Obasanjo’s Red Herring in Geneva

Issa Aremu

4 July 2011

opinion

Mni — To an alien body from the outer space, former President Olusegun Obasanjo could have just been mistaken for a post modern Russian Bolshevik revolutionary following his recent red alert (his words!) in Geneva about probable revolution because of the worsening unemployment situation on the continent.

Witness him at the 100th Session of the International Labour Conference, in Geneva: “I want to underline this as a situation that must signal red alert for us in Africa; I am worried, I am apprehensive about unemployment in our continent. It is not being taken as seriously as it should be.

I give the example of my own country Nigeria, we now have 120 universities. When I was growing up and I have to go to university, there was only one university. With polytechnics and other tertiary institution, we have more than 200. We have over 600, 000 graduates every year and we are not creating 100, 000 jobs for the graduates.

The youths can be ignited anytime, and now we have about 165 million populations, we must be talking of jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs, ” “none of us the leaders would a place to hide “. “We have all heard what my brother from Yemen has said about the situation in the Arab countries and North Africa”. According to Obasanjo, “governments in Africa had not been good job creators hence they must provide a conducive environment for the private sector to thrive and create jobs.” From the on-line spontaneous damnation of Obasanjo’s red alert it is self evident that he is certainly not a revolutionary and if he appoints to be one, he lacks followers.

Notwithstanding his current out-of-power false emphasis (jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs,) the former President was never a passionate enthusiast of mass decent jobs throughout his eight year tenure as elected President of Nigeria.

On the contrary, under the notorious policy dogma of monetization and market led reform of Obasanjo administration, as many as 200,000 public service workers were retrenched with ruthless suppression of opposition to the policy repression. He promoted precarious throw away indecent jobs, namely casualization, monetization, outsourcing and de-unionization.

At its March 2003 session, the Governing Body of the ILO adopted the historic Global Employment Agenda. 2003 was when Obasanjo got re-elected for second term in office. Nigeria long subscribes to ILO conventions and recommendations. ILO Employment Agenda’s main aim is to place employment at the heart of economic and social policies. The conviction is that mass decent employment is fundamental and indispensable to the fight against poverty and social exclusion. Indeed the Agenda spells out seven significant success factor principles, the most important being a pro-employment macroeconomic framework.

The eight year long annual trillion Naira budgets under former President Obasanjo were employment blind. Indeed it was a lost decade in Nigeria with respect to “jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs”! Paradoxically it was a job-full growth decade for China through creative development agenda that dramatically uplifted 500 million Chinese out of poverty with jobs, jobs, jobs ad infinitum! While OBJ elects to divert attention through scare mongering about North African implosions, we must not forget the alternative prosperity and mass employment China offers the world.

In OBJ’s budgets there were verifiable targets with respects to inflation, interest rates debt repayments and fiscal deficit and of course crude oil production (respected more in the breach!). But definitely there were no clear cut targets at all for job-creation and employment. He promoted from the roof top of NEPAD and fringe corridors of G8, the false paradigm that government had no business in business.

His passion was for neo-liberal policies of privatization and deregulation which undermined labour market through massive job losses and deepened poverty while simultaneously privileging the capital and money markets with respect to unearned speculative profits and dividends until the criminal melt down of 2007. OBJ’s trickle down false assumption (which he again parroted in Geneva) was that growth will automatically lead to job creation.

Long before the on-going Arab revolts against mass unemployment and lack of democracy, ILO had warned about the danger of jobless growth. It was then it was fashionable on the part of IMF and World Bank to taunt jobless growth (via, Banking and Finance sectors, Telecoms, oil and gas industry in particular) in countries like Egypt under the discredited Hussein Mubarak and Ben Alli of Tunisia (dubbed Singapore of Africa). At a time the likes of OBJ, Gorge Bush and Tony Blair were obsessed with macroeconomics for Growth (and Growth alone!) ILO had called for growth and Employment and integration of the two.

Therefore OBJ’s latest red alert about the danger of unemployment is a false red herring; a belated plagiarism of a received wisdom. It is an immodest arrogant non-admission of the misgovernance of the continent with respect to labour market issues, especially employment.

Open unemployment averaged as high as 50 per cent with unimaginable gross under his full employment as President. His National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) promised 7 million direct jobs. But by the time he left office 10 million direct and indirect jobs have destroyed through factory closures and idle capacity promoted by inadequate electricity among others. OBJ’s red herring in Geneva has however raised the debate about the message and the messenger.

The emperor must have lost his clothes but somehow he still rules through occasional hysteria that captures global imagination. All said, the danger of unemployment is not that it denies our “…leaders …a place to hide as OBJ personalizes a development challenge. Idle capacity and unemployment mean value subtraction for a country like urgently begging for value-addition and wealth generation. In a country without social security like Nigeria unemployment is a social equivalent of mass terrorism without justification whatsoever.

Unemployment means hunger at homes, family collapse, mass withdrawal of children from schools and mass crimes of varying dimensions as we are currently witnessing in the country. As far back as 1977, an African social scientist and revolutionary wrote a book entitled Revolutionary Pressures in Africa. He warned that “the choice for Africans is not between capitalism and socialism after all but between socialism barbarisms”. The author whose long dated scholarly insight is being proven with daily events from Egypt to Senegal is our late Professor Claude Ake, not OBJ.

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