We are in BIG trouble (Naira my God to thee)

I am watching the movie Titanic.  I am watching it all over again.  The first time I watched it, I cried. 
Every time I watch it, the tears overflow with Celine Dion’s melodious voice.  I am watching the Titanic and I have reached the point where the band is playing the hymn: “Nearer my God to thee.”
It’s a swan song preceding catastrophe.  Here was the ship that was thought to be the strongest, unsinkable.  It was sailing from England to America, the land of the almighty dollar.  Everybody and everything was on board.  The rich and the poor.  The weak and the strong.  The men and the women. Adults and children.  Enjoyment galore.  Nobody ever imagined the Titanic could sink.  But it did.  And as the ship was sinking, the band started playing “Nearer my God to thee.”
The Titanic is the parable of today’s Nigeria.  The Nigeria where the naira was the strongest of currencies in Sub-Saharan Africa.  The currency supported by the might of oil, the backbone of our economy.  All these years, we have been wining and dining, carousing on the Titanic, but now, the danger lurking behind our prodigality is here.  We had so much money we didn’t know what to do with it.  We made enough oil money yet we couldn’t plan for a time like this.  We didn’t plan for the rainy day.  We didn’t build infrastructure, we didn’t build capacity, we didn’t build a good foundation to cushion us against any future eventuality.  We didn’t invest in education.  We didn’t invest in health.  We abandoned agriculture.  We abandoned all other riches that God endowed us with for the so-called black gold.  And what accrued from it, we looted.  We didn’t do what we ought to do with oil proceeds.  We even looted our own reserves.  Almost everybody entered this ship called “SS Politics” to loot.  Those who entered it with nothing grew fat overnight and became extremely wealthy.  The captain and the crew all became drunk with money.  Like Kelly Handsome’s song, there was “Too Much Money.” Too much money that created the cancer of corruption which is now our No.1 problem.
The problem of Nigeria, everyone keeps saying, is the problem of leadership.  Just imagine if Nigeria had been led by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew who was a true transformational leader.  Not the “Imagined Savior” painted in Ambrose Akinmusire’s latest Jazz CD.  If you don’t know this young Nigerian trumpeter shaking the Jazz world, then Google or check him out on YouTube.  Nigeria is a great country blessed with great talents.  Let’s make Nigeria great again.
The man who inspired today’s column is Bisi Onasanya, Sun Awards’ “Banker of the Year”.  Ordinarily, I should be angry with the First Bank Group Managing Director but I am not.  I have done everything to get him interviewed for my book on Bankers of our time.  He asked me to draw up a questionnaire which I did.  Up till now, not a word from him.  But I won’t lose hope because entrepreneurs don’t give up.  I trust that as a respectable banker, his word is his bond.  I have watched him from a distance and I have read everything there is to read about him.  At the Sun Awards, I heard him espousing his banking philosophy which I quickly jotted down.
“Banking is not about being extremely profitable,” he says.  “We like to look at a bank not just from the size of the institution but the culture.  In First Bank today, the culture is that no matter how profitable a transaction is, if it cannot stand the test of scrutiny, don’t do it.  So we have no apology if we are not the most profitable because we are very ethical and professional in the kind of things we do.  That is very, very important.  My wish and hope is that all Nigerian banks would strive as professional as we are in First Bank.  We would not stop until every bankable Nigerian experiences the first class professional banking services available anywhere in the world.”
Published on that day was an Onasanya interview on the economy and the fate of the naira—a currency that is in BIG trouble.  I read his analysis and I was frightened, coming from a man who could as well have been the governor of the Central Bank because once upon a time the governors of First Bank used to be the Central Bank governors.  After reading, I prayed and sang the Titanic hymn: “Nearer my God to thee.” (Naira my God to thee)
Like every patriotic Nigerian concerned about what we are bequeathing to the unborn generation, Onasanya is worried over the economy, the oil price drop and the sinking naira.  We would be deceiving ourselves “if we say there is no cause for alarm,” Onasanya says.  He likens our situation to a “pregnant lady who after nine months delivers a baby.  We should have expected that if you carry a pregnancy for that long, at some point you would deliver a baby.  All the time, the signs were there that oil price would come down some day because it’s a cycle that would always come.  We also had all the warnings that you can’t be a mono-product economy for too long and expect to be unaffected by global crisis.  So, I don’t think we are short of knowledge in terms of what to do because we all know the solution to that kind of economic structure would be diversification, less reliance on imports, reduction on government spending on recurrent expenditure and building capacity and infrastructure for industries, so that when the unexpected happens in terms of drop in oil prices, we have something to fall back upon.”
The meat of his story is that we depended too much on oil.  We put all our eggs one basket.  Now we are paying the price.
“My challenge to our leaders is that we need to accept that this is not a short-term impact on our economy.  We need to accept that we owe the next generation the right to live by building a strong foundation for the new economy of Nigeria, which can no longer be benchmarked or be dependent on oil.  We have to build capacity, we have to build infrastructure, develop businesses, develop the manufacturing sector, provide education for the masses such that at the end of the day, we have much more business that would contribute more to the economy of Nigeria, provide employment to a lot more people so that you have ancillary from taxes and other sectors of the economy, thereby forming a basis for further diversification of the economy.  There are therefore no quick fixes to achieving all these target than to diversify our economy and make it less dependent on oil.
No magic to save the Naira
Onasanya didn’t want to sound like a prophet of doom, but he has to speak the truth anyway.  Looking into the crystal ball, he cannot see how the naira can regain its health so fast from this fiscal Ebola.
“I don’t see how you can fix the exchange rate in the short term when you know that we depend a lot on revenue from oil to defend the naira,” the banking oracle says.  “I would say that we would not be able to see a stronger naira in the short term.  I don’t expect anybody to think that the naira would strengthen in the next three months.  Unfortunately, it would be so in the short term.  If it appears to be so in the short run, it would be because we are trying to manage the situation in certain directions and if we allow a free flow of the currency as it is today it will cross N200 by the end of this year.  Is there any magic?  No.  Because I don’t see any.  There is no magic wand.”
The summary of Onasanya’s gospel is that we are in this mess because we did the things we ought not to have done and we left undone the things we ought to have done.  We failed.
Yet we have the audacity to compare our “leadership” to the likes of Obama, Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew.  “These are the times that tries men’s souls,” as Thomas Paine wrote in The American Crisis.  “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
If only more of our elites can come out of their cocoons to speak up on how to rescue our Titanic and save Nigeria.
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