By Abraham Amah
I listened to Prof. Usman Yusuf, former Director General of the National Health Insurance Scheme, NHIS on Arise TV recently where he poured out his heart on the current economic hardship that is sweeping the entire country and what he thinks are the causes and remedies that should be applied by President Bola Tinubu to address the impasse. While I share the frustrations of Nigerians as expressed by Prof. Yusuf and many other commentators who have towed his line of thought, I am inclined to think that certain fundamental misconceptions fueled their positions and led them to apply minimalist approaches in deconstructing the issues and consequently mislead their intervention paradigms.
Firstly, the impression that it was President Bola Tinubu that ‘flippantly removed the fuel subsidy regime’ according to Prof. Yusuf is false, dangerous and misleading to the point that every economic ill arising from the removal of the fuel subsidy is hanged on President Tinubu’s neck. Fact is that the 2023 Appropriation Bill conceived and delivered halfway by the previous government of Muhammadu Buhari had technically removed the fuel subsidy regime by the end of June 2023, a few weeks into the new government of President Tinubu by the non-provisioning for payouts for fuel subsidy after June 2023. Would it then be proper to profile President Tinubu as the poster child of anti fuel subsidy, when every other government from the Goodluck Jonathan regime and matter of fact, every presidential contender in 2023 general elections had agreed in principle that the fuel subsidy regime was a debilitating drain on the country’s economy, besides being fraudulent and should not last a day beyond May 29, 2023.
It is true that Nigeria is experiencing rising inflation, however, any discerning observer would appreciate the fact that inflation under President Buhari grew from 9% in 2015 and hovered around 24.4% before he left office and today, Nigeria’s inflation rate is around 29%. Thankfully, Prof. Yusuf even admitted that in 2015, at the inception of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, a 50 kilogram bag of rice sold at N7,500 but now sells at N70,000, not forgetting that it fluctuated between N50- 60,000 as at May 29, 2023 when President Buhari left office.
At the moment, the current administration is grappling with high exchange rate occasioned by the unconscionable frittering of the forex regime by the operatives of the previous administration under the watch of the incorruptible sherrif, Muhammadu Buhari as revealed by the forensic audit conducted recently by the Yemi Cardoso-led CBN management. By 2015 when Buhari assumed office, the dollar to naira exchange rate fluctuated between $1-N220-N238 and left it at exactly N780 by May 29, 2023 when he left office. The current precipitous fall of the naira against the dollar was already in place before this administration assumed office and put in place the floating exchange rate, a desperate effort to address the already worsened situation. That the positive results have not become manifest is not an statement of failure. This administration is just nine months old and deserves a bit of time to prove its mettle.
The above figures regarding the inflation and exchange rate suggest that while President Buhari was supposed to build the economy, he was busy growing inflation and his macroeconomic policies just like his political policies aimed at causing disunity among Nigerians were artfully designed as landmines for any incoming administration and that is the result of the current climate of hunger and social discontent that has enveloped the country with a potential for an uprising of monumental proportion.
The social discontent that pervades the land leading to protests everywhere except in the South East as Prof. Yusuf rightly observed is coming on the heels of crushing and devastating hunger inspired by an inflation that does not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, religion, creed or colour. In the North and the West, several women, trade associations, youths and unorganised groups have poured into the streets to protest the hardship and hunger and in some occasions waylaid truck loads of foodstuffs, in severe cases vendor’s food that is steaming hot on fire and helped themselves to stave off hunger, albeit temporarily. Surprisingly, some Nigerians are wondering why the South East has remained silent in the midst of all the madness of hunger and frustration in the country.
The reasons are not far fetched. The last eight years of Muhammadu Buhari government gave the South East the short end of the stick and everything it did to address and redress the situation was seen by other sections as an attempt to promote bias against the North and possibly pull out of the union. If there had been attempts by successive federal governments since after the Civil War to rebuild the country on equitable terms and give every section a sense of belonging and oneness to build a Nigerian nation, President Muhammadu Buhari reversed every conceivable gain and went further to entrench a regime of hate and exclusion of the South East from every segment of the commanding height of the country’s economic, political, military and bureaucratic structures.
When Buhari made appointments into the security high command, he flagrantly excluded the South East, when he built rail and roads infrastructure with money borrowed from the Chinese, the left the South East out, he went ahead to implement his 97-5% vote equation and rubbed it in the face of the South East. When our eminent sons cried out against marginalisation they were branded wailing wailers by his operatives, when unarmed youths went into the streets of the South East in peaceful protests, they were gunned down in cold blood and branded terrorists with the backing of the central government when known Boko Haram terrorists who had killed fellow Nigerians were granted amnesty and reintegrated into national institutions like the military and paramilitary organisations. In all of these, other sections of the country were silent and enjoyed the suffering and hardship of the Igbo and nudged the administration to deal with the noisemakers from the East. Now the chicken has come home to roost and the South East is tired of wailing.
In the lead up to the 2023 general elections, the South East made attempts to take its turn at the Presidency and presented a credible candidate for the position, the whole country conspired against it and denied it yet, another opportunity to be at the helm of affairs.
The South East has experienced the worst from of hardship in the past 54 years since the Civil War ended and has become inured to the pains of hardship. To the South East, hardship has become a way of life and if anybody thinks that the South East would feather the nest of any other region and consequently bear the brunt of State high handedness, the person should have a rethink because it would not happen again. The South East relies on its ingenuity and the resilient spirit of its people to survive and we encourage our brother-regions to stop complaining and guard their loins because the the journey ahead would be very turbulent.
Nigerians must understand that the present economic hardship requires rigorous, painstaking and careful planning to clean the Augean’s stable left behind by the inconsistent, directionless and ill-fated policies of the Muhammadu Buhari. The present government of President Bola Tinubu is making concerted efforts to reverse the economic fortunes of this country and the only thing Nigerians can do is to give him a chance to deploy resources as he deems fit. What is required of everybody, including the leadership is to make painful sacrifices for the good of all.
Above all, the central government should start to reconfigure the parameters that define this union called Nigeria and look for ways to address the concerns of all sections, especially the South East which has been shot out of the political space for too long and evidently marginalised in all measures. For now, the silence in the South East would remain deafening until the right things are done.
• Abraham Amah is the Vice Chairman and Acting Publicity Secretary of the Abia PDP