For sure, the Communique which emerged from the July 16th, 2026 Conference on 40 Years of SAP in Nigeria is now a collective effort but it had an agentian push. And the agency is none other than Dr. Otive Igbuzor who circulated the text on 40 years of Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in Nigeria. So, uncontroversially, agency and collectivity are co-producing a reality. The double in the move are in the timeliness in someone forcing into the ethno-regionally charged atmosphere a matter that transcends such boundaries and, by doing so, push pro- and – anti – SAP positioning as a criterion for rating presidential candidates in 2027.
A civil society vote against SAP in Nigeria
It is good it is being done by Dr. Igbuzor for the simple fact that he was the one who brought up the case for a reflection on 40 years of SAP during the recent memorial for the late Dr. Abubakar Sokoto Mohammed. More importantly, 40 years after the hot disputation around the policy package, all the data are now available regarding which frontier got it right and which got it wrong. It was clear from the beginning that, other than that those who imposed it were under instructions from their foreign masters, there is no sense in talking about the SAP route in any country in Africa.
It is thus gratifying to hear that the text presentation was well attended and Dr. Igbuzor must be happy to have done his bit. Others can now add their own bit.
The current Resident Officer implementing SAP or ‘renewed hope’ as they now call it
Without having the time yet in a week of deadlines and too many online commitments to have read or attended the presentation event, there is no chance of any report original to Intervention on the presentation event. The gist is that it went well. Could it have been anything less, given the nature of the topic?
The expectation is that Dr Igbuzor will now enrich the original text with the comments of reviewers and readers and expand the text into something much, much more substantial. Nothing has any significance higher than SAP in Nigeria since 1986.
The policy mill in Europe is ever lost wondering how an economy such as Zimbabwe could ever be subjected to a SAP policy package. Most Asian leaders rejected it and even the ones that took it did it with a pinch of the salt. Except the comrades in Mozambique in the early years of the ‘revolution’, it is hard to find any African leaders who refused or sustained any remarkable objections to SAP.
A self-proclaimed SAPist
The Shagari regime did object to SAP and for which it got booted out. General Muhammadu Buhari raised some hopes in 1983 when he said that “the IMF aroused the indignation of all self-respecting and patriotic Nigerians when it started insisting … that the government must carry out its dictates.” Before any one could say Buhari or patriotism, he was also out of power. By the time he managed to find his way back to power in 2015, he had learnt his lessons and discovered the greatness of democracy. In other words, he had learnt that there are masters who run the world and one of whose demands is compliance with SAP or whatever name it is now called as a condition for a complete tenure. So. he bought peace by buying into reform.
Another General and Chief, Olusegun Obasanjo also learnt his lessons but in a stylish way. The late Chief Economist of the NLC put it nicely when he said what he said in an interview in 2006 which deserves to be quoted in full:
We know that when the neo-liberal invasion started, OBJ was one of those who came out publicly to say that we must do it with human face. That shows to me that deep down within him, that was what he believed to be the best. Periodically you see where the nationalist sensibility in him comes to the fore. And such occasional protests even if temporarily signify that no matter the pressures, he knows that neo-liberalism is hopeless for a country in Nigeria’s stage of development. Even recently, you see him trying to resist. Contrary to the pension model they were given which says you should give pensioners instruments to hold, they are now paying cash because I believe he knows giving the kind of people who are pensioners here instruments to hold is nonsensical. So, I see him as somebody who is operating under pressure from the international policy mill, (the World Bank, the Washington Consensus, etc). Although he has submitted to them for reason of regime survival, he is still unable to fully suppress the nationalist tendencies he has always possessed. Hence his periodic swing between neo-liberalism and nationalism.
A turbulent SAP implementer
It is in the above sense that Chief Obasanjo is a more informed and more sophisticated member of the ruling class and a more competent reformer ever since 1986. But that inference does not absolve him of the guilt of sentencing the people to penury on behalf of capital and foreign benefactors, something he could have negotiated without much risks to him or the regime because of his location in that order. After all, when it suited him, he said whatever he wanted as when he said to an ECOSOC session in 2001 that (another long but revealing quote, especially the last sentence:
A close look at the development models that have been applied in Africa would also be necessary as we chart the new course forward. Africa has, in the past, been subjected to numerous externally designed models as a panacea to its economic problems over the last three decades. The Bretton Woods institutions with the support of the international community have designed some of these models. However, in spite of the good intentions of their authors, these experiments have not achieved the desired results, in some cases, the results had caused so much pains and social upheavals that their local advocates – politicians, administrators, and even academia – have had to be branded foreign lackeys.
Either for fear of Obidients or whatever, no body asks about Obi’s stance on things such as SAP, He is simply believed to be transparently good!
Dr Goodluck Jonathan would carry the credit for a remarkable slogan in his and PDP’s ‘transformation agenda’. No one can deny him of that. It doesn’t matter who coined it. It was remarkably appropriate and carries the same weight as his disinclination to rough rider approach to politics, what the others call ‘do or die’ affair. So, he is a good man, by ordinary standard of reasoning. But he negativises his tenure by the same metric of submission to reform, including selling NEPA which Obasanjo was unsure of doing. He didn’t just do that, he lists it as an achievement.
President Tinubu has advanced the submission to reform on all counts. In his own case, he tries to give the impression that he even designed the package rather than implementing what some people who may not even locate Nigeria on the world map designed and circulated. The truth is that Boss Tinubu has domesticated aspects of the reform package, adding patches of the NADECO vision of federalism to it here and there, the same stuff Buhari also tried without much success. Only Obasanjo is the exception in that resort to sub-nationalistic temptations at the level of paradigm.
So, kudos to Dr. Igbuzor for bringing up an inexhaustible topic. Intervention’s punishment for not making the presentation is not knowing what attendees said about reform slavery and the presidential line-up for the 2027 struggle for power. It is heard regularly in important places that Nigerians love suffering, that suffering and smiling makes them strong. The reason those who say so do that is because they claim that Nigerians consider religion and region more important criteria than ideological pedigree of candidates. And they argue that when people behave that way, it means they are not tired of suffering yet.
Has this subaltern ever spoken on SAP or not?
This would be an unsympathetic take on the working class, the urban poor and peasant Nigerians waiting for enlightened members of the elite to come and lead them from their imprisonment in agrarian world. But it would not be too judgmental a take on the category of people who attended Dr Igbuzor’s text presentation: mostly well educated, well located and ideologically conscious, including the right wing elements among them. So, what did they say on SAP yesterday and SAP (whether called ‘reform’ or ‘transformation agenda’ or ‘renewed hope’) tomorrow? In other words, what did they say about the ideological direction of Peter Obi, Atiku Abubakar and Prince Adewale Adebayo (the nice looking and nice talking presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
Dr. Igbuzor has ignited a fire that he should sustain in the best tradition of civil society’s role as the fire eaters of the politics of ‘war of position’. But it is not him alone. The civil society should buy into it. There are no reasons for anything otherwise. It doesn’t say that Tinubu or whoever should not be elected. It only says that whoever is elected should do what we, the people, want, not what those who have no idea of where Nigeria is on the world map want.
