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Thursday, 4 October 2012

PRIVATE JETS IN A TROUBLED ECONOMY

IF the ailing Nigerian economy were to be a patient in a hospital, to borrow from the fecund imaginations of the cartoonists, it would confuse its physicians who may not be able to diagnose or offer prophylaxis because of its disparate, conflicting symptoms. One of the paradoxes of the signals from the economy was reported recently that while the country records a substantial increase in revenue from crude oil sales, there is no corresponding improvement in the lives of Nigerians. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) in its reaction had frowned on this paradox of huge annual budgetary spending by the Federal Government without any improvement in the standard of living of Nigerians, stressing that the Nigerian economy was not moving forward. In other words, the economy’s performance barely reflects the huge inflow of revenue from the sale of the country’s crude oil. There are only very few Nigerians that would need empirical data to be convinced that the country’s economy is not in an upswing, what with the sky bound prices of food items, the rate of youth unemployment and the docile real sector.

EVEN the figures on the country’s poverty level have been dismal for a long time, irrespective of their sources. Most analysts claim that a majority of Nigerians live below the poverty line, and the conditions of the rural dwellers are simply beyond belief in terms of the putrid squalor and absolute deprivation of basic amenities of life, yet, sources in the aviation sector of the country recently revealed a luxury trend in which wealthy Nigerians are nursing a growing penchant for the acquisition of private jets, a trend which rose by 650 per cent between 2007 and 2012! According to an aviation official, the economic downturn in both Europe and the United States of America has made Nigeria and China to become two of the fastest growing private jet markets in the world!

APART from the taste for private jets amongst their citizens, it is almost impossible to fathom any other similarities between Nigeria’s economy and China’s. We find it curious that the Nigerian economy could sprout wealthy individuals capable of nursing a consumption pattern that their probably wealthier counterparts in Europe and America find scary! But certain questions derive from these revelations that should interest the Nigerian state. Who are these wealthy Nigerians who spend $6.5 billion on 130 private jets? What businesses are they engaged in? How much tax are they paying to the relevant tax bodies? As a capitalist economy, individuals are free to own property, provided that the process of acquisition of such is legitimate and taxes are duly paid on them. Most structured economies operate on these principles in the ultimate need to guarantee security for all the citizens.

PRIVATE jets are not commonplace items that could be purchased off the counter, and if the documents in the aviation agencies are to be believed, it means that these wealthy Nigerians acquired these private jets between 2007 and 2012, the same period during which the country’s economy suffered unprecedented haemorrhaging with closures of manufacturing plants, banks and some other service sectors of the economy. Interestingly, even the aviation sector which witnessed the intrusion of these wealthy and gallivanting adventurers in its domain has been experiencing a lull! Aviation services in Nigeria are arguably the most expensive in the world despite the fact that the safety of its airspace and the industry has been shrinking in spite of privatisation and other interventions, including bailouts from the government.

ACCORDING to media reports, aviation sources say that the luxury trend is encouraged amongst the rich by the need for privacy, fear of insecurity and the urgency required by modern businesses which sometimes compels sudden air travels. These reasons may be plausible, even valid, but they certainly do not detract from the need to comply with international best practices in pursuing its other policies. The planning ministry should be bothered by an economy which reflects a consumption pattern which is at variance with its production capacity, especially when such becomes outrageous and we are worried that this trend has been left unchecked for too long. To turn a blind eye to these developments and not ask relevant questions is to allow the country’s economy experience undue vagaries which will ultimately endanger even the security which these wealthy Nigerians or individuals desire in the first place.

THERE are reasons to believe that the country’s economy is too loose and unmonitored for its own health and this explains the scary and bizarre eruptions therein, a phenomenon which forced an erstwhile military president to exclaim, in a moment of unguarded candour and exasperation that the Nigerian economy befuddled his administration because it refused to collapse despite the onslaught it suffered during his regime. The resilience of the Nigerian economy should not be taken for granted by its handlers. It should be closely monitored and guided back to buoyancy and a level of predictability. But that cannot happen simply by a wish, the paradoxes of opulence amid grinding and pervasive poverty, the huge budgetary expenditure without concomitant improvement in living standards, and the poverty despite huge sales of crude oil must be explainable, even to those who are not good economists.
culled from the (tribune newspaper)

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