Dear President Muhamadu Buhari: You stoked price vectors to let the inflation genie out of the bottle and then burnt up Nigerians’ cash assets with 68% Naira devaluation starting in the last week of May,
Dear President Muhamadu Buhari: You stoked price vectors to let the inflation genie out of the bottle and then burnt up Nigerians’ cash assets with 68% Naira devaluation starting in the last week of May, after increasing pump price of petrol by 67% a few weeks earlier, to send all things up in the air - with nothing settled as yet; not even Nigeria itself; which badly convulsed in feverish price hikes, country-wide, after reeling for long under the rubble of rocket propelled grenades fired by hundreds of militias who are doubly armed with improvised explosives, and who now rampage all across Nigeria.
As news of Nigeria’s mounting horrors then quickly spread, London’s Evening Standard reported it on 7th September. A slew of foreign investors may be closing its files on Nigeria. They are put off by the way things are going awry. “Western firms can be forgiven for shying away from investing in Buhari’s Nigeria,” the Evening Standard reported, for reasons ranging from untrammelled treasury thefts to your having no clearly seen resolve to fight corruption, the paper said.
Schools now crumble in Nigeria without books as hospitals also lay bare without imported medicines - all of which can’t be bought at the current pricey exchange rate of 425 Naira to a dollar versus the much lower April exchange rate of 260 Naira to one dollar. Workers are being laid off in thousands and the casualties are nearing 4.5 million Nigerians sacked under your 15-month regime, according to some anecdotal evidence.
Those spared mass sackings are pitchforked to half salary - in defiance of anything contracts law may say on the sanctity of existing agreements in an increasingly anomic Nigeria – where besides routine beheading on the streets nowadays from mere neighbourhood spats, the Court of Appeal in Lagos division declared a few weeks ago that wearing the Muslim Hijab head-cover is superior (as Islamic Law) and it overrides any other law that any state government may enact as ‘school uniform rule’.
A false bottom for this rather zany declarative law was quickly constructed judicially and called ‘fundamental human rights’………in a country contradictorily self-described in its 1999 Constitution as’ secular’. In just under 16 months Nigeria now looks eerily strange - like a horror film - to those looking in from outside. Less worrying though is the false bottom than the implication of the Court of Appeal’s jurisprudence.
“For if Islamic Law now overrides legal regulations issued by a state government or by a legislative state assembly, what will Islamic Law not override in Nigeria in consequence of that case law precedent?”, immediately occurred to me like an apocalyptic insight.
But to be sure, Nigeria was not as much a puzzle or hardscrabble place as this; or flailing in pains all about at the time you took office on 29th May last year and pledged to deliver a praline country from inside the bitterest cusps of past thefts by government officials. Nigeria was contrarily a fragile and less horrific and much less hopeless place. So, what happened to CHANGE, President Buhari?
That’s the crux. No two broom-wavers on your APC side of the Nigeria’s party politics divide ever understood what CHANGE means from get-go. In retrospect, it would seem like a mere slogan just thrown in to replace absent thought-process inside the party. It could even be worse. For after you won the election on that abstract sloganeering you alone will now have the writ to decide what CHANGE means, since your party members were only more ecstatic by the sound of that word and mindlessly ran to town with it.
The winds can only assist a bird which already has a direction, the old wit says. Without clarity of thought on the gritty specifics of CHANGE - which should encapsulate a theory of state in ideological terms – the winds cannot assist the APC bird’s flight to anywhere at the moment. That’s why Nigeria looks more driftless; like flotsam and jetsam on the high seas, just being blown away with sea currents, and without volition or direction, in negation of the purpose and meaning of ‘government’.
Today, if it is systems-analysed for structural functionality, Nigeria is much closer to a failed state. Indeed, social scientists around the world concur on that point. Nigeria is now precariously placed 14th from the bottom of the INDEX OF THE WORLD’s FAAILED STATES. The question will then recur: ‘Whatever happened to CHANGE’? It is neither obvious nor felt. That’s why many foreign investors hiss at the cheapened Nigerian currency from your devaluation and still resist rushing in to buy up the country’s assets for peanuts. They simply don’t see a plan of what will happen next to their imported capital should they gamble on Nigeria.
A foreign investor wishing to set up a manufacturing business in Nigeria will need advanced calculators for starters. His imported dollars will firstly be converted by the bank at 320 to a dollar. The investor will then confront a new price structure on the streets where his converted dollars will have to chase mostly imported inputs at the rate of 450 to a dollar. That’s besides a different set of existential crises of non-available electricity supply plus no water running from the taps to do any basic manufacturing or even flush a toilet.
Since July 1st when Nigeria was driven by your trial-by-error government into economic recession; after two consecutive negative results from Nigeria’s import/export trade on the back of high inflation from your price vector devaluation with petrol pump price hike, now made worse by much slackened effective demand as a result of massive retrenchment of workers, and made worse still by a recent increase in bank lending rate to over 20% - in a theoretical fight against inflation – investors don’t see these reflexive and reactive actions as tantamount to a policy on how to exit an economic recession.
Truth is, without an intelligent exit plan disclosed in clear details to the public, it is par for the course Nigeria would spend several years still badly mired in this economic recession with far worse consequences for political stability.
It is in that vortex your approval rating dropped to 32% today, according to the GAIN POLL, because a beclouded leadership usually won’t inspire. That’s why Nigeria fades away from the horizon of the international community which is too busy to do a mind-reading and worry over another country’s leadership which has no direction after 15 months in office. The word out there in several European capitals is not that you are concealing your actual plans and dissembling on it; no, but that you have no plans, other than sitting on your hands and waiting for Indian and Chinese economies to rebounce and need to import more crude oil from Nigeria. The sarcasm was cutting when i heard it in a decent circle in Brussels and it resonates the same way still.
Mr. President, getting one’s country into a recession is terribly bad. That’s exactly what cost President George H.W Bush his job, especially when Bush’s approval rating plummeted to the depths where yours is stuck today. Getting into a deepening recession with a blank head and without any intellectual plan on a means of escape, is worse. You cannot be the lightning rod of a whole nation, and its sole hope of CHANGE, and still be its sole repository of knowledge on how to exit from a crushing economic depression. You can’t be all of those things at the same time and claim to be running a modern government.
One reason why the joys of electing you as president abruptly stopped is because there’s now blood on the dance floor. You alone will now have to decide if to call off the party or mop the dance floor; but either way, you’ll need spatial awareness of why bleeding occurred to spoil the party.
The point of living in a big country is to draw from the intellectual strength in one’s country. Not all persons are looking for money. There are Nigerians who prefer honour to money and will feel more fulfilled to rise to the occasion and answer a patriotic call to help push Nigeria gingerly back from the precipice of the abyss. But that cannot even happen if your government is insular and will not reply letters on policy issues, as your Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, is wont.
Best of luck to you Mr President on the intentional choices you make for yourself.
…Seyi Olu Awofeso
(A legal Practitioner resident in Lagos, Nigeria)
President Muhammadu Buhari
BY SEYI OLU AWOFESO
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