[dropcap]P[/dropcap]lease, let’s be very honest with ourselves. Very honest.
You see that crap some people keep mouthing that things HAVE to get worse before they get better? I always restrain myself from throwing a rude retort to the hallucigenic proponents of such a ridiculous mantra.
They only mouth what is a face-save resignation to an anomie they arrogantly got us all into, even when sensible ones amongst us were warning that this administration has no economic policy, no economic direction and no predictable redemption in sight.
The only truthful thing I have believed in the past one year of this rut (not rot, I know what I’m saying) is that indeed the administration itself has admitted that things are WORSE under them. It’s that simple. The economy is WORSE. And the statistics prove it.
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The official statistics released Friday, May 20, 2016 state that Nigeria’s GDP in the past ONE YEAR have plunged to the lowest in 25 years! Isn’t that a record!
Add the same official figures that the economy has been contracting in the past year and is likely to officially be in recession by next quarter, then you don’t need anyone to tell you where we are and where we are headed.
When we dip into official recession, it will take us at least a decade to come out of it. 7 to 10 years. The economy they met which was the biggest economy in Africa and the 21st largest economy in the world (correct me if I’m wrong ) which had been growing at 6% steadily for the past decade, they destroyed in just one year! And what is the official mantra? ‘ Things have to get worse before they get better’
It’s a disservice to Obama to even compare his approach to the American economic turnaround to Buhari’s slow poke policies but it’s the best example I have to give. Obama won the election in his first term and as soon as he was sworn in, we never heard anything from him again about how Bush ruined the economy. He went straight to work and kept pushing stimulus packages to shore up the American economy. His mindset, apart from the legacy of his campaign promises, was that the American Economy is too big to fail. It had to be stimulated.
It’s a disservice to humanity to compare his traction in his first 100 days to ours here in Nigeria but there’s no other option. After all, we were the biggest economy in Africa as at May 29 2015 when Bubu was sworn in and the World Bank has still projected the Nigerian economy to grow by 6% in 2016 despite the change of government. That assumption was predicated on the hope that Bubu would be savvy enough to put a strong economic direction in place.
It didn’t take up to two months before the best economists in the world started scratching their heads on Nigeria.
The Dude first took six months to chill, command and control the bucks in the economy with military fiat for a brimming economy like ours and quietly refused to listen when voices were groaning that the economy was sinking under him! The fall outs of that economic ignorance is what we are suffering today.
The Worst slide to recession in twenty-five years!
I have always said it that leaders of any nation are JUDGED by history and its people by the collective prosperity of the nation and the people during the reign of such rulers. No one remembers shit about your Guy Smiley face or Wooden Expressions to governance if the people are worse off during your reign. No one. They will always remember the economic pains and pangs a leader caused them. And in present times, this is clearly the worst ever.
Some jocks will come up here to say it was caused by past governments. Rubbish. Convenient excuses. Shaka Momodu in his Thisday Column on Friday wrote that the present government got into power through elevated propaganda and were shocked that they won in spite of the lies they told during electioneering. And they know nothing else but to govern with propaganda which no one believes anymore. Their own propaganda has demystified them.
It’s very sad o. It’s very sad.
Sad that this had to happen and WORSE will happen again economically this year. Fuel prices will rise before December again. It’s inevitable. But that’s not even the big problem.
Oh….for those who think some of us ventilate because we wish those in power ill, I’m sorry for you. We speak out because patriotism demands that no one keeps silent when the obvious slide to crisis is staring at us. The other thing they ask is that I should be giving advice to the government on the way forward. Rubbish!
Didn’t this government come in with the sniggering arrogance of knowing it all? They know it all and haven’t eaten their humble pie in anyway. So let them ‘kontinu’.
If the middle class are feeling the pinch in the last and deliberate decimation of their own prosperity, you can imagine what the poor people are going through. The hunger I see in the eyes of people in cursory glances when driving on the streets is a sure sign of a pending apocalypse in this country.
‘One day the poor will have no one else to eat within themselves and they will come for the rich’
Charles Novia is an award-winning filmmaker. He is founder of November Productions and November Records. Connect with him on Facebook.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
