Emir of Kano and former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Muhammad Sanusi II has said that Nigeria is a series of broken value chains and until the federal government takes action, the economy will remain stagnant.
During a lecture to mark the 41st Convocation and Founder’s Day ceremonies of the University of Benin, Edo State, he used Ethiopian economy to illustrate how to fix the broken value chain.
He said ”Everywhere, we have got potential and if your economy is growing at six per cent with these value chains, imagine the rate at which you will go. And it is not a theory. Ethiopia has been growing at 11-12 per cent consistently for over a decade. They did just this: fixed their coffee value chain; leather value chain; power value chain and cement value chain and every year, they get new value chains and they keep growing. That is a model.”
Sanusi who is also the Chancellor of the University added that “The way I look at Nigeria and the Nigerian economy is that we have a very simple problem and I do not know why it is just so difficult to fix it. Nigeria is just a series of broken value chains; a country that specialises in exporting what it does not have and importing what it has. This is Africa’s largest oil producer but the largest imports of Nigeria from the United Kingdom are petroleum products.
“We are the world’s largest producer of cassava; we don’t produce starch. We burn our gas every day; for a country of 167 million people, we are generating 4,000 megawatts of electricity. And if you want to know how far we have come, when Obasanjo left office, we were at 5,000 (megawatts). There was a target of getting to 6,000; after we spent several billions of dollars, we ended up moving from 6,000 to 3,000.
“We produce cotton, we import textiles. We have hides and skin but we import shoes and bags from China. Not that we don’t kill the cattle. But what do we do with the leather? We eat ponmo. It is a delicacy; we consume our GDP.”
“We talk of diversifying the economy away from oil. We do not even need to diversify away from oil; you can diversify the oil itself, from exporting crude to producing refined PMS, refined kerosene, diesel, gas for power, gas for fertiliser, petrochemicals.”