President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
In August 2023, I published in Saturday Breakfast, a piece which I titled “Chai! Naira is running fast to one thousand to a Dollar!”. At the time, the Naira was hovering around 800 to one U.S. Dollar. There were many who reacted angrily to the piece. Some even called me a messenger of doom. In our part of the world, if you express an opinion which the leadership does not like, rather than examine the facts on which the opinion is based, you are labeled a political hack sponsored by the enemies of the government.
Four months later in December 2023, I published the following words in Saturday Breakfast: “Today, the Naira has fallen so low that you need more than N1,000 to obtain one dollar. None of those who said I was a messenger of doom, has apologised to me. Facts are facts. Please call me what you may, but I see no policy or activity in the horizon that will stop all of us from needing more than N1,500 to purchase only one U.S. Dollar, very soon”. Today, you need about N1,600 to buy one Dollar.
I am not a prophet. I am not a seer. I do not have a crystal ball. Anyone with average intelligence could have seen what I saw.
In May 2023 Nigerians were hit by a double whammy. The truth is that for so many years Nigerians have been under tremendous pressure, but since May 2023, as the poet, W.B. Yeats would say, “things have clearly fallen apart, the centre can no longer hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the people”.
I don’t care about your politics or who you may have voted for in the last elections in Nigeria. The period since the end of May 2023 has tried men’s souls. First came the sudden removal of “fuel subsidy” which overnight, tripled the price of fuel with immediate spiraling inflation. Dazed, and staggering from the effect of that policy, there came another announcement almost immediately that our foreign exchange would “float” henceforth. The average Nigerian is like a boxer hit with a sucker punch, and on his way down, gets thrown an uppercut!
Please pardon me: Where exactly did “Dr” Tinubu study his Medicine and where did he do his houseman-ship? I do not know the economist who wrote the script that is being implemented in Nigeria. Who prescribed these very-very bitter medicines that are choking Nigerians to death? Where exactly in the world has this brazen double injection of antibiotics without any vitamins and without monitoring the blood pressure or pulse of the patient, cured a sick economy and stopped the people from dying?
I am afraid to answer my telephone calls these days. Almost every call I receive is from someone with a tale of woes. “The transport fare to work is more than the salary”; “the family cannot eat because the price of basic food items has gone through the roof”; “school fees cannot be paid”; “rent is due and Landlord has increased the rent”; “my child is sick and I cannot afford the medication he needs to get well”; “My mother is very sick in the village and I need money urgently to go and see her”; “I have to get out of this crazy country but I need to pay for my visa and air fares which are out of reach”; “I was forced to borrow money from loan sharks and they are now harassing me and sending embarrassing messages to all my phone contacts”… It is endless and everybody appears to need help urgently.
Except you are connected to one of the political contraptions in the country with a pipe to government allocations or loans or you are into some illegal hustle, you are on your own. Unfortunately, I am not a politician or a political thug. I am not a government official. I am not into oil bunkering, smuggling or money laundering. I do not do kidnapping or abduction. I do not even do the common Yahoo-yahoo which a lot of Nigerian young men have been forced into. To all intents and purposes, I am OMO – on my own.
So, I lie awake at night thinking of all the stories of anguish I have been told in various telephone calls during the day. I am traumatised that I am in no position to help many of the people seeking my help. I understand that each person who calls does not know that there are many who have called before him or her, also seeking help. I can feel it that some of them hang up believing that I am tight-fisted, and I just don’t want to help. They don’t believe that my situation is not much better than theirs.
I wrote in August 2023 that this government needs a lot of fire extinguishers. I knew then that I ran the risk of once again being called a messenger of doom, but it was clear to me that Nigeria had been programmed for a period when there will be fire and fire everywhere. As hopelessness bestrides the land, you should not be surprised if before the end of one agitation, there is another agitation and another… There is no way that some of these agitations will not become violent and uncontrollable. We are not unaware of the saying: a hungry man is an angry man. There are too many hungry men in Nigeria now and we should be prepared for the great anger this portends and the fire that will follow. How many people are you going to arrest? How many people are you going to jail?
The problem is that when the choice cars your team drives are bought by the government; the fuel inside the tanks of the cars are supplied by the government; the sumptuous dinner in front of you is provided by the government; the luxurious mansions you sleep in are provided by the government and while Nigerians are in dire straits, you can fly in a newly bought Airbus fitted with every luxury money can buy, to anywhere in the world, at any time, and still earn estacode, you tend to become stone deaf and cannot hear the noise and agitation outside.
It will not matter to you that some Nigerians are sleeping at petrol stations and struggling to buy fuel at more than N1000 a liter, the same fuel that was sold for N185 a liter, just in May last year, when “Dr” Tinubu became Nigeria’s Surgeon-General and began his weird surgery on the Nigerian economy. It may not matter to you that the average Nigerian needs about N1,600 to get just one badly needed Dollar. Yes, you may not quite understand that there are many-many Nigerians suffering from malnutrition because they cannot afford even one decent meal a day. If you hear, you may shrug your shoulders, look the other way, and murmur, “they will survive”. How?
When you are protected 24 hours every day by a battery of gun-wielding police, army and DSS operatives, the tale of the crazy torment to the lives of Nigerians who do not own ordinary catapult, by kidnappers and unknown gun men, operating almost unchecked across the country, may sound like “tales by moonlight”.
My country is owing everybody everywhere. The tragedy is that the money we have borrowed is not spent on the people. It is stolen, shared and lodged in private accounts.
Some people might say, “give the president some time. Eventually, the economy will be repaired”. When? How? With this over-dose of anti-biotics?… Pray, what use is a repaired economy to a dead man?
See you next week.
