By Abuchi Obiora
As Nigeria moves closer to the D-day of making a choice of their President in 2023 general elections for the next four years, they are expected, first, to be able to articulate the qualities they would be needing their president to have, in the light of the subsisting general insecurity across the country, hunger, abject poverty and penury, youth unemployment and mass under employment, general distaste of the polity apathy and hopelessness of Nigerians as a result of ruined economy at the hands of corrupt and inept politicians.
From this perspective of general ruin, one would think that the most important consideration for the choice of a President in 2023 by Nigerians should be to engage a President and a team that will turn-around the fortunes of the country – a team that will address all the adverse conditions mentioned in the previous paragraph. For this reason, the slogan for every patriotic and well-meaning Nigerian, therefore, should be “who the cap fits, let him wear it” without any other considerations, including ethnicity, religion, gender, social class, political affiliation and without regard of the consequences of this general understanding and consensus to the discredited contemporary political class who have caused ruination of the country for the many decades the country has been under their watch.
Let me, before I elaborate on what Nigerians should do before hitting the bull’s eye in the choice of their President in 2023, consider some expert opinions about the economic health and social safety of the country to effectively underscore the urgency of a wise and unemotional need for Nigeria and corporate Nigeria to work again – to resurrect her from her present comatose, almost dead condition.
Recently, it was reported that the amount of money used to service Nigeria’s external debt obligations surpassed the accruable revenue by N310BN. This information was contained in a four month fiscal performance and appraisal report spanning January, February, March and April 2022. According to the report, the Federal Government total revenue for the period was N1.63 trillion, while the cost of servicing the debt was N1.94 trillion within the same period.
Giving details of the Federal fiscal transaction within the period (these details are not necessary to be reproduced here in this discourse), the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed observed that urgent action is required to address underperformance and expenditure efficiency at both the national and sub-national strata of the economy. To buttress the need for Nigerians to appreciate the urgency of salvaging the sinking ship of national economy, it is important to make the following observations.
- Nigeria paid a total sum of N598.59m to World Bank and China in 2021 for servicing external loans owed to them. The serving of Nigeria’s external loans has become the new conduit pipe through which Nigerian agents of the World Bank and the Paris Club and other international creditor agencies use to milk Nigeria dry. Nigerians know all these economic saboteurs and betrayers who use their ill-gotten wealth to marry wives not old enough to be their daughters.
- Presently, Nigeria spends 86% of her total revenue on external debt servicing, leaving a paltry 14% for the running of the country, and none for development purposes, unless, of course, the country resorts to further borrowing. This is against the backdrop of the fact that South Africa, another country obviously competing for the leadership of African continent, spend 20% of her total national revenue in debt servicing.
- The IMF (International Monetary Fund) warned Nigeria that servicing of her external debt obligations may hit the 100% mark of the Federal Government total revenue in no time, if beneficial economic and fiscal policies are not quickly articulated and executed with commensurate fiscal discipline. It is important to understand that this warning by the IMF portends that though Nigeria has all the potentials to walk herself out of economic doldrums, she may soon run into bankruptcy, becoming insolvent, if necessary and proper precautions are not taken.
- With a foreign reserve of $38.48 billion (May 31,2022) and an external debt burden of $40.00 billion (March 2022), Nigeria may be said to be literally bankrupt, though it may still not be said that she is technically insolvent. But this is only a fiscal terminology because it may not be long when the two points in the graph meet, considering the ineptitude of the present economic managers of the country who may have been overwhelmed with economic conditions they know not have to remedy.
Meanwhile, as the country walks gradually towards the point of total bankruptcy, individual (peoples’) economies are being riddled and eroded with skyrocketing inflation. According to the NBS (National Bureau of Statistics), Nigerian inflation rose in June 2022 to its highest level in more than five years, peaking at 18.60 percent. The NBS report for the first and second quarters of the year 2022 also recorded that the Composite Food Index rose to 20.60 percent in June 2022 in a year-on-year basis. The rise in food index, the report observed, was caused by increase in the prices of Nigerian’s staple foods, notably, bread, cereals, potatoes, yam and other tubers, meat, fish, oil, fats, etc.
The simple summary of these observations as it concerns all of us is that more Nigerians are eating less food or nothing at all (especially with the loss of living wages among the working classes as a result of high exchange rate and the increasing bank interest rate in a mono product, consuming, nonproductive economy) and this comes with the consequence of health hazards and diminishing life expectancy of a malnourished population.
So much has been written by me in the kaleidoscope before about insecurity in Nigeria, so let us just take a cursory look at one of the safety report cards of Nigeria recently compiled. In the recent report compiled by SBM Intelligence, a geopolitical Intelligence Platform and Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) released to media, no fewer than 17,363 persons were killed across Nigeria in violent incidents between 2020 and 2021. The NBS report revealed that 7,063 people were killed in 2020, while 10,366 people were killed in 2021, making it an average of 28 people killed daily in Nigeria.
This high casualty, definitely, is more than as may be recorded in a war such as is presently raging between Russia and Ukraine. But wait! That figure is only for the years 2020 and 2021. The figure of wanton killing by terrorists in Nigeria during the subsisting year 2022 (which year has been known to be the most bloody year during the almost 8-year carnage under the watch of the APC government) has yet to be compiled. The deaths recorded in 2022 included those of soldiers of different ranks including some serving Generals.
During the same period under review (2020-2021), 1,469 students and 17 teachers were abducted by the terrorists and hundreds of millions of Naira paid to the terrorist to secure their freedom. A few of them died in captivity. A yet-to-be-determined number of Christian clergymen across Nigeria also succumbed to the hot leads of the Islamic terrorists freely operating unchecked by the government during the same period.
To complicate the insecurity in Nigeria, 7,879 prison inmates have escaped from not less than 16 successful jail breaks since the present government took over the reins of power in Nigeria. The first and second of these jail breaks happened in Edo State on October 19 and 21 involving the two facilities in Edo State (Oko town and Sapele Road Prisons) where a total number of 1,993 inmates escaped, while the latest jail break so far was the Kuje maximum facility which happened on July 5, 2022, where 879 inmates escaped.
Amongst these escapees were 69 hardened Boko Haram criminals. Many of these jail breaks were known to have been masterminded by different terror groups operating freely in Nigeria, including the ISWAP, the Boko Haram and the Bandits. Many of these run-away jailbirds are hardened criminals and terrorists and their escape from the prisons only helped to complicate the security situation in the country, putting national security operatives in an endless merry-go-round of chasing criminals who had earlier been apprehended, convicted and jailed.
While all these go on, executive corruption and impunity among Nigerian elected politicians and appointed public servants has risen to an all-time high. For example, the Accountant General of the Federation was nabbed for an unbelievable sleaze of N105bn, while Sahara Reporters reported that a sum of N1.2b of Nigeria’s money was spent to buy ten state-of-the-art bulletproof vehicles for some high-ranking government officials of Niger Republic, by the Nigerian government.
The Nigerian government, through the President also gave out a donation of $1m to the Talibans in Afghanistan when that group, hitherto classified as terrorists by the international community, forcibly took over power through an internal and well-planned religious insurrection in that country.
As if to underplay the abject poverty and penury stalking Nigerians, the Federal government (as reported by Mr. Emmanuel Onwubiko, the Chief Executive Officer of HURIWA-Human Rights Writers Association) borrowed the sum of $2bn from the People’s Republic of China to construct a railway facility from Daura, the hometown of the President in Katsina State to Maradi in Niger Republic, suspected to be his Fulani ancestral origin.
The reports reproduced here point to a grave danger ahead for Nigeria and Nigerians if they should choose the wrong President in 2023, especially when looked at from the perspective of the statistics of Nigerian National Population growth. The current population of Nigeria was estimated at 214,471,307 as of Sunday March 6th, 2022 based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data. This population, equivalent to 2.64% of the total world population, was tenable when I procured this data. Estimated to hit a total number of 215,017,408 based on this UN data projections by July 1st 2022 (this has already happened), Nigeria has the highest population of people amongst the countries in Africa. The overall population of Nigeria will hit the 401.31m mark by the end of the year 2050.
The report further says that if the current indices continue to remain constant, the population of Nigeria will clock 728m by the year 2100. This means that taking cognizance of the general pattern of growth in all the countries of the world, and in reference to the figures provided by the Census Bureau of the United States of America, the population of Nigeria will surpass that of the United State of America in 2047, when the Nigerian population will reach 379.25m. In this same year 2047, Nigeria will become the third most populous country in the world.
Chances are very high that all the population projection factors and indices will remain constant for a long time in Nigeria because the major contributors to the rapid growth of Nigeria’s population are deep and longtime held cultural/traditional values derived from group ethnic customs and life style. Such issues are early marriages, exponential and high birth rate (about 37 births per 1000 people) and lack of access to family planning. Even when there is access to family planning, many Nigerians do not take advantage of it as evidenced in the lukewarm attitude of Nigerians to the international organizations providing family planning including the Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria, PPFN.
In spite of this terrible, bleak future for Nigeria, some people think that business must proceed as usual as Nigeria prepare to file out to vote in their new President in 2023. For example the unprecedented rush of many Nigeria politicians in APC to procure Nomination Forms at N100m for the office of the President was a testimony to their ingenious capacity to discover and create an unending avalanche of dubious avenues to do a last-minute scavenge of what is left of the national treasury which they have looted in the almost eight years that the government has been under their watch. But Nigerians understand the game played by their politicians when the politicians buy Nomination Forms to enable them invite dialogue from the successful candidates after the “Primaries” and either get their money refunded with interest or considered for juicy political appointments after election. For this reason, Nigerians understood that all those politicians who rushed to obtain Presidential Nomination Forms were actually not prepared to emerge as the President of the country. They were just businessmen.
By their actions during the controversial “Primaries” of Nigerians two major political parties – the APC and the PDP – these Presidential venture capitalists and political virtuosi portrayed unusual but great skills and creativity in hawkish political jobbing. They made Nigerians understand that all the wealth of the country put together may not be enough to satiate their unquenchable thirst for ill-gotten wealth.
Are these the kind of people Nigerians will entrust the leadership of an already battered country to?
It is a mockery of Nigeria and the sensibilities of Nigerians for any politician who had ever featured in the ruination of the country to present himself as a candidate to change the status quo which he had been an active part of. Nigerians must, of necessity, try out a new breed of politicians, especially from the camp of youths and the youthful in mind – the Nigerian youths who have long been neglected, marginalized and shortchanged – to change the status quo and take the country to her Eldorado.
(TO BE CONCLUDED)
ABUCHI OBIORA
FOR:
Global Upfront Newspapers
REMARK:
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