An Epidemic of Downward Mobility 

ENGAGEMENTS BY Chidi Amuta

It is a sort of sinking feeling. Something like an uncontrolled slide into a dungeon down a slippery slope. You seem trapped as you descend into a hellish pit out of which you are powerless to climb out. The descent is often propelled by a force beyond your control. Government. The IMF. The World Bank. Policy makers in Abuja and other bastions of power.

Suddenly, your living standards plummet.  The things that you have long taken for granted slip out of your control and become privileged luxuries instead of casual entitlements.  You begin to learn a life style of subtractions, eliminations and substitutions. Subtract bread and replace with slices of yam; cut out butter for breakfast and do palm oil stew. Demobilize one car out of a fleet of two. Cut back on electricity consumption. Switch to fans instead of air conditioners etc.

It is time to quit cooking with gas and switch to firewood and charcoal. But someone from the government is paid to scream about climate change and deforestation. There is no need to go to the hospital for every little headache. Forget essential drugs. Just pray and hope for the best. It is time for every man to become a doctor in the house: ‘physician, heal thyself!’  Ours is after all a land of miracles. There is no need for man made medicines. Just call in the neighborhood pastor to say a little prayer and ‘ye shall become whole!’ Do not worry about what thou shall eat. Man shall not live by bread alone! Adults do not need three meals a day. That luxury should be reserved for children.

The elimination and substitutions goes on in nearly every aspect of your daily life. Beyond individual life changes, you see whole segments of the society sliding downwards. Government has changed and has introduced new economic policies. A new deity is in town. It is called “the economy”; it feeds on the things that make people happy and lives livable. The things that enabled a better life yesterday have suddenly been pulled off.  Downward mobility suddenly replaces upward mobility as the standard mode of social aspiration.

In nearly all cultures, the desire of citizens to move upwards in their circumstances is universal. We strive to move up in our circumstances. We toil so that our children will live a better life than us. In a sense, the dream of all humanity is that the next generation will, through education and skill acquisition, enjoy a better quality and standard of life than the present. In this sense, all national dreams have a meeting point: upward mobility. Details and cultural paraphernalia may differ but we all meet at the place of a better life for our offspring. The future is always a better place.

Some societies have a constant dream, an ideal that fires the aspirations and hopes of their citizens. The American dream is easily the most famous. It is best captured by ‘the pursuit of happiness’ through positive aspiration and grueling hard work. It is most graphically captured by the 2006 film ‘The Pursuit of Happiness” directed by Gabriel Muccinno starring Will Smith as a homeless salesman in search of a good and meaningful life.

In real life, the American dream remains alive as the powering impetus of the United States as the land of possibility and opportunity for those who seek it through hard work and perseverance. The son or daughter of a pauper can struggle through a life of obstacles and booby traps to emerge on the sunny side of life as a millionaire or something nearly as good. Not too many people, native born or immigrants, achieve the American dream. But they all embrace the spirit and struggle on. Hope eternal drives life’s struggles towards a national dream that fires every life.

This is why people of diverse nationalities keep trooping to America in the hope of realizing the American dream in one lifetime if possible. The material indicators of the attainment of the American dream in the lives of individuals include a good credit card, a house on a viable mortgage, a decent automobile, access to weekend grocery shopping, sausage and egg on the breakfast table and the occasional annual vacation for self and family etc. These appearances decorate a pretension to partaking in the American dream.

No one has yet defined the Nigerian dream in any clear terms. No one knows exactly what the average Nigerian kid struggling through school should look forward to on graduation. It is a blind voyage into the treacherous darkness of chances and uncertainty. To the politically minded elite, the Nigerian dream is the realization of a truly united nation that is home to all Nigerians irrespective of creed, region or tongue. To the common folk, the Nigerian dream is a place to call home, to pursue one’s quest for 3 meals and a future that is better than the present. The Nigerian dream is never an entitlement to material contentment.

The Nigerian dream in terms of social and economic life used to be the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment through education, a career path and an ‘arrival’ at a destination where every child that goes to school and succeeds ends up better than his/her parents in terms of material and socio economic accomplishments. The sun total of the aspiration of every struggling Nigerian is to bring up their children through education so that they can join the elite who possess cars, decent living accommodation, a career etc. In sum, up to the time of the civil war and soon after, it could be said that the Nigerian dream remained a certain upward mobility in which future generations were expected to far better than those before them in material socio economic terms.

The clearest manifestation of the thriving of the Nigerian dream was perhaps the rise of a Nigerian middle class. All over the country in the span between 1972 and 2007, there arose in the urban areas a demographic mass of Nigerians who could afford cars, apartments, weekend shopping, occasional holidays, bank accounts, investment in stocks and indulgence in the trappings of middle class existence. The middle class was an enrollment into a productive role in national development.

Earlier in our history, investment in higher education was the best guarantee of enrollment into the Nigerian middle class. People pursued education as a means of guaranteeing their children a slot in the emergent middle class. Of course there were other not so legitimate routes to this dream. Short cuts emerged: fraud, corruption, robbery, ritual and cybercrimes. They could earn financial and material reward but not a place among the middle class.

The success of the economic policies of successive administrations could mostly be measured by whether the youth were moving upwards or were static or were regressing socio economically. Times changed and different periods redefined upward mobility and the good life.

Easily the most noticeable upward mobility in terms of an increase in the size of the middle class was under the Obasanjo elected government between 1999 and 2007. The banking sector ballooned, access to consumer credit grew phenomenally, employment in new growth sectors- telecom, banking and financial services, oil and gas, public works, the stock market etc. Most importantly, the sudden and phenomenal growth in cell phone ownership and use unlocked hitherto hidden economic powers in the hands of multitudes in both rural and urban Nigeria (and Africa). This coincided with the period when the international slogan about Africa changed from unrelieved doomsday predictions about “the dark continent” to  an upbeat optimistic note about ‘Africa rising’ especially up to the 2010s.

 In sharp contrast to the rev of upward mobility initiated under Mr. Obasanjo as elected president, the economic downturn under Buhari inaugurated a massive downward mobility that has only accelerated in the more recent months. National debt ballooned, inflation jumped, consumer credits dried up, retail and consumption shrank, unemployment grew as businesses struggled etc. From 2015 to 2023, we witnessed a phenomenal rise of downward mobility. The middle class shrank as living costs shot up. Inflation shot up. Retail and construction nosedived as the exchange rate of the Naira to major currencies worsened more than ever before. 

In the fifteen months under Mr. Bola Tinubu as president, Nigeria’s downward mobility has entered a jet speed momentum. It is now an epidemic. On a daily basis , throngs of Nigerians are sliding out of the middle class. Multitudes are drifting into poverty. Even those that used to exist at the fringes are now at the peripheries of bare existence. In some states, schools cannot reopen for the new school year as a result of high fuel prices making busing of children to school impossible. Some former middle class parents have changed the schools of their children and wards to lower class schools because of higher school fees. Even the federal government has increased school fees in the Unity Schools from N30,000 per term to N100,000 a term. In Lagos state, boarding fees have escalated from N30,000 a term to N100,000 per term. No one has said how these higher fees will be paid by parents whose monthly wag is about N70,000!

Nigerian youth who cannot stand the gravity of spreading downward mobility have opted to flee, swearing that this was not the homeland that they dreamt of growing up in. The more elderly are fleeing also in the hope of finding places where their old age medical costs can be covered by the welfare schemes of better climes. The only jobs they can find range from morgue attendants, care  home attendants to grueling manual labour as factory hands. The favourite destinations of the japa crowd range from Canada to the United States, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirate, South Africa and even some unlikely African destinations.

Some of the youth have set out with nowhere in particular as destination. Some have found themselves stranded in fatal crossings through the Sahara desert only hoping that their voyage would lead to southern Europe. Many have died of heat and exhaustion. Others have boarded boats on a journey of no return. Many have perished in the Mediterranean, leaving no trace, trail or message. For those who have stubbornly stayed at home, a different life has been defined by minus signs. Exclude one meal. Exclude another half. Exclude hospitals and make do with across- the- counter cheap drugs from Pakistani and India.

 In the last one year, the rate at which Nigerians are being forced out of the middle class is unequalled in our history. Astronomical gasoline prices have chased many off the roads as car owners. Families that owned and operated two or more cars now make do with one. Inflation has reached 43% while unemployment figures among the young highly qualified has exceeded 4.5%. Food inflation has driven many Nigerians into an unplanned hunger republic.

In recent times, parents who manage to send their children to schools and universities are doing so in order to keep the children engaged and out of trouble. There is hardly any expectation that the children would end up better educated or socio economically better off. We are now in a precarious position in our socio-economic evolution.

We used to lament that we the middle class of today are a ‘sandwich’ generation; we served and took care of our parents in old age. We ferried our children to privileged schools now only to have little time and resources for ourselves in retirement. Now, we are paying through our noses to educate children who are condemned to end up worse off than us and our fathers! Those we were expecting to take care of us in old age are themselves likely to remain dependent on us for the foreseeable future.

This is the crux of our present curse of raging downward mobility. Undoubtedly, our epidemic of downward mass migration has unmistakable  political origins. It is inbuilt in a growing endemic culture of bad governance whose origins we know too well and whose duration remains unknown. Those who have descended from the middle class are not likely to return there any time soon. Those driven into poverty may be stuck there for the rest of their lives. The children now being thrust into poverty may be stuck there forever as more children are born into the poverty republic of the world. Everyone knows we are descending downhill but no one knows when the slide will end and whether an economic recovery is possible in our life time. 

Yet, our only hope of recovery lies in the political realm. Democracy holds the key in the hope that the periodic changes of administrations will bring forth leadership that will redefine national progress and reverse our descent into oblivion. No one knows if Nigerian democracy will eve produce leaders of vision and courage that can reverse the curse of this generation.

When in one life time, we see the lives of the majority take a nose dive downwards, something uncanny has happened. Worse still, when in spite of our most strenuous efforts the life expectations of our children is condemned to end up worse than ours, we are in a bad place. No quantum of prayers and supplications is likely to rescue a nation mired in bad governance and misrule.