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The third lever of the NEEDS initiative is the privitisation programme. 'Rolling back the state' is IMF Holy Grail, the underlying assumption here being that the private sector is far more efficient than the public sector. It is also seen as the engine of long-term national prosperity.

There is no doubt that an efficient and strategically-minded private sector can play a pivotal role in national development; but it is not true that it is the only vehicle. Indeed, a private sector dominated by grasping entrepreneurs can quickly turn into a national liability. The story of British Rail, privatized by the Thatcher government in the 1980s, come to mind here. The British rail industry was one of the proudest achievements of that country's public sector; it had its share of problems, but it delivered public value all considered.

Then the carpet baggers moved in following privatization and embarked on an orgy of asset stripping and profit maximization. Little of the profits were reinvested in an industry that soon began to cry out for new rolling stock. Today, late trains, fatal crashes, buckling lines, and profoundly dissatisfied commuters is all that is left of the once shining icon of British public enterprise.

The point here is that merely jumping on the IMF's privatization train without bothering to work out independently for ourselves whether this train is indeed headed for our desired direction is not the way to ground development strategy in the soil of Nigerian reality. I concede that there are public enterprises that should be privatized for the simple reason that they can best be run by private entrepreneurs. But I also argue that there are enterprises too strategic and complex, requiring a continuous dose of public investment to ensure that they continue to deliver vital public value in the long term, that to privatize them would be tantamount to handing over the heart of the nation to buccaneers.

I do not doubt that these sentiments are shared by some in the Finance ministry, but it seems to me that there are powerful forces working to undermine the national interest in their rush to snap up public enterprises built up over the years at great public expense, including such strategic industries as oil, gas, power, and water. Which brings me to the little matter of the BPE and the way in which certain powerful public officials have used their offices to browbeat otherwise honest and patriotic Bureau officials to cede companies to them at less than the market price.

I have it on good authority that one of the reasons that Phillip Asiodu lost his job as President Obasanjo's chief economic adviser is because he insisted during a cabinet meeting that the matter of the Vice President and his use of cronies to buy up public enterprises be deliberated and sanctions applied where appropriate. The Vice President is still in office, as powerful as ever. It remains to be seen how the new Finance Minister proposes to negotiate this powerful obstacle, and ensure that privatized enterprises not only yield adequate financial returns to the exchequer commensurate to their true market value, but also that they are taken over by true entrepreneurs who will go on to create wealth and jobs by running them profitably, not asset strippers anxious to salt away the proceeds in bank vaults in Zurich.

It also needs to be pointed out that it is not enough to privatize enterprises. At the heart of the industrialization and development crisis in our nation is the inability of successive 'elites' to build on the modest infrastructure the departing colonialists left behind and thus provide the basis for a modern economy. The nation's rail network is still as Lugard and his band left it, running from cash crop centers in the hinterland to the coast. One could travel by rail from Port Harcourt to Kano without effort in 1930. Seventy-three years later the rail-lines are non-existent, the trains have been cannibalized, and our once-proud railway workers a study in poverty and frustration.

The highways are death-traps, filled more with potholes than traffic lights guiding road users to safety. Road transport is the most hazardous of endeavours. Pipe borne water is non-existent. Power generation is epileptic.

To the extent that this nightmare scenario persists, all talk of an economic renaissance is an exercise in wishful thinking. This may not sound sexy or fashionable, but what is really needed at this point in Nigeria is a return to basics: regular electricity, good roads and rail networks, pipe borne water, education, and healthcare. When these are in place, economic players will, of their initiative, move seamlessly to the take-off stage.

NEEDS' fourth lever is debt forgiveness. But really, there is nothing to forgive. The bulk of Nigeria's 30 billion dollar debt, 'owed' to the Paris and London club of creditors, are bogus and unverifiable. That's not the point, though. I remember that when General Muhammadu Buhari, on taking power in December 1983 began to make moves to get Britain to return the billions of pounds sterling salted away in London banks by thieving Nigerian public officials, Prime Minister Thatcher replied by threatening to publish the names of Nigerians with loot stashed away in the UK. Nothing more was heard from the 'tough-talking' Buhari junta.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala should do well not to pin her hopes on debt-forgiveness. It will not happen, and for good reason. Charity is a rare commodity in Western capitals. Realpolitik also says that you don't give away a powerful bargaining chip in the strategic game of securing and consolidating vital national interest. Nigeria, led by Obasanjo in his first coming in 1976, stumbled foolishly into the debt trap. From the giant of Africa that could intervene decisively in the independence struggles in Angola and Zimbabwe in the 1970s to the cowering puppy in 2003 slapped around by Western interests is a precipitate drop brought about in large part by the debt noose. A debtor is by definition the master of his creditor, subject to his every whim.

Nor will Western creditors take seriously the case for debt 'forgiveness' when key actors in the present PDP government are still looting the treasury with impunity. Those who aspire to take their case to Equity's court must wash their hands clean. Those best placed to make a case for debt forgiveness, minus a handful of the finance minister's ilk, have soiled hands. Worse, they are election riggers who are not taken seriously by thinking Nigerians.

Negotiators for the Western creditor banks and countries know this only too well, and shall keep tightening the noose and bleeding Nigeria dry in the name of 'debt-servicing,' secure in the knowledge that Nigeria's governing class will be unable to do anything about this.

Ideological purists like Kalu Idika Kalu and Olu Falae, led by a self serving General Babangida and his World Bank accomplices, took Nigeria into the SAP ditch in 1986. Seventeen years later the health and educational sectors have collapsed, agriculture is comatose, industry is performing far below installed capacity, and illiteracy, poverty and disease have flowered most luxuriantly.

If there is a powerful argument against the IMF and its structural adjustment elixir, it is Nigeria and the other African countries that swallowed this dubious medicine and came down with stomach upset.

Claude Ake's book, Democracy and Development in Africa, is a withering critique of the SAP project. The counter-response at the time was that Claude Ake was an 'unreconstructed Marxist' living in cloud cuckoo land. Now Ake's central arguments have been taken up by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in Economics, former Clinton adviser, and former World Bank insider, in his barn-stormer, Globalisation and Its Discontents; arguments reiterated in his latest book, The Roaring Nineties.

The Cancun talks have collapsed. The World Trade Organisation is on life-support. The World Bank and the IMF and their death-dispensing policies in the southern hemisphere are widely vilified. They stand discredited in Nigeria.

These, clearly, are turbulent times. Old shibboleths no longer suffice. Bold new thinking is required in our country more now than ever before, for the simple reason that the country is dangling on the precipice. Unfortunately we have at the present moment an election-rigging political leadership, wedded to authoritarian and centralized rule, to contend with. Worse, it suffers a deficit of civic virtue and intellectual rigour.