My Beauty Best Teacher

Emmanuel Oluwatosin comments on the award winning achievements of Nigeria's Central Bank governor, Charles Soludo. "...Soludo has the strongest success story on banking any where in the world in 2005...",The Banker.The Soludo-inspired and driven consolidation programme is also reputed to be the least-cost industry-wide restructuring of the banking system anywhere in the world...The Soludo-inspired and driven consolidation programme is also reputed to be the least-cost industry-wide restructuring of the banking system anywhere in the world...This has had the double effect of bringing into the formal sector, large funds hitherto were trapped in the infamous informal sector, and further boosting financial and investment awareness among Nigeria’s informal sector operators..."

Via Coder at a lecture titled “Who Will Reform Politics in Nigeria” Charles Soludo:

...called for the pruning of Nigeria to six regions with Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja as special centres. He said 774 local governments, were merely conduits for profligacy and waste, as well as the adoption of a unicameral legislature that would reduce the number of law- makers from 459-150.

More here
Well said! We have previously discussed Nigeria's synthetic states and largely pirate governors. Its unlikely that Nigeria's political turkeys will vote for this kind of thanksgiving.

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Looking forward to Nigeria's elections Charles Soludo contends that:

....we need answers to is how the candidates hope to reconstruct our public finance and put it back on the path of sustainability. How can they rein-in the obtuse and rapacious federal bureaucracy in particular, and the state bureaucracies, balance our budget during this period of oil boom, and yet spend at least 40% of the budget on capital expenditure as required by the Fiscal Responsibility Act? Personally, I am not convinced that we need more than 10 ministries and 10 ministers at the Federal level. They should explain to us their contingency plans in case oil price crashes tomorrow. Candidates should also let us know their views on, and framework for, borrowing (when to borrow, for what, and how it will be paid back?). Without clarity on these issues, much of the talk about government providing power/electricity and infrastructure on a sustainable basis will remain a joke as funding will always remain a binding constraint. In other words, candidates should tell us their plans to shrink the domain of the public sector to free resources to enlarge the domain of the private sector— to truly have a private sector-led, market economy. For example, I have always believed that company profit tax rate should not be more than 10% (down from the current 30% plus education tax of another 2%) especially at a period of oil price boom, and where the businesses provide their own infrastructure. For businesses to expand and create jobs, the tax rate needs to go down significantly. We need to debate this.

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Nigerian Banks are steadily transforming themselves into regional powerhouses, the Punch reports:

Quoting Charles Soludo(Nigerian Central Bank Governor)...the expansion of Nigerian banks into the economies of other West African countries "is just a natural way to manage the huge funds at their disposal"...This is largely because, virtually all the banks that accessed the capital market in 2007 recorded an over-subscription of their shares,and consequently a overly cash heavy balance sheet which had to be managed profitably.

Nigeria's banking reforms are now perceived as the benchmark across the region.

Charles C. Soludo wrote;

It is evident that the development challenge facing Africa requires major strategic, creative thinking. The SSA needs to do certain things very differently, but the question is how? A dominant view is that the best chance of sustained development in Africa should be pursued within the framework of a growth-promoting and market-accelerating model, but which is human-centred to address the pervasive poverty of the region...
With regard to specific area of strategies for rapid industrialization, several questions emerge. For example, where would Africa’s comparative advantage lie in the future, and how can such comparative advantage be “created” — a la the Asian way — without being constrained by the GATTified world? Should Africa start small (with little things that have lost competitiveness, and as Ojimi(Yoshishisa Ojimi a former vice-minister of MITI) argued in the case of Japan — areas that have lowest productivity and lowest returns), or, should it go high-tech. and seek to compete all the way? In the latter case, how would SSA do it, and with what technology and market penetration strategies?
It has become fashionable to suggest diversification of the export base into manufactures, but the challenge is to demonstrate how such an option is viable and that chosen sectors/products are potentially competitive. In essence, while it is important to learn how the Asians dealt with the past, it is even more important to understand how some of the countries (especially those in “transition”) are coping with current constraints and opportunities. For example, a lot of lessons could be learnt from other emerging industrializers (e.g., China, Vietnam, etc.) in terms of their innovations in interpreting and exploiting the provisions of the GATT/WTO and their strategies for “economic diplomacy.”

via IDRC