From Abraham Amah
Public Forum
I listened to Prof. Usman Yusuf, former director-general of the National Health Insurance Scheme, on Arise TV recently, where he poured out his heart on the economic hardship that is sweeping across the entire country and what he thought were 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 Yusuf and many other commentators who have toed his line of thought, I am inclined to think that certain fundamental misconceptions fuelled their positions and led them to apply minimalist approaches in deconstructing the issues, consequently, misleading their intervention paradigms.
First, the impression that it was Tinubu that “flippantly removed the fuel subsidy regime,” according to Yusuf, is false, dangerous and misleading to the point that every economic ill arising from the removal of the fuel subsidy is hanged around Tinubu’s neck. Fact is that the 2023 Appropriation Bill conceived and delivered halfway by the previous government of President Muhammadu Buhari had technically removed the fuel subsidy regime by the end of June 2023, a few weeks into the new government of Tinubu by the non-provisioning for payouts for fuel subsidy after June 2023. Would it then be proper to profile Tinubu as the poster child of anti-fuel subsidy, when every other government, from the President Goodluck Jonathan regime and, matter of fact, every presidential contender in 2023 general election had agreed in principle that the fuel subsidy regime was a debilitating drain on the country’s economy, besides being fraudulent and should not continue?
It is true that Nigeria is experiencing rising inflatio. However, any discerning observer would appreciate the fact that inflation under Buhari grew from 9 per cent in 2015 and hovered around 24.4 per cent before he left office and, today, Nigeria’s inflation rate is around 29 per cent. Thankfully, Yusuf even admitted that, in 2015, at the inception of the Buhari administration, a 50 kilogramme bag of rice sold at N7,500 but now sells at N70,000, not forgetting that it fluctuated between N50,000 and N60,000 by May 29, 2023, when 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 operatives of the previous administration under the watch of the incorruptible sherrif, Buhari, as revealed by the forensic audit conducted recently by the Yemi Cardoso-led Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) management. By 2015, when Buhari assumed office, the dollar-to-naira exchange rate fluctuated between $1/N220 and N238 and left it at exactly N780 by May 29, 2023. 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 woeful situation. That positive results have not become manifest is not a 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 rates suggest that, while Buhari was supposed to build the economy, he was busy growing inflation and his macroeconomic policies, 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 , with a potential for an uprising of monumental proportions.
The social discontent that pervades the land, leading to protests everywhere except in the South East, as 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, on some occasions, waylaid truckloads of foodstuff and, in severe cases, vendor’s food that was steaming hot on the fire and helped themselves to stave off hunger, albeit temporarily. Surprisingly, some Nigerians are wondering why this has not happened in the South East, in the midst of all the madness of hunger and frustration in the country.
The reasons are obvious. Protests are not happening in the South East because the Igbo know that anything they do is always misconstrued by government in Nigeria and they are singled out to be dealt with. The South East knows that, if it protests, the government will see it as an affront. The South East knows that, while government is overlooking protests in other parts of Nigeria, if it happens in the region, government will use all its might to deal with the people.
The South East has always been singled out in Nigeria to be punished for no good reason whatsoever. The last eight years of Buhari’s 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, 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 heights 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 road infrastructure with money borrowed from the Chinese, he left the South East out. He went ahead to implement his 97%-5% 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, even as known Boko Haram terrorists who had killed fellow Nigerians were granted amnesty and reintegrated into national institutions like the military and paramilitary organisations.
In the lead-up to the 2023 general election, 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.
The South East has experienced the worst 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 misbehave and consequently bear the brunt of state high-handedness, the person should have a rethink because it would not happen again.
The South East has become wise and would not do anything that would give anybody the opportunity to unduly descend on its people. The South East relies on its ingenuity and the resilient spirit of its people to survive.
Nigerians must understand that the present economic hardship requires rigorous, painstaking and careful planning to clean the Augean stable left behind by the inconsistent, directionless and ill-fated policies of Buhari. The present government of President Bola Tinubu is making concerted efforts to reverse the economic misfortunes 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 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 shut 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 because the region would not be anybody’s scapegoat, until the right things are done.
•Amah is vice chairman and acting publicity secretary of Abia State chapter of the
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)