By Olu Fasan
PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari recently constituted a high-calibre Presidential Economic Advisory Council, EAC, chaired by Dr Doyin Salami, former adviser to the IMF and, for eight years, a member of the Central Bank’s monetary policy committee, with other members, including Professor Chukwuma Soludo, former CBN governor. For a president who largely shunned economic technocracy in his first term, and who only recently appointed an entirely political cabinet for his second term, this was a pleasant surprise.
So, how did we get here? Well, given the president’s long standing antipathy towards economists, it’s difficult to say that his decision to establish what he calls an “independent body” of economic advisers was borne out of a Damascene conversion to economic technocracy. Surely, he hasn’t suddenly fallen in love with the use of technical economic knowledge and analysis to address policy problems, rather than reliance on personal predilection or…
Source: Vanguard Newspaper
