This column republished “The Bogey of Fuel Subsidies” last week. According to the report, the CBN’s currency control has resulted in fuel subsidies that continue to devalue the naira; if reform is not implemented, poverty will worsen. The liberalization of forex using dollar certificates makes the naira stronger.
(This series and other essays by the late Sir Henry Boyo can be found at www.betternigerianow.com.)
Christian economic theologian Peter Alexander Egom, who connects biblical values to economic justice, is introduced in this week’s republication. The World Bank’s “one price” policy and the CBN’s FX control, he contends, are to blame for Nigeria’s downfall rather than a “resource curse,” as they devalue the naira, damage industry, export jobs, and incite trouble.
Remember the article’s year of publication (2012) while you read it, noting past occurrences or rates. This makes it quite evident that Nigeria’s economic status has not improved despite all this time.
This week, we have Peter Alexander Egom as our guest columnist. Maybe it would be better if I let our guest columnist do the talking as an introduction! The passage that follows is taken from Egom’s profile on a “professionals’ social media network.”
“I am a Christian evangelist and economic theorist. I look for the market techniques and market regulations of God Almighty in the books of the Holy Bible. I accomplish this by using the Adione Institute for Justice & Peace, or AIJP, as my corporate vehicle for my practical work in market evangelicalism and economics. Within and between the world’s growing full reserve states, AIJP creates and oversees level-ground markets for capital, currencies, and commodities. Therefore, I employ God-compliant currency, financial, and industrial market concepts and practices with AIJP to change the existing world economy of chaos, conflict, and market hierarchy into the emerging and millennial global economy of justice, order, and peace.
Additionally, Egom is a prolific writer, and the summaries that follow are a selection of his works: As we consider God Almighty in the context of global economic cause and effect, we become aware of three economic facts regarding the past, present, and future situations and circumstances of any market economy worldwide, according to the “Global Joseph Project.” The author of “Economic Mind of God” asserts that, according to Christian doctrine, God is a Trinity of Persons and Activities—God the Father, who created the world; God the Son, who saved humanity; and God the Holy Spirit, who sanctified humanity. “He
considers any modern economy to be 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.
The author of “Economics of Justice & Peace” also maintains that 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 historical periods covered in the Bible.
The economics of the end times were covered by Egom in “Christian Society Before & After Parousia.” According to him, Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead for a single economic reason: to use his Global Joseph Project as a means of transferring the world economy from its existing association with Mammon’s gold exchange debt standard payments regime to its developing association with God’s gold standard payments regime.
Currently serving as Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Adione Institute of Justice & Peace and Consultant Publisher at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Egom’s educational background includes a Master’s degree in Anthropology and National Economy from Cambridge University and additional postgraduate honors from Aarhus University in Sweden.
Let’s now assess Peter Egom’s remarks on the “Market Law for Job Creation in Nigeria” after gaining his impressive credentials. Continue reading.
Since September 26, 1986, chaos and an unwillingness to concentrate on creating jobs at home have remained indicators of Nigeria’s economic management practices. On that day, Nigeria gave in to the World Bank’s economic sabotage by creating the interest-based import parity pricing theorem and, consequently, the neo-colonial currency market policy of continuously devaluing the non-convertible naira, which was the mainstay of her economic strategy. Following financial deregulation, Nigeria has been reduced to a desolate state of industrial disarticulation, unemployment, and social anomie by neo-colonial market forces.
The market law of one price, known as the import parity-pricing theorem, states that the prices of goods traded internationally, such as petroleum products, should be the same in Nigeria, a country with relatively low technological advancement and non-convertible currency, as they are in Britain, a country with advanced technology and convertible currency. By enforcing the periodic elimination of fictitious and manufactured subsidies from Nigerian pump prices for petroleum products, for instance, this pricing standard automatically eliminates any fiscal support for Nigeria’s baby sector compared to Britain. And as a result, the non-convertible naira’s internal and external market values are constantly being destroyed, which prevents the technologically illiterate and outward-looking Nigerian economy from using the naira to produce a large portion of its consumption and, consequently, employment opportunities in Nigeria. Instead, Nigeria’s ever-depreciating naira shifts job creation and overall value addition to Western industrial protégés like China, India, and Brazil. Let’s all be clear about the cause of Nigeria’s unemployment, then. The World Bank’s market law of one price is the one at fault in Nigeria.
Therefore, we Nigerians should never allow it to get away with this neo-colonial economic jargon when Western economic experts like Paul Collier and Jeremy Sachs 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 unemployment and malignant industrial disarticulation in otherwise resource-rich Nigeria. We should firmly tell them to “go siddon” because they are either being dishonest or are oblivious to the fact that the resource curse phenomenon is the same as the World Bank’s interest-based import parity pricing theorem, which is in effect in Nigeria and other non-convertible currency countries.
In actuality, the resource curse issue is completely unmysterious. It is not difficult to identify the root cause of a country like Nigeria’s inability to utilize its vast natural resource endowment for job development and local value addition. The imperial and interest-based market law of one price, which Nigeria adopted on September 26, 1986, under the blatantly neo-colonial misguided advice of World Bank economists Ishrat Hussains, Paul Colliers, and Jeremy Sachses, is what is at issue. Nigeria is forced to rely on the outside world for her consumption needs because of the high imperial tax imposed by the market law of one price on any goods produced in the country. This is the reason why the pricing law of the colonial currency board system is the same as the law of one price. From a Nigerian perspective, 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.
In addition, economics has long acknowledged that two factors keep open and non-convertible currency countries like Nigeria in the debilitating grip of unemployment and low domestic value addition. The first is the domestic dual economy phenomenon, which causes a torrential flow of people, capital, and supplies from rural to urban areas. The other phenomenon is the external center-periphery syndrome, which causes these countries to send a lemming rush of people, capital, and supplies to the Western countries that accept convertible currencies. What, then, is the underlying reason of the external resource flight and drain in, say, Nigeria, as well as the rural-urban resource drift? Just the one-price imperial market legislation, nothing more, nothing less! The World Bank’s Colliers and Sachses should therefore cover their heads in shame for not intellectually keeping up with this imperial pricing norm, which is actually to blame for the nature and root cause of poverty in the numerous countries that do not use convertible currencies, such as Nigeria.
This means that the Niger Deltans’ resource control militancy was a very patriotic and reasonable reaction to the industrial destruction that the World Bank’s economic directive of capital and job export had caused in Nigeria since September 26, 1986. With this added to the social tinderbox of the Northern states’ rulers’ decades-long disregard for policies that should keep their citizens employed and in school, it is obvious that social revolt of some kind will eventually break out in those states and eventually become Nigeria’s scourge.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times of London, Mr. Lamido Sanusi Lamido, Governor of the Nigerian Central Bank, or CBN, asserted 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 suggests that 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 for many Nigerians, it is not.
The origin and currency of the Boko Haram social revolution can be attributed to a combination of the World Bank’s job and capital exporting market legislation of one price and the anti-human-capital-developing economic policies of the Northern states’ rulers. Ironically, Mr. Sanusi’s CBN is the institutional implementer of the World Bank’s anti-Nigeria forex management strategy!
The incredulous Mr. Henry Boyo occasionally brings up this argument in reference to the CBN’s devaluing approach to handling Nigeria’s foreign reserves. According to Mr. Boyo, the CBN’s monopoly control over the use of Nigeria’s foreign exchange resources and its consequent naira depreciation are the main causes of the country’s widespread unemployment and industry disarticulation. Therefore, if Mr. Boyo is correct—which I believe he is—the inflationary and naira-depreciating forex management style of Sanusi’s CBN is largely to blame for Nigeria’s widespread social and material apartheid, which Boko Haram is aggressively and heedlessly fighting! Because, according to Boko Haram, there is no use in having a thorough education if it does not provide one with a job or support. Sanusi’s market law of one price is, thus, the root cause and sustaining force of the Boko Haram insurgency, the Niger Delta insurgency, and everything else that is materially and socially wrong in Nigeria to the extent that his FX management pattern is based on job and capital exporting. That’s it!
