NationStates Jolt Archive

The Mubarrak Doctrine

Status Report: Nigeria remains one of the world’s most impoverished nations, with a GDP per capita in the mid hundreds of dollars and an economy still stuck in archaic Stalinist workings. However, Regent Ghosni Mubarrak and his economic advisors have devised a series of long term solutions to Nigeria’s economic woes. (These solutions are those strictly relating to economics---while certain political factors also affect the economy, they are explained elsewhere)

Debt Relief

Ever since the 1967 Nigerian Civil War turned the fledgling ex-British colony into a Bolshevik dictatorship, the Soviet Union (and later its main successor state, the Divine Russian Empire/Republic) became its main creditor. The Soviets saw Nigeria as a key ally in Africa and a major source of oil, and thus heavily supplied the Nigerian Communist regime with loans and held it afloat during its many rebellions and civil wars. After the fall of the Soviets, the Russians lost interest in Nigeria, seeing it now as less of an ally and more as a competitor in the international oil markets. Gadhafi, who had seized power in the chaos surrounding the USSR’s fall, and implemented his own brand of nationalist Communism, amazingly enough failed to repudiate Nigeria’s foreign debt. This was largely due to the presence of several KGB operatives within Nigeria, who could wreak serious havoc if unleashed (as evidenced by Mubarrak’s later coup) and Gadhafi’s intention to create a good credit rating. His economic programs had only run Nigeria further into the ground, and he required more loans to keep Nigeria afloat. Several nations, mainly from The Paris Club (OOC: Informal club of wealthy western nations <Japan being the exception> who loan out money to developing ones. Of it’s members, the US, Austria, France, Canada, Japan, Spain, and the UK have AMW representation) and any willing neighbors reluctantly loaned Gadhafi’s regime huge sums, fearing instability in Nigeria might lead to a spike in oil prices and worrying about the fate of Nigeria’s people. Now this crushing debt weighed heavily upon the fledgling Russian protectorate’s economy; the government desperately needed money to fund various recovery projects but was stuck paying off wealthy nations instead. A significant chunk of this debt was erased by Vladimir Putin, but the remaining chunks were still a crushing burden. President Ghosni Mubarrak has plead with the outside world to forgive Nigeria’s debt.

Oil

The Nigerian oil industry has been a highly dysfunctional mess of domestic Communism and foreign (heavily restricted) capitalism ever since the fall of the USSR forced Gadhafi to allow foreign corporations to invest in Nigeria. Now Mubarrak plans to completely privatize all oil industries (albeit with significant percentages of revenue still going to the government), eliminate tremendous amounts of paperwork and bureaucracy that only bogged companies down, force corporations to allow their Nigerian employees to buy a certain percentage of their stock at a discounted price, order companies to build infrastructure wherever they ran their operations. (For example, you build a refinery, you have to build a school for all the employees’ kids) Note: The oil companies responsible for Morgan’s mercenaries will be given preferential treatment, although all companies are welcome.

Corruption/Efficiency

Like many impoverished nations, Nigeria suffers from drastic and rampant corruption. In a nation where no government institution functions smoothly (and since the country was recently Communist, where the government controlled the economy, nothing runs smoothly), obtaining the most basic government services requires months of bureaucratic wrangling, thousands of dollars in bribes, and endless confusion. With lower echelons of government thoroughly ruined, Mubarrak faces a monumental task in rooting out corruption. His first step was to have Russian accountants evaluate the government’s low and mid level bureaucracy for optimum efficiency, and then fire the entire lower and mid ranks of government officials. Hiring was immediately initiated afterwards, with new employees being subject to strict tests before being admitted to the job (although they are rewarded with significant pay increases).

The overall bureaucracy is subject to constant investigation for corruption and inefficiency by the KGB and the Kargat. The Kargat mainly serve as a oversight on the KGB, since the KGB holds the most experience in anti-corruption/anti-efficiency area, from the Putin-era purges. The penalties for corruption vary, but are all extremely harsh, with the milder penalties being long terms in brainwashing camps, and the harshest being death.



Agriculture

Although agricultural subsidies are a rarity in AMW, any that still do exist represent a direct threat to Nigerian agriculture. Since over 2/3 of working Nigerians are employed in the agricultural industry, it is vital for Mubarrak to ensure that the agricultural industry prospers. Thus, the government has begun lending huge sums of money to farmers, especially those who start planting crops not yet widely adopted, lobbied for the dropping of agricultural subsidies, giving tax breaks to encourage small farmers to band together and form larger corporations, encouraging foreign investment, encouraging other nations to purchase low cost and high quality Nigerian products, and attempting to establish Nigeria as the breadbasket of the Holy League.

Land Reform

With most lands still publicly owned, Mubarrak faces a dilemma of how the land is going to return to private hands. Ideas are sought from the international community on how to resolve this problem.


Privatization

Privatization remains a sticky issue, as the initial disastrous attempts at crash privatization in Russia proved, so a hybrid system of sorts is introduced. A certain percentage of stock is sold to large, established corporations (and since Nigeria has very few of these, this essentially means foreign ones) at a higher price than market value, while another percentage is sold to Nigerian citizens at a lower one. While this might seem to discourage foreign investment, the fact remains that the cost is still relatively cheap, and the security of the investment is backed by Russian gold.

Holy League Relations (brief, I have to run)

-Increased immigration to Europe from Nigeria
-Importation of HL experts to run industries, government
-Full hand over of educational and medical institutions to the Catholic Church

OOC: Remember, the Eastern 10% of Nigeria is a Roycelandian Colony, and doing reasonably well for itself, all things considered...

The Indian National Union continues to condemn the Russian possession of Nigeria in the strongest terms, with many Unioners fearing a Holy League takeover of West Africa from its borders. Mumbai actively encourages Nigerians to "overthrow the Mubarrak dictatorship by any means possible," although so far such support does not extend to arms shipments. The rest of West Africa, though, is a different story and MoD planners have been long at work drawing-up plans to fight a potential French or Russian invasion through Nigeria. Unioners are quite resolute in their promise not to tolerate any further territorial expansion on the part of the Holy League.

Under such dire threats, the Nigerian Protectorate has little choice but to consider repudiating its (small) debts to the INU. It cannot afford to keep on funding those who threaten its very existence, after all. However, Mubarrak is keen to ameloriate tensions with the Progressives, and would be extremely reluctant to take such a drastic step. In private, Nigerian diplomats disclose that the French actions are viewed as "reckless" by not only the Nigerian upper echelons but certain elements of the Russian government as well. They confess anger at not being informed of French plans beforehand, and overall attempt to distance themselves from the French, whose piracy and ill fated Southeast Asian adventure has tainted the reputation of the Holy League overall.

Tsarist promises for aid are coming fast and hard, given all of teh progress that has been made thus far. It seems that Tsar Wingert is beginning to feel mortality's icy grip at his age and he has confided to court insiders that, "I want one of the peoples that I rule to do it to allow my rule out of love, not out of fear."

This report is unconfirmed, to say the least, but it comes on the eve of a series of promises of increased aid. The Kargat and KGB is told that rooting out corruption in Nigeria is "of personal interest to the Tsar." With that, work on that most importnat faculty begins.

As for the land reforms, it is proposed that the land is sold by the government to Russian nobles and governmental agencies, as well as the rest of the Tsarist regimes, and they will in turn simply donate it in lottery to the people of local villages. This will be a conbination of allowing the poerful families of the Tsarist regimes to help generate revenue for the nation and allowing the people to gain the land for no cost.

This could only be done with say, 20% of teh land, but the decision is yours.

Tsar Wingert the Great.

As ever the official line of the Strathdonian govenrment and the actual practises of the Strathdonian business Community are not entirely in line with each other.

On one hand the Strathdonian govenrment while not encouraging outright rebellion isn't markign itself as a nation that would be adverse to the Nigerians throwing off the Tsarist shackles. While on the other a number of Strathdonian "linked" businesses are keen to make thier suggestions of how things might be run.
Those Strathdonians operating in the area and with contacts within the Mubarrak govenrment are probabaly pushing the idea of communty ownership and buy outs of rural land and that generous mortgage rates in the region of 2-4% coudl perhaps be provided to communties lookign to purhcase thier land, companies offering these mortgage schemes would of course be willing to open local offices and pay standard business rates.

Belgrade has thus far refused to recognise the current government of Nigeria and the legitimacy of Roycelandian occupation, and, of late, has made increasingly little effort to hide attempts to contact and support opposition groups in the country or in exile. Since the makings of political disaster for the Holy League over South East Asia, the Socialist Federal Republic has abandoned policy that deployment of forces to the United African Republic should be frozen until new increases by Russia, and President Aidarov has returned to making directly confrontational addresses in the national media.

In spite of non-recognition of the current government of Nigeria, Belgrade has begun to pursue stakes in the Nigerian oil industry while the situation remains one in which, "all companies are welcome", with Yugoslavia's relatively small state oil concern, which extracts daily over thirty-thousand barrels of crude in the Balkans and refines a large part of the Federal Republic's one-third of a million barrel daily use (most of which is imported from Libya), making known its interest, however unlikely it may seem, in reference to a minority part of the Nigerian industry.