Someone once said, push a ‘naija’ man to the wall, he will burrow through the wall to continue to survive. We are optimistic too, perhaps a little too much. We just see a silver lining in every cloud. E go better is one of our favourite catch phrases.
However, in Nigeria of today, most people are anxious…and I think they deserve to be. Much more than ever before, the uncertainties around our country and our economy is at fever pitch. You can’t say for sure what is wrong really, neither are people certain of what is being done in a practical sense. We go from day to day tinkering with monetary and fiscal policies; economic policies which are not clear in the first place.
Government is not telling Nigerians what the real deal is. We need to know, ‘how broke are we really”? When is money going to run out? When is government going to go completely broke? Some state governments have stopped paying salaries for a while now. Will there be a reprieve or will it all go down the drain?
Businesses are being cautious even when they spend. Employment is not the new fear, it is unemployment. People are scared of losing their jobs. How will they survive? How will they take care of the bills? Those who don’t have a job cannot see any hope on the horizon. There is despair and anger all over the place.
LIVING IN THIS COUN¬TRY IS HARD!! This is the song on everybody’s lips. People are suffering. Take home salaries does not even get you out of the office. Inflation has eaten out the value, and you are even lucky to get the salary when it is due.
It is not Boko Haram that we hate with hate with passion now, it is the price of the dollar against the naira. Suddenly, that is our new Satan! Na Dollar o! Recently the exchange rate went to as high as 391naira to a dollar! Thank God it’s come down marginally since hitting that point, but I am not sure it’s by anything special that the CBN or the FG has done. Providence maybe!
The national conversation is around how bad things are. If you tell someone the naira has fallen again, the answer is by how much? Tell them Petrol has risen again, how much?
Our economy is in trouble, how bad is it? Oil price has dropped again, how low?
Food prices are eating the roof, and that is not the only thing eating the roof. Consumer price index is sliding up. Inflation is naturally on the high side, forget what the government tells me it is.
Our famed optimism is now giving way to pessimism. Things are becoming tighter, finding a job is now an illusion, those who are working spend more time praying not to lose the job than they spend actually doing the work.
We are living in fear. Cost of living is going up, income is at a standstill even when they are still coming in. Your naira today is less than half of its value pre-May 29 last year. The man is not a man when there is instability around him.
People are getting poorer everyday as the dollar is rising… well most people. Some people are obviously profiting from this dollar minini. The round trippers, the BDC owners, the bank executives, those who have hoarded the dollars in the past… they are now making money; and most of the rest of us are thinking desperately of how we can catch up and benefit.
In this mad dash to be part of the beneficiaries of the dollar debacle, people are throwing morality to the dogs; there are still more shenanigans going on in government. Plots are getting thicker on how to embezzle even more money. The budget padding scandal is a clear case in point. One man remarked, “it is not the exchange rate I am worried about, I am worried about how to make more naira to buy the dollar!”.
We have a government in place, but the citizenry is now asking if we really do, because the economy is seemingly defying governance. Where will it stop? How will it end?
The little change in our pocket is further threatened by a plethora of taxes and levies and charges. We don’t even know how many we have to pay, and how many more are coming. Our administrators are going into the dustbins of history to remember charges and permits that were in place when Nigeria was just in its infancy- fancy someone asking for a levy on a private borehole! Every government ought at least to provide electricity, water and good road at a minimum. Our government has failed on these three fronts, and on every other front that you can think of. Before we misconstrue what is meant, It’s not the failure of this administration, rather it is the failure of every government that has been in place in this country since our independence.
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