Nigeria is currently faced with a developmental crisis that needs not only the input of political leaders to overcome but also contributions by economists, the Chairman of Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof Tunji Olaopa, has said.
Olaopa spoke at the weekend during a courtesy visit to his office by top officials of Nigerian Economic Society (NES), led by its President, Prof Adeola Adenikinju, of the School of Economics, University of Ibadan.
According to Olaopa, Nigeria is back at a defining stage in its economic policy development and needs the intervention of top political leadership and policymakers and the “nation’s massive corps of expert-economists and their huge transdisciplinary intellectual capital.”
He said the situation in the country “indeed brings back such historic moments as the Ibadan Conference on National Reconstruction and Development of 1969 convened by NISER, and the IMF debate of 1985.
“There’s been a big movement from 1985 when the state was dominant through the Washington Consensus period of backing off and allowing the market to dominate, and then towards a rebalancing, which gives the state a more proactive role in guiding the economy. Getting this balance right is still invariably critical to ensuring a well-functioning economy, especially given the huge potential that public private partnerships (PPPs) present. We are not doing enough yet in harnessing the full potential of PPP across its three maturity curve thresholds, and in measures to reinforce public sector investment with good corporate governance principles”, he said.
He noted that “the whole Dutch and double Dutch disease and economic diversification was, however, still an issue. One of how a resource-rich economy like ours can move towards a job-rich growth pattern, so that the natural resource will not only be an easy source of government revenue, but a big source of jobs, productivity, or local content cum export-led growth. “
According to Olaopa, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has provided uncommon leadership with the “national seminal climate” for policy conversation that he has enabled in being not just a listening President, but one who concedes to superior ideas and solutions.”
Wondering if economists, especially those of the Nigerian Economic Society (NES) were rising up to the nation’s developmental challenges, Olaopa said it was commendable that NISER and the NES had engaged the CBN governor in an important conversation.
Olaopa, who noted that the nation needed to do more about building a data culture, said: “My message to MDAs is that data culture is not about data collection, the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the data we collect. It is about encouraging and indeed, making it mandatory for cross-functional teams to use data to inform their daily tasks, and creating data-driven plans, strategies, policies, goals and objectives.”
