“The Bogey of Fuel Subsidies” was republished in this column last week. The essay makes the case that fuel subsidies continue to exist because of the CBN’s currency control, which devalues the naira; if reform is not implemented, poverty would worsen. The naira is strengthened via forex deregulation using dollar certificates.
(For this series and further essays by the late Sir Henry Boyo, visit www.betternigerianow.com.)
Peter Alexander Egom, a Christian economic theologian who connects biblical values to economic justice, is introduced in this week’s republication. He contends that the World Bank’s “one price” policy and the CBN’s FX control, which devalue the naira, destroy industry, export jobs, and inflame instability, are to blame for Nigeria’s downfall rather than a “resource curse.”
Remember that the article below was published in 2012, which makes it very evident that Nigeria’s economic status has not improved despite the passage of time. As you read it, take notice of past occurrences or rates.
This week’s guest columnist is Peter Alexander Egom. As an introduction, I think it would be better if I let our guest columnist do the talking! An excerpt from Egom’s profile on a “professionals’ social media network” is shown in the paragraph that follows.
“I am an evangelist and Christian economic theorist. I look for God Almighty’s market ways and market regulations in the books of the Holy Bible. I accomplish this through my practical economic and market-evangelical activity through the Adione Institute for Justice & Peace, or AIJP. AIJP creates and oversees level-ground marketplaces for commodities, capital, and currencies both within and between the world’s developing full reserve countries. In order to change the existing world economy of market hierarchy, injustice, chaos, and war into the emerging and millennial global economy of market level-ground, justice, order, and peace, I employ God-compliant monetary, financial, and industrial market concepts and practices with AIJP.
As a prolific writer, Egom has authored numerous works, some of which are summarized below: According to the “Global Joseph Project,” we become aware of three economic facts regarding the past, present, and future situations and circumstances of any market economy worldwide when we take God Almighty into account while analyzing global economic cause and effect. God, according to Christian doctrine, is One in Essence but a Trinity of Persons and Activities: God the Father, the Creator; God the Son, the Redeemer; and God the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier. This is confirmed by the author of “Economic Mind of God.” He
believes that any modern economy is a money-flow structure of three interdependent markets: the currency market, which creates and manages an economy’s means of trade and payments; the financial market, which manages the sources and uses of savings; and the industrial market, which distributes work and its material and social rewards among an economy’s citizens.
According to the author of “Economics of Justice & Peace,” the Bible tells a prophetic and evolutionary three-stage economic story from creation to the end of time. This evolutionary economic story can be decoded by simply identifying, from Book to Book, the specific social or economic unit of measurement that the Bible either supported or opposed over the course of biblical time.
Egom’s work, “Christian Society Before & After Parousia,” discusses the end-times economy. He notes that the only economic reason Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead was to move the world economy from its existing association with Mammon’s gold exchange debt standard payments regime to its new association with God’s gold standard payments regime through his Global Joseph Project.
In addition to his postgraduate honors from Aarhus University in Sweden and his Master’s degree in Anthropology and National Economy from Cambridge University, Egom is currently the Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Adione Institute of Justice & Peace and the Consultant Publisher at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs.
With Peter Egom’s impressive credentials in hand, let’s now assess his remarks regarding the “Market Law for Job Creation in Nigeria.” Please continue reading.
Since September 26, 1986, Nigeria’s economic management practices have been characterized by chaos and an inability to concentrate on creating jobs at home. Because Nigeria adopted the interest-based import parity pricing theory on that day, giving in to the World Bank’s economic sabotage. This led to the neo-colonial currency market policy of continuously devaluing the non-convertible naira, which was the mainstay of Nigeria’s economic strategy. Since then, Nigeria has been reduced to a dismal mess of industrial disarticulation, unemployment, and social anomie by the neo-colonial market forces of financial deregulation.
The import parity-pricing theorem, also known as the market law of one price, states that the prices of goods that are traded internationally, such as petroleum products, should be the same in Nigeria, a country with a low level of technology and non-convertible currency, as they are in Britain, a country with a high level of technology and convertible currency. As it solidifies the deindustrializing fiscal regime of periodically eliminating fictitious and manufactured subsidies from Nigerian pump prices for petroleum goods, for instance, this pricing standard automatically eliminates any infant-industry fiscal support from Nigeria as comparison to Britain. Furthermore, the consequent ongoing destruction of the non-convertible naira’s internal and external market values prevents the technologically illiterate and outward-looking Nigerian economy from using the naira to produce a large portion of its consumption and, consequently, to generate a large number of jobs in Nigeria. Instead, the steadily declining value of the naira pushes job creation and overall value addition out of Nigeria and into Western industrial protégés like China, India, and Brazil. Thus, let’s all be clear about the cause of Nigeria’s unemployment rate. The World Bank’s one-price market law is the one at fault in Nigeria.
Thus, we Nigerians should never let Western economic experts like Paul Collier and Jeremy Sachs get away with this neo-colonial economic jargon when they try to mislead us in Nigeria about currency market policy by telling us the long story that a mysterious phenomenon known as the resource curse is to blame for the malignant industrial disarticulation and unemployment in otherwise resource-rich Nigeria. Since they are either being economical with the truth or are oblivious to the fact that the resource curse phenomenon is equivalent to the World Bank’s interest-based import parity pricing theorem in operation in Nigeria or any other non-convertible currency, we should politely tell them to “go siddon.”
In actuality, there is absolutely no mystery about the resource curse phenomenon. We don’t need to search far to identify the reason why a country like Nigeria is unable to utilize her vast natural resource endowment for job development and local value addition. Under the blatantly neo-colonial misguided counsel of the World Bank’s Ishrat Hussains, Paul Colliers, and Jeremy Sachses, Nigeria adopted the imperial and interest-based market law of one price on September 26, 1986. Nigeria never manages to produce much of what she consumes and is forced to rely on the outside world to meet her consumption demands because of the high imperial tax imposed by this market law of one price on any goods produced in Nigeria. For this reason, what the World Bank refers to as a price subsidy from an external standpoint is equivalent to an imperial tax of the currency board system from a Nigerian perspective. This is because the law of one price is the same as the pricing law of the colonial currency board system.
Furthermore, economics has long acknowledged that two factors, low domestic value-adding and unemployment, put open and non-convertible currency countries like Nigeria in numbing chains. One of the causes of the Lemming rush of people, capital, and materials from rural to urban areas is the domestic dual economy syndrome. The external center-periphery syndrome is another phenomena that causes a Lemming rush of people, capital, and resources from these countries to the Western countries that accept convertible currencies. In Nigeria, for example, what is the underlying reason of the external resource flight and drain as well as the rural-urban resource drift? The imperial market law of one price, nothing more, nothing less! Because they are not intellectually in sync with this imperial pricing norm, which is genuinely to blame for the nature and cause of poverty in the numerous non-convertible currency countries like Nigeria, the Colliers and Sachses of the World Bank should cover their heads in shame.
Thus, it can be concluded that the Niger Delta’s resource control militancy was a patriotic and reasonable reaction by the local population to the industrial destruction caused by the World Bank’s economic directive to export jobs and capital to Nigeria since September 26, 1986. Add this to the social tinderbox of the Northern states’ rulers’ decades-long disregard for policies that should keep their citizens employed and in school, and it becomes abundantly evident that eventually, some kind of social uprising would arise in those states and eventually turn into Nigeria’s scourge.
According to Mr. Lamido Sanusi Lamido, Governor of the Nigerian Central Bank, or CBN, who recently stated in an interview with the Financial Times of London that the Boko Haram insurgency can be attributed in large part to the additional 13% of the distributable pool of the Federation Account that currently goes to the states of the Niger Delta, this is not the case if the nihilistic Boko Haram is genuinely a violent reaction by some individuals in Northern Nigeria to the pervasive and debilitating social and material poverty that many Nigerians face.
Instead, the anti-human-capital-developing economic policies of the Northern states’ rulers, along with the World Bank’s job and capital exporting market legislation of one price, are what gave rise to and gave currency to the Boko Haram social uprising. Furthermore, it is ironic that Mr. Sanusi’s CBN is the institutional implementer of the World Bank’s anti-Nigeria forex management strategy!
And this is the issue that the inept Mr. Henry Boyo occasionally raises in reference to the CBN’s devaluing approach to handling Nigeria’s foreign reserves. Mr. Boyo informs us that the reason for the widespread unemployment and industry disarticulation in the Nigerian economy is the CBN’s monopoly control over the use of Nigeria’s foreign exchange resources, which devalues the naira. If Mr. Boyo is correct, as I believe he is, then Sanusi’s CBN’s inflationary and naira-depreciating foreign exchange management style is largely to blame for Nigeria’s widespread social and material apartheid, which Boko Haram is fighting in a violent and heedless manner! According to Boko Haram, there is no use in having a thorough education if it does not provide one with employment or food for their family. Therefore, the inception and sustaining force of the Boko Haram insurgency, the Niger Delta insurgency, and everything else that is materially and socially wrong in Nigeria can be attributed to Sanusi’s market law of one price, to the extent that his FX management pattern is based on the exporting of jobs and capital. That’s it!
