Economy requires carefully planned policies

NIGERIANS have endured a month of rising adversity as President Bola Tinubu unleashed a barrage of shock measures. The naira crashed toover N800 to $1 midweek before settling to N775/$1 by weekend. Higher electricity tariffs are imminent; more multinational firms are heading for the exit door; inflation is reaching for the sky, and about 7.1 million more persons are forecast to plunge into extreme poverty. Beyond drastic decisions, Tinubu should adopt thorough planning, preparation, and fallback measures to avoid creating bigger problems than he set out to solve.

For an economy of over 200 million persons, 63.6 percent of whom are living in penury, Africa’s largest, disarticulated, often dysfunctional, driven largely by the informal sector, and built on weak, compromised institutions, drastic policies must be preceded by exhaustive planning. Additionally, there must be simultaneous programmes to raise state capacity, protect the most vulnerable, and manage the inevitable fallout.

Adopting wholesale, the standard prescriptions of the Bretton Woods institutions without poverty-preventing guardrails is imprudent. Rather, Tinubu and his economic team should adapt proven revitalisation programmes to the Nigerian reality and borrow from the ingenuity of the ‘Asian Tigers’ – South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong – and from the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — club that emerged from relative underdevelopment with a mix of market-led, and robust state intervention and institution-building to become major global economic players.

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