The former Deputy
Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Professor Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu,
has said that Nigeria needs a worldview that could help realize its potential,
reports ITRealms.
Speaking 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, on
the topic “The Wealth of Nations and the Imperative of Economic Transformation”,
Prof. Moghalu said that “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”.
He attributed Nigeria’s
economic poor performance to lack of this essential worldview, especially lack
of economic philosophy. “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.
Also, he noted that
though Nigeria has a national policy on science, technology and innovation, this
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, and because the
incentives for innovation are not yet strong enough in intellectual property
law and regulation.
He disclosed that
patents and other kinds of intellectual property are the engine drivers of
knowledge economy.
“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 revealed
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.
Moghalu insisted that
Nigeria should have an established worldview; establishment 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; constitutional repeal of 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.
Nenye Dom/GEE
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