The function of financial coverage is to construct a succesful, affluent and safe society, argues Okay. BOLANLE ATI-JOHN
Something troubling is stirring internationally. In the United States, Donald Trump’s return to energy displays, amongst different forces, financial insecurity, immigration anxieties and declining confidence in established establishments. In France, protests in opposition to austerity and rising residing prices have challenged successive governments. Indonesia’s 2025 demonstrations uncovered public anger over political privilege and inequality. Across components of Europe, financial uncertainty has accompanied the resurgence of nationalism and populism.
Closer to dwelling, South Africa presents a very disturbing warning. Persistent unemployment, inequality and frustration with governance have offered fertile floor for xenophobic and Afrophobic actions akin to Operation Dudula, which have turned grievances over jobs and public companies into hostility in direction of fellow Africans. What needs to be a requirement for accountable authorities turns into, as a substitute, an assault upon susceptible neighbours. In Kenya, lethal protests in opposition to the 2024 Finance Bill uncovered wider anger over taxation, residing prices and political management.
These developments have totally different causes. Economic hardship alone can not clarify them, nor justify violence or xenophobia. Yet they elevate a typical query: what occurs when residents more and more imagine that the financial and political methods governing their lives now not provide a reputable prospect of shared prosperity?
And then there’s Nigeria. A nation of greater than 200 million folks, enormously endowed with human and pure assets, but battling poverty, deteriorating buying energy, insufficient public companies and protracted insecurity. The National Bureau of Statistics reported that 133 million Nigerians, roughly 63 per cent of the inhabitants surveyed in 2022, had been multidimensionally poor.
Governments borrow. Public debt accumulates. Taxes and tariffs rise. Citizens are repeatedly requested to sacrifice right this moment for prosperity tomorrow. Yet, for a lot of households, tomorrow by no means appears to reach.
History warns that extended financial exclusion, perceived injustice and declining institutional belief can threaten social cohesion. The hazard is just not essentially imminent revolution. It is the gradual erosion of the circumstances that maintain a secure society.
How did we arrive right here? And are our financial insurance policies strengthening the state or progressively undermining its capability to serve its folks?
Part of the reply lies in an financial doctrine that has profoundly influenced public coverage for many years: the assumption that market forces and personal possession usually ship higher effectivity than authorities administration.
Although rooted in earlier financial thought, this philosophy gained political ascendancy by way of the market-oriented concepts related to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and the reforms championed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It subsequently influenced structural adjustment programmes, privatisation and the Washington Consensus. John Maynard Keynes had earlier challenged extreme confidence in markets’ capability to take care of financial stability with out public intervention.
These colleges of thought tackle real financial issues. Public enterprises might be inefficient, corrupt and politically manipulated. Private funding can introduce capital, know-how, competitors and managerial self-discipline. Nigeria’s telecommunications revolution demonstrates what personal funding can ship, nevertheless it got here from opening the market to competitors, not from promoting an current public enterprise.
But someplace between recognising the worth of markets and elevating market effectivity right into a governing doctrine, a harmful simplification emerged: that transferring public property into personal fingers is itself financial reform.
It is just not.
A change of possession is a transaction. Reform should be measured by improved companies, productive capability, public welfare and the preservation of nationwide wealth.
Consider the underlying contradiction. If a public enterprise fails due to corruption, political interference, incompetent appointments and weak monetary administration, why ought to promoting it’s considered the pure resolution? Why is the primary accountability of management to not confront the institutional failures accountable?
Private buyers make use of skilled managers, implement budgets, keep monetary self-discipline and demand accountability. None of those practices is past the capability of a reliable public establishment. Ownership incentives actually matter, however personal possession may also produce monopolistic pricing, underinvestment and the extraction of extreme returns the place regulation is weak.
Indeed, a authorities incapable of managing a public monopoly could also be equally incapable of regulating a personal one.
That is the privatisation paradox.
It exposes a deeper hazard in management: mistaking the disposal of nationwide property for the troublesome work of institutional reconstruction.
Economic theories don’t govern nations. Leaders do. They select whether or not to confront corruption or accommodate it, restore establishments or abandon them, protect nationwide wealth or eat it.
Norway demonstrates that one other method is feasible. Its authorities retains 67 per cent possession of Equinor, whereas main power enterprises akin to Statkraft stay publicly owned. Professional administration and industrial self-discipline coexist with strategic public possession. Petroleum revenues have additionally been transformed into substantial nationwide financial savings by way of its sovereign wealth fund.
Singapore presents one other lesson. Its mixture of state funding establishments, industrial enterprise and deliberate housing coverage has helped give residents a cloth stake in nationwide improvement. In 2025, greater than three-quarters of resident households lived in public housing, whereas over 91 per cent owned their houses.
Neither nation offers a system Nigeria can merely import. Their institutional histories and circumstances differ significantly. But each exhibit that efficient management needn’t select between market effectivity and public function. It can construct establishments able to advancing each.
Nigeria’s electrical energy expertise deserves scrutiny on this mild. The 2013 privatisation promised funding, effectivity and improved provide. More than a decade later, the President’s Special Adviser on Energy, Olu Verheijen, acknowledged that the method was deeply flawed, with many consumers missing the monetary and technical capability to make the investments that they had promised. Tariff inadequacies, regulatory failures, inadequate funding and longstanding structural weaknesses all contributed.
Changing possession didn’t remove the issues of governance.
The query stays pressing. In February 2026, Finance Minister Wale Edun introduced plans to supply chosen state-owned property to personal buyers. The Bureau of Public Enterprises had already recognized 91 excellent public enterprises for potential privatisation or commercialisation, together with property in petroleum, aviation and different strategic sectors. Meanwhile, Nigeria’s revised 2026 funds envisages substantial borrowing and a few proceeds from asset gross sales. Before additional disposals proceed, Nigerians need to know what classes have been discovered.
What is being offered? Why is institutional reform inadequate? Who determines the valuation? What future earnings and strategic capabilities could be relinquished? And how will the proceeds profit generations but unborn?
An asset sale can create public worth when pretty priced and its proceeds are productively invested. But promoting income-generating nationwide property to finance recurrent consumption could merely trade tomorrow’s wealth for right this moment’s expenditure.
A nation can not sustainably finance its future by repeatedly consuming its inheritance.
There can be a nationwide safety dimension that financial reformers can not afford to miss.
National safety is just not merely the defence of territory or the containment of armed threats. It relies upon upon financial resilience, dependable infrastructure, institutional legitimacy and the cohesion of society.
A authorities that loses efficient management over strategic infrastructure, weakens its fiscal capability or permits widespread financial exclusion could create vulnerabilities extending far past the economic system. Such circumstances can deepen grievances, weaken nationwide belonging and supply alternatives for felony and extremist exploitation.
Poverty doesn’t mechanically produce violence. Nevertheless, safety establishments can not indefinitely compensate for failures of financial governance. There is a basic distinction between sustaining order and creating the circumstances by which order might be sustained.
This requires a National Wealth and Security Review earlier than main strategic property are offered or concessioned. Such a overview, performed independently of the businesses selling the transaction and reported to the National Assembly, ought to require impartial valuation, examination of alternate options, legislative scrutiny, evaluation of financial and safety penalties, clear use of proceeds and measurable post-transaction accountability. Public enterprises retained by authorities should face equally rigorous efficiency scrutiny.
But the way forward for a nation is just too necessary to be left to its authorities alone. Citizens can not stay spectators.
National property are held in public belief. Governments are their custodians, not their unrestricted homeowners. Citizens should due to this fact demand to know what belongs to them, how it’s managed, who advantages from its disposal and what inheritance stays for his or her youngsters.
The media, skilled associations, universities and civil society should make these questions central to public debate. Citizenship requires greater than voting periodically and complaining afterwards. It calls for knowledgeable, sustained engagement with selections shaping the nation’s future.
The function of financial coverage is just not merely to fulfill markets or steadiness authorities accounts. It is to construct a succesful, affluent and safe society.
And the true measure of management is just not what authorities sells, however what it builds, protects and leaves behind.
Rear Admiral Ati-John (Rtd) is a Distinguished Fellow of the National Defence College, Abuja. He writes from Lagos
