Deregulation as public policy in any economic sector, especially the oil & gas industry, for a visionary and viable ruling class should not just consist in the enthronement of a certain ostensibly permissible theoretical economic thought; it should on the contrary entail employing the services of applied and patented economic management.
Our argument here is that no national economy especially on the continent of Africa can afford to leave itself completely open to the ferocious arguments of unbridled market economics. That economy will not survive the untold pressure. This position is obviously against the grain of widely-held wisdom in the hallowed portals of World Bank and IMF power economics. It is of course to be
expected.
And the Nigerian ruling class has generally bought into the peculiar argument of that species of deregulation. And we are collectively worse for it today. It is a great pity. An intellectually alive and creative ruling class would have in the recessive circumstances addressed the following socio-economic issues ab initio through well-thought-out public policy instruments:
- The accumulation of investment capital through vigorously encouraging domestic savings.
- The domestication of industrialization through engendering the conditions for the emergence of product-ideas led economy.
- The examination of the contributions of various factors of production with a view to severally reducing the costs of these factors.
- A robust engagement with the people by government for the purpose of a multilateral and solutions-driven exploration of their realistic anxieties and expectations with a view to working those into realistic public policy engineering processes.
And we will hasten to add here that at the root of these economic issues is energy and subsidy of same. A ruling class which gets its bearing wrong on those issues due to undiscriminating application of externally-induced blanket options in sorting domestic socio-economic challenges will greatly undermine the overall health of the people.
We have often read with dismay the specious contentions of arrowheads of this species of policy on deregulation as if it was a panacea for all the challenges of the economy, especially the matter of subsidy on energy and also the making out of productive tax regimes with an eye on the most vulnerable and the weakest link in the total production value chain in the domestic economy. They have often argued that subsidy on energy products must be taken away and buried, for instance.
And we make bold to argue here that a more creative and intellectually resourceful ruling class will not balk at the prospect of providing critical subsidy, especially on a segregated basis, to the consumption of petroleum products.
And we are persuaded to think that all it takes is the effective, hard-nosed strategic planning by a corps of hands-on professional economic managers who are not only intellectually endowed but are also patriotically-driven and not arm-chair theorists who are ever combing for the easiest ways out of a bind.
We therefore need productive, indigenous socio-economic thinkers today and not extremely comfortable, desk-bound, chauffeur-driven and perks-chasing ruling class. We desire as a people a ruling class who would task their cerebral resources rather than settle for
the well-worn prescriptions of the economic theories of the West. And then they would go ahead to destroy their people in the name a species of deregulation which frowns at subsidy for energy products, especially for the critical segments of the domestic economy.
And yet again, we argue that recruitment of The Effective Leader by the people to superintend over the national political space, for instance, of Nigeria in 2023, is certainly the most important step in the productive process of democratizing the sources of wealth creation for the good of all and for the purpose of staking a place in the comity of global socio-economic leadership and domestic peace, prosperity and desirable progress..
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