Diplomat Tasks Government on Privatisation
Gives recipe for poverty alleviation
By Tokunbo Adedoja
President of the Nigerian-Finnish Association, Ambassador Peter Afolabi has tasked the Federal Government on the need to carry the privatisation exercise to its logical conclusion.
Speaking at an interactive session with journalists in Lagos, Afolabi said the argument that some enterprises are too strategic to be fully privatised is flawed.
He said the more strategic an industry is, the more rapidly it must be privatised in order to introduce greater efficiency, profitability and accountability.
He added that "oil and gas, electricity, water, telecommunications and transportation companies must belong to the people, not in the nominal sense of being public utilities, but in the true sense of the word".
In his view, the strategic goal of privatisation is for the government to withdraw from all the productive sectors of the economy, to concentrate on infrastructural development, education, health, law and order, and foreign policy, and to transfer to the shoulders of the private sector, the burden of economic development.
The diplomat added that "the oil and gas sector will continue to play a dominant role in our national economic fortunes. It is therefore an area in which privatisation must be accelerated".
Afolabi also said privatisation programme must remove all obstacles to the full and unfettered movement of domestic investment capital to every nook and corner of the country. He noted that the practice of erecting state quotas and preferential allocations and limits severely restrict the flow of funds from areas of excess to those of scarcity while also sending the wrong message to foreign investors.
He said the ultimate goal of privatisation is to transform the lives of the people positively and ensure national development. He said the government must strive to achieve the goal.
"The fundamental benefit of privatisation of the widest possible share ownership in society is that, in the final analysis, these are the only guarantee for democracy and stability. Democracy will endure and flourish only when all citizens have right to ownership of part of the wealth creating machinery of the nation. This is the only way in which every citizen will have a real stake in the system and will be motivated to rise up and defend the system should it be threatened. A situation whereby the elite live like their counterparts in Paris, Geneva, New York and London, while the generality of the people wallow in poverty, disease and ignorance is inherently unstable and few will mourn its collapse", he said.
Commenting on the hydra-headed problem of poverty, Afolabi said there must be a distinction between poverty alleviation and poverty elimination.
The diplomat, who commended the strategies of the President Obasanjo administration to tackle the problem of poverty frontally however noted that while the government should try to eliminate absolute poverty, it should reduce relative poverty.
He noted that poverty lines vary between climates, cultures and social environments, and that the common practice of using dociles of income recipients has serious defects.
Afolabi also commended the recent gesture of the Finnish government to reschedule Nigeria's debt and urged other members of the Paris Club to learn from Finland.
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