When the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari launched his presidential campaign in Uyo recently, he warned Nigerians to brace up for tougher times ahead because the economy was not in any way looking up. To many Nigerians, it was a very uncharitable thing to say, especially from someone who is seeking re-election as President. Very unlike soapbox rhetoric and offering no cheering proposition. In view of people’s experience with the economy in recent times and the fact that Nigeria only recently exited a recession, the outrage expressed appears justifiable! To me however, I think the President made one of the best statements to come out of the mouth of any Nigerian leader in recent times. Before you pillory me, let me explain.
In Chinese, the words ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity’ are spelt the same way! A national recession is a crisis. What this implies is that such a season is also pregnant with opportunities. In reality, there is no such thing as a recession. Recession is a term coined by the world’s economic system to describe a situation that makes people feel forlorn, desperate, and hopelessly dependent on a system that has become increasingly incapable of sustaining them. In a recession, there is a marked shortage of material resources, especially in the area of cash flow. So, at the onset, everybody seems to feel the pinch, excluding those who saw it coming and already had their ‘migration’ strategy.
When the government says there is a recession, people with a breakthrough mindset don’t panic. They think ‘value shift’. Resources always follow value. When the direction of value changes, so does the flow of resources. The problem is that very often, when a particular value proposition has provided resources or income for a long time for a person, organization or nation as is the case with crude oil in Nigeria, there is a tendency to settle into complacency such that even when that source begins to diminish or have hiccups, a coping mechanism, rather than an exit strategy that deliberately calibrates the situation with a view to finding and following the direction in which value is migrating, is usually the focus. This results in panicky, knee-jerk reactions. This is the time when the system wants to shrink budget, increase prices, cut corners in production quality, cut personnel costs, all in an attempt to survive. Preservation, not transformation is the concern. But no man can shrink his way to greatness.
What should be a leader’s response to economic crisis? First, you must recognize that money did not disappear from the system. It simply followed value as value migrated. In any environment, the money simply shifts to where the market is! For instance, how many people read news from tabloids anymore? I doubt if there is any tabloid in Nigeria today that circulates up to two hundred thousand copies daily. Does this mean that people no longer read the news? Of course they do, but on different platforms! They would rather go online to read on-the-go and even reference old information that has been archived (isn’t that why they say Google is your friend?).
Kodak was the world’s largest photography company. It appeared indomitable until the advent of digital technology in photography. Having become a corporate behemoth, the couch potato mentality made Kodak ignore the new technology that helped the consumer to bypass the laborious process of taking photo films to dark rooms to go through a long process of development and printing. It felt that digital photography had no future. But digital photography met the yearnings of the consumer whose concern was convenience, as well as quality at an affordable rate, provided by a technology that was not only user-friendly but which put the control firmly in the consumer’s hands. In time, money moved away from film photography. Kodak became another corporate dinosaur, victim of a ‘recession’ it never braced up to overcome.
No recession is ever interminable. It only lasts for as long as the people in it are able to bring a creative solution to the problem! Recession is an impetus for the creative spirit to find expression. The story of Jesus feeding a multitude puts this fact in bold relief. Jesus had preached to over fifteen thousand people for about three days without anyone being able to find food to eat. At the end of it all, everyone was famished. It was in the desert and there was nowhere in sight to get food. Recession. One of the disciples suggested that Jesus should send the famished crowd away so that they could go find something to eat. In what appeared a preposterous, tongue-in-cheek instruction, Jesus asked His disciples to give the people something to eat. Tall order; because there was not even enough in the treasury to feed a few, talk less of thousands of people. And they promptly told Him so! Recession had brought along its next-of-kin, depression about what seemed to be a hopeless situation. Jesus simply asked them for what was immediately available. Courtesy of a young lad who had and surrendered his ‘paltry’ five loaves of bread and two little fish, Jesus fed over ten thousand people! How? The creative spirit thrives on the premise that the solution to every problem can be found in the problem; but only by those whose thinking is not conditioned by the problem but by the outcomes they seek. Jesus simply took what was available and, operating from a higher dimension inspired by the divine, used it to provide the solution required, thus putting paid to the pervasive hopelessness occasioned by the shortage. This is the stage of recovery and supply. Indeed there was such abundance of food to eat that Jesus had to prevail on the people to gather the fragments and allow no waste.
In a recession, resourcefulness, not resources, is the operative word. When people are awash with resources, they can hardly be resourceful. In fact, they tend to be wasteful until there is a crisis. The breakthrough spirit however, produces resources by a value addition that applies creativity to what already exists.
What Jesus did was unusual and unprecedented. But it underscores the fact that the thought process that produced a problem cannot be expected to solve it. In a recession, not everyone is negatively affected. While it spells pain for the majority who have settled or camped where value has migrated from, for the few who can follow the cheese (read ‘value’) as it shifts, taking resources with it, recession actually signals a period of unprecedented breakthrough.
How is this so? Every crisis generates a new body of needs. Money is the reward you get in the degree to which you are meeting human needs or solving problems for others in a significant way per time. Those who can devise ways and means of meeting those new challenges will become the nouveaux-riches, attracting money away from those currently holding it.
In a recession, the mediocre leader wrings his hands and sings a Nunc Dimmitis while asking ‘Why?” An uncommon leader squares up his shoulder and says “Why not? Bring it on”!
Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!
and then