The Challenges of Nigeria's Economic Development in the 21st Century: Baking the National Cake

Being Text of a Lecturer Delivered by His Excellency, Dr. Abdullahi Adamu, Executive Governor of Nasarawa State at a Symposium Organised by the Nigeria Awareness Group, Switzerland at the Hilton Airport Hotel, Zurich, Switzerland, Saturday, June 24, 2006

Our second national development plan, 1970-74, was clear-headed about the kind of country we set out to build as an independent nation. According to the policy objectives of the plan, our dream Nigeria would be:

Ø      a united, strong and self-reliant nation;

Ø      a great and dynamic economy;

Ø      a just and egalitarian society;

Ø      a land of bright and full opportunities for all citizens; and

Ø      a free and democratic society.

Our country has not attained this height. There is no shame in admitting that many things went wrong in the past and almost turned our dream into a nightmare. We made grievous mistakes that we are still paying for. But the good news is that the dream was only delayed, not lost. We have the opportunity once again to do better by putting our shoulders to the plough to build that dream country that meets our fond expectations in all areas of human development.

Our gathering here in the ancient and modern city of Zurich shows we are willing to join hands and make Nigeria what it should be. The theme of the lecture initiated by the Nigeria Awareness Group based in Bern, Switzerland, is Nigeria, the Way Forward. The theme does not, in my view, suggest that our country has been arrested in its forward movement or that it is groping in the dark. I believe the Nigerian Awareness Group initiated the series to challenge Nigerians both at home and in the diaspora to think positively about their country and ask not what it can do for them but what they can do for it to make it a great nation.

We are pleased to be part of this initiative and sincerely thank the organizers of this forum for giving me the opportunity to share my views and hopes on the way forward with my dear compatriots. This forum is a necessary bridge between Nigerians at home and those in the diaspora. It brings them together to exchange views and cross-fertilize their ideas about our country. It also enhances the traffic of ideas in the form of constant dialogue on the challenges facing us and how we can collectively take them up. The development of our country is the responsibility of all its citizens. It is neither the responsibility of some of its citizens nor of the political leaders alone. Political leaders may be wise but none of them is wise enough to know everything. After all, King Solomon had advisers.

I am intrigued by the fact that the lecture series is held here in Zurich, an important commercial and manufacturing city as well as the financial capital of Switzerland. Zurich exemplifies the synergy between the ancient and the modern. The past will always be the foundation of the present. We cannot leave this hospitable environment without learning something about how the city fathers made it an economic success story. We will learn the lessons and I promise you that we will apply them to make Lafia, the capital of our own state, Nasarawa, the commercial and financial nerve centre of the North-Central geo-political zone and, hopefully, the Zurich of Nigeria.

I thank you, fellow Nigerians, who have spared your time to participate in this discussion. I sincerely thank the good friends of Nigeria who are here with us and, in particular, the coalition of non-governmental organisations that support this lecture series. We deeply appreciate their love for our country and their confidence in our ability to rebuild and reposition it as the leading black nation in the world.

Let me also pay tribute to those of my compatriots who have participated in the annual lecture series. I fondly remember in particular the late Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, a tireless social activist who, in his own iconoclastic way, struggled for a better Nigeria. Our moral obligation is to ensure that he and other Nigerians that gave their time and sweat that Nigeria might be a better country, did not labour in vain.

In his famous little book, The Trouble with Nigeria, published in 1985, our famous novelist and great man of letters, Professor Chinua Achebe, observes: "We have lost the twentieth century." He then wonders, "Are we bent on seeing that our children too lose the twenty-first? God forbid." May God, indeed, forbid.

In Professor Achebe’s poignant question lies our national challenge. We are already six years into the twenty-first century. We are all anxious to see our country become a modern, united, developed and prosperous nation. It has the potential. Nigeria has the eighth largest and fifth largest proven reserves of oil and gas respectively in the world. It has an estimated population of 150 million and a highly articulate and educated work force. Our earnings from crude oil are so good that the federal government’s annual budget is in trillions of Naira. State governments budget their annual capital and recurrent expenditures in billions of Naira. Yet in 1998, the then head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, said: "Every human welfare and development index measuring the well-being of our people is on the decline. Currently, we are the world’s 13^th poorest nation. Given our resource endowments, this sorry state is a serious indictment." In 2003, the United Nations Human Development Index ranked Nigeria 152 out of 175 countries with less than $300 per capita. Sixty per cent of our people are said to live below the poverty line.

This paradox of a rich and yet poor nation befuddles the mind. Our country is so richly blessed that it has no reasons to be at or near the bottom of the world development table. It should not be a struggling developing nation but a developed one. Professor Achebe, certainly, captured the feelings of most Nigerians when he wrote: "The countless billions that a generous Providence poured into our national coffers….would have been enough to launch this nation into the middle-rank of developed nations and transformed the lives of our poor and needy."

What can we do, as Nigerians, to launch our country into the high rank of developed nations and transform the lives of all its citizens? For an answer, I invite you to share with me my thoughts on a topic dear to my heart, namely, The Challenges of Nigeria’s Economic Development in the 21^st Century: Baking the National Cake.

Nigerians and all those who are familiar with our country know how frequently the national cake features in our national discourse. We borrowed the phrase from confectioners to reduce our national wealth to its practical purposes. We usually talk about sharing the cake and rarely how it is baked. Dr. Iyorchia Ayu, former senate president and former minister in the Obasanjo administration, made this point a few years ago when he wrote:

"The first remark (to make) about Nigerian federalism is its preoccupation with revenue allocation or the distribution of rewards. Most people who have either written or formulated policies for Nigeria have placed emphasis on distribution, or what is cynically referred to as the sharing of the national cake. Unfortunately, not much emphasis has been placed on the baking of the cake by every member and component part or segment of the Nigerian political community; inevitably distribution or sharing has completely overshadowed production and effective growth."

Why is the sharing of the cake more important to us than how it is baked? A possible explanation is our tendency to believe that there is a national wealth to which we are simply entitled as Nigerians. We tend to believe that our country owes each one of us a piece of this cake, hence our agitation. As I have had cause to point out at another forum, the agitation for resource control by the oil-producing states and the violence in the Niger Delta are motivated entirely by what those behind it consider to be their unfair and inequitable share of the national cake, given that crude oil, the mainstay of our national economy, is exploited mostly from their land. We have had at least eight revenue allocation formulas for determining how the national cake should be shared among the three tiers of government. None of them satisfied everyone’s idea of fairness and equity. Another revenue allocation formula is now before the National Assembly. We are not about to see the end of the agitations for a fair and equitable sharing of the national cake in the foreseeable future. But I believe that the agitations and the violence, consequent upon a feeling of denial, would greatly be moderated by the availability of more cakes whose sale contributes to the national purse. My choice of the topic is an attempt to provoke national discourse on the baking of the cake rather than its sharing. Sharing what is available is easy. Making something available for sharing is not that easy.

All developing and under-developed countries grapple with the twin problems of a weak economy and political instability. This too has been our experience in Nigeria. The argument as to which comes first, a strong economy or political stability, has never been quite settled among economists and political scientists. We do not intend to engage in that argument here. For our purpose, let us simply accept that a modern nation must be politically stable and economically strong. The strength of one reinforces the other. A strong economy is critical to political stability just as political stability exerts a favourable pull towards a strong economy. It is common sense that no country can develop in a situation of political instability or social chaos. A measure of internal peace and political stability is an essential ingredient for human development. Political stability is quite often undermined by poverty and unemployment.

Our country returned to civil rule on May 29, 1999. It marked yet a new beginning for us as a democracy. The last years of the military regime that terminated seven years ago were not particularly happy ones for the country. The nation was traumatized by self-inflicted political injuries beginning with the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election that exacerbated primordial ethnic fears and distrust. The mutual distrust cast a dark shadow over our country and raised genuine concerns about the survival of our country and its newly-earned democracy.

The instability in our political system had a deleterious effect on the national economy. Direct foreign investments dried up. Whatever meaningful progress we made in our economic development became a victim of the unhealthy political climate. Some experts have estimated that Nigeria was set back more than fifty years. When our country returned to civil rule, we were faced with the urgent problems of unrealistic but legitimate expectations from the people and the critical imperatives of making up for lost times and opportunities.

It was a delicate situation. We were lucky to have as our president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, who ruled the country as a military head of state and made history by voluntarily relinquishing power to an elected civilian administration on October 1, 1979. He knew what should be done. His first order of business in government was, therefore, the enormous task of rebuilding our confidence in ourselves and in our nation. He devoted the greater part of his first four-year term in office to achieving a measure of political stability as a logical foundation on which to build the edifices of our democratic dreams of a robust economy. Chief Obasanjo first sought the political kingdom. Our country has now reasonably gained that kingdom and things are looking much brighter and hopeful for us.

The president has now turned his full attention to the economy with a series of radical reforms to act as pillars of our economic development. Their ultimate objective is to make all Nigerians bakers of the national cake through individual efforts in a free, liberal economy.

Our national economy is mono-cultural with crude oil being our major foreign exchange earner. All tiers of government depend on it. A 1994 Central Bank of Nigeria report observed:

"The statutory allocation from the Federation Account between 1990 and 1994 constituted, on the average, over 70 per cent of the current revenues of the state governments, while internally generated revenues accounted for only 17.8 per cent and the balance was by special (discretionary) grants from the federal government."

Crude oil is a national cake baked entirely by nature. All cakes baked by nature are by nature depletable. We can have and enjoy this cake only for a season, not for ever. Nature’s season may be as short as one year or as long as one hundred or two hundred or more years but the resource will ultimately be depleted or its fortunes may be unfavourably affected by industrial and technological changes. A cheaper source of energy for industrial, domestic and vehicular use, for instance, would instantly change the status of crude oil from being the precious black gold into dross. The developed nations are busy researching into alternative sources of energy to free them from their current dependence on oil from the developing countries. The United States intends to reduce its crude oil consumption by more than 25 per cent by 2025. Every inch of progress made by them to find a cost effective alternative to oil translates into a glut in the crude oil market. When you realise that oil revenue accounts for 80 per cent of government revenue and 90 per cent of export earnings, it should not be difficult to appreciate our precarious national situation. We cannot ignore the danger signal.

As far as the oil industry is concerned, ours is really a rentier economy. Rentier economy is defined by economists as "the sharing of a produce or natural stock of wealth without contributing to it." The exploration and the exploitation of our oil and natural gas were, until quite recently, firmly in the hands of foreign oil giants such as Shell, Mobil, Chevron, Total and others. To put it rather indelicately, the federal government simply collected "rent" due to it from the activities of the oil companies. The current participation of indigenous oil companies in the industry is a welcome development but it has not changed the status of the country as a rentier state. However, one of the objectives of the reforms is to change the rentier economy status of the country.

The oil boom misled us about our national wealth. Our extravagant expenditure patterns and gigantic development projects, for which we had neither the administrative capacity nor the technical expertise to sustain, lived up to our billing as a nation awash in petro-dollar. Some of these gigantic projects were of doubtful economic value. Many of them were subsequently abandoned either by the governments that initiated them or by their successors. Most of them have never been completed. Inadequate funding might have been responsible for this but very often projects were abandoned because of policy instability. Successive governments tend to feel no moral obligation to complete projects initiated by their predecessors, even if such projects are of sound social or economic values.

Clearly, the era of jumbo projects is over. Back home, as the Warri man would say, condition don bend crayfish. A mono-cultural economy is like a disaster waiting to happen. Some day, for one reason or another, the cake will no longer be available in the size or the quantity that we are used to – and that would be disastrous for our economy. This fact prompted our past leaders to initiate policies aimed at diversifying the economic base so that we could have national cakes from different sources and thus protect us from the vagaries and tyranny of a mono-cultural economy. Both Operation Feed the Nation and the Green Revolution programmes of General Olusegun Obasanjo in the late seventies and President Shehu Shagari in the early eighties respectively were aimed squarely at restoring agriculture to its pride pf place. Agriculture was the mainstay of our national economy before the discovery of crude oil in commercial quantities in the mid-fifties. There could be no greater pity for our national economy than that these programmes failed to achieve their set objectives. Our country is still a net importer of food, poultry, beef and diary, spending as much as two million dollars annually on these and other food items. Our arable lands are still not lush green with cash and food crops.

The fault was not in the programmes but in policy instability that appears to have been accepted as a normal way of doing government business in our country. I have no doubt that had these policies been sustained and occasionally retuned and retooled by successive administrations, our national economy would be healthier today and we would all be the happier for it.

Our economy was public sector-driven. Federal and state governments invested directly in virtually all areas of economic activities. State governments even owned breweries, transport services and retail companies. The state was thus in the commanding height of our national economy. The rationale was that we did not have enough indigenous entrepreneurs to invest in these and other areas of the economy. But direct government ownership of such companies stifled the enterprising spirit of our potential indigenous entrepreneurs. It did not help matters at all that the government-owned companies, be they federal or state, were inefficient and wasteful. They became bottomless pits and a drain on the public purse.

The mixed economy model of development that we practised fell out of favour with economists and economic planners elsewhere in the world in the early seventies. Public sector-driven economies began to give way to private sector-driven economies. This was a major, global paradigm shift. The introduction of the structural adjustment programme, SAP, by the Babangida administration in 1986 was partly in response to this paradigm shift and partly forced on us by the steady drop in our revenue profile. Our economy was ailing. The Breton Woods Institutions designed the structural adjustment programme for ailing third world economies. Our SAP was touted as a home-grown alternative to the harsher prescriptions of the IMF and the World Bank. The main policy objectives of the programme were:

b) to achieve a fiscal and balance of payment viability over the medium term and

f) to lay the basis for a sustainable non-inflationary growth over the medium and the long-term.

Under the programme government embarked on partial or full privatization of its companies and parastatals. Seventy-three of the 95 government enterprises put on the block were privatised. But we did not bargain for the pains of SAP. Intense criticisms of the programme shook the confidence of the government that initiated it and it eventually bowed to the pressures of entrenched interests in the management of the national economy and terminated SAP barely two years later. SAP left a bitter feeling in the national psyche and became a metaphor for a wrong path to our national developmental. Policy instability had claimed one more victim.

On May 29, 2004, the Obasanjo administration launched a major economic development programme known as the National Economic Empowerment Development Strategy, NEEDS, which according to Chief Obasanjo was "in response to the development challenges of Nigeria." He said that the programme would "lay a solid foundation for sustainable poverty reduction, employment generation, wealth creation and value reorientation." The same programme at the state and local government levels are known as SEEDS and LEEDS respectively.

NEEDS rests on these four pillars:

Ø      reforming the way government and its institutions work;

Ø      boosting the private sector;

Ø      implementing a social charter for the people; and

Ø      re-orienting people’s values.

This new major national economic reform programme must be appreciated in the context of the entire package of reforms in virtually all areas of our national development. These, together with NEEDS, would put Nigeria on the pedestal for sustained economic and social development. For instance, the federal government expected the economy to grow from three per cent to five per cent in 2004 and 10 per cent by the end of 2006. This would be a phenomenal growth and launch our economy into the orbit of sustained development. But it is an achievable target because the economy would be almost entirely private-sector driven. This, indeed, is Chief Obasanjo’s ambition and a monument to his singular dedication to the economic prosperity and the development of our dear nation.

A unique feature of NEEDS is that the federal government supports it with comprehensive reforms in the public sector. The reform in the banking sector consolidated our banks into twenty-five mega banks, each with a minimum capital base of 25 billion Naira. For a private sector-driven economy it means that the banks are strong enough to support private initiatives and entrepreneurship. Secondly, government has shown sufficient political will by its full and unequivocal commitment to the success of this and its other developmental programmes. NEEDS, certainly, is meeting our national developmental needs. It is taking the baking of the cake from nature into the hands of Nigerians. We can already see the fruits in the branches. It has substantially changed the way we do government business by freeing the public sector from participating in economic activities and limiting it to its statutory role of policy formulation and supervision as is the practices in all successful capitalist economies.

Most, if not all of you here are aware of the president’s determined war against corruption. Corruption corrupts the very soul of a nation. From the inception of his administration in 1999, Chief Obasanjo served notice that it would not be business as usual. He has been as good as his word. But it is a tough fight. No one expected those who over the years benefited from corrupt practices not to resist the war on corruption. But we must join hands to wage the war against corruption and make the corrupt lose the war. The success of the reform agenda is tied in with victory in the war against corruption.

The Obasanjo administration has also set Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by the year 2015. These goals encapsulate a national desire to deal with "poverty, educational development, gender equality, child and maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, the malaria scourge, environmental sustainability and international cooperation." NEEDS represents a new beginning for us. But it is not a magic wand. Its success and that of other developmental policies of the administration rests on all Nigerians, at home and in the diaspora. The reform programmes offer us unique opportunities to become captains in the numerous ships, barges and canoes in the waters of our economic development. We are happy to welcome foreign investors who are eager to take advantage of the new, friendly business environment in our country. We see them as co-pilots in the cockpit of our economy. The full participation of Nigerians in the economy of their country is the greatest assurance to foreign investors that the economic climate in our country is conducive to their enterprise.

We can say that the rest of the world is responding positively to the management of our national economy under President Obasanjo. I can find no better evidence for this than that the members of the Paris Club forgave us part of the debt we owed them. A nation freed from the burden of a foreign debt is indeed a nation that enjoys the confidence of the international community. If they believe in us, we must believe in ourselves.

As I noted earlier, we are still paying rather dearly for our mistakes in the past. For instance, for the last twenty years or so, our country has witnessed a steady brain drain of academicians, doctors, engineers and other highly qualified professionals to Europe and the United States. Poor conditions at home made the brain drain inevitable but regrettable. About four to five million Nigerians now live and work in Europe and the United States of America. A good number of them are highly qualified professionals in medicine, engineering, law, banking, real estate, aeronautical and space engineering and information technology. There are more than two thousand, five hundred Nigerian doctors in the United Kingdom alone. Five hundred of them joined the national health service of that country in 2003. There are also about six thousand Nigerian doctors in the United States. We have lost the direct services and the contributions of more than eight thousand Nigerians doctors to the United Kingdom and the United States alone. Just consider what difference they would make to our health services if all of them returned home today!

However, this is not necessarily a clarion call for them to return home en masse. We must acknowledge the fact that the Nigerians in the diaspora have not in any way turned their back on their mother land. They are as committed to our national development as those of us at home. They are contributing significantly to the national economy with their remittances home. Officially, this is put at about $1.3 billion United States dollars. And that is 3.7 per cent of our gross domestic product. That is not bad at all. They too are baking the cake.

They too fought for civil rule in our country. This forum is one of many organised by Nigerians in the diaspora to maintain constant dialogue with those of us at home to help our leaders chart a new course for our nation. They are responding to President Obasanjo’s initiative in encouraging Nigerians in the diaspora to be part and parcel of the policies and programmes of his administration. In September 2000, Chief Obasanjo took his initiative a step further with the first presidential dialogue held in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. More than three thousand, seven hundred Nigerians drawn from various parts of the world attended that conference. Its immediate fall out was the formation of the Nigerians in the Diaspora Organisation as a formal forum for these interactions among them and between them and Nigerians at home. The federal government is organizing another conference at home on July 25. We expect thousands of our compatriots in the diaspora to attend it.

It is important to underline the fact that Nigerians in the diaspora are critical to the good international image of our country. As students and as workers in various fields of human endeavour, they constitute a unique corps of ambassadors for our country. Most foreigners know our country through interactions with them. Unfortunately, a few bad eggs among them are tarnishing the image of our country and of the thousands of wonderful, honest and hard working Nigerians in the diaspora. We must not allow them.

The reform programmes of the Obasanjo administration are addressing the conditions that forced Nigerians in the past to seek greener pastures else where. When the reforms come into fruition, the pastures back home will be lush green and no Nigerian would ever go elsewhere again in search of green pasture. I urge Nigerians in the diaspora to take advantage of the new, healthy business environment created by the reforms by investing directly in the economy or transferring technical and other know-how home for the greater good of the country and its people. Perhaps, they should borrow a leaf from the nationals of other countries such as India, Pakistan, Singapore, China and South Korea who have learnt over the years to regard their foreign sojourn as an extension of their national economic activities. They are home but not at home.

There are big investment opportunities in the non-oil sector. At the moment, that sector contributes less than 20 per cent of our GDP. It can contribute much more if our solid mineral resources are fully tapped and our agriculture re-occupies its pride of place. Indeed, the federal government is carrying out reforms in the solid minerals sector, the first since we became independent. My state is the home of solid minerals. There are twenty-five solid minerals waiting to be exploited in the state alone. Nasarawa, like other states of the federation that have huge solid mineral deposits stand to benefit from these reforms. These reforms would mean the baking of new cakes – and our national purse would be the healthier for it.

Agriculture stands more or alone as the king of opportunities in the non-oil sector. Experts estimate that 78 per cent of our lands are arable. Compare this with South Korea’s 30 per cent arable land. Yet, that country is a net exporter of agricultural produce such as rice. We have lands crying for large-scale, modern agriculture. Our peasant agriculture employs 70 per cent of the nation’s labour force and yet contributes less than four per cent of our gross national product. Compare this with the oil industry that employs less than two per cent and yet contributes 80 per cent of the GDP. If we put but half of our arable land under cultivation, we can boost our agricultural production beyond our imagination. One immediate result would be a dramatically changed face of our rural areas and the arrest of the rural urban drift that has taxed our planners for as long as anyone can remember. I have no doubt that this would substantially reduce poverty in our rural as well as our urban centres throughout the country. In this connection, please permit me to commend the federal government policy of offering, through the states, opportunities for the dispossessed Zimbabwean farmers to bring their expertise and capital to our country. I am happy to say that my state supports this policy. We now have twenty of these farmers in my state, Nasarawa each of whom has been given a minimum of 700 hectares of land under our commercial agricultural programme.

I cannot recommend too strongly the need to boost our agricultural production to feed ourselves, earn us foreign exchange and serve as raw materials for medium and large-scale manufacturing enterprises. But in saying this, as far as President Obasanjo is concerned, I am preaching to the converted. As a farmer, the president knows, perhaps more than anyone else, the place of agriculture in national development. We recall his Operation Feed the Nation programme in the late seventies. His current welcome package of reforms has an honoured place for boosting our agricultural production. The federal government has set aside N70 billion under a new loan scheme for commercial agriculture. The loan, with a low interest rate of eight per cent, is accessible to small, medium and large scale farmers throughout the country.

As you can see, we are on the move. We must bake and bake more national cakes. When everyone has access to the national cake, no one would fight for a mere slice of it.

In his reform programme, President Obasanjo has set high targets for us. He admits that the reform programme "is rightly ambitious." But he believes that it "reflects the impatience of Nigerians to see quick and dramatic changes and also the fact that Nigeria has immense potential waiting to be unleashed, talents to be tapped. Having lost some decades, we are in haste to cover lost ground, catch up with our contemporaries and become the largest and the strongest economy in Africa."

We can all say amen to that. This is the 21^st century, with its own challenges to be met and problems to be tackled. We cannot afford to waste any more time and opportunities. Our country must fly into the orbit of developed nations. We have been an observer nation in the G8 long enough. We too must join this exclusive club of nations that control the wealth of the world. People used to call Nigeria a sleeping giant. Chief Obasanjo’s reform programme has kicked it awake. We must not let it go back to sleep. The only rational choice for us is to continue with the reform programme when its initiator leaves the stage at the end of his tenure. We must resolve to sustain the reform programme. It must not become a victim of policy instability that ruined earlier efforts at reforming and diversifying the economy. The new administration that takes over next year must sustain it and make adjustments only to respond to changing social and economic circumstances. Policy sustainability is the bridge between the past and the present. Without such a bridge, all reforms and development efforts are isolated efforts that take us one step forward and two steps backward.

I am a committed apostle of bridge-building as a deliberate policy of linkages in our economic and social development efforts. Governance was never meant to be a series of isolated activities by political actors. Governance is a continuous process involving, in varying degrees, all citizens in all walks of life. One of the saddest comments on our national development is that as soon as a man leaves public office we tend to forget him and even try to consign him to the dustbin of our national history. We have countless number of former public office holders who are either in their prime or are still mentally alert and physically fit enough to be relevant to current development efforts but who are more or less vegetate because, as they saying goes, they have had their time. This is a patently wrong national attitude towards those who have served this country in various capacities. It also creates the unfortunate impression that we do not have a sense of history. Perhaps, that is why Nigerian history is not even a compulsory subject in our schools. The average Nigerian child grows up knowing almost nothing about the past political, technocratic, and other professional leaders of his country, some of whom are celebrated men and women whose lives and times should inspire a new generation of political, social and business leaders in our country.

Given our current attitude to former public office holders, I am prepared to bet that the members of President Obasanjo’s economic team, who put together the economic and other reform programmes of this administration, would not find relevance in the succeeding administration. If it does, it would be roundly accused of re-circling expired men and women of yesterday. We should learn from other countries such as the United States, Singapore, South Korea and China that continue to find relevance for their former public officers. Take Lee Kwan Yu, former prime minister and the architect of modern Singapore. After serving his term, he served successive administrations as a senior government minister. The state needed his services and he continued to serve. I am not suggesting that anyone is indispensable, for indeed, the grave is full of the indispensables. But most nations have father figures whose views are regularly sought for on critical national issues. We too can avert our minds to this concept and begin now to build a corps of respected former public office holders to whom the nation can turn in delicate moments of pressing socio-political problems. I advocate for a new national culture of respecting the past and the past stewards of our country at every level. I suggest that we build bridges between the present and the past and, as a matter of national policy, promote a free flow of the traffic of ideas and contributions for sustainable policies and programmes. The contributions of formulators or initiators of policies and programmes should not end when they leave public. Such people should be available for regular consultations. Only this would guarantee policy stability and sustainability and ensure that every step we take in our national development is a firm step forward so Nigeria, in the fond hopes of our president, becomes "the largest and the strongest economy in Africa."

One step forward is for us to quit bickering over the sharing of the national cake and instead put on the aprons, find a space in the kitchen and get on with the urgent business of baking cakes as a national economic activity.

Thank you and God bless.