Strategic consumer goods like petroleum products, foodstuffs and building materials are now imported on a regular basis. Indeed, the Nigerian economy has stumbled so much that, these days, the richest Nigerians, essentially, are those who import goods from metropolitan economies.
Things have gone so bad with the economy, so much that Nigeria seems to owe everyone, from World Bank, to International Monetary Fund, the London Club, the Paris Club, China, sellers of petroleum products, and the economy has gone dysfunctional.
Those who currently manage the economy do not seem to know if they should continue with the draconian macroeconomic, fiscal and monetary policies that they have introduced to revive the economy, or go back to the way things were. The managers of Nigeria’s economy are now at the crossroads.
Every time the economic team talks about a long-term solution being the only way out of Nigeria’s economic quagmire, Nigerians purse their lips and blow a raspberry at them.
All these may explain why, from Independence to date, Nigerians have had to constantly endure irregular electricity supply, scarcity of petroleum products, inadequate medical care, perennial strikes by university lecturers and their students, educational policies that do not meet the needs of the country, insecurity, inadequate infrastructure and so many other failures.
Many have argued ad nauseum that if government will just solve the energy problems of Nigeria by ensuring that electricity is regular and petroleum products are available, at whatever price, the economy will stabilise and the extortionate prices will abate when supply eventually outstrips demand.
No one in government seems to understand this logic or even seriously thinking about its possible redeeming efficacy. But there is hope that the wisdom of government in selling petroleum to domestic refineries in Naira may eventually bring some light at the end of the tunnel.
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However, the agents of the Bretton Woods institutions are very much around. They practically compelled military President Ibrahim Babangida to adopt the pernicious Structural Adjustment Programme that sent Nigeria’s economy into a tailspin out of which it has never recovered.
They are still lurking around monitoring the upticks of the Nigerian economy and promptly making suggestions that will reverse them in the interest of the metropolitan powers.
As if these gross economic policy and social services failures are not enough, Nigerians have to endure a political system that not only impoverishes them, but stifles their ambition and misdirects their creative energies to unnecessary social and political strife.
This aspect of the plight of Nigerians is caused by a military that imposed itself onto the saddle of political leadership in Nigeria even though they lack both the temperament and the skills necessary to successfully run a modern state. The training of the military is essentially to search and destroy.
The essence of war is that one side’s victory is equal to the defeat of the other side; a zero-sum game of the winner taking all, and brooks no in-between for compromise or accommodation. The imposition of the military’s command-and-control template became the loss of the freedom of expression, democratic ethics and federal structure of Nigeria.
The first wrong step the military took was the toppling of the civilian administrations of Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and those of the Premiers in the four regions of the country. The second wrong step was the Unification Decree of 1966 that turned back the hands of the clock from federalism and made Nigeria a unitary state.
One grave consequence of the military intervention was the Civil War that reportedly resulted in the death of more than three million Nigerians. It has been argued that the Civil War was the resurrection of the Wild, Wild West Riots that engulfed Western Nigeria, except that it was fought by the conventional armies with conventional weapons, and not the rag-tag political thugs, and was also fought in Eastern Nigeria, a different theatre of war.
The next wrong step was the splintering or balkanization of the hitherto viable regions into febrile states that are always broke and, like panhandlers, take beggar bowls to the Federal Allocation Accounts Committee to collect the monthly dole.
