The newly constituted Economic Advisory Council (EAC) has assured Nigerians that the economy will soon bounce back to prosperity.
This assurance was disclosed on Tuesday by some of the members of the EAC at an event organized by Covenant Christian Centre to mark Nigeria’s 59th Independence anniversary led by Pastor Oyemade Poju.
The Chief Executive Officer of Financial Derivatives Limited Mr Bismarck Rewane and former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Prof. Charles Soludo, spoke on how to get the economy soaring again.
Rewane and Soludo are members of the eight-man Presidential EAC. The president in his 59th independence broadcast yesterday, expresses his expectations from the EAC team to revamp the economy.
Other members of the team led by Dr. Doyin Salami are: Mohammed Sagagi (Vice Chairman); Prof Ode Ojowu; Shehu Yahaya; Iyabo Masha; and Mohammed Adaya Salisu.
The theme for the event was ‘Re-designing the Nigerian Economy with New Ideas’, Rewane, a renown economist, spoke on the need for financial discipline and said “What our economy needs is a mental discipline to learn from the mistakes of the past. Our vulnerability has increased because we have not learned from the mistakes of our past and that of other countries.”
He noted that “When the institutions of conflict resolution are broken, the alternative to what you have is anarchy. The social contract between the rulers and the ruled is very important as it’s so cheap to just talk than to act”.
“What we have control over is our credibility and leadership. Social credibility over what we say is important because talk is cheap. Credibility does not come from what we say, but what we do,” Rewane said”.
Prof Charles Soludo who defied negative insinuations about the country added: “The game of the future is “innovate, compete or die.”
“Nigeria needs to start preparing for a world without oil, which calls for innovation in diverse aspects of the economy”.
He warned: “We need to start preparing for 400 million people that will soon be upon us in a world without oil. We have been living on the life support of oil. When oil goes up, the economy goes up and when oil comes down, the economy comes down.
“The misery that will befall us is to continue to churn out millions of semi-literate youths and largely unemployed citizens.”.
Soludo advocates for devolution of power, which he said, means giving power back to the people.
He said: “Our constitution, together with its command and control institutions concentrated at Abuja, was designed for and around the sharing and consumption of the oil rent. It is largely obsolete for the demands of a production economy without oil rent, which requires competitive and flexible rather than unitary federalism.
“As the oil rent is tapping off, its internal contradictions have burst open, requiring a lot of survival mechanisms to keep the system afloat. But, for how long?
“You cannot build a 100-storey building upon a foundation of an old bungalow. The new economy we need to build is a 100-storey building and we cannot put a 100-storey building on this foundation that has been laid for a bungalow”.
“A post-oil economy requires that agents maximise their fullest potentials, which would require a national rather than a federal response. You can’t clap with one hand.
“What we need is a new national business model. You are designing good ideas and good plans without the underlying infrastructure to carry those ideas forward.”
Soludo added: “These children in the next 30 years will be youth. They need jobs, they need education, they need water, they need housing. Twenty years time, the oil will be history.
“Since 1992, we have implemented all kinds of plans all designed to diversify the economy, but we are still tied to the life support of the oil sector. If you want to change a persistent economic structure, you have to change the underlying economic institution.
“Our greatest resource is human beings, but we are not going to export illiterates. The easiest way to waste the future is to continue to churn out illiterates and largely unemployed persons most of who see criminality as the only way to escape.”
© Control TV 2019
