Nigeria's unexplainable wealth in the hands of few people but explainable abject poverty in the country
Opinion
By Steve Nwabuko
NIGERIA sits on a precipice of political, economic, social and physical dissonance inundated with poor leadership, weak followership, disagreeable constitution and very wry institutions that would have salvaged her from decapitation.
Nigeria is blessed with huge resources of human, material, capital, natural and creative spark but also deluded and badly drenched in bribery, corruption, malfeasance, nepotism, divisions, hatred and ignorance in the era of light and knowledge driven by technological advancements in science.
We can explain our acute, abject poverty profiles in severe decline in all known indices of development like:
Fall in per capita income.
Fall in standard of living.
Fall in the ease of doing business.
Fall in the value of the naira.
Fall in export components.
Fall in national values, ethics and morals.
Fall in patriotic zeal.
Rise in interest rates.
Rise in vandalism.
Rise in insecurity.
Rise in inflation.
Rise in oil theft.
Rise in unemployment.
Rise in criminality.
Rise in cost of governance.
Rise in systemic corruption.
Rise in ethnic tensions, divisions and tribalism.
Disappearance of the middle class.
Disappearance of honesty and humility.
Disappearance of Integrity and courage.
Disappearance of merit and competition.
Disappearance of effort and commitment.
Disappearance of truth and justice.
A country fails when it’s leadership is richer and stronger than the citizens.
It is in the public domain that a well known Nigerian politician boasted in 2019 that he is richer than Osun state and therefore must call the shots there and as it is currently playing out with the controversial February 25,2023 Presidential election.
The pattern of Nigeria’s explainable acute and abject poverty is groomed around the following contrivances and tendencies.
PRIVATIZATION
The manner in which privatisation exercise was planned, packaged, executed or discharged between 1999 to 2015, resulted in empowering the very rich and impoverishing the poor in Nigeria.
Beginning with the unbundling of NEPA, sale of ALSCON, Transcorp, Delta steel, and many other commanding assets of Nigeria were sold at give away prices to surrogates and fronts of Nigeria’s leadership who neither had the expertise nor acumen to turnaround such assets but stripped and castrated them through undue circumventions.
Rather than privatisation moving Nigeria forward by creating employment opportunities and ensuring backward integration, it took us into the dark ages of unemployment, underdevelopment, darkness and raised a new class of jet flying local AFRI-capitalists as they call themselves, without the capacity to create and multiply wealth and greatness for Nigerians.
OIL SUBSIDY
The discovery of huge oil reserves in commercial quantities at Oloibiri in present day Rivers state in 1956 has become a curse rather than a benefit to Nigerians.
After building four refineries, Nigerians in NNPC made sure those refineries never served their useful purposes.
The zeal to rake in profits into private pockets resulted in sabotaging refinery facilities to force importation of refined petroleum products from abroad.
Subsidy, being payments made to importers of refined petroleum products by government in order to regulate it’s benchmark prices at local dispensing points became a huge scam that gulped trillions in naira up to the point of becoming a first line item charge in Nigeria’s annual budget presentation.
Oil theft has the imprimatur of official negligence, fraudulence and dereliction of duty by top notch oil practitioners in connivance with security chiefs.
The very wealthy are the oil thieves who can higher vessels, tankers, pay security and sea pirates in hard currency while escaping with their oil loot.
In the past twenty years or so, Nigeria has not been able to meet it’s OPEC approved oil production quota of 2.5 million barrels per day and this has significantly impacted negatively on our earnings and caused disequilibrium in service rendition, resources allocation due to revenue shortfalls.
The receivers of subsidy payments are the rich, well connected capitalist agents holding brief for politicians and senior public office holders while the poor bear the brunt in higher prices of petroleum products at the discharge points.
Nigeria is the only country in the world where very wealthy individuals from one section of the country hold, own and manage oil wells or acreages in the name of oil prospecting leases which opened the oil industry to unmitigated unfettered foul plays by criminal practitioners.
MONETARY AND FISCAL INDISCIPLINE AND IRRESPONSIBILITY
Nigeria’s monetary policy basket is literarily confusing, momentarily disgusting, and strategically discouraging by not being able to tackle headlong issues of:
Dual foreign exchange market/regime.
Currency convertibility.
Inflationary discomforts.
Currency round tripping transactions.
Aggregate money supply.
Leakages from the circular flow.
Banking indiscretions.
Opaque monetarism.
On the fiscal side, tax management has been short changed with waivers and concessions for the very wealthy, who rather than pay accurate taxes are awarded over invoiced infrastructure projects as tax remits implying deductively, that wealthy Nigerians are rewarded for not paying taxes.
Nigeria’s monetary and fiscal policies have voluntarily dissuaded Foreign Direct Investments(FDI) because of uncertainty and extenuating risks aggregation.
Nigeria’s economy over protects and benefits the wealthy only, while at the same time consigning the poor to penury and the vagaries of deliberate policy summersaults.
POLITICAL BRIGANDAGE
Nigeria is currently running the most expensive Presidential democracy on planet earth with it’s Parliamentarians earning more in remunerations than the Presidents of global Western democracies that lend money to her.
Nigeria borrows money from owners of democracy in the Western world to fund democracy in a third world Nigeria.
A former Nigerian Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria(CBN), Lamido Sanusi Lamido, once testified at the floor of Nigeria’s Senate, that the country is using 25% of it’s Gross Domestic Product(GDP) to service the largesse of the Legislature and Presidentialism.
The overhead costs of running the Executive and the Legislature arms of government in Nigeria is higher than the combined budgets of the Federal ministries of Education, Health and Agriculture.
Rather than the Legislature make laws for the good governance of the country, they seek to massage themselves with budget padding, constituency projects claim, leadership of NASS Committees and scramble for leadership of Presiding Officers of the National Assembly through the corridors of transactional manipulations.
Nigeria’s Parliament since 1999 to 2023 has not been able to produce a clean copy of an acceptable constitution for the country inspite of huge sums expended in constitution review committee work.
Jus a week ago, the Federal government through its ministry of Aviation directed all private jet owners to *remove* their jets from Nnamdi Azikiwe international airport Abuja without questioning the source of wealth of it’s owners.
Corruption thrives in Nigeria because ICPC and EFCC have failed in stopping corrupt practices before they occur but chasing corrupt identities after it has occurred and receiving gratifications therefrom.
As President Buhari’s government begins to exit power in two weeks time with a hefty debt overhang in excess of $46 billion USD dollars, paltry foreign reserves of about $32.3 billion USD dollars, debt service ratio of about 90% of annual budget, multi dimensional poverty of about 133.3 million Nigerians and a disputed Presidential election organized by a highly discredited umpire(INEC) headed by Prof
Mahmood Yakubu, Nigeria looks set to have arrived at an ominous point of national convulsions of monumental proportions.
The competition for hosting of Nigeria’s unexplainable wealthy citizens is hinged on the tripod of:
AFRI-Capitalist Government assisted Forbes Billionaires as predators
The Political Class represented by: Presidency, Governors and NASS members as captors.
*Corrupt Civil Servants that opened the governmental systems for criminal violation by deliberate association as collaborators.
Nigeria is currently held in bondage by:Predators, Captors and Collaborators.
If the center cannot hold, the units may disintegrate unadvisedly arising from the discrepancies of bad choices and decisions made that undermined national cohesion and unity.
The non implementation of the 2014 National confab, has brought Nigeria bleeding profusely on all fronts: Economy, Politics, Security, Unity and decrepit infrastructure.
The panacea for Nigeria’s continued existence still remains full unabated national restructuring.
When Forbes Magazine begin to reel out it’s list of Nigeria’s billionaires, it did not offer insight as to how they made their unimaginable wealth that left Nigerians unexplainably poor and destitute.
That Nigeria is today the poverty capital of the world is due to official substituted criminal allocation of economic resources from the have-nots to the haves through unscrupulous policy machinations.
On total restructuring we stand going forward.
God bless Nigeria.
A.
Related Posts
The disturbing hypocrisy of media-organized award ceremonies in Nigeria
By Charles Chukwuedo THE recently concluded ThisDay newspaper awards, held in Lagos to commemorate its 30th anniversary, exemplify a troubling...
Read MoreBetween Japan’s Kaizen philosophy and Nigeria’s National Values Charter
By Temitope Ajayi TWO days after DeepSeek took the world by surprise, a Financial Times report warned that the West...
Read MorePreparing for Trump Deportation Copycats in Europe
Azu Ishiekwene I can understand if many people outside the US wish to forget about President Donald Trump and get...
Read MoreMost Read
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Keep abreast of news and other developments from our website.