IT’S no longer news that Nigeria is in a long, dark economic tunnel. The indices are all there: unprecedented high cost of living, high inflation rate, high unemployment rate, mass poverty, factory closures and job losses, high cost of doing business, epileptic electricity supplies, foreign exchange rate volatility, hostile monetary and fiscal policies, scourge of insecurity, etc. It’s unpredictable when the country would see light at the end of the tunnel. A more purposeful, visionary and people-oriented administration should have been able to beneficially manage and overcome the variables.
But sadly, the economy, which was pretty manageable under the administration of General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd), between 2015 and 2023, took a dive for the worst following the inauguration of the incumbent President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, on May 29, 2023, when he unilaterally announced the removal of oil subsidy in the country.
Thus, from less than N200 per litre of petrol, the petroleum product immediately pole vaulted to N500 plus per litre, steadily rising to over N1,000 per litre as at today in different parts of the country. This, suddenly, impacted heavily on virtually all sectors of the economy, inflicting crushing pain and hardship on all. Later via another poorly articulated policy instrument, the President freed the local currency, the naira, from state control, declaring that its value would henceforth be determined by the economic forces of demand and supply.
Thenceforth, the naira exchange rate crashed against international currencies. From an exchange rate of less than N500 to one United States dollar ($1) in May, for example, the exchange rate began a downward spiral, and as at September 2024 stood at a hopeless N1,700 to one dollar, under President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda. What a manifest irony. The twin policy thrusts further concretized the terrible scenario that has worsened the economic and social condition of citizens.
As poverty capital of the world, available data indicates that some 104 million citizens out of about 220million population of the country live under the poverty line. That is almost 50 per cent of the nation’s population. The current administration believes it has embarked on some sort of economic reforms, which would soon begin to yield dividends. It pleaded that citizens should endure the pains for a while. The president even repeated the appeal in his Independence Day broadcast on October 1.
Ordinarily, the positive effects of the reforms ought to have started trickling down after 16 months of the government being in power but the reform belt is squeezing life out of citizens through its brutal impacts. The human, material and natural resources to radically reverse the economic trend are available in this country yet what is apparently lacking is the right governance model to harness the resources and channel them on the path of sound national economic development. In other words, governance had remained the bane of the nation’s economic progress.
Going by public comments at various forums and media platforms, there’s hardly any doubt that Nigerians are hugely disappointed by the performance of the current federal administration in the management of the economy. Factually, some sub national administrations also have their share in the poor management of the nation’s economy. Some just wait for the monthly statutory federal allocations before anything can be done in their domains. They fail to take full advantage of their internal sources of revenue.
Nigerians have wept enough over the hostile economic condition of the country. In fact, they want the horrible situation reversed, beginning from this moment. The advocated solutions abound in hard and soft copies. They include enthronement of a more credible governance structure; the incumbent has the capacity to so transform itself; massive re-jigging of the agriculture sector; strategic, practical degrading of insecurity across the country; further improvement in the energy sector.
Other measures are diversification of the economy as oil for decades had remained the focal point of the nation’s revenue earning; initiating fiscal and monetary policies that would motivate investors and tame inflation; deliberate and serious job-creation schemes for young graduates and school leavers and granting them adequate loans to start their businesses with their certificates as collaterals; making it mandatory for banks to prioritize funding of MSMEs at low interest rates; serious investment in information technology and innovations; and ridding the country of endemic corruption.
Properly articulated and implemented, it’s our view that the Bola Tinubu administration would be on the path of well-paced economic recovery and growth. We also believe that in a short while, the ongoing hardship would be a thing of the past, and by then Nigerians would have seen bright light at the end of the tunnel.
