By manipulating and enforcing the seignorage of the dollar in the way it does, the United States ensures a beggar-the-world economic policy which places it in a favourable position to live off the world.
For countries like Nigeria this results in perpetual balance of payment issues, devaluation of the naira and capital flight in various ways.
The institution which was set up by the US and which it relies on to corral countries like Nigeria into implementing policies that aid this humongous heist of resources of global proportions is the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Since its formation in 1945, the IMF has always proposed a one size fits all economic propositions to countries needing economic assistance to develop. But the policies the IMF prescribes hardly help in this regard. Instead, such policies help to drive countries further into debt and capital flight to the advantage of the US and its principal allies.
You want to know why our universities and the educational system generally has deteriorated drastically? Don’t look further than the policies recommended by the IMF for removal of support for education by our governments. You want to know why we have to pay the odds for petroleum products, a commodity which God has endowed us to benefit from? It is because the IMF insists that doing such is to “subsidise inefficiency” which in their thinking amounts to economic heresy. And why is our health system not up to scratch? Because according to the IMF, it does not make economic sense for our government to provide health services as doing that will amount to throwing good money into a ‘’wasteful endeavour’’.
And where does all the money ‘’saved’’ from all these removal of ‘’subsidies’’ go? If you believe the IMF it should go to providing and improving social services. But in reality the IMF knows that those monies will find their way through capital flight in various ways to the economies of the rich countries led by the US. The economic prescriptions the IMF insists we follow in order to enjoy economic assistance are in reality bobby traps.
That is why for our kids to acquire the top flight education that my generation enjoyed, a good many Nigerians have to spend the odds to send them abroad. And because of IMF cost of health care has gone through the roof without a corresponding increase in quality of services. Again following IMF prescriptions, many Nigerians now have to pay through their noses to be treated abroad what our local hospitals used to provide.
This sums up the totality of the subtle but effective economic warfare intended to deny us the use and benefit of our resources by the US, keeping us poor in perpetuity despite our riches and thus preventing us from independently thinking and planning our economic destiny.
It is imperative that in the trajectory of Nigeria’s destined rise to superpower status, this factor be reckoned with. Nigeria cannot hope to mobilize and apply its resources for future development if its economic fortunes are perpetually subject to the manipulations of outside powers. We must devise a new economic paradigm to negotiate with the principal economic powers that will cater for our need to develop and utilize our resources for our benefit.
On the military sphere, there is an over arching need to fundamentally change the orientation and doctrine of our military. The British colonialists first formed our military as a force to conquer and subjugate the various entities they met here. For this they gave the first and subsequent recruits the orientation of a force that was intended to enforce the colonial design and will of Britain.
Through the years, even up till now, this has not changed fundamentally.
To be the superpower that we are destined, we need to change all that. Rather than a force that is orientated towards contempt of the Nigerian people who it should protect and defend, the military should principally be a force to project our power on the African continent and beyond.
Although our military by all accounts exhibits a potential to undertake operations that make it capable of projecting Nigeria’s strategic interests, it is still far short of that decisive cutting edge required of a game changing force for Nigeria’s power projection in Africa which is Nigeria’s sphere of interest. That much was demonstrated in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the course of our engagements there in peace enforcement, which was a notch higher than the international peace keeping we are used to. Although our military acquitted themselves very well in a terrain that favoured the insurgents they were ranged against from a long disadvantaged supply line in Nigeria.
However, due to poorly defined strategic orientation and objectives, other powers who did no heavy lifting as much as our military did in these two theatres of engagements came in to take the prize of our hard slog. It was pretty much a repeat of what happened in the liberation wars in southern Africa and elsewhere on the continent where again other powers and local movements we supported turned their backs on us.
At home here, we have also seen the limitations of our military doctrine and orientation manifested in what is clearly an externally orchestrated threat to our internal security from insurgent groups which has been going on for over a decade now in the North East and now North West of the country. Not to denigrate the excellent performance of our military, it would however have been different if the doctrine and operational modus of our military were geared principally towards warding off threats such as we are faced with in those areas.
If our military were structured and orientated primarily as a force for strategic continental engagements in pursuit of our interests in Africa, there would have been the capability to identify the source of the insurgency, its modus (including supply line, command and control) and decisively deal with it at infancy as a first line of our defence. But whoever is supporting the insurgency must have studied this very basic flaw in our defence to catch our military and pin it down using the insurgents as cat’s paw.
In all these engagements (southern Africa, Liberia, Sierra Leone, other peace keeping operations, the fight against Boko Haram etc) the underlying lessons are that as a great infantry fighting force, our military has demonstrated a capability to engage defensively, keep a position and even advance decisively against forces ranged against it.
But the key limitation is that because of a distinct absence of a forward operating doctrine and orientation as an integral part our continental strategic objectives, we all too soon lose it all or as in the case of the fight against internal insurgents, find our military pinned down asymmetrically by foreign supported non-state actors.
Taking our economic and military situation together and the limitations posed by the factors I identified, there is clearly a discernible need for injection of decisive strategic objectives in those key areas of our national life going forward.
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