Farooq Kperogi: World Bank’s 15-year death sentence on Nigeria

Farooq Kperogi

Farooq Kperogi: World Bank’s 15-year death sentence on Nigeria

The World Bank’s Senior Vice President by the name of Indermit Gill, who is originally Indian, incited mass panic in Nigeria on October 14 when he said Nigeria would need to sustain its current soul-sucking, agonizingly punishing, and self-destructive “reforms” for “at least another 10 to 15 years to transform its economy.”

Gill’s speech at the 30th Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja—which read partly like the smug, cloying, self-congratulatory bluster President Bola Tinubu would write and partly like the intentionally obfuscating gobbledygook of dubious experts who want to conceal the truth from the uninitiated—elicited verbal and nonverbal expressions of fervent disapproval from the well-fed elites of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group and the Ministry of Budget and National Planning (who planned the event) when he said Nigeria must continue this path of national self-incineration “at least another 10 to 15 years.”

Gill was compelled to wonder aloud if the murmurs his callous exhortation triggered were a signal of disagreement or agreement from his audience. The camera zoomed in on people nodding discontentment or using their fingers to gesture disapproval. If he is smart, he would know the answer to his question.

But the soulless, blood-sucking economic vampire was unmoved. He insisted that enduring “terrible hardship across the breadth of Nigerian society” (his words) as a consequence of the gutting of petrol subsidies is the only way to “become the engine of growth in sub-Saharan Africa.” “It is very difficult to do these things,” he said, “but the rewards are massive.” What massive rewards can come out of policies that take both lives and means of livelihood?

The phrase “at least” suggests that 10 to 15 years of piecemeal national mass immolation is the irreducible minimum required to achieve prosperity. That is, 10 to 15 years is the smallest possible national self-annihilation Nigeria has to endure to “transform its economy.” Since the least possible effort can’t always guarantee success, it means it would take more than 15 years (possibly 50 years— or even eternity) to achieve prosperity through national mass annihilation.

Well, since President Tinubu can’t rule longer than seven more years (assuming he wins a second term in 2027), the World Bank has effectively prepared the perfect, ready-made alibi to explain away the irrecoverable harm its loathsome and baleful prescriptions will visit on Nigeria in the next few years.

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Tinubu’s successor, whoever that may be, would be insane to continue with this mass obliteration of the populace they call “reforms.”

If he or she has brain cells in his or her skull and reverses this ruinous course, the World Bank would say, “Well, we told you that you needed to incinerate yourselves for at least 15 more years before you can have a chance at living. Since you brought yourselves back to life after only eight years of being in the burner, you are not sufficiently cooked, and we are not responsible for the burns and devastation that eight years of incineration brought to you. You see, you can only live if you burn yourselves alive, which you refused to do.”

This caricature might come across as grotesque and transgressive of the bounds of reasonableness, but it faithfully captures the logic of World Bank economic prescriptions for developing countries: you need to die before you can live.

If not, how could anyone celebrate the democratization of privation? “The price of [petrol] has quintupled since the subsidy cuts, imposing terrible hardships across the breadth of Nigerian society,” Gill said with a triumphant tone.

Well, one of the unspoken, unacknowledged but nonetheless far-reaching consequences of the quintupling of petrol prices is the slow but sure death of what remained of Nigeria’s education. Because of the dire existential precarity that the unaccustomed and ceaseless hikes in petrol prices have caused, many children are dropping out of school like leaves abandoning a tree before the storm hits.

A National Assembly member told me a few days ago that a prominent emir in Northwest Nigeria confided in him that he was alarmed by the sheer number of young people who are dropping out of school (at all levels of education) in his traditional sphere of authority because parents can’t afford to feed, and they consider paying the school fees of their children a burden they can’t shoulder.

This tragedy, this conscienceless assassination of the future of our youth in the service of the World Bank, isn’t limited to the North.

Two weeks ago, a close relative of mine who lives in the Southwest requested my assistance to pay the school fees of five children who were roaming the streets because they had been sent home from school for failure to pay their school fees.

Their father disappeared without a trace before he couldn’t cope. Their mother, a petty trader, manages to feed the children once in a day on a good day. But they used to get by before Tinubu’s “economic reforms” upended their lives.

We in the North are in a worse state because we are already behind the rest of the country in educational attainment. Now we are sliding even further as the sting of Tinubu’s World Bank-instigated “reforms” disrupts lives.

When a “reform” rolls back gains in school enrollment and effectively jeopardizes the future of the youth and of the country, you have to wonder why you need to implement it for at least 10 to 15 years to “grow.” It’s like pulling bricks from the foundation of a house in the name of building a taller roof. What good can possibly come out of that?