EATING AWAY OUR FUTURE - OIL AND THE DILEMMA OF A NATION

According to a Standard Bank study, Nigeria has earned revenues in excess of $1.6 trillion in the last 50 years, but there is so little to show for it in terms of infrastructure or in terms of sovereign investment. Nigeria recently set up a Sovereign Wealth Fund, albeit with a lot of resistance from the Governors Forum, who will rather that the monies in the excess crude account be shared and squandered as we have done in the past fifty years; but even then, that intervention is too little and needless to state that it may be too late as time is running out on the Kleptocracy that Nigeria has been in the last 50 years.

 COMPARING OTHER OIL PRODUCING COUNTRIES SOVEREIGN INVESTMENT TO THEIR GDP:

 Given the need for resource based economies to diversify their income base, a lot of Oil and Commodity led economies started the move from traditional reserve management to investing proceeds from their resources in other investment vehicles such as Stocks and Bonds across the World; and by so doing, diversify their income base while edging against volatility in the resource or commodity market. In doing this, a lot of these economies had reckoned that capital need to be deployed in economies with capacity and markets with growth potential in order to drive maximal output and investment appreciation. Today, a lot of those investments have grown and are providing a cushion for periodic volatility in the resource or commodity market. Saudi Arabia for instance has a Sovereign Investment value worth 98% of it 780 Billion Dollar GDP, while Kuwait has a Sovereign Investment that stands at 150% of its 200.062 Billion Dollar GDP with both Countries also ranking very high in terms of per capita GDP. But on the flip-side, Nigeria's Sovereign Investment stands at 0.3 percent of 2013 GDP of $510, with a current reserve that is less than 40 Billion Dollars.

 CREATION OF BIG GOVERNMENT AND BOGUS BUREAUCRACIES RATHER THAN INVESTING IN HUMAN CAPACITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE

 Now we seem to be in panic mode since Crude Oil began to witness a free fall in the international market because we have failed to appropriate the opportunity provided by the in-flow of over $1.6 Trillion in the last 50 years, to build robust infrastructure which can support growth and create jobs. We have also failed to invest in the future, beyond traditional reserve management, and by so doing, stabilize our economy. Yet we keep feeding a big government created by arbitrary State creation and funding of phony Bureaucracies which are self-serving and not adding value, to the extent that Nigeria has the largest Public Sector in Africa and one of the lowest private sector employment to population ratio in the world. But this large Public Sector has not translated to greater efficiency in th

 e delivery of public service and part of the hindrance to competitiveness and ease of doing business in Nigeria is the corruption and inefficiency of Nigeria's bogus Public Sector.

 WE NEED TO RETHINK OUR ROUTE TO NATIONHOOD

 Rethinking our route to nationhood seem to be the sustainable solution to stemming the kind of profligacy we have seen in the last 50 years. I really do not believe we need 36 States if 2/3 of these States are going to remain takers and not contributors to the National Treasury. We do not need a bogus Bureaucracy which duplicates Civil Service Structures across the 36 States if all we have seen is more corruption than service. What we need no is a system which frees each Federating zone to create wealth from the different resources available within their immediate environment - whether human or natural resources - and share same with the centre rather than having the centre become Lord and Master with parasitic States that do not have any source of revenue beyond the Federation Account. Truth be told, Nigeria will remain a profligate State under the current arrangement.

Bolaji Okusaga is a Lagos based PR Practitioner