Legal Luminary, Olehi tasks Christians on reversing Nigeria’s ‘resource curse’

By Athan Agbakwuru, Owerri

In the light of the current excruciating economic hardship facing Nigerians, a seasoned legal personality and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Barr. Ngozi Olehi, SAN, has challenged Nigerian Christians to wake up to their spiritual roles to reverse the declaration by two renowned economists that Nigeria ‘is suffering from a resource curse.’

Addressing journalists in Owerri Monday, on the recently released IMF Report titled: ‘Budget Credibility in Sub-Saharan Africa,’ Olehi who recalled that two economists of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, had in 2004 declared that ‘Nigeria is suffering from resource curse,’ noted that current political and socio-economic events in the country depict the assertion as true.

He urged Nigerians especially Christians to destroy the curse and usher in righteousness in governance that could transform the wretched condition of the nation into a prosperous nation.

According to him, the report which paints “a disturbing picture of how governments across the Sub-Saharan region routinely depart from approved fiscal plans, with deficits exceeding projections, current expenditures overshooting limits and capital projects repeatedly abandoned or implementation delayed midway.”

Olehi further stated, “The 2004 declaration of two IMF economists that Nigeria is suffering from a ‘resource curse,’ which current political and socio-economic events depict, creates a duty on the Body of Christ to destroy the curse and usher in righteousness in governance that could transform wretched Nigeria into a prosperous nation.

“With the said publication saying that IMF has no specific policy for addressing or preventing resource curse, it is the Church that should deal with spiritual foundations that grease the curse by manipulating the electoral system to produce misfits to populate the corridors of power whose incompetence give rise to weak credibility of governance that erode public trust and makes democracy worthless.”

The Learned Silk lamented that no policy framework or constitutional or statutory provision has proved it wrong that the 2004 International Monetary Fund, IMF publication that had stated that Nigeria’s resource endowments have become a resource curse is untrue.

He insisted that the claims by thieves in politics to be Christians cast a sludge on the image of the Church and the reverence such crooks receive make it impossible for the Church to be active in dealing with ‘resource curse’ which has no scientific, political or economic solution.

In addition, he said, “Venezuela, which has the largest crude oil deposit in the world, and therefore ought to be one of the most prosperous countries in the world has a global ranking of being the worst governed country in the world, while Switzerland, with no drop of oil is the 5th richest country in the world.”

He quoted a Professor of Economics at Columbia University Xavier Sala-I Martins and Arvind Subramanian, a Division Chief, IMF Research Department in the said IMF 2004 publication as saying that natural resource curse is intrinsic to most countries with oil or minerals and that the curse works by destroying domestic and political institutions and thus making natural endowments in such countries, including Nigeria the single most important cause of institutional deterioration that precipitate intractable political and economic traumas.

He observed that apart from when Umaru Musa Yar ’adua was President of Nigeria and the country’s GDP swelled to the highest growth rate since 1999, that is about 7% and then President Goodluck Jonathan drove Nigeria to the 3rd fastest growing economy in the world next to China and India, the successive administration of Buhari and Tinubu have been worse off in exemplifying the cursed trend that diminishes democratic values, destroys political and economic institutions and see nothing worthy in rule of law, human capital development and in building strong institutions.

Commenting on the current administration, the legal luminary pointed that no one had ever imagined that Mohammed Buhari’s administration between 2015 and 2023 which was the worst since 1999 would be better than what Nigerians are going through presently and regretted Nigeria’s current budget crises.

He accused the President Bola Tinubu administration of running multiple national budgets simultaneously which blurs accountability and complicates formal reconciliation of accounts, transparency and audit failures, frequent departures from approved plans which lead to massive spending variances and heightened economic uncertainty.

He also identified other challenges as frequent misclassifications which camouflage routine administrative costs as capital expenditure, thus starving actual infrastructural projects of funds, debt service swallowing more than half of federal revenue are features in the economic space that clearly show there is no hope for the future if Nigeria continues to be the fifth worst governed country in the world.

The SAN who posited that though Nigeria is one of Africa’s largest economies, with a large population, vibrant private sector and significant entrepreneurial activities, ‘resource curse’ also called ‘paradox of plenty,’ described the puzzling economic trend where countries rich in valuable natural resources perform worse economically and indeed politically than resource-poor nations as unwelcome development.