Why has Nigeria positioned herself as the headquarters of poverty? One may be quick to retort with another question: what do you expect of a people whose majority are rendered jobless but are giving birth (in joblessness) like the breed of rats called ‘eku eda’? According to a research published by Discover Magazine, rats generally, especially brown rats, are baby-making machines. While female rats can mate around 500 times in a six-hour period, brown rats can produce up to 2,000 offspring in a year. These breed of rats, with average of eight or nine babies, can have up to 22 at once. In the words of the wise, indolence generates more problems and higher costs, but it takes knowledge to tame nature’s demands. Nigeria’s current problem of high costs of living and skyrocketing prices of essential products stem from two issues: energy market and foreign exchange market activities. But the challenges arose from just a root-cause: the uncontrollable love for foreign products. For decades, Nigeria has been suffering from this very severe, chronic and incurable sickness. On her sickbed and life support, the country couldn’t forgo what is causing her death. It’s like it prefers to die than let go what is killing her: insatiable love for imported products. Even on the death-bed, her own doctors and nurses, the care-givers (politicians and economy regulators) are applying more of the poison. Surely and very soon when the sick breathes her last, both the care-givers and the poke-nosing foreign advisors, will look elsewhere for another willing entity to apply doses of their poisons.
World over, increasing costs of living are caused by rising energy costs and petrol prices, shortages of essential commodities, increasing shipping costs to countries that depends on imported products, rising wages in a depressed economy, costly imports, among others. In Nigeria, the causes of the unbearable costs of living, in addition to above, include uncontrollable spending by the government especially on overheads and jumbo allowances. When a government is spending above what they can make, it is a recipe for economic chaos. Nigeria, for decades, has been running budget deficits year after year and the lifestyles of politicians in government is full of flamboyance and extravagance in the midst of acute poverty.
Currency devaluation which is a tool to stimulate exportation was sold to Nigeria at a time the local production base was rapidly collapsing. Since the devaluation of Naira by the Babangida military regime, the country’s economy had moved from bad to worse. To further inflame the terrible policy are worsening insecurity in production communities; increasing costs of production, mounting national debts; reduced productivity, increasing taxes, increasing demands for foreign exchange, intractable forex market and unfavourable exchange rate; rising unemployment, bad economic policies; increasing price of fuel, increase and wrong public spending, endemic corruption, etc.
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Will Nigeria ever tame the rising costs of living? For this to happen, the first step is that the federal government need to immediately ban importation of refined fuel into the country (no matter whose ox is gored). So far a date is not set for importation of fuel into Nigeria to cease, the local refineries, whether owned by government or privately owned, will never work. There are too many saboteurs, Nigerians and foreigners, deeply entrenched, that are not ready to let Nigeria overcome this fuel importation malady. The importation cabal must be dismantled for Nigeria to breathe. If this is the only thing President Tinubu led federal government can achieve in addition to putting a stop to the insecurity that has ravaged farming communities, it will be seen by greater number of Nigerians as good achievements. Nigerians need to begin to ask the hard questions and also demand effective responses from government concerning Nigeria’s oil and gas industry. When exactly did Nigeria start importation of refined petroleum products and what led to it? Was it during the military regime or President Obasanjo’s 1999-2007 reign? Was that the same period fuel subsidy started? What were the roles of fuel marketers in creating arbitrage at the point of loading fuel at depots by selling allocation papers? Is it impossible for oil tank farms to shift from receiving imported fuel to receiving fuel from local refineries for export market and can’t they be mandated to shift? What has been happening to all by-products of crude meant for local consumption that NNPC has been taking out of the country to refine for the past over 20 years? Who are the people profiting from importation of refined products and in what ways can they be made to contribute to the development of local refineries?
In the same vein, Nigerians need to ask: for how long will their be country be dancing to the tunes dictated by the developed western economies whose interests are being pursued by their unholy trinity (IMF, World Bank and the World Trade Organisation)? Fortnight ago in the piece titled ‘The Oily Mess, Mafia Malta And Unbearable Effects Of The Sector Players’ Gangsterism’ I mentioned that truth be told, the Nigeria’s federal government, its agencies, the oil and gas sector cartels, even international organisations that are suggesting policy directions to Nigeria are all suspects in the sabotage of Nigeria’s economy and they are complicit in the sufferings that over 200 million people are experiencing every day. During the Senate Screening of Dr Yemi Cardoso as CBN Governor, Senator Adams Oshiomhole declared that “it is now clear after General Babangida carried out the devaluation that the naira, and the market forces can never stabilize the naira. When the West celebrate our free market, no control and so on, I am always suspicious and when they clap for us that we are doing the right thing, the state is withdrawing and less regulation at a time when nation-states are negotiating to have specific trade relationship”. His suspicion cannot be called unfounded, going by the words of Mr Femi Falana (SAN) that the federal government needs to turn its back on the policies inspired by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and that of Ha-Joon Chang, concerning South Korea’s economic development as he declares that “in relation to the developing countries, the neo-liberal agenda has been pushed by an alliance of rich country governments led by the US and mediated by the ‘Unholy Trinity’ of international economic organizations that they largely control – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The rich governments use their aid budgets and access to their home markets as carrots to induce the developing countries to adopt neo-liberal policies. This is sometimes to benefit specific firms that lobby, but usually to create an environment in the developing country concerned that is friendly to foreign goods and investment in general (Bad Samaritans, The Myth Of Free Trade And The Secret History Of Capitalism)”.
If Nigeria wants to make painful but necessary decisions to tame the increasing costs of living in a country too stunted to drop colonial feeding bottles, the citizens of the country be ready to snatch back their country from the stranglehold of the elements that are happy with the current state of the economy and its inability to produce locally and create employment opportunities for the army of unemployed working class.
Ola Emmanuel is a business planning consultant
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