One of the greatest legacy of the State-driven development of the 1960s to the early 1980s was that it took education, at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, seriously. Nigerian universities competed with the best universities in Western Europe, North America and Asia. They attracted the best scholars all over Africa and the world, who also contributed to Nigeria’s development.
Thus, when Nigeria witnessed its first major post-colonial economic crisis in the early 1980s, the universities and other tertiary institutions were hotbeds of intense debates on the causes of, and solutions to, the economic crisis. A forefront participant in this debate was the Sierra Leonean Dr Yusuf Bangura, who taught and researched in the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
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Mainstream economists, largely comprising of Keynesians and monetarists, recommended high-level support for the manufacturing sector and increase in government expenditures, as well as regulation of money supply, curtailment of government expenditures, and drastic reduction of public borrowings, etc.
Radicals like Dr Yusuf Bala Usman and Balarabe Musa recommended the complete elimination of the contract system, or, at best, a rationalised contract system. They also demanded the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, optimum utilisation of raw materials, and national/state control of the economy, etc.
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Right-wingers like Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon, stood for a proper management of the economy, a rationalised contract system, war against discipline and corruption, as well as decisive confrontation with the forces opposed to government’s measures to resolve the crisis.
Since 1984, various government have implemented these and other recommendations, including the use of local raw materials, sectoral linkages, rationalisation of imports, control of public expenditures, foreign exchange control, rationalised contracts system, devaluation, imports control, cuts in social services and welfare, removal of state subsidies, tax increases, etc., as measures to resolve the crisis.
Bangura, in his 1984 article, “Overcoming Some Basic Misconceptions of the Nigerian Economic Crisis” foresaw the limitations and dangers of these recommendations. To him: “anybody interested in finding out solutions to the crisis should subject the capitalist economy to a rigorous critique instead of isolating its parts.” Besides, the recommendations only favoured “the owners of capital”, whereas the working peoples are most affected by the crisis.
Fourty-one years of implementing these recommendations, the State has only succeeded in antagonising and agonising the working people, empowering and enthroning the private sector, and producing a few people who are stupendously rich – with global business operations – and all sorts of scandalously rich lumpen politicians, without any productive base.
But for the working people, it has been massive unemployment, bastardization of the naira, collapse of social institutions, elimination of welfare services, elevation of poverty, the elimination of the middle classes, demobilisation of labour movement, abuse of human, civil and democratic rights, and enthronement of lumpen democracy, amongst others.
The mainstream economists’ recommendations were drawn largely from the the neoclassical works John Maynard Keynes, and/or monetarists like Milton Friedman. To Bangura, their “entire methodology is empiricist; it places emphasis on consumer sovereignty and subjective factors like demand as prime determination of value, savings and investment ratio.” By so doing, they ignore “the roots of the social relationships, contradictions and struggles that informs the general movement of the economy and the character of savings and investments.”
Also, they are fascinated “with equilibrium in a world economy that has shown an incredible capacity for change”; thereby ignoring “the fundamental conflicts in production and the way in which the working class surplus is used to provide an income structures which is weighted against latter.”
Further, they take a highly “simplistic position on savings by maintaining that only the rich and powerful can save and invest, thus the encouragement given to them by government policies.” By so doing, they ignore the struggles of the state and various arms of capital to control the wealth created by the working people.
By seeing economic crisis in simple statistical forces of oil gluts (low prices) and depressions (low demand), these economists ignore the forces that created the statistics and graphs. In so doing, they bury the forces “creating the crisis and makes it difficult to hold any one responsible.”
Most significantly, they stand for “expanded capitalist accumulation as a solution to the crisis” and yet blame the crisis on “the working class, the source for the generation of surplus, even though this class does not control the state and social surplus.”
Bangura equally criticised those left and right-wing forces, who argued that the economic crisis was caused by “the specificity of mismanaged nature of the economy, the high level of indiscipline and corruption in the society and the proliferation of middlemen, the contract system and consultancy”. While the radicals focused on “contractocracy”, and the right-wingers concentrated on “indiscipline and mismanagement” of the economy.
Bangura agreed that the Nigerian economy is “among the most mismanaged in the world which has certainly made matters worst”. Yet, he emphasised that: “there can never be a perfectly managed capitalist economy that will be permanently crisis-free; for capitalism is a system of competitive centrally-planned autonomous corporate units in an anarchical environment.”
He emphasised that corruption, looting, and illegal transactions surely aggravated the crisis, more so, as the looted funds are repatriated to the metropolitan economies for investment and squandering, and not used in “the circuit of the reproduction of the local economy”. But, underscored that these “cannot on their own constitute the cause of the crisis. In any case…corruption is an integral part of the accumulation process, especially at its most primitive stage.”
Thus, that while these problems and illegalities should and must be checked, so doing will never prevent the occurrences of economic crisis. For these problems, if anything, only show “the contradiction between national and international systems of accumulation and the structure of production and exchange relations that tie the Nigerian economy to the world capitalist economy.”
Bangura accepted that consultancy and contractocracy have been tremendously abused in Nigeria, but insisted that these, in themselves, were not responsible for crisis. Countries like United States, Western Europe, and Japan, where contracts and consultancy are rationalised and well-valued, periodically experience economic crises.
He maintained that contractocracy “is at the heart of capitalism; it is a reflection of the complex and expanding nature of market relations.” Therefore, the role of contractors and consultants in the crisis can only be understood when located “within the context of the general dynamics of the world capitalist economy.”
Bangura’s paper is a demand that attention must equally be paid to the “repressive capitalist order by focusing on the concrete problems of the working people in their struggles against retrenchment, job insecurity, non-payment of salaries, and repressive labour and civil law”, amongst others.
Further, it is a call for the proper management of the economy, rational valuation of contracts and consultancies, decisive confrontation of corrupt practices, outright looting, and the need to expand Nigeria’s “low organic composition of capital”.
But, most importantly, the paper is, a clarion call that the capitalist system which gives rise, nourish, reinforce, sustain and reproduce economic crises must be decisively confronted, dealt with, and qualitatively transformed to put people first over and above profit.
Ahmed Aminu-Ramatu Yusuf worked as deputy director, Cabinet Affairs Office, The Presidency, and retired as General Manager (Administration), Nigerian Meteorological Agency, (NiMet). Email: [email protected]
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