How will people regard a man who brags about his increasing bank-account balance, while his children are hungry, sick, uneducated and unemployed? He gets happy by checking the growth of his account balance instead of investing in his children or other businesses. Since the bankers know the size of his account balance, they continuously advertise goods, services and programs for him to patronize. Apart from spending on trivial goods and services, the bankers steadily deduct charges and hardly pay him savings interest. Without understanding the purpose of national savings and investment, efforts to increase Nigerian foreign reserve will remain an economic leakage.
Banks and insurance companies were formed to respond to the unpredictability of events in nature, society and personal life. Cautious people set aside parts of their earnings to cater for unforeseen circumstances from disasters, illness or other accidents. This reservation does not stop people from maintaining and improving their economic or social life. For while some people reserve percentile-earnings as security, other people invest their percentile-earning in other businesses for steady profit. Like private citizens, governments take precaution by having foreign reserve in financial or productive institutions.
Various Nigerian governments often grade their success by how much they met and left in the foreign reserve. Being a country of brutally merged ethnic communities,[1] Nigeria depends on sale of crude oil in Niger-Delta for income. The crude-oil-dependent economy pretends to diversify source of income by seeking more crude resources to sell or seek more oil in the north, so that the government can brag about raising foreign reserve, after servicing foreign-debts, administrative salaries, imported goods and infrastructure, with zero technological productivity.
Developed countries are rich because of their ability to technologically utilize natural resources for solving human problems. Underdeveloped countries are poor because of their inability to utilize their natural resources technologically for producing what they need. Presently, underdeveloped countries depend on the developed for ‘all’ technological needs in communication, transport, health, feeding, power, governance, entertainment and luxury. Hence, by stocking their foreign reserve, Nigeria and other underdeveloped countries slightly postpone their importation of fast-depreciating goods.
Economic growth is not calculated by the dormant balance lodged in an account over a period, but by the frequency of significant turnover in response to viable economic activities. Nobody grows rich by lodging his money in account[2] or nations as foreign reserve. Instead, people grow rich by investing resources in ventures that have potentials of growth. And the first factors of such economic growth are people who are trained and motivated to convert resources to useful products and services. All the technological manifestations of jets, cars, mansions, gadgets, internet, drugs and machines come from people who have been trained and motivated to convert resources to products and services.
So, the use of foreign reserve account balance as a measure of good governance is a waste of human intelligence. However, the underdeveloped countries will eventually organize, train and enable their citizens to privately own and use their lands and natural resources for solving their problems. Thus, instead of stocking the foreign reserves in expectation of consumerist finished goods, they will invest in organizing and educating their people to collaborate for technological productivity.
[1] S. O. Oyedele, “Federalism in Nigeria” in Issues in contemporary political economy of Nigeria, edited by Hassan A. Saliu (Ilorin: T. A. Olayeri publishers, 1999) p57
[2] Cf. Richest man in Babylon