it adds little or nothing to our economic prospect, due to the tactless and skewed nature of our procurement policy; what ordinarily should have created another viable economic sector is now looking like wasted expenditures, draining the purse with no feedback mechanism. Nigeria is not profiting from the security crisis, which creates a double whammy of some sort.
The only thing that should be dominating discussions now is GROWTH, the economy hasn’t grown in a very long time, while problems have been expanding, these things naturally create poverty, without needing extra motivation or misdemeanour from the managers.
But it’s very difficult telling people who have reached their full capacity to do more, and that is exactly where we are. THE PEOPLE WE ARE LOOKING UP TO AND SHOUTING AT DO NOT HAVE MORE TO GIVE. You cannot ask a short man to perform tasks meant for tall people.
To move away from mediocrity, you have to change things, starting from the managers.