Avoid Further Foreign Loans, Privatise NNPC – Moghalu Tells FG

Professor Kingsley Moghalu, former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, has advised the Federal Government against seeking loans from foreign nations.

Professor Moghalu stated this in Lagos at the 2018 edition of The Bullion Lecture, the annual lecture series of Centre for Financial Journalism (CFJ Nigeria), a training and research organization based in Lagos.

The former CBN deputy governor, who spoke on the topic “The Wealth of Nations and the Imperative of Economic Transformation”, said the government should transform the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation into a partially privatized company.

He attributed Nigeria’s economic poor performance to lack of a worldview that can help it realize its potential.

According to the professor of Economics, for Nigeria to have an established worldview, the country must have an “established and consistent application of clear economic philosophy of entrepreneurial capitalism in the context of a developmental state, as the guiding framework for the Nigerian economy”.

He equally advised the government to “constitutionally repeal the Land Use Act that traps wealth of Nigerian citizens in the hands of government choking grip of state bureaucracy; reforming the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation into a partially privatized company; deregulating the downstream petroleum sector; and avoid further foreign loans which has put us back into a debt trap that will mortgage the future generations of Nigeria”.

He said: “As in individuals, so it is for countries. Those that have well developed worldview, with global strategic intent in a competitive world, tend to perform better than those that don’t.

“Nigeria has failed to achieve high-quality economic growth because the country’s economy is managed mostly on an ad-hoc, reactive basis. It is a “survival” economy in which most governments that held political power have had no real economic vision or a strategy to execute such a vision successfully.”

Moghalu said the country has a national policy on science, technology and innovation, which has practically no impact on Nigeria’s economy, arguing that this is because there is no policy support for moving the products of innovation into the marketplace through mass production and marketing distribution, adding that the incentives for innovation are not yet strong enough in intellectual property law and regulation.

The former CBN deputy governor further disclosed that patents and other kinds of intellectual property are the engine drivers of knowledge economy.

According to him, “The absence of a link between science, commercialized indigenous innovation, and economic and business activity is a fundamental obstacle between Nigeria and a quantum leap to prosperity. This gap is all the more tragic because science and technology is one area in which African countries such as Nigeria can quickly develop global competitive advantage over the Western world and even Asia”.

He further stated that Nigeria’s economy lacks complexity in the extreme, which is why the country remains the greatest importer of Premium Motor Spirit while it exports crude oil.