Category: Sanya Oni

It couldn’t get more bizarre – and interesting – that two of the apex court justices currently in the eye of the corruption storm have literally been singing as if determined to bring the roof down on selves and just about everyone. First it was Justice John Okoro, who on Tuesday last week fired a letter to the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Mahmud Mohammed. The letter dated October 17, leaked to the media moments after, accused Rotimi Amaechi, former Rivers Governor and current minister of transportation of being behind his travails. His problems, he claimed in the letter, stemmed from his refusal to help the Amaechi fix the apex court judgment in the Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Abia states’ election cases.

Rather than being exculpatory as one might expect in the circumstance, the letter  would seem perfect, tailored to draw blood: “I strongly believe that my travail is not unconnected with the verbal report I made to you on February 1, 2016, about the visit to my official residence by H/E Rotimi Amaechi, former Governor of Rivers State, and now Minister of Transportation…In that report, I told you my Lord that Mr. Amaechi said the President of Nigeria and the All Progressives Congress mandated him to inform me that they must win their election appeals in Rivers State, Akwa Ibom and Abia states at all costs.”

The judge would also finger Umana Okon Umana, the APC gubernatorial candidate for Akwa Ibom in another nocturnal visit, again, for the same mission of judicial subversion.

Next to break the dam was his ‘co-accused’ on the apex bench, Sylvester Ngwuta. Forty-eight hours after his brother justice released his ‘satanic verses’, he fired his own well-timed canon: Amaechi, he wrote, also sought his help to make the Supreme Court to set aside the election of Ayodele Fayose, to pave the way for another election to enable his friend, Kayode Fayemi (Minister of Solid Mineral and Steel Development), contest the poll again.  Again, he added that Amaechi claimed he was acting at the behest of his boss, President Muhammadu Buhari. The judge also accused Ogbonnaya Onu, minister of Science and Technology of seeking his help to sway the Court of Appeal’s decision on Ebonyi State governorship election matter.

Whoever said that the nation’s judicial establishment would remain the same after the on-going saga must be kidding. For while the thrills, the intrigues and the suspense would make for an interesting thriller, we must see the latest development as marking the final rite of despoliation by those sworn to the duty of maintaining the ethical and spiritual balance of the nation’s judicial establishment.

Let me clear, much as the revelations about judges’ residences being turned to Bureau de Change are ordinarily troubling, no one has dared to suggest that the accused justices are guilty at this point.

So it goes also to the point that their quarries, the politicians whom we so much love to hate, have also not been found complicit in the crime of subversion. However, while those are for the investigating agencies and ultimately the courts to decide, if they ever will, it would seem that the justices, in electing to cast away restraint in their indignation, may have thrown a dart more lethal into the heart of the justice system than the agencies being accused of hounding their esteemed institution could have done; and so have unwittingly raised questions about the quality of the individuals invested with the judicial aura and authority.

Of course, Nigeria has never been anything other than a strange country. A country where a citizen defence when caught for a crime is that others who did the same in the past are walking free; where an accused will rather spend a fortune not to clear his name but to frustrate trial!

Before now, we thought that such routes were the exclusive preserve of our politicians; we are however finally finding out that our esteemed justices have not been inoculated against the lethal virus! Aside every other thing, it is certainly a new thing that judges ordinarily trained to be taciturn would elect to sing like a canary.

Short of offering what could plausibly be described as defence, what the justices did vide their averments that the CJN was privy to the alleged attempt to bribe them to subvert the cause of justice, was to literally throw their principal under a moving trailer!

How?

Here is what the law – the ICPC Act 2000, says in section 23: sub sections (1), (2), (3).

23(1) Any public officer to whom any gratification is given, promised, or offered, in contravention of any provision of this Act, shall report such gift, promise or offer together with the name, if known, of the person who gave, promised or offered such gratification to him to the nearest officer of the commission or police officer.

(2) Any person  from gratification has been solicited or obtained, or from whom an attempt has been made to obtain such gratification, in contravention of any provision of this Act, shall at the earliest opportunity thereafter, report such soliciting or obtaining, or attempt to obtain the gratification together with the name, if known, or a true and full description of the said person who solicited, or obtained, or attempted to obtain the gratification from him, to the nearest officer of the commission or police officer.

(3) Any person who fails, without reasonable excuse, to  comply with subsections (1) and (2) shall be guilty of an offense and shall on conviction be liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred thousand Naira or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or both fine and imprisonment.

By the account of the judges, the CJN was duly informed of the alleged bribe as well as the nocturnal visitation by the parties. Nothing in the letter however suggested that the justices reported the inducements to the security agencies as the law required. The best we could glean from the letters is the statement that his lordship – their principal – was not only informed, but that he also admitted that similar pressures were being brought to bear on other justices sitting over electoral cases!

While it remains their words as against those being accused of inducing them to break their judicial oath, the statement is hardly ennobling, coming several months after, and only after the DSS went after them. Not only does it render their account less than credible, it makes the CJN an accessory to the crime. That is how messy things can get.

Don’t ask me where all of these will end? Truth is, I don’t know. What I do know is that things will never be the same – ever.

 

If anyone still needed evidence on how still deeply troubled the financial services sector is, one only needs to grab a copy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s June 2016 edition  Financial Systems Report for a first hand report on the status of a sector that continues to play the laggard. Of interest aren’t just the similarities between it and the findings of the United Arab Emirates-based investment bank, Arqaam Capital suggesting a sector very much in trouble – something the apex bank stridently denies – the revelation that very little has changed after two major restructurings in just a little more than a decade ought to be seen as troubling.

According to Arqaam Capital, seven Nigerian banks are undercapitalised to the tune of N1tn ($3.2bn). It identified the banks as First Bank of Nigeria, Unity Bank Plc, Diamond Bank Plc, Skye Bank Plc, FCMB Group Plc, Sterling Bank Plc and Fidelity Bank Plc. Two others, Unity and Skye banks, it further claims, is close to being insolvent. In all, it averred that Nigeria’s banking industry “is experiencing a full-blown financial crisis” as failed fiscal and monetary policies had led to a credit crunch.

Let’s look at what the CBN’s own authoritative report – the Financial Systems Report says.  Under the section Key Risks to the Financial System, the report cites non-performing loans as growing by 158 per cent from N649.63 billion at end December 2015, to N1,678.59 billion at end June 2016 – taking the industry wide NPL ratio from 5.3 per cent to 11.7 per cent thus exceeding the prudential limit of 5.0 per cent. Familiar?

Oil and gas, of course remains the leader accounting for 28.77 per cent of the gross loan portfolio, growing from N3, 307.87 billion at end December   2015 to N4, 511.34 billion. By contrast, manufacturing sector accounted for 12.95 per cent of the total credit, compared with 13.91 per cent in the second half of 2015. Agriculture, forestry and fishery accounted for a measly 3.08 per cent of the total, indicating a 0.69 percentage point decline compared with 3.77 per cent in the preceding half year.

State governments, faced by the biting realities  declining  revenues, have also had their share of credit rise to N1,386.61  billion  by June end from N1,053.97  billion  at  end December  2015. This is despite CBN’s N338   billion special scheme designed to  refinance their debts,  and  a  debt  restructuring programme introduced by  the  Debt  Management  Office  (DMO),  which  enabled them restructure  their  commercial  loans.  This is also aside afresh  facility  of N90  billion  with  a  nine  per  cent  interest  made available to the states.

Nothing however compares with the revelation that top 50 obligors took between them a whopping N5.23 trillion (33.4%) of total industry credit exposure of N15.68 trillion. Needless to state that a huge chunk of this belong in the troubled category. For a country in the throes of an unprecedented meltdown and which currently have its hands full managing its fallouts, the thought of using public funds to bail out a club of unprofessional lenders and their delinquent friends would certainly pass for a troubling proposition. Unfortunately, that is what the signs of the moment suggest.

Just as the denial of the problem would seem out of the question at this time, the questions we must be asking at this time are why our banks, despite claims to have arrived at the big league, remains essentially fragile entities tied to the apron strings of a cartel; institutions that would rather play in the comfort zone of easy money than oil the wheel of national development; a club that would rather scorn the small creditor, an industry which hat has for all practical purposes has not grown beyond our traditional esusu collectors.

Yours truly has a personal testimony in this regard. Few months back, I received an unsolicited offer of a loan from a bank where my salary is domiciled. The conditions for the personal loan, never mind the fine print, were ordinarily fair enough until I started going through the motion of filling the forms which I found quite burdensome. This, I was assured, came with the territory. At some point, I was told that I needed authorisation for the bank to obtain a credit report from a credit bureau – which again, seemed just fine – hence my doing the needful. Some three weeks later, I got a call that one out of the three credit bureaux contacted by the bank found that I had an outstanding balance of N9,999 on a domestic loan I took from another bank nearly eight years before!

How can? I wondered? A loan charged to an account whose operations have remained unbroken all these years? And now one out of three different credit bureaux arriving at different opinions on the same set of bank data? Ever seen a loan applicant suddenly turn bad debtor within hours? That, I though could only be the stuff of the Nigerian wonder.

More than mere multiple ironies; first, the account in question, far from being a dormant one was not only ‘live’ as it were but had as balance an amount far exceeding the amount said to be standing to my name at the point of enquiry; second, the bank had at no point in time informed me of the existence of any debt not to talk of classifying the debt! To be fair to  the creditor bank, they assured me that the credit report could have come from Mars as nothing in their books showed that I owed a dime! And to imagine that I had to go through all of this just to be able to access a credit facility equal to one half of my monthly salary! And third, I, not my accusers, had to part with my hard earned money to prove my innocence!

And to imagine that as being my testimonial for a “relationship banking” that has spanned the whole of nine unbroken years?

My story, hardly unique, is probably one out of the many frustrations daily experienced by the bank customer in our typically antediluvian banking environment. It is partly the reason why more money is outside the banking system than in it; it is the reason the market woman in Oke-Arin, Lagos or the transporter upland has more faith in the age-long guild contributors than they have in the banks. It  explains one peculiar characteristic of the sector: the prevalence of short-term funds and with it the humongous cost of funds.

For now, we continue to indulge the big boys who do not consider themselves bounds by the strictures of obligor limits or the rules of process; the so-called top 50 who, with the regulators looking askance, would not baulk at bringing down the industry with their odious debts while the rest of us are forced to pick up the bills. That is how it has been and will remain in the foreseeable future. It is after all, their world.

 

Thanks to YouTube, I had a good time on Sunday evening watching the presentation by former Anambra State governor, Peter Obi at this year’s edition of The Platform, powered by the Covenant Christian Centre. If you subtract the hubris, the vainglory which shone through and through, the presentation comes to a fair testimonial of the sojourn of the man his admirers prefer to call Okwute in the Anambra Government House. In this, yours truly bears testimony to the former governor’s frugality when, on invitation to Awka, the Anambra State capital, I had to pay for a bottle of Fanta ordered in the hotel to down my meal because, the governor, I was told, had decreed that drinks – alcoholic or none – save water, was off limits!

His Platform outing is however not entirely a Peter Obi story. A window into all that is wrong with our polity, a stinging rebuke of the culture of waste and profligacy in our government houses and the cluelessness of their occupants in the face of shrunk national gravy; his tale essentially captures the recurring tragedy of a prodigal nation banking on bountiful harvest after eating a huge chunk of its productive seeds.

Hereunder are two takeaways from the outing that I find to be at the heart of the mess that governance has become today.

The first of course is that governance has long ceased to be a serious business in these shores. Witness the whining and moaning going across the state capitals only because oil, a sector that contributes 8.26 percent to the real GDP has gone bust under just two years. After two lifelines from the federal government, many of the states have remained practically insolvent. Not even the endless staff audit and verifications appears to have done the magic of pruning state expenditures into manageable levels. Most states, it would appear, have long given up on the possibility of raising their Internally Generated Revenue hence their unending supplication for either a rebound in oil prices or a change of heart by the Niger Delta militants. Meanwhile, in the event of inability of to think through a way out, most have elected to either kick the problem down the road or take solace in harebrained solutions that are at best placebos!

In this, the federal government does not appear to fare any better. With the economy officially in recession, the nation is at crossroads over what to do to get thing moving again. If one expected clarity of purpose and strategy at a time like this, the signals have been at best mixed. Yes, we have heard the familiar catchphrases about spending our ways out of recession; but then, it is increasingly clear that the federal government does not have the foggiest idea of how to proceed let alone where the funds will come from!

Borrowing? Yes, but from where and at what terms? Assets sale. Is it not amazing that administration could not lay out a good case for its proposal to sell national assets to raise cash? Agriculture? Whence? Industry? Where are the infrastructure and the policy support? Solid minerals? Really? Which ones?

The railways? On the pages of newspapers?

When will the federal government quit talking to start getting the job done? Again and again, we are told that the PDP brought the nation into this mess.  Wasn’t that the reason Nigerians sacked the inept PDP federal government?  When are we going to see signs that the federal government truly knows what it is doing?

Let’s turn to the second takeaway – the pervasive wastefulness – a vice that is unfortunately aided and abetted by the very institutions charged with the delivery of the public good.

Nigerians have spoken, and continue to speak of the dysfunctions of our institutions and how these inhibit the delivery of the so-called public good. Today, we know that our budgetary process is worse than a mess. Like we have seen of Budget 2016, the executive may have its wishes, the bureaucrats and the legislature will nonetheless have their way. It is a messy affair all the way.

Today, few speak of the kalokalo –that our bureaucracies have become, particularly their infinitely creative ability to spin dizzying zillions into private coffers of public actors. We would rather talk about the politicians – the tribe we love to hate only for their love of ostentation and good life. Hardly do we talk about the brood of vipers in the bureaucracy that daily suck our blood.  Yet, between our politicians who are given to boisterous living and our bureaucrats who prefer to operate by stealth, the battle for the control of the national gravy, akin to the battle of two strong men are such that both are guaranteed to win while the rest of society remain anaemic!

Still wondering where the zillions earmarked for roads and other infrastructures disappeared to? Check out the sprawling real estates with the tag Anonymous – dotting Abuja and the 36 state capitals; look out for those gleaming armoured plated SUVs – the terror on Nigeria’s pot-hole infested highways that routinely announces the arrival of the man of power to town; funny how Nigerians continue to fail to make the critical connection between their poverty and these elite indulgencies!

At 56, the Nigerian story remains one of missed opportunities. It is lamentation galore. Fifty years after the country found oil in commercial quantities, our capacity to undertake meaningful activities in the upstream has remained extremely limited; as for our involvement in downstream operations – whether in refining or petrochemicals, it has been an unmitigated disaster. The story is no less true in the power sector that has been in perpetual regression, or of the antediluvian railway contraption bequeathed to us by Lord Lugard that has been object of endless modernization programmes. All have been utter disappointments all the way. In the absence of the critical enablers of infrastructure, describing the Nigerian economy as pre-industrial can hardly be an overstatement although a more fitting description will be an acquisitive-consumptive society!

At 56, the great tragedy is that leadership hasn’t even begun to figure out the place of the African giant in the sun. It is the reason why the nation is not working – or not at work. A Nigeria where wealth comes before work. Our case is worse than tragedy.

 

 

 

Only those unfamiliar with the ways of the leadership of the labour movement will be surprised by its resort to threat of ‘fire and brimstone’ over the plan by the federal government to sell some national assets to raise cash.

Africa’s richest businessman, Aliko Dangote, it was that stirred the hornets’ nest penultimate week when he told the South African broadcaster, CNBC Africa that the shortest route out of the recession is to sell some of our national assets.

He reportedly told CNBC Africa: “We have a lot of assets to sell. We can sell part of the joint venture; part of the shares…. We also have another asset I think we don’t really need – the African Finance Corporation; it can fetch them $800million easily. My own suggestion before was that they should even sell 100 percent of NLNG. I don’t think government should be in any business of investing in sectors of LNG. A company like that, with earnings of $1.5 billion on the average, they should get anywhere between $12 billion and $15 billion.”

A week after, the National Economic Council, a body comprised of the 36 governors chaired by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, gave its imprimatur. Listed for sale are – government shares in Joint Venture Companies (JVCs),   Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG), some aircraft in the presidential fleet, and the four refineries in Kaduna, Port Harcourt and Warri.

By the weekend, on Sunday September 26 precisely, Labour –  never mind that the rank and file had neither met nor got its various organs to sufficiently interrogate the measure in the light the challenges currently facing the Nigerian economy – was literally on war path: the sale, it pronounced, is not only unacceptable, it would be resisted.

Of the plan, Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, one of two unions in the oil industry says: “The plan meant to solve short-term financial obligations is targeted at handing over our collective wealth to a few individuals and further impoverish the rest of our countrymen and women.”

And then the warning:  “Any attempt to sell these national assets will be met with stiff resistance from the association, as PENGASSAN will galvanise every support, including that of our sister union and labour centres to shut down this country by ensuring that every activity in the oil and gas sector is brought to a complete halt”.

The Trade Union Congress, TUC, on its part would let it be known that it would collaborate with the two major unions in the oil sector to ground the economy should the sale proceed because, the planned sale of the assets was ‘flawed’.  TUC President Bala Kaigama, told newsmen that had those who invested in the assets sold them, the current administration would not have met them.

Let’s be clear upfront: the debate is one that neither its protagonists nor the government can win. Not even now; or anytime in the future. It’s the same old contest between economics and populism; the wearisome, but stultifying ideological debate about national assets and what to do with them when exigencies arise. Flowing from the debate is the assumption  that public assets are sacrosanct – to be held in trust from generation to generation – even when as it is often the case, they neither deliver value as service providers nor justify taxpayers’ funds used to keep them as going concerns. Or, as in extreme cases, when the entities are left abandoned with predictable results in value depletion, the question of what to do with them has remained an unsettled one – just like Grandpa’s ancient clock that must be preserved even for its nuisance value!

We are however talking of a different scenario. One of grave national emergency – a situation in which government finances have plummeted to such an extent that it is gasping for breath making governance such a herculean task and in an environment of unprecedented infrastructure gaps.

No thanks to Niger Delta agitators’ strangulating hold on the nation’s oil production, its main forex earner, Nigeria is currently locked in a death-throe struggle to cover its import bill. At a time it requires forex for anything from household consumables to fuel to keep vehicles and factories running and to finance the war in the North-east, earnings have depleted to such an abysmal level that it is a daily struggle to keep basic governance going.

That is the context in which the Buhari administration is currently challenged to perform what is akin to magic. By this, one refers to meeting the recurrent bills; financing capital expenditure so critical to halting the recession; meeting the daily forex requirements of our hordes of importers – all of which are needed to get the country on the recovery path, at a time of serious internal security challenges.

Try as anyone might to understate the nation’s revenue problem at this time, that our country faces a threatening insolvency, is beyond deniability. By now, the illusion that the country is earning enough to meet up its bills ought to have worn off; truth is – we are impecunious!

And so while labour, like most segments of the Nigerian population, appears to appreciate the need for massive infrastructural renewal programmes to lift the country out of the morass, the irony is that the same body would rather choose to sacrifice one of the more viable policy options to expeditiously raise cash on the altar of some jaded ideology.

Labour is right in one respect: the nation has never got it right. Not on Power Holdings Company, not Nitel, certainly not the countless public entities which have succumbed to the gavel of the Bureau for Privatisation. The result is that very few Nigerians consider the entire privatisation as anything but a scam.

The mistake however is to conflate the principle with the botched process. Had labour bothered to undertake the due rigour of painstaking research, Nigerians would have had the benefit of their informed position as against the current play at demagoguery.

Let’s examine the argument against the sale of the national assets. The arguments are two-fold: first, that the country would never get fair value for the assets; and second, that these assets represent our patrimony and so should be kept willy-nilly. There is a third argument – the possibility of private power growing to a point where it not only stifles competition but is allowed to become stronger than the state.

These are legitimate fears. However, I  find none of the problems that cannot be addressed – some by legislation and others by clear, transparent administrative action! In any case, can the nation afford to surrender to the fear of the past?

So what would Nigeria lose by letting go of its ‘lucrative’ holdings in NLNG? Indeed, other than the annual payouts in dividends and perhaps the hefty allowances of its officials on the board of the company, there is pretty little else that Nigeria will miss.

I perfectly understand the confusion over ownership and the imperative of service and the tendency to conflate them. In a globalizing world where premium is placed in service as against labels of ownership, it comes to a big tragedy that the Nigerian labour movement has remained locked in the ideological time warp entirely of its own making. Little wonder it is leading from behind!

It was, no doubt, long in coming – although most people would prefer to deny the signsof a looming petrol price hike. Never mind that that the prices of domestic fuel, kerosene, and its industrial fuel counterpart, diesel, have long hit the roof. For most Nigerians, it was perhaps sufficient to pretend that the day will never come when the price of their famous product, petrol, would also answer to the dynamics of the freewheeling marketforces unleashed in the wake of naira’s floatation.

Take it or leave it – it goes without saying that the declaration by the hitherto unknown association – a body ofex-Group Managing Directors the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation – goes beyond flying of the kite;painful as their prognostications may appear to be, it is real economics.

Of course, their statement as read by the minister of state for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu was explicit as can be: “They (the GMDs) noted”, the statementwent, “that the petrol price of N145/litre is not congruent with the liberalisation policy especially with the foreign exchange rate and other price determining components such as crude cost, Nigerian Ports Authority charges, etc. remaining uncapped.”As would be expected, they also voiced their concerns with the declining crude oil production level and its consequences on the environment and the nation’s revenue as well as fears that the current situation, if unchecked, could lead to the crippling of the corporation.

We have certainly turned full cycle, haven’t we? Are theseex-NNPC helmsmen crying wolf where there is none? I certainly donot think so. Apart from being correct in their prognosis of the future, I don’t think anyone would dare to deny the picture so graphically painted given the situation in which we currently shell a whopping 40 percent of our entire forex outlay on fuel imports. Grim would in fact be an understatement in the circumstance that the nation currently finds itself.

Of course, the story of how the nation got to this point is now a familiar one. It is the story of a nation that spends fortunes to import what it ordinarily has a comparative advantage to produce. With four refineries said to have a combined capacity to process 425,000 barrels of crude daily – all of them run down, we have made an industry of living in the terrible illusion that those contraptions could somehow be made to work. If we had thought that the cycles of Turn Around Maintenances (TAMs) that straddled 16 years of PDPs inept administrations would have settled the question of what to do with the moribund entities, the Buhari administration’s policy on them has been a study not just in unexampled vacillation, but one of utter incoherence. A year and half into its four-year tenure, it remains a mixed signal – no one can claim to know with certainty the mind of the federal government on the issue of the refineries.

By the way, three months ago, Nigerians could have sworn that their nightmares in the hand of fuel marketers had finally ended. That was after the federal government finally resolved that “any Nigerian entity is now free to import the product, subject to existing quality specifications and other guidelines issued by Regulatory Agencies”.After a reportedly stormy meeting in Abuja which had in attendance the Leadership of the Senate, House of Representatives, Governors Forum, and Labour Unions (NLC, TUC, NUPENG, and PENGASSAN) in May, Kachikwu would declare rather magisterially afterwards that “All oil marketerswill be allowed to import PMS on the basis of FOREX procured from secondary sources and accordingly PPPRA template will reflect this in the pricing of the product”.

Too bad that no one envisaged the terror that would be unleashed by the crippling forex scarcity – three months after. At a time, the naira officially sold for N199 to the United States dollars, the marketers had insisted on a ‘comfort exchange rate’ of N285 – the basis of which the May template which pegs petrol price at N145 per litre was determined. Today, the same naira has since hit N420 to the USD. Couldn’t anyone have envisaged the situation? Given the acute scarcity of forex – and the near impossibility of increasing supply of same in the foreseeable future, was it a case of postponing the evil day –a scenario of we will cross the bridge when we get there?

It appears we are there much sooner than later. The situation, to be sure, is a Catch-22 situation. While the possibility of maintaining the current template and hence return to the ancien regime of subsidising petrol at a time the nation is desperately looking for funds for its programmes is would qualify as toxic proposition; the alternative, which is to allow the price to adjust to the dictates of the exchange mechanism (that is hike) in the situation of worsening poverty and unemployment is even worse.

I would agree that the Buhari administration deserves understanding in some respects. That the nation currently spends 40 percent on forex is certainly not its making. Indeed, for a nation hung on imports as a result of the myopic policies of successive administrations before it, there is pretty little that the administration could have done to reverse the tide in any serious way particularly in the near term.This is where those blaming the administration for the current travails of the economy miss the point.

It is however a different matter to suggest that the administration could not have foreseen some of the negative effects of its forex policy. After throwing the naira to the hounds, what does the government expect? That the petrol importer will to hold on to the prophecy of CBN governor Godwin Emefiele that naira will settle at N250 to the USD?

That the spike of the dollar to N420 would be a passing phase hence the expectation that patriotic importers forbear with a price freeze?Ever heard of voodoo economics!

I guess the choice ahead is tough enough without the thought of additional burden on the citizen or the requirement that the treasury pick the bill of the quantum differential from forex fluctuations. Whereas the former is guaranteed to send more citizens to their early graves, the latter will most certainly knock the bottom off the economy already struggling to wade through the bout of depression.

My opinion? I will advise that the federal government let the season roll. Yes, the experts have spoken; it is not always the case that they are right. Left to choose between a dead or dying NNPC and premature sentencing of Nigerians to their early graves, Nigerians would gladly inter a contraption that has brought them more anguish than real service.

The truth is – we are not even there yet.

 

Is this the change we voted for? Yes it is!That was Garba Shehu, the President’s spokesman’s riposte to the growing street broadsides in the aftermath of the vicious storms that have devastated the nation’s socio-economic landscape while turning most households destitute.  That the response took some 1,700 words would seem to suggest the extent to which the deeply the anguished cries of Nigerians have managed to penetrate the thick, legendary impervious walls of the villa. As one would imagine, the media, ever the whipping boy, could not escape the firing line:  “Boko Haram terrorist leader, Shekau or the pipeline vandal form the Delta region”, saysShehu, “is more likely to get newspaper front pages today than the Minister of Labour, Governor Emeka Ngige or the Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun talking about jobs creation in the economy”. Friendly fires are of course permitted!

Whether anyone likes or not, the substance of the change, as sold to Nigerians by the Buhari administration, has since become the defining question of our day. Whereas our fathers may have eaten the sour fruits, we the children’s teeth are the ones set on the edge! The story everywhere is country hard.

It must therefore be said that the presidential spokesman merely acknowledges the validity of a raging debate that goes on in every street corner at a time of terrible economic difficulties. Unfortunately, while it is also now all too fashionable to accuse Nigerians of exaggerated expectations, the penchant by hierarchs of the administration to either lapse into needless defensiveness when their policies – or lack thereof – comer under intense scrutiny, or as is now fashionable, the constant reminders about the locust years of the PDP and how things could have been worse (as if these were not the reason Nigerians elected to bring in fresh hands)would appear as part of the budding national pathology.

Is this the change we voted for? In an environment that has witnessed interminable reforms; where talks about “progress” and “strong economic fundamentals” have come to mean nothing else than deepening poverty; a land where governance activism continues to deliver at the very best, extremely dubious outcomes, the question is as legitimate as it is reasonable. It is hard to deny the reality when the signs are all too visible for all to see.

Of course, the question means no disrespect to the bold determination of the Buhari administration to turn things around. For instance, warts and all, corruption is being fought heroically by the administration; Boko Haram is in retreat although the menace of the Fulani herdsmen persists; so also is the restiveness in the Niger Delta. Clearly, I will go as far as to argue that the administration is doing its damned best to clear the mess left by the PDP’s misrule of 16 years just as I would also agree that the administration deserves more sympathetic hearing in the face of current challenges.

I say this because the problems are daunting enough – and that is putting things mildly. That is why I am often in wonder when Nigerians either talk glibly or understate the problems that are as structural as they are deep. Whether it is the hydrocarbons sector where Nigeria struggles to pump 1.6 million barrels of crude per day – as against this year’s budgetary projection of 2.2 million barrels; or the tragedy of a nation fated to spend a whopping 40 percent of its monthly forex outlay on fuel import which is not only at the heart of the current crisis but has since forced a most unproductive debate on the value of the naira; need one add the unrelenting spate of factory closures that has reduced Nigeria to a net importer of all manners of imported goods conceivable; and of course the breakdown that has brought on the fiscal paralysis in most state capitals.  In all of these, there is almost a universal rejection of the notion that a good number of the problems that the nation is currently afflicted with would take time to solve. Indeed,it is like the broad section of Nigerians actually believes that a magic wand exists somewhere to solve all of the problems at once.

The issue at stake is that these problems are hardly new. There were there in 1999; 2003; 2007; 2011; and 2015. Of course, with the way things are, there is in fact the possibility that they could again be the talking points when the electioneering season kicks off in two years’ time given that administration is yet to offer practical short, medium and long-term solutions to some of the problems after more than a year and half in office.

Worried by what I considered as denial of the grave emergency that the problem has assumed and the typically casual approach of a government that gave them so much hope at the beginning, I had tasked the administration to seek counsel from foreign jurisdictions when serious troubles loomed. I drew attention to the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States and how the Americans came up with the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to rid the country’s financial system of toxic assets. I reminded the administration of the Economic Stabilisation Act 1982 passed by the Shagari administration in the wake of the economic crisis of the 80s, and the bailout of the banking sector that cost the nation an initial N620 billion in 2009.All of these being to underscore the fact that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. That was barely two weeks ago. Today, it must come as a big relief to Nigerians that the federal government has finally come round to admitting the dire emergency and the need for such extraordinary measures as reported by some newspapers including The Nation, yesterday.

Would the measures necessarily address the problem? A lot of course depends on the content. However, to the extent that the administration now accepts that its hitherto snail-paced approach to the current problems is flawed, the sign is no doubt positive.

Which takes us back to the question:Is this the change we voted for? My answer is that we have some two years more to find out. To the hierarchs of the administration asking us to substitute the fleeting aroma for the pleasure of the fulsome broth served fresh and hot – and this at a time of rumbling bellies – I urge patience! I tell them: Let us begin to see the concrete results in those areas that particularly make living bearable for Nigerians. I guarantee them: the same Nigerians being accused of exaggerated expectations today would descend to the valley of low expectations when they see modest results delivered.