Kingsley Moghalu, a former deputy governor, Central Bank of Nigeria and presidential aspirant is worried that the Nigerian economy is still in the woods and majority of people still living in abject poverty

By Anayo Ezugwu

DESPITE the claims by the Nigerian government that the economy has fully recovered from recession, Kingsley Moghalu, a former deputy governor, Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, said the economy had failed to achieve high-quality economic growth. He noted that the country’s economy is managed mostly on an ad-hoc and reactive basis.

Moghalu made the observation while delivering the third edition of the ‘Bullion Lecture’ organised by the Centre for Financial Journalism in Lagos, on Wednesday, March 21, with the theme: “The Secret of the Wealth of Nations.” According to him, the Nigera’s economy is a survival economy in which most governments that hold political power have had no real economic vision or a strategy to execute such a vision successfully.

The presidential hopeful said to build a sustainable economic future, Nigeria must now address the aching need for a clear economic vision, situated in a philosophical framework from which economic policy should be derived. He noted that Nigeria’s economic policy had not undertaken the kind of self-examination since General Ibrahim Babangida’s military government introduced the international Monetary Fund and World Bank – inspired Structural Adjustment Programme, SAP, in 1986.

“The problem we have today is not that the economy was liberalised. The problem that continues to challenge our economic development path is that, first, liberalisation happened without the necessary foundations for prosperity in a liberal capitalist economy because we moved into financial liberalisation without achieving the required minimum threshold of industrialisation.

“As a result, finance does not play the optimal role it should in economic development in Nigeria, and the three factors of production – land, capital, and labour are out of synchronisation in our economy. The second dimension of this problem is that the state is confused about its role in the economy. In various epochs we have observed the federal government of Nigeria as business and private enterprise friendly,” he said.

According to Moghalu, the scenario has made Nigeria a very poor country. He noted that recent World Poverty Clock showed that Nigeria had overtaken India as the poverty capital of the world. He said the country has the greatest numbers of people, who live in extreme poverty, which is to say, those who live on less than the equivalent of $1.90 or N600 per day.

He also cited the African Development Bank, AfDB, recent report, which indicated that 152 million Nigerians, in an overall population of about 190 million, met the criteria of absolute poverty. “This means that 80 percent of Nigerians are extremely poor. We should note that India has a population that is six times that of Nigeria,” he said.

– Mar. 22, 2018 @ 18:12 GMT |