NIGERIA: MORNING YET ON DIFFICULT DAYS
There’s no regime in our chequered history as a nation that took off with so much difficulty, squalor, privation, and disillusionment as far as the daily survival of the people is concerned than the Government of President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
To deny the above is to play the Ostrich and at the same time, contribute to the scarcity of truth and the death of collective conscience in our land.
Nevertheless, this observation does not exonerate the previous administrations’ ignoble contribution to the overall difficult conditions that we wallow in today.
But what I found disconcerting is the heaping of blame on previous administrations by the present drivers as a favorite pass time, while groping in the dark endlessly for solutions.
People are indeed hungry and angry in our land. And this is palpable everywhere you go; be it on the streets of our inner cities or the very abode of the once-average people.
Yet, what we are hearing is still the rumor of the soon emergence of higher tariffs on electricity as clandestinely dictated to the leadership by the dare-devil liberal metropoles.
It has become very obvious that every policy action or inaction of the government ends in impoverishing the poor more than the rich.
Be it the removal of oil subsidies or other strangulating Bretten Woods-induced neoliberal economic policies like the borderless floating of the Naira, the common man is inadvertently targeted and therefore, bears the brunt.
With the swinging pendulum of the prices of almost every consumable in Nigeria, which is inexplicably attributed to known and unknown economic forces, human policy errors, and international capitalists pressure by the global north, life has become unbearable for the citizens.
Even the price of bread has quadrupled since the advent of this administration. The price of flour which was N25,000 before the removal of the oil subsidy is now N75,000. The price of 20 liters of cooking oil which was N15,000 is now N55,000. The same for the price of Butter and Sugar.
This is just a randomized take on the general effect of the strangulating prices of essential commodities in the market, after subsidy removal. Yet the rate at which the Naira is depreciating against the dollar shows that we’re still in the morning of difficult days ahead.
The government must wake up to its responsibility and quickly address the rising cost of things by fiat where necessary and by economic policy decisions also.
Austen Akhagbeme, Abuja
