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 towards austerity and rising residing prices have challenged successive governments. Indonesia’s 2025 demonstrations uncovered public anger over political privilege and inequality. Across elements of Europe, financial uncertainty has accompanied the resurgence of nationalism and populism.
Closer to house, South Africa gives a very disturbing warning. Persistent unemployment, inequality and frustration with governance have supplied fertile floor for xenophobic and Afrophobic actions similar to Operation Dudula, which have turned grievances over jobs and public providers into hostility in the direction of fellow Africans. What ought to be a requirement for accountable authorities turns into, as a substitute, an assault upon weak neighbours. In Kenya, lethal protests towards the 2024 Finance Bill uncovered wider anger over taxation, residing prices and political management.
These developments have completely different causes. Economic hardship alone can not clarify them, nor justify violence or xenophobia. Yet they increase a standard query: what occurs when residents more and more consider that the financial and political techniques governing their lives not supply a reputable prospect of shared prosperity?
And then there may be Nigeria. A nation of greater than 200 million individuals, enormously endowed with human and pure assets, but battling poverty, deteriorating buying energy, insufficient public providers and protracted insecurity. The National Bureau of Statistics reported that 133 million Nigerians, roughly 63 per cent of the inhabitants surveyed in 2022, have been multidimensionally poor.
Governments borrow. Public debt accumulates. Taxes and tariffs rise. Citizens are repeatedly requested to sacrifice right now 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 just isn’t essentially imminent revolution. It is the gradual erosion of the situations 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 individuals?
Part of the reply lies in an financial doctrine that has profoundly influenced public coverage for many years: the idea that market forces and personal possession usually ship larger 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 faculties of thought tackle real financial issues. Public enterprises could 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, however 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 belongings into personal arms is itself financial reform.
It just isn’t.
A change of possession is a transaction. Reform should be measured by improved providers, 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 thought to be the pure answer? Why is the primary duty 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 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 belongings 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 devour it.
Norway demonstrates that one other strategy is feasible. Its authorities retains 67 per cent possession of Equinor, whereas main vitality enterprises similar 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 gives one other lesson. Its mixture of state funding establishments, industrial enterprise and deliberate housing coverage has helped give residents a fabric stake in nationwide improvement. In 2025, greater than three-quarters of resident households lived in public housing, whereas over 91 per cent owned their properties.
Neither nation gives a system Nigeria can merely import. Their institutional histories and circumstances differ significantly. But each show 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 they’d 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 belongings to personal buyers. The Bureau of Public Enterprises had already recognized 91 excellent public enterprises for attainable privatisation or commercialisation, together with belongings 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 should know what classes have been realized.
What is being bought? Why is institutional reform inadequate? Who determines the valuation? What future earnings and strategic capabilities is likely to 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 belongings to finance recurrent consumption could merely trade tomorrow’s wealth for right now’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 just isn’t 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 situations can deepen grievances, weaken nationwide belonging and supply alternatives for legal 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 situations through which order could be sustained.
This requires a National Wealth and Security Review earlier than main strategic belongings are bought or concessioned. Such a evaluate, carried out 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 essential to be left to its authorities alone. Citizens can not stay spectators.
National belongings are held in public belief. Governments are their custodians, not their unrestricted house owners. Citizens should subsequently demand to know what belongs to them, how it’s managed, who advantages from its disposal and what inheritance stays for his or her kids.
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 just isn’t merely to fulfill markets or steadiness authorities accounts. It is to construct a succesful, affluent and safe society.
And the true measure of management just isn’t 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
