Since Adam Smith wrote his classic, in 1776, the Wealth of Nations, to upend the mercantilist system and set forward the basic foundations for modern classical economics, we have seen corporations come and go. The core pillars of productivity and division of labour have been the tenets in the organization of firms which thrived. The free market system provided the cement mortars in states.
Andrew Carnegie lived. John D. Rockefeller lived. Bill Gates is living. Jeff Bezos is living. Nigeria needs builders to fix our paralyses as Naira fades as a currency.
Very painful indeed: the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has made it official – Naira has lost more grounds to the US dollars. According to the Vanguard, Godwin Emefiele, the apex bank governor, “who spoke at a summit on the economy by Bank CEOs on Friday, said the drop in crude oil earnings and the associated reduction in foreign portfolio inflows significantly affected the supply of foreign exchange into Nigeria”.
His words: “In order to adjust for the decrease in supply of foreign exchange, the naira depreciated at the official window from N305/$ to N360/$ and now hovers around N410/$.”
These men are icons of their generations, pursuing the noble cause of entrepreneurial capitalism – aligning assets and knowledge to provide services where fictions exist between those that want and those selling. Corporations exist to simplify that interplay of demand and supply, and these legends and others thrived in providing solutions that eliminate most of the frictions. They pursued different levels of innovations for scale using productivity, specialization and uncommon vision.
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The path to the rise of Naira will not come from the headquarters of the Central of Nigeria, but from factories, offices, etc, across Nigeria. It goes beyond using financial quick-fixes to pursue ephemeral mercantilist system, instead of looking for ways to efficiently form, combine and recombine factors of production, to create innovations, aspiring to be the BEST, regionally and globally, without relying on pure mercantilism!
Nigeria exports more than the world, per capita – but unfortunately, its exports are its future. It has exported most doctors, engineers, etc to America, Canada, and the United Kingdom, per capita. The path to the mountaintop must reverse that. Watch this video.
Inaugural Address by Ndubuisi Ekekwe, President, LinkedIn Nation
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Every society has its flaws, but one of our major flaws is that we failed as a society to mould citizens with national pride and consciousness. Of course an average citizen will give you amalgam of reasons why he/she doesn’t believe in Nigeria, from corrupt political and judicial system to filthy politicians and judges; these are valid excuses. But they all fall short of what you expect from patriots.
The people we are blaming or pointing fingers at are equally Nigerians, what does that tell you? It means that one doesn’t become corrupt or filthy because he/she is a politician, judge, policeman or soldier; rather because of human inadequacy. What those positions only do is to accentuate and make those ills palpable.
Look at the financial performances of entities released so far, for the year 2020. A bank is more profitable, a telecom giant made more on revenues, but the leading bank still trumped it on profit! What is the effect on society? One of them is that rather than working to setup a cassava or starch processing cottage industry, you will find Bureau De Change more lucrative. But to grow an economy, you need more of productive systems, not money exchangers and traders we term financial services here.
Let me just stop.