Still on Dredging the Niger

I want to clarify my post on dredging the Niger.

It is not the absolute cost of the project that worries me. I suppose my beef has more to do with the opportunity cost of every Naira spent on the project.

Public services like healthcare and education are obviously important, and I do not mean to neglect them, but our economic growth has long been stymied by our inadequate infrastructure. And it is economic growth (and growth in the disposable income of our citizens) that will pay for public services, and for individual and family access to private health insurance. We cannot get this growth without infrastructure that supports rapid economic development.

In this context, revamping the railway system is a MASSIVE priority. The only things I would rate higher on the infrastructure priority scale would be:

(a) Raising our electricity generation from below 6,000 megawatts to at least 200,000 megawatts if not more. I don't know what a Nigeria operating at maximum potential would require, since it has never happened, but it bothers me that we have been talking for years, decades, about rasing our generation to 10,000 megawatts, when it is clear that 40,000 is insufficient for South Africa (with 33% of our population, and 500% of our per capita income) and they are not operating on maximum potential either! For the record, this counts only electricity generated by entities like PHCN and Eskom, and not the electricity produced by private generators and in-house production by large and small corporations in both countries, but it is enough to surmise that 150,000 megawatts would be barely sufficient to support a Nigeria operating at South African levels of output.

(b) Water. Having individual citizens, firms and corporations randomly sinking boreholes into the ground all over the country does not strike me as a sensible way to manage scarce water resources. I have heard of no concrete plans advanced by any of the major political parties in 1999, 2003 and 2007 for the management, collection, processing and distribution of water on a federal-scale for our urban and rural communities. There are assorted World Bank-backed projects here and there, but our federal republic needs a coordinated approach to an already serious problem that will become even more important going forward.

The above two priorities will require a LOT of investment, public and private, and we do not currently have access to the requisite funding. Added to these two, we must also prioritize the rail system (and the federal inter-city expressways) and we don't necessarily have access to the funds to do that properly either.

We have a couple of state plans (light rail in Cross River and Lagos State), and a federal plan that seems to consist of a Lagos-Kano line that passes through Abuja (or a separate Lagos-Abuja line, hard to tell) and a Port Harcourt-Maiduguri line as mentioned by Presiden Yar'Adua in his 25-page Guardian inteview.

Now if you are the British colonialists, seeking only to export resources to the coast, the federal plan would work for you; and if you have a simplistic view of Nigeria's economic future, the federal plan would work for you too. But if you have an ambitious understanding of the internal economic inter-dependence of the federal republic, and how this inter-dependence can be used to create internal chains of production, and how these chains could create an entirely different type of international trade for the federal republic -- well, then the federal plan is not good enough. The rail system we need desperately is a lot more complex (and hence more expensive) than that. We need it not only to support autochthonous economic development, but to take some of the pressure (and congestion and risk of accidents) of off our inter-city expressways. And if we are serious about protecting vital national resources like the vast Gashaka-Gumpti Reserve, we would have to invest in elevated lines across sensitive areas.

The state plans are interesting in and of themselves, but we risk duplicating costs if the state plans ultimately are incongruent with the eventually improved (I hope) federal plan. Indeed, there is something strange about deciding on the placement of municipal airports, inter-city bus depots, putative inland ports, export promotion zones, and major industrial development projects without first answering the question of where we can and cannot feasibly build, renovate or add a spur or main line of a pan-federal railway system.

My criticism of the spending on dredging the Naira is tied to the fact that I would rather we consolidated what funds (public and private) we have to attack the problem of the pan-federal railway system first. I don't care so much what the absolute cost of the dredging is -- whatever it is, I would rather those funds were first committed to the railways. My point is further buttressed by the fact that once the railways are where they need to be, there will actually be no need to dredge the Niger as intra-Nigerian transportation would be on a solid footing (six inland ports simply do not achieve anywhere near as much in internal and external transport as an effective pan-federal rail system). With proper planning, we could have rail access to the ports of Douala, Porto Novo, Cotonou and perhaps even Accra and Abidjan.

By the way, could someone direct me to the environmental impact study vis-a-vis the Niger Delta? The construction of the Kainji Dam denied the many islands of the Delta their natural source of silt, the earth of which they are made and with which they are sustained. Combined with the rising oceans, many islands were reported to have lost territory to the sea. The loss of territory in Lagos gets more media coverage, but the issue exists in the Niger Delta too.

Sometime soon, we have to ask ourselves questions about how to protect Lagos and the Niger Delta from ocean erosion, how to protect the states created from the defunct "East-Central State" from gulley erosion, and how to protect Niger Republic (which is a climate buffer between our northern frontier and the Sahara Desert) from the southward march of the arid and semi-arid climate zones. These goals will require better understanding of the region of the natural world in which we find ourselves, as well as the political will and access to funding necessary to do whatever is necessary.

It just seems strange to me that everything important is on hold, while we commit scarce funds to dredging the River Niger.