 Sanusi Lamido | Nigeria's Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido delivers a powerful moving speech about conquering Vested Interests in Nigeria. The speech was made last August at the TEDxYouth platform in Maitama, Abuja. It was however not available for public access until last week. Watch the video below or read the full text thereafter... You can also listen to the audio by clicking the source provided... |
Premium Times
January 13,2014
Hello everyone and good morning.
I’m very happy to be here with you. Just to tell you that I am a rather outdated person. I never really knew what the TEDeX event was, and when my daughter spoke to me about it, she said something about youth and development.
I thought I’d just come here and talk about young people and job creation and the usual stuff we talk about until a group of young ladies came to me to explain that I was actually expected to speak in 16 to 18 minutes about one idea that can change the world.
I thought that was crazy because I don’t have any idea that can change the world. And the thing with young people is that they are the most difficult audience to address. I have found myself in situations to address people of your generation and frankly the questions I get are more incisive, more intelligent, more thought-provoking than the questions I get from people of my generation. At all levels.
I am actually just beginning to understand how difficult it is for those of us who were in the analog generation to have a conversation with our children.
I have am eight to nine-year-old daughter that I always see in the morning and she goes to school, she comes back… I’ve never really had serious conversation with her. Two days ago we were at the table with her sister who is about 15 or 16 who then said to me you know dad it’s time for us to start talking about boys. Before I could answer, this younger one who’s eight or nine looks up and said ‘you want to talk to dad about boys? He won’t understand. He is a man. He’s a big boy.’
Now, you can imagine for me I mean this wasn’t the kind of conversation I had with my mother or my father. So for me, having … and of course the next day I had my son who’s in Form one talking about chromosomes and X&Y cells on the table. So this is a completely different world for me.
I am going to speak to you today about overcoming the fear of vested interests.
It’s a topic that I have come to be engaged in mentally because I have learnt in the four years also that I have been in Abuja that if we understand, we may begin to unlock the key to change our world. The world of the country in which we live. And what is this country?
It’s a country of 167 million people, as you know. Largest population in Africa. Second-biggest economy on the African continent. In 1960 with the per capita income that was better that higher than per capita income of South Korea. 1960 Nigeria was the preferred investment destination – prefered to Japan according to US investment advisory – which has always had potential but which has never been able to realize that potential
A country that specializes in exporting what it does not produce and importing that which it produces.
One of the world’s largest producer of crude oil, that does not refine its own petroleum products and has to import petroleum products.
The world’s largest producer of cassava but does not produce starch or ethanol.
A large tomato belt, yet the world’s largest importer of tomato paste..
A country that from my childhood I have heard, had the potentials for being a world power, but everyday we talk about potentials! Everyday we talk about potentials!
Today we still talk about the potentials of Nigeria. And yet China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil… all of those countries have turned the potential that they had into reality.
What are these? What’s the one thing that if I were to ask, what is the one thing that we need to do to break this barrier that faces us?
In four years in Abuja, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to overcome the fear vested interests.
I’ll talk to you through a little bit of my own experiences and as governor of Central Bank and use that as a basis or as a template for what I think we need to do if change this country.
I became governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria in 2009 and this was in the middle of a global financial crisis. I came to the central bank knowing that banks have problems and believing that these problems were caused by a global crisis, by the collapse in the capital market, the collapse in the price of oil, and that they would be fixed by simply addressing the normal risk management issues in banks.
In 2009 this country paid $291 billion naira as subsidy for petroleum products. By 2011, this number had jumped to 2.7 trillion naira.
Did we start consuming 10 times as much petrol? Do we have 10 times as many cars? Did the population of Nigeria multiply 10 times?
I did not believe those numbers. I screamed against those numbers, and more people screamed, of course we tried to remove subsidy, there was occupy Nigeria.
There have been investigations, and what did we discover? That a lot of that money never went to fuel subsidy that was consumed by Nigerians.
There are people in this country that produced pieces of paper and brought to PPPRA and somebody stamped those pieces of paper and said they brought in petroleum products and actually paid them subsidy. And those pieces of paper said I brought 30,000 metric tones on so so ship, and we discovered that the said ship was nowhere near the coast of Nigeria on that date.
We have seen vessels that did not even exist – that had been retired – on bills of landing and money has been paid. And you know what? None of them as I speak to you has gone to jail.
This is the only country in the world where you have something called oil theft. Where vessels can simply come and take crude oil and literally just drive out of the country. You see the numbers every day 100,000 200,000 400,000 barrels a day, nobody even knows. 7.3 billion naira.
How does anybody take oil in a vessel and leave the country? We’ve got the Navy, we’ve got NIMASA, we’ve got security services, you’ve got the oil companies themselves.
Audio Version & Full Text: http://premiumtimesng.com/news/153212-sanusi-lamido-explodes-how-vested-interests-are-killing-nigeria.html
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