Paper growth as dangerous growth

[Mirror]

Over the years, especially in recent times, some analysts, commentators, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund agents, and sundry watchers of the nation's economy have bandied statistics portraying a positive outlook of the Gross Domestic Product– GDP, and laudable performances of selected sectors such as trade surpluses from agricultural exports like cassava products, oil and gas, electric power infrastructure, employment generation, and more recently, the putative growth of the construction industry.

Not too long ago, World Bank report presented Nigeria's economy as about the fastest growing economy in the world. When the Minister of Finance was confronted with the brutal fact that youth and graduate unemployment was becoming a time bomb threatening to unleash youth restiveness on the the country to complicate the dangerous security challenges created by the Boko Haram insurgency and terrorism in the north eastern part and the kidnapping and militancy in the south east and the Niger Delta, respectively, she replied that what Nigeria actually have is "jobless growth"; implying that the sort of growth that world doctored statistics project is absolutely meaningless because it is totally abstracted from life and social reality.

That is the kind of statistics that are usuallfoisted by agencies that are intent on deceiving the gullible social regimes and political actors in African States to gourd them into taking committal and suicidal economic decisions. Any growth analysis on paper anchored on some bizarre economic models not in congruence with social reality is a dangerous statistical ploy to plunge developing economies like that of Nigeria in dire straits to throw them in utter confusion and make further neocolonial exploitation feasible and unquestionable. That tells the story of how myopic the thieving, invading, imperialist global conspirators have become.

The sad thing is that the immediate sufferers of the hardships occasioned by the global players and their multinational corporations and collaborators are the innocent, apparently powerless, citizens of the exploited human communities. The good thing is that if the global players remain adamant in their devious ways, frustrated citizens of the decimated human communities in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and those in Africa would become the nemesis of the big powers and their so-called developed economies. As the African proverb goes, "if you do not allow your neighbors to have nine, you would not even have one."

American Pragmatism teaches that any theory or idea or statistical report for that matter that has no immediate bearing on and solutions to life's aching problems are meaningless and nonsensical and should be cast into the dustbin of obsolescence and anachronism. One wonders why the global financial and economic players from the nations and peoples that should know better are now the ones helping state actors in Africa to dig the grave and nail the coffins of developing economies in the continent. The answer is mischief and half-way cleverness. The way the karma-mic law works is that anyone who is mischievous and devious enough to throw mud on his fellow men may hit his target, but his hands will be dirty, and will surely pay for his mischief.

Are the Europeans who had been more than clever in the past not the ones facing the burden of over spending and looming economic recession today? The British have been colonial master to Americans and Africans, and are still involved in subtle manipulation of African crude oil business through the oil cartels and multinationals. But how is the one time big imperial master and over lord faring today? Just a trifle better than the best of her former African colonies. A modern and subtle form of colonization is deceit with doctored documents to gain undue advantage over others. The global players, institutions and countries involved in this form of deceit are, in the last analysis, operating on the principle of "penny wise pound foolish." Their gimmickry and deceit will soon catch up with them.

As for the African state actors and leadership elite who connive at and collaborate with exploiters and invaders of Africa's economies for pecuniary benefits, they would have nemesis as the pension and gratuity of their self-serving, duplicitous, corrupt, profligate and iniquitous political career. The practice of collaborating with invaders to pillage the economic commonwealth of a whole people does not only result in material deficit and disadvantage to a people, it traumatizes their psyche and creates a deep sense of insecurity in the generality of the people which finds outlets in socially disruptive conducts and life-strategies. Incremental political misbehavior of the leadership elite in African states, and now in the Arab states, has combined forces with the conspiracy of global gladiators and business cartels to traumatize the peoples of these regions and turn their societies into chaos-prone communities.

The devil may celebrate, but his victory is temporary. All the agents of Satan who labour daily to make canon fodders of innocent citizens of human communities everywhere will, in course of time, pay the ultimate penalty for trading with the happiness of mankind. The political actors involved in mere power tussle for self-aggrandizement, and not social service and social infrastructure delivery are executing their private projects, not the people's mandate. And this is the political strategy that breeds social discontent and fuels the tendency of the aggrieved and deprived to dismantle society.

My point is that the time is over due for the leadership elite and the state actors in Nigeria to mend their ways, and stop bandying fictitious statistical reports often written to curry favor from the powers-that-be, as evidence of performance and delivery of social and economic happiness to the people. All they need is to ply the expressways daily to know the state of decay of road infrastructure in the country; use the rail transport to see what is going on in that sector; pack up imported generators and walk the streets in the different parts of the country at night to know that the country is in total darkness most of the month, and sponsor a protest of unemployed youths and graduates to see the dangerous time bomb of idle, disgruntled, deprived, hungry and angry army the whole nation is sitting on.

National Mirror