THE countdown has began in earnest and frenzied expectations. In a couple of hours, the curtain of year 2024 shall be drawn in a ceremony of an end that marks a beginning in an interlocking chain of history fading into eternity. To many Nigerians, year 2024 has turned out to be another bad dream dotted with economic woes , tragedies and Rhapsodies of absurdities. Many say it’s been one year fraught with diverse dimensions of pain, poverty and far reaching forms of scarcity cutting across food supply, unbearably high cost of Forex, incessant collapse of power supply from the national grid, worsened unemployment challenges. Even the national currency, the Naira has become so scarce , citizens are forced to buy it at a price. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s exclamation that “subsidy is gone” in his inaugural address shortly after he was sworn in as president on May 29, 2023, represented the beginning of high degree pain and pervasive hunger that has seen citizens dying in stampedes in desperate moves to clinch on to life. In his first media chat President Tinubu has insisted that he has no regrets over the hardship in the land traceable to a jaundiced application of his economic reform policies. It has been a year of dashed hopes, punctured aspirations and frustrated expectations. Nigerians were told that with the liberalisation of the downstream sector and the coming on stream of the Dangote Refinery, the price of petroleum products will naturally come down. That was in line with economic theory and projection. The reality on ground however shows that cost of living crisis in Nigeria has become suffocating to many. Many also believe that the time has now come for the president to rise up to the occasion to address the worsening anomaly so as to save the nation from a deeper descent into the abyss of economic suffocation.
The markets for foreign exchange and refined petroleum products have been liberalised, but the nation is yet to get the desired results. The economic situation got compounded by the repeated collapse of the national power grid and unprecedented energy crisis. The national currency, the Naira has come under severe pressure due to spurious and frivolous demand for foreign exchange. In no single year did the national currency, the Naira cascade in value in a free fall that came at such a great cost to the people.
If there is only one phrase that summarises or epitomises the present dire situation of the Nigerian economy, it is the travails of the naira with unending pains to the citizens. In the last year alone, the naira has depreciated by 51 percent from N820/US$1 on November 21, 2023, to N1,679/US$1 on November 21, 2024, making it one of the three worst-performing currencies in Africa in 2024, according to the World Bank.
Partly because of the weakness of the national currency, headline inflation increased to 33.88 percent in October 2024, from 32.70 percent in September 2024, compared to 27.33 in October 2023. Many are leaving the country in droves in what has become known as the Japa syndrome.
2024 has seen our public power supply in a deepening irredeemable crisis. Instead of improving, our national power supply has stagnated in the past ten years, and the national grid has collapsed 15 times in 2024 alone and 105 times in the last 10 years. While China produces 8,839 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity (1 TWh = 1,000,000 megawatt hours (MWh)); the USA, 4,287 TWh; India, 1,858 TWh; South Africa, 239 TWh; Egypt, 201 TWh; Nigeria only produces 37 TWh. That means China produces 239 times more power than Nigeria!
Throughout 2024, security challenge in Nigeria remained high. This gave rise to displacement of thousands of citizens, especially in northern part of the country. The situation in the South East has also remained a key disincentive to investment and food production. This has further exarcerbated food crisis.
Inflation has remained disturbingly high, for an import dependent economy, many goods and services have gone way out of the reach of the average citizens. It can be crazy that you’re given a price list today only for you to go to the market the next day to be told the prices changed overnight.
Fiscal deficits remained large and growing, financed by deficit monetization from the Central Bank of Nigeria. Meanwhile the Federal Government has continued on a borrowing spree. The Tinubu administration has paid deaf ears to the public outcry on the need to cut down on cost of governance. There really can be a clear and present danger when the economic structure can no longer sustain an overbloated plofligate pseudo democracy. The Federal Government’s economic reform policies ended up with deformative impact in the year 2024. If there are no clear and definitive adjustments to the reforms, the year 2025 might see poverty and scarcity further driving more Nigerians to the limits of desperate absurdities and bizarre conducts in the bid to survive the escalating hardship in the land.
