The Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, Mr. Waziri Adio, has declared that the fall in the price of crude oil in the global market is not the only thing responsible for Nigeria’s present economic crisis, even as he blamed successive managers of Nigeria’s economy for not administering the right therapy.
Adio, who spoke on Thursday while delivering a keynote address at the 2016 Academics Stand Against Poverty, ASAP, conference in Lagos, said: “The fall in oil price is not the sole culprit for our current economic troubles.
“Believing that it is would delude the managers of the economy and diminish the country’s capacity to administer the right therapy.
“Here is where the political element becomes useful as an explanatory variable for this ailment, and also exposes the fall in prices as only an inevitable trigger.”
The NEITI boss observed that revenues from natural resource, are by their nature, easy to earn and easy to appropriate and expropriate.
His words, “And since it is not revenue taxed from the sweat of citizens, the citizens are not involved in the process of generation or computation.
“This situation creates a huge incentive for capture by public officials. Its non-tax characteristic also makes managers of public resources less accountable. This inevitably fuels corruption and rent-seeking behaviours and intense competition for a time at the trough.
“According to Jeffery Sachs and Andrew Warner in a 2001 paper, the political process also gets captured, and then the “predatory state eclipses the developmental state”.
Adio, who held that abundant natural resources do not always lead to resource curse, said: “It is clear that it is not what natural resources do to countries that cause the retrogression.
“Rather, it is what countries do with natural resources. Hence, it is not the case that natural resources in themselves are inherently tainted with a curse which, willy-nilly, afflicts the society where they are found and extracted.
“The exceptions provided by countries like Norway, Botswana and others show that resources do not come embedded with curses. The exceptions also show that when the right lessons are learned, the curse of resources can be reversed.”
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