Similarly, there is also the issue of assets, which in some instances, are not taken into account in the evaluation process. This practice is inimical to Nigeria’s economic growth and development. At the level of the private sector, the process remains inhuman, insensitive, callous and exploitative. There is virtually no safety nets for employees of such sectors. Thus, many of the private sector employers neither provide insurance nor social security for their employees. They do not obey labour laws and therefore sack workers arbitrarily, for good or bad reasons. Many of them do not have pension schemes. It can be deduced from the above that the private sector is a very hostile environment. They do not in some cases permit their employees to even unionize.
Thus, while inaugurating the National Council on Privatization, president Obasanjo (as cited by Kande, 2005:57) stated thus:
State enterprises suffer from fundamental problems of defective capital structure, excessive bureaucratic control or intervention, inappropriate technology, gross in competence and mismanagement, blatant corruption and crippling complacency which monopoly engenders. As a result of the foregoing, we are privatizing for the benefit of our economic recovery and benefit of life…. We are not about to replace public monopoly with private monopoly. Rather in our determination to be unyielding and uncompromising in the best interest of this country, we want to remove the financial burden which these enterprises constitute on the public and release resources for essential functions of government (2005:57).
Incidentally, the researcher is of the view that several issues can be decoded from the policy statement of Mr President. Again, the issue of morality in the entire exercise comes to the fore as in the above. The poser therefore is: If government is not trying to hand over the country to a few comprador bourgeoisie class in Nigeria as in the case of the erstwhile Obasanjo regime, how should it expect the majority poor and the already impoverished masses of the people to afford colossal capital and resources needed to acquire such enterprises? If the government was not replacing state monopoly with private sector monopoly, why would she not emphasize on private sector expansion and development of their various business empires instead of buying over those whose original owner is government? However, the presidential speech of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic can be reduced to two critical issues – those of over politicization and poor management of our national resource endowment.
Everything else within the state derives from the above (Obadan 1913). Indisputably, however, the plenary speech appears to be shielding the role of government by way of poor handling and management of state enterprises. Interestingly, however, the same government and its agencies are involved in or inextricably constitutes the Boards of management of public enterprises. So it becomes difficult to justify the position of government on enterprises failure in Nigeria (Ojo, 1994).