PATRICK ABANG, Calabar –
While developed countries’ economics determines their politics. The case of Nigeria seems different as the country’s politics always determine her economic policies.
This is according to the assertion made by the former Senate Leader, Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba, during an interview with our correspondent in Calabar, the Cross River State capital.
According to him, there has been this age long relational disputation between economics and politics. In theory, economics should be non political. In practice, however, there is a strong relationship between economics and politics because the performance of the economy, especially developed economics, is always a key political battleground.
Senator Ndoma Egba, who was the former National Secretary of the 2018 All Progressive Congress (APC) National Convention, stressed that politics should be about the economy, how to better it, and not the economy about politics.
“If one should be sacrificed at the alter of the other it should be politics being sacrificed at the alter of the economy and not the other way round as ultimately the business of government is the security, welfare and wellbeing of the citizens” he said.
The former lawmaker lamented that Nigerians must agree that the structure “we have today has taken us nowhere and we are in a coup de sac. Even if you reform the police and the rest of the country remains the way it is, the reforms will be to no avail”.
He revealed that ” Our situation now can be likened to a car whose engine has knocked and the owner is trying to fix brand new tyres in the car as a means of getting it to work. The so called federal structure we have is no longer workable. The center is overburdened, it has become so unwieldy that more than seventy percent of the federal expenditure goes to recurrent expenditure while less than thirty percent is left for capital.
“Paradoxically, it is the capital budget that delivers development. With sixty eight items in the exclusive and twenty nine in the concurrent lists we have a more justifiable claim to being a unitary state than a federal one.
“The states, as federating units have become absolutely dependent on federal allocations than their own internally generated revenues, what my friend and brother, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, refers to as feeding bottle federalism. The local government system across the country has completely collapsed leading to increased migration from the rural communities to state capitals overstretching infrastructure and facilities beyond limits.
The structure is no longer working. We are are at the point of structural implosion. More so, as the economy has lost its productive capacity. Manufacturing is grounded and the economy’s absorptive capabilities are zero and unemployment soars by the day. Social infrastructure has collapsed , social indices are unimpressive and all these are reflective in the security situation and the value of the Naira. Things will only get worse if we insist on retaining the current structure. We have to go back to the drawing board, we must restructure one way or the other.
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