WE will do the unusual in our discourse today. We will copiously quote Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in his address to a university convocation about two weeks ago. But first the summary of what he said. He claimed in his usual unconscionable, insensitive, provocative and uncaring manner that the ‘good life’ Nigerians had enjoyed before he happened to the presidency was fake, unreal, undeserved, and contrived. He said that that life was bogus, founded on falsehood, and erected on nothing really. He said we lived the life of, to use a local parlance, 419ers. Four one nine (419) is a clause in Nigeria’s criminal code that deals with obtaining by false pretext. In other words, in the president’s full contemplation, Nigerians were all 419ners or were made to appear so until he came and removed the so-called petrol subsidy on May 29, 2023. What a man. What callousness. What a president of a people going through severe privations visited on them by himself.
Tinubu said, as widely reported in the media during the 34th and 35th combined convocation ceremonies of the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) in Ondo state: “As you are all aware, we took the baton of authority at a time our economy was nose-diving as a result of heavy debts from fuel and Dollar subsidies. The subsidies were meant to support the poor and make life better for all Nigerians. We are all aware of the fact that the poor and average Nigerians were the sufferers of what was supposed to give them succour and improved standard of living. Unfortunately, the good life we (other Nigerians really) thought we (they) were living was a fake one that was capable of leading to a total collapse unless drastic efforts were urgently taken. The need to salvage the future of our children, and bring the country back from the brink of collapse necessitated the strategic (thoughtless) decisions to remove the fuel subsidy and also unify the exchange rate”. ‘Unify the exchange rate’ was an euphemism for what has turned out to be the current and sustained devaluation of the Naira. But as we write the Naira is gaining in value due largely to the recently issued Euro bond (yet another debt) which was made attractive by high coupon rates offered to ‘hot money’ and volatile foreign portfolio investors (FPIs); the new mechanism introduced by the central bank for FX traders (usually banks); and, the influx of dollars from diaspora Nigerians who are home for the Christmas and New Year celebrations.
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For a start here’s the immediate fallout of the regime’s claim about securing the future of Nigerian children. Recently there was a report that a consultant in one of Nigeria’s foremost teaching hospitals had raised an alarm that many children in our country were presenting with kwashiorkor. In 2024? Damn it! This is not only a national embarrassment but a grave national disaster. There has been no time since the Nigeria -Biafra civil war that kwashiorkor had posed a clear and present danger to the country than today. And this is all down to Tinubu’s economic ‘rescue mission’ and Renewed Hope mantra. For our casual information kwashiorkor is a disease that affects children who don’t have access to enough protein in their meals. Its early symptoms include but are not limited to fatigue, irritability, lethargy, growth retardation, loss of muscle mass, swelling and severely eroded immunity which makes room for other opportunistic diseases to strike. I saw this image live as a child in the defunct Republic of Biafra in the late 1960s. The legs of a kwashiorkor victim look like tiny sticks and s/he presents a protruded stomach which is filled with rotten gas. There are exceptions but generally kwashiorkor leads to poor brain development and low IQ, that’s, if the child survives.
The frightening dimension is that the findings claim that the outbreak of kwashiorkor is across all the zones of the country. It has to be said, no matter how offensive our current rulers may consider it, that the prevailing outbreak of kwashiorkor in this country is a direct result of the pervasive hunger situation which now borders on starvation. And this is down to the grossly misguided economic policies of the All Progressives Congress (APC), and Tinubu. If Nigerians lose their children to death through kwashiorkor or stunted growth in body and IQ, then the claim by the extant regime that it is fighting to secure the future of the country becomes questionable. Whose future? And for whom? It has to be stated that kwashiorkor is not an infectious disease, and so it can be arrested and reversed within weeks with diets that are rich in protein and sundry wholesome foods. Even before the kwashiorkor story broke UNICEF had revealed that “around 11 million children in Nigeria, or one in every three children under five years of age”, were “experiencing severe child food poverty, making them up to 50% more likely to experience wasting, a life – threatening form of malnutrition”. (Apparently UNICEF restrained itself from using the word kwashiorkor). But how can the prevailing food insecurity situation and the attendant kwashiorkor be reversed with a majority of Nigerian families struggling for access to basic foods. Just before Nigeria’s affliction, Maj Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, left the presidency in 2023, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) had reported that about 133 million Nigerians were suffering from multidimensional poverty. By the level of today’s suffering where two-thirds of families in Nigeria can hardly afford one decent meal a day, the Buhari era could as well be classified as being among the good old days. Certainly, the figure of the dimensionally poor in Nigeria could be in excess of 150 million people today.
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In Tinubu’s reckoning the ‘fake good life’ that many Nigerians lived before he happened on the country and yanked off the so-called petrol subsidy and then devalued the Naira would certainly include to get by the day with at least two meals that may actually have been of doubtful nutritional quality; struggle to see their children through schools and in some cases the university; acquire and dress up in modest attires; afford a modicum of potable water (a rarity before Tinubu and after Tinubu); barely manage to provide a shelter over their heads; afford transportation fares to commute from one point to the other to eke out a living; visit a drug (chemist as we know them) shop or hospital (consulting clinic really) and then be able to pay for medication and consultation; buy a 15-year-old pre-used or tokunbo car/truck shipped in from the dump sites of Europe, North America and Asia; buy an okrika (second hand) shirt or blouse that probably might have been stripped off the back of a dead person elsewhere; or to buy a coffin, not casket, to bury a dead loved one. For Tinubu and his cohorts and choristers, these were luxuries and in their own words ‘fake good life’. One illustration they routinely use to justify their silliness was that in the era of Nigerians living a ‘fake good life’, there were some people who had a fleet of cars, some of which were fuel guzzlers, who ran around town aimlessly. The people who make this argument to justify petrol subsidy removal and Naira devaluation are either being mischievous or are outrightly depraved. They could have the two maladies at the same time, anyway. How many Nigerians since the advent of this dispensation in 1999 could afford a multiplicity of cars/vehicles for frivolities? Even without the benefit of any structured study, they were certainly less than 5%, and we are being generous, of Nigeria’s population at any point in time. And the people in this class were mostly civil/public servants, their proxies, and the few rich and wealthy families in our midst. And the wealth of some of these families were linked to the pervasive corruption in government. How then could that be a basis for inflicting pains on the vast majority of the citizens.
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If the truth must be told, the people who are really presently living a fake good life are Tinubu and his co-travellers. It was the president who acquired a $150 million presidential jet and reportedly used another $50 million to retrofit it for his globetrotting. Since the country is in the throes of debt peonage, it could reasonably be argued that every dollar expended on the purchase of that bird and to retrofit it was borrowed money. In addition, the acquisition of the craft was tainted with corruption. There was no request before the national assembly. There was no specific appropriation for the purchase of the aircraft. The purchase was shrouded in secrecy. The latter-day revelation that the aircraft was bought via the service -wide vote was a glaring abuse of the budgetary system. The service – wide vote was not designed for such a purpose. Apart from the litany of abuses, what more can demonstrate living a fake good life than that the president of a country that is the poverty capital of the world had prioritised the purchase of an aircraft for his personal comfort above the crying needs in all sectors of the country? And he feels no shame travelling inside the same aircraft to visit countries from whose institutions the monies were borrowed. From the last count which was before he went to South Africa recently, Tinubu jets out of Nigeria to visit one country or the other after spending only 17 days of any given month here at home since he assumed office in May 2023. Every expert will tell you that a presidential trip abroad is akin to the execution of a big envelope capital project. Every trip involves payment for personnel in dollars, aircraft maintenance in dollars, hotel bills in dollars like the $500,000 or so that was expended on hotel bills last year in New York in barely one week, airport parking fees in dollars, among others. Now supporters of the vice president Kashim Shettima are also clamouring for an aircraft for him. Why not? Shettima’s life also matters.
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A fake good life is when the president of a country where families can hardly afford one meal a day, and where some family members would need to skip meals completely for the sake of others, will proceed to buy a car worth tens of millions of Naira for prestige purposes without qualms. The same country also embarks on buying sprees of luxury sport utility vehicles (SUVs) for the vice president, ministers and sundry state functionaries. It also spends billions of Naira on SUVs for offices that are not known to the laws of the land such as that of the first lady. Ours is a country that is said to be poor but behaves as though it is affluent. Our rulers have no conscience. If they do, their consciences are seared. They splurge money borrowed in our collective names on themselves for their fake good life. And they then turn around to provocatively project the fake good life on the rest of us. What more can better illustrate living a fake good life than splashing N21 billion to build a mansion for the vice president in a paranoid and paralyzed economy and to spend billions of Naira to renovate presidential and vice presidential vacation mansions? Here’s the debt profile as at June of a country whose rulers are spending borrowed money with reckless abandon on promiscuous consumption, and as if money is going out of fashion. Going by the prevailing exchange rate the indebtedness of our country should be in excess of N100 trillion with multilateral lenders accounting for more than half of the debt. And the creditors include the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank Group, the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), among others.
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As at last June Nigeria whose rulers live the life of drunken sailors owed the IMF about $1.61 billion; the World Bank Group $16.32 billion; AfDB $3.87 billion; the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa $4.97 million; the Islamic Development Bank $241.84 million; and, the International Fund for Agricultural Development $273.51 million. Then there are debts from bilateral lenders with Nigeria owing China in excess of $5 billion routed through that country’s Exim Bank. We owe Nigeria’s new lovers, France, about $623.55 million; Japan $52.18 million; India $22 million; Germany $115.81 million; and, commercial creditors through Eurobonds $15.12 billion. Meanwhile, Nigeria has struggled to reduce debt servicing, not repayment, from over 100% of revenue to just below 70% currently. In other words, after servicing debts and taking care of recurrent expenditures and overhead, nothing is left for capital projects which spur development. This could explain why the regime is desperate to force through its tax reform bills now mired in controversy. The implication of this situation is that borrowing is not about to end.
It has been said that people get the kind of leadership they deserve. Nigeria is a classical case in the 21st century. It has fake rulers with fake promises and fake assurances and fake policies and fake programmes. And the rulers are in overdrive to project fakery on the hapless citizens. But they will not succeed in making Nigeria a fake and failed country.
Ugo Onuoha, Veteran Journalist, was the Managing Director, Editor-in-Chief, Champion Newspapers Limited.
