Translating data to insights: Avoiding the fate of Sodom.

Between 2010 and 2020, Nigeria uniquely added some 27+ % to its population. And there is more. 44%+ of our 200m population are under 15 years old, accounting for some 88 million people - more than the entire population of many countries we signpost as development models. This category is classified as dependent and non-productive. China and the??USA have less than 20% and 10% respectively. Our development analysis must therefore recognize these important??factors, else they become critically flawed.?

However, our discourse appears to have yielded to depths of bias, magnified by social and conventional media, oft with cognitive altering algorithms. There is now a demand for?binarism?that evades rigorous examination of??issues. You must be right or left, all-in or all - against to avoid being accused of?dancing incoherently. Cancel culture and character denigration of alternative views now pervade. Reality and facts do not seem relevant factors anymore. This ‘tower of babel’ situation is arguably the most potent threat to development, as narratives morph to investments into terror and other kinetic actions.?

Government indeed has a critical role to play in leading and shaping culture towards a vision of a Nigeria that works for all and must be constantly held to account??for what it has not done and should do. It is government's responsibility to lead the orchestration of human and non-human resources towards National development. However,??government isn’t an abstract.?It is PEOPLE?and leaders and officials come from this same society, intermingle and plough back into that society. They are arguably a microcosm of society.?

The countries we love to hold as aspirations forged character over time. They left cannibalism, idol worship, ballot snatching, blatant theft of public resources, and evolved. They understood that societal organization, prudent investment in people and infrastructure are drivers of a modern liveable society.?We, as a people, have simply refused to evolve, confusing material acquisitions and “wokeness’ with ‘evolution’. Connecting simple??dots evade us in our miasma of divisive and jaundiced narratives.

The topical forex issue is a good one to examine as an example of this “disconnected thinking”.?Reflexively, political, and economic pundits have attributed the Naira decline to mismanagement by the CBN and the government. This may be the case.?It may also be the case that there are other factors that would still ensure the Naira continues to decline, even when there is economic prosperity within society.?Whilst it cannot be denied that multiple rates and all sorts of alleged shenanigans and conferment of discretionary advantages play a negative role - and should be sanctioned where culpability is found - we must yet again pause and stop characterizing the tail of an elephant as the whole animal.?

Nigeria imported US$53 billion worth of goods from around the globe in 2020,?up by 47.3% since 2016?and up?by 11.8% from 2019 to 2020. Based on the average exchange rate for 2020, the Nigerian Naira depreciated by -41.5% against the US dollar since 2016 and declined by -16.9% from 2019 to 2020.??It is interesting to note the proximity of the increase in importation percentage to the % decline in value. It is??therefore a matter of some fascination when?thought and economic??leaders?talk about the days when dollar to Naira was 1 to 1, or when we talk about the good old days, when indeed our 61 years have had a consistent thread of lamentation. Population size, importation content, productivity, exportation, consumption, inflation, and supply side intervention all impact currency value.

In that period too, we somehow became an obesity epidemic country, according to the WHO, though we are quick to cite hunger in the land. According to?Elegbede, Ezejimofor, Owolabi and Ezeighe’s 2020 study:?About 12 million persons in Nigeria were estimated to be obese in 2020, with prevalence considerably higher among women. Nutritional and epidemiological transitions driven by demographic changes, rising income, urbanization, unhealthy lifestyles, and consumption of highly processed diets appear to be driving an obesity epidemic in the country.?

In 2010, we imported packaged medicaments to the tune of $634 m. By 2019 this had doubled to $1.32 B.??Panoramic thinking??will guide us towards preventative healthcare approaches, and more local production capacity expansion. Afterall, the cement manufacturers, palm producers, brewers, rice growers??and many others have been expanding capacity and booking significant profits to boot.??

Nigeria‘s?imported value?of??wheat is circa $2.06 billion (4.3 per cent global total). Since 2019, imports have risen by 62.3 %. Wheat is used in making noodles, flour, pasta, semolina etc; and the consumption pattern has risen dramatically for various reasons. The discussions should??be focussed on how we produce the variants needed, and how we adjust our palettes to accommodate substitutes. The use of Sorghum??in brewing is a case in point.?

In 2010, the HS code import for telephones from China alone shows??$235m. In 2019, this figure had risen to $526m, hovering around 3.45% of our imports,?and still within the ten-year range had risen to some $730m per annum, from multiple sources.?Did we have 180 million phones ten or twenty years ago? Had iphones become the staple for the ‘urban woke?’ Do we make iphones,??Samsung or techno phones here???Isn’t it true that a large portion of our phones and the ‘phone graveyards’ are not always about??productive power, but status signals?

Did we have the means to shop from our living rooms ten or twenty years ago???According to data from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS),?in 2020, Nigerian merchants and mobile money operators processed over 655 million point of sale (POS) transactions valued at??4.7 trillion ($13 billion). This number presents a 50% increase from 2019, despite covid lockdowns for significant portions of the year. In 2020, total inter-bank transactions reached a record high of two billion valued at??158 trillion ($415 billion).??Is it not true that a significant quantum of this spend ultimately purchases foreign goods? Do investors pump over $500m into four??payment companies if they doubted??that economy will spend and??keep spending?

Were we engaging in??sports betting at this pace and scale 10 or 20 years ago? Did we even have the quantum??of mobile phones to do so??Official comments suggest about N4b per day is wagered, with pay-outs of about N800M. Insiders say this is conservative. Most of that money searches for the dollar immediately as most platform owners are based outside Nigeria. Since it is legitimate, one cannot moralize. However, if we must bet at this scale, then perhaps we should focus on policies and tactical interventions??for the domiciliation of platforms, better application of the garnered funds, and taxation for ‘public good’ causes.

The importation of petrol for a crude oil producing nation evinces the??madness of corruption, callousness, and inefficiency that we now hope Dangote’s refinery, modular private sector ones ,and a??rehabilitated PH refinery will assuage. Nonetheless, our 2010 importation bill of $7b had risen to $10b by 2019.??Even at that, petrol at least fuels productivity, in a way that many of our??importation and capital exportation habits do not.?

In our period of plenty, when oil was being sold for $110 per barrel, we reached car importation heights of $2b but ignored the refineries. We pared down to a low of $536m in 2017. We have now gone back upwards reaching??$1.57b in 2019, and $1.7b in 2020. A point to note here is how our per capital figures are skewed by the population demography. If we have 44% of population as dependents, they can’t own cars, yet we have some 13 million vehicles on our roads amongst the 106 million people above 18 years, eligible to own and drive cars.??I also doubt many countries can boast of the wasted value lying in?mechanic workshop graveyards?across the country. All ultimately dollarized waste. We still spend over half a billion on car parts per annum.?

Make what you will of the data, including the fact that we have sub-par public transportation systems, but??please ask yourself how many middle-class families that you know have one car, as is often the case in the countries we like to import from? How many Rolls Royce’s, G-wagons, and Range Rovers were on Nigeria’s roads 20 years ago, compared to what we see today? From corporate titans to men and women of the pulpit, we have even crept towards private jet ownership as the manifestation of ultimate status. We must respect the right of people to??spend their money however they want to if they?play within the rules?in gathering their wealth and paying the appropriate levies. But it’s impact on currency value??should not be wished away in our analysis.

If our African hair has become too ‘kinky’ to manage in these fast-paced times, necessitating wigs, why aren’t we scaling up local production of wigs? That assumes foreign products won’t be preferred as “ differentiators of status?” Could the real issue be a deeply rooted inferiority complex or?“Kardashian copycat culture”?that leads us to wanting to look like Americans, Europeans, and others we feel inferior to???Or perhaps it is just another vector of signalling that we “belong” to a certain sophisticated class.??In 2013,??our hair $213m importation bill for fake hair was??close to our tractor importation at some $230m dollars. That says a lot.??Our focus should probably target re-establishing the Afrocentric culture that birthed hair museums in the past. These are non-fiscal interventions that panoramic analysis of data and root cause analysis may help impact significantly. They impact Naira value.

If our hair is kinky and difficult, is our skin kinky too? The WHO says 77% of Nigerian women now bleach making us one of the highest consumers of bleaching products in the world. Injections are apparently now available for foetus bleaching with no thought of the health implications, and men have since joined the bleaching train too. If so, are our eyelashes kinky too? Are our nails brittle too? Could our desires to be what we are not be leading us to the pursuit of foreign goods like a frenzied mob? Yet, the Naira is expected to strengthen.

How many Nigerians had found the appetites for collecting diamond studded wrist watches back then, as is the case today? How many Nightclubs served Dom Perignon, 25-year Glenfiddich to clientele who bath with them in clubs 20 years ago? How many Nigerians were?importing?girlfriends for trysts from afar? What quantum of imported hard drugs were Nigerians indulging in for temporal satiation or misery alleviation? The local sex for money transactions which now runs into trillions of Naira ( and which many of the critics who say one thing on TV and Instagram but admit another in private, agree is arguably the largest sector after oil and Agric) are largely??conduits for capital exportation, as the monies find their way to dollarized imports of both fake and original Gucci and Louis Vuitton apparels, shoes, phones and bags.

Could it therefore be that we have become increasingly?dollarized?in thought and deeds over the years, killing the Naira softly buy surely with our actions? Could?growth in internal prosperity continue to deplete the value of the Naira, not necessarily because of our productivity levels - which are largely miscomputed considering the mammoth size of our informal economy -?but because of our national and individual choices,?and some extant realities we choose to ignore??Could it be that any Naira prosperity we generate internally, with our less than 100m productive base, starts chasing the dollar to support our hedonistic pleasure-seeking pursuits and preference for investing in other climes rather than ours?

Whilst the ‘Ghana must go’ has somewhat disappeared??from public sight, this??does not mean bribes have stopped moving in exchange for contracts, because the prebendal nature of Nigerians remains intact, despite the war on corruption.??If we are to believe the NBS that N400B plus is still paid out in bribes to corrupt government officials, then the dollar portability and?value assurance?as the global currency of trade assures its demand, even for the quantum of bribes paid. Some of this is horded and stashed away. A quantum feeds into the economy as crooks also procure goods and services.??The Naira chases the dollar with frenzy and won’t strengthen.?

We are all witnesses to the massive forex investments in military platforms and armament. We saw $500m handed over to the US government for purchase of 12 Super Tucanos, some of which reports say are now making??decisive difference in the fight against ideological terrorists, commercial bandits, and kidnappers. Three J-17??next generation??fighters’ cost??$ 60m a piece from the Pakistani / Chinese alliance.??24 M63s from Italy are sapping $1.2b. UAV’s and all sorts are being expected and will certainly birth??a proper air-based defence strategy for the future.?All dollarized, to resolve problems that investments in infrastructure, people, opportunity over the decades may have significantly mitigated, if we heeded the data.??A stitch in time saves dollars and enhances the value of the Naira.??

One could go on, and I urge those interested in visualized data to visit sources like the MIT observatory of economic complexity site to connect the dots.?We are a rapidly growing population, expending too many resources??on non-essentials and vain vacuous pleasure seeking, that can be diverted towards productive capacity, and finding every excuse to be under productive. Yet we expect the Naira to strengthen.

If we lament the state of public schools, whey can’t all our elite billionaires compete on the ownership of world class schools???Why can’t we build more Day Watermans,??Greenspring’s and CIS’s ? Is this because of government policies, lack of synergistic thinking, or the desire to boast that our children are schooling abroad as a status badge to let peers know how well we are doing? According to a recent guardian report?“?Despite a severe shortage of foreign exchange (forex), overseas education continues to drain the country’s resources, as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, admitted $80 million weekly disbursements for personal travel allowances or payment of overseas school fees. This amounts to $960 m??annually.

When the CBN dared to mull removal of this education subsidy, some of today’s most vociferous critics jumped out of the woodworks to oppose the idea, simply because most of them were funding??children in the UK from monies beaten out of this economy that??they spend every day characterizing as “dead”.?That is a major problem with Nigeria.?More leeches exist than patriots in the so self-described elite class, and rather than confront this character beast and acknowledge it, we have mastered pointing fingers at everything, but our innate inability to self-regulate.?

So, to be clear, we see an avalanche of?owanbe’s?and all sorts of events across the length and breadth of Nigeria. We see??retail outlets springing up in residential areas across the country’s main cities and filling up with shoppers as quickly as they open. We see construction everywhere, suggesting a lengthy value chain is being lubricated, just like the lengthy owanbe?value chain.?

We see more cars and gridlock on our roads. We see hotels opening left, right and centre. We see companies like Okomu Palm recording almost 87% stock value growth rate in two years. We see MTN about to do N1.2 trillion in revenues. We see fraudsters heisting away billions from “get rich quick” oriented Nigerian’s in MMM type schemes. We see the second Niger bridge after consuming N400b rise in majestic height as one of the 700 roads and bridges we understand are nearing completion. Profits abound in this vortex of expenditure, but what does it ultimately chase? What quantum chases goods we do not really need but choose to indulge ourselves with??

We always cite 33% unemployment figures that simply don’t reflect reality of the population dispersion and consumption data. This is a society where unemployment and opportunity are cited as issues,?yet most small enterprises lament, almost unanimously, that they simply can’t find honest people ready to work and grow.?We fail to recognize or admit that many now want to take their own chances, on their??own terms in both legitimate and illegitimate “hustle” economy sphere,???online and offline, compounding the complexities of data capture and analysis.?Over?80 percent of the population work?in the informal sector according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), so even the 100m poverty assessment requires detailed examination as poverty may require new definitions away from $1.90 template we use.?

Put bluntly, we may have become a hedonistic society who don’t see risks when shuttling from one?'owanbe'?to the other but advance every excuse to justify under??productivity.?Whilst we are doing that, the Mr Lee’s of the world are acquiring thousands of hectares for farmland and may well??end up employing us as workers in our own country. They have more belief in Nigeria than Nigerian thought leaders who recite a script about every reason why the environment isn’t conducive for manufacturing, but conducive for enjoyment, capital exportation and wasteful pursuits.?Their narratives are regurgitated by an increasingly??“zombified “society, too tethered to exculpatory thinking and always seeking to absolve themselves of any blame in the underdevelopment they lament.?

We should be aware that this zombification of thought is real. It simply builds on bias and presents different truths to different echo-chambers.?It may well be the biggest threat we face as we lose the rigour of analytical and fact-based discourse to ethnic, partisan, religious and other bubbles, created to ensure we are accurately packaged and targeted for economic and political herding, depending on who has the most financial firepower to acquire the services of the most revered influencers in media.?

We dishonour the amazing efforts of companies like ??Innosen, Nordmotion, Proforce, Coscharis Farms, The cassava queen, Loom chocolate, Dala, Dangote, Bua, Zinox, and countless manufacturers investing?in the local production of physical goods?across various sectors, when we constantly peddle this narrative. We dishonour the "sweat" of the suya / chicken guys on my street who turn over circa N1m on a good day, and many others sweating to thrive from honest endeavour, and in their own little way taking people off the unemployment market.??We dishonour the Gen Ezugwu's who conceptualized, designed, and oversaw the production of the first indigenous MRAP from start to finish during his tenure as the head of the Defence Industry corporation of Nigeria, earning a historic naming of the vehicle as EZUGWU in 2019.

A relative few may be sapping resources at scale.?It may be a trickle-down economy where the ones at the top fleece and are in turn fleeced by those in the chain,?but money moves around, and the consumption data and the evidence of our eyes is somewhat proof of this, despite the accompanying visual dysfunction. To sustain an almost moronic recital of “dead economy’ where nothing works is arguably puerile. To ignore the vast gaps especially in terms of cost rationalisation, productivity upscaling, revenue expansion, and debt management are also grave folly. To fail to link the uptick in kidnapping as a more profitable crime replacing home invasion / armed robbery that cashless economy improvements have made unpredictable is dangerous. To undermine the importance of establishing and deepening a culture of rectitude is simply suicidal.?

Many still wonder why an alleged fraudster like hushpuppy would parade himself so obviously on social media.?Those who ask this question are missing the elephant in the room.? Nigerian's?seem??obsessed with appearances, flattery, and adulation; and will take enormous risks to be adulated and envied by others.?This may be the most potent driver??of corruption and societal dysfunction. However, a society can’t keep carving development resources up, wasting same on insane often?dollarized?lifestyles, and yet expecting development at pace, scale, and quality. It is counter logical. We simply reduce ourselves to ants who can’t figure out, generation after generation, that heading into a pot of honey is ultimately a fatal endeavour. We may even become the manifestation of??Richard Tahlers Nobel winning analysis that economic outcomes largely depend on the “inability of man to control his irrational desires” .

If we continue to misinterpret the data, ignore the fact that all we need is under our feet and in our hands, and continue relishing the obfuscation of reality for political and other objectives,?our decimation may well be assured by violence and crime, as population growth and hedonistic desires exceed productivity, and our insane habits morph at even greater exponential rates.?Such societies have existed before. The format of decimation may just be different. Sodom and Gomorrah are two historical examples.?