By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The Nigerian economy is in dire straits, and many families cannot make ends meet in the drive for survival.
Most of the presidents of African countries have just travelled to China including Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu.
The neo-liberal economic policies of the Western world have done a great deal of harm to the economies of Africa, and there appears a propulsion to go to China.
It is incumbent on Nigeria to look into history to understand how many economies of the world were saved in times of distress.
There is the urgent need to marshal out a plan to save the country.
The early Nigerian dream of becoming one of the top 20 economies of the world has somewhat turned into a nightmare.
Given Nigeria’s dire circumstances today, there is the crying need for the federal government and the governments across the various states to come up with a common vision to give Nigerians a new lease of life.
There have been some mistakes like the off-hand announcement of fuel subsidy removal that instantly conduced to hyper-inflation and the apparently uncontrollable devaluation of the Naira.
Massive poverty has since spread across the nation.
The Nigerian government is duty bound to learn from how other nations across the world tackled such dire crises.
To take Germany for example, there was the insane inflation of 1923 in which the German Mark was declared effectively dead on all accounts by economists.
The German Mark in one week recorded an amazing output of, wait for it, 389,000,000,000,000!
The discount rate at Reichsbank stood at an unparalleled rate of 90 percent by mid-September of 1923.
Even with all the pessimism holding sway in Nigeria today, it has to be admitted that the country’s situation has not gone as bad as that of Germany then.
If Germany can survive with proper economic planning, it stands to reason that Nigeria cannot do much worse if it gets its act together.
Still on the thread of Germany as a ready example for Nigeria, the trauma of the Second World would have ruined any nation for good.
At the end of the war in 1945, Germany and all of the Western European nations were all in economic ruins.
It took the imaginative statesmanship of the then United States Secretary of State, George Marshall, to propose what became known globally as the “Marshall Plan”.
George Marshall’s vision started the rebuilding of the war-shattered economy of Western Europe into the mighty industrial engine of today.
It was while being decorated with Harvard University’s honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1947 that George Marshall said: “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world.”
As in the case of Nigeria where the battle is geared toward hunger, poverty and creeping chaos, the United States felt correctly that it had to intervene in Europe at a critical moment to halt the drift of the world order.
The auspicious aspect of the Nigerian angle is that Nigeria’s fate is in its own hands as the country is abundantly blessed with human and material resources to engineer an immediate turnaround.
The Nigerian landscape actually provides a large canvass as much as Europe to galvanize an exemplary economic growth.
In putting forward the Marshall Plan, the US hoped to retain the large market that Europe presented for American goods.
The US Congress approved $13 billion in aid to Europe of which a whopping 70 percent was spent on US goods.
Talk of enlightened self-interest.
A Nigerian version of Marshall Plan will of course stand the country in good stead in extending her influence in the West African sub-region.
Why is Nigeria, for instance, not pursuing the currency exchange with China?
Does a Nigerian trader necessarily need the American Dollar to purchase multiform goods in China?
The agreement can be reached for Nigerian Naira to be exchanged with the Chinese Yuan.
If our country is truly independent, we do not need to always bow the knee to America or Britain.
In Nigeria where organized labour is forever suspicious of governmental plans it is crucial to note that Britain’s arguably greatest trade unionist and Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, supported the Marshall Plan wholeheartedly when he exclaimed, “When the Marshall proposals were announced, I grabbed them with both hands.”
The accord of the general populace in Europe was for a prosperous Europe in the same way that the common people of Nigeria will always opt for any plan that would save Nigerians from want, disease, hunger etc.
In the implementation of the Marshall Plan, many commoners in Europe appeared to be far ahead of their own leaders.
Time magazine of 1947 quoted Henri-Albert Joinville, a 46-year-old road repair man as saying, “The Marshall Plan was quite simple when it started and now the politicians are trying to make it complicated. It is still simple for me. We are in trouble. If we don’t get help, there may be anarchy in France.”
The Nigerian government should come up with its own Marshall Plan, a workable vision to stop anarchy from overwhelming the country.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author
