In an interview with sunnews, Senator Bassey Albert Akpan popularly representing Akwa Ibom North-east in the Senate and chairs the committee on Gas.
You are well vast in economic matters and Nigerians will want to know from your own perspective as a Senator, what you think the country or the leadership is not getting right and what they need to do right so as to get us out of the mess we are in?
There have been so much inconsistency in terms of policy formulation and implementation in the last couple of months. The President came in and in seven months, there was no cabinet and there was no economic direction. So, this brought about fear in the minds and hearts of foreign investors. How can a government come in and seven months after, nobody knows the policy direction of the government. We do not even understand what kind of economy we are running. Are we running export economy? Or are we running an import position economy? So, these are some of the fundamental reasons. I believe that when the government came in, they had their own medium term framework and these are basic options. What has happened to those parameters? What happened to our projections?
There have been so much inconsistency in terms of policy formulation and implementation in the last couple of months. The President came in and in seven months, there was no cabinet and there was no economic direction. So, this brought about fear in the minds and hearts of foreign investors. How can a government come in and seven months after, nobody knows the policy direction of the government. We do not even understand what kind of economy we are running. Are we running export economy? Or are we running an import position economy? So, these are some of the fundamental reasons. I believe that when the government came in, they had their own medium term framework and these are basic options. What has happened to those parameters? What happened to our projections?
To what extent have they varied?
I still believe we have not done enough in terms of economic analysis and deploying the economic principles. It is normal all over the world. Once you are faced with inflation and recession, you fight recession. Inflation will take care of itself, but what we have seen here is that even the Central Bank of Nigeria has been concentrating on fighting inflation and how to create a disincentive for the banks not to stimulate foreign exchange to the detriment of their core mandate. The economy has shown us a trend and an established trend that economy was going down. So all we needed to do was to see what we could do to arrest it at that point in time. But we come from a country where everybody believes that even when you see fire burning, you say ‘no I cannot leave this house. Let that fire stay’. All over the world, you find people take two – three years to find solutions based on the existing projections and forecast. Look at Japan. A Typhoon was passing Japan and they spent the last two years planning for that same Typhoon, but in Nigeria, we do not even have the capacity to handle emergencies and we do not also have the patience and the planning to plan for exigencies. These are the issues. So I think we should stop the blame game because Nigerians are the ones bearing the pains.
I still believe we have not done enough in terms of economic analysis and deploying the economic principles. It is normal all over the world. Once you are faced with inflation and recession, you fight recession. Inflation will take care of itself, but what we have seen here is that even the Central Bank of Nigeria has been concentrating on fighting inflation and how to create a disincentive for the banks not to stimulate foreign exchange to the detriment of their core mandate. The economy has shown us a trend and an established trend that economy was going down. So all we needed to do was to see what we could do to arrest it at that point in time. But we come from a country where everybody believes that even when you see fire burning, you say ‘no I cannot leave this house. Let that fire stay’. All over the world, you find people take two – three years to find solutions based on the existing projections and forecast. Look at Japan. A Typhoon was passing Japan and they spent the last two years planning for that same Typhoon, but in Nigeria, we do not even have the capacity to handle emergencies and we do not also have the patience and the planning to plan for exigencies. These are the issues. So I think we should stop the blame game because Nigerians are the ones bearing the pains.
Some people have partly blamed the current situation on the implementation of TSA and that banks did not have enough money to inject into the economy. They have argued that it led to loss of jobs, manufacturing sector not functioning well and other things went wrong. Do you share in that thought?
I think I was the first person who threw light on the issue of TSA in the last three weeks even when I was on vacation when I heard that banks and insurance companies were retrenching and sacking their Staff. I believe that there cannot be a virile economy without a vibrant financial sector. It is not only the Central Bank of Nigeria that will make the system work. Central Bank is to proffer policies. The implementation of CBN policies are the financial institutions and there is no bank today that does not own an insurance company or a mortgage finance company. Most of them have become warehouses. So, if anything happens to the economy, it affects the whole financial system.
I think I was the first person who threw light on the issue of TSA in the last three weeks even when I was on vacation when I heard that banks and insurance companies were retrenching and sacking their Staff. I believe that there cannot be a virile economy without a vibrant financial sector. It is not only the Central Bank of Nigeria that will make the system work. Central Bank is to proffer policies. The implementation of CBN policies are the financial institutions and there is no bank today that does not own an insurance company or a mortgage finance company. Most of them have become warehouses. So, if anything happens to the economy, it affects the whole financial system.
