The Deputy President of the Nigeria Labour Congress and President, Public Service International Africa, Peters Adeyemi, has in an interview with the Guardian, added his voice to the opposition against sale of national assets to fund the budget.
Adeyemi said it is unwise to sell government assets considering the fact that challenges may still come in the future, and the country will be left with nothing to fall back on. He also added that selling of government assets is in itself another form of corruption as there's no guarantee that Nigerians will actually benefit anything from the sales.
Below is an excerpt of his response:
It is only commonsensical that if government sells now and in future another challenge comes, what does the country do?
I think that in an environment where transparency cannot be guaranteed, environment that is filled with corruption and greed, selling government equities in corporation or selling public institutions outright cannot be a panacea to solving economic challenges. Such a step is itself another way of corruption. We think that that is not the way to go. How can a country be without national assets and nothing to fall back on tomorrow?
If governments that came before this one decided to sell off those properties, what will this government fall back on today, to even generate money to run its activities, even though the money is not enough? The major problem with our leaders is that they are always very wasteful.
When we had all the opportunities in the world to save, we did not. Now that recession has hit us that require deployment of economic skills and sagacity, we are exploring how to adopt quick fix approach, to put the economy back to shape.
There can’t be quick fix to getting out of the problem. Indeed part of the quick fix steps of the government, was to rush to increase pump price of petrol. We can see that that has not also worked. Government said it was liberalizing the sector and that marketers should go and look for foreign currency at any cost, then government turned around to regulate the price. That does not make any sense.
Government had thought that when they increase the price of fuel, there would be easy money to run the economy. It is clear that has not worked, rather the economy is plunging further into recession. Who told the apostles of ‘sell public institutions’ that the present situation would change after the sale of the institutions. I doubt if things would change. What would be evident would be that government would have succeeded in putting more money in a few people’s hands. We would have lost those shares forever and ordinary Nigerians would pay the price.
