Buhari gets the rebuke for saying Nigerians are better off today than in 2015

Is Nigeria better off today than in 2015

There are two things politicians do not have control over – time and history. One day, whether they like it or not, their time in power will end. Secondly, the duty of writing their history belongs to others and not the politicians.

When a politician seeks to write his own history, he only indulges in self-adulation. That may be exactly what President Muhammadu Buhari sought to do last week when in a written response to questions from Bloomberg, he posited that Nigerians are in a better place today than in 2015.

Unsurprisingly, the rebuke against the president’s comments was swift in coming. In the Bloomberg interview, Buhari had been asked how he will rate his performance in fulfilling his pledges to fight corruption, secure the country and fix the economy. “We leave Nigeria in a far better place than we found it,” the president said.

Finding Nigerians who say they are better off today is like looking for a needle in the bed of an ocean. The day after Buhari’s assertion, leaders of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry and economists countered the claim made by the President.

Chairman of the Gas Group, the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, Mr Ola Adebayo, said Buhari’s regime’s policies have not translated into positive economy growth and real sector development, insisting “we only have very good policies on paper.”

Deputy-President of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mr Gabriel Idahosa, said the reality was at variance with the claims, explaining, “the business community has been consistent in saying so. It’s not a matter of disagreeing with him. It’s a matter of looking at the facts.”

Since 2015, Nigeria’s insecurity situation has worsened, spreading from the traditional theatre in the northwest down to the hitherto quiet part of the south where killings and kidnappings have become rampant.

On Sunday June 5, 68 worshippers at a Catholic church in the sleepy town of Owo, were mowed down in a hail of bullets by Islamic militants. Between January 2020 and June of 2022, a total of 2,079 Nigerians died in mass killings around the country according to a report by Punch newspaper.

On the economic front, the situation is even more dire. Since Buhari took power in 2015, Nigeria has suffered two debilitating economic contractions that. Continue to ripple through with disastrous consequences for the people. Poverty is rife compounded by an ever-rising inflation and Nigeria is approaching a fiscal cliff with a severe debt servicing that consumes virtually all government revenues.

With no end in sight to the double whammy of soaring petrol subsidy and plunging crude oil production, the World Bank warned a week ago that a fiscal time bomb could explode in Nigeria. “Despite rising oil and gas revenues for the Federation, deductions for the petrol subsidy are causing stagnation in net oil and gas revenues transferred to the Federation Account. Many states are expected to see a drop in federation revenue transfers in 2022 despite growing expenditure needs,” the bank said.

Poverty is surging and the number of out of school children in Nigeria is now the highest in the world, with the country accounting for one in every five of the world’s out of school children according to UNICEF data.

In the two years from 2018, the country dropped three places from 158 to 161 in the Global Human Development Index, HDI published by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP and is a measure for assessing long-term progress in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living.

Nigeria is in the throes of an inflation crisis which the Economist Intelligence Unit, EIU recently said is being worsened by the country’s central bank. According to the EIU, “the CBN has continued to print money for the federal government, whose overdraft facility with the CBN reached N19trn (US$46bn) in April 2022, up from N17.4trn at end-2021.

The CBN is also operating a range of direct lending schemes for the agricultural, manufacturing and energy sectors, currently totalling about N3.6trn (US$9bn).” All these make nonsense of the apex bank’s monetary tightening initiatives.

In the meantime, prices of commodities continue to gallop with annualized inflation in Nigeria surging from 9% in 2015 to today’s 17.17%. Everyone is hurting and chunk of the country’s middle class is being wiped out.

A new report by SB Morgen, titled ‘Nigeria’s History of Inflation: A Tale of the Destruction of Value’, identified the 2019 border closure by Buhari, high import tariffs, petrol subsidy, and the current exchange rate regime of the Central Bank of Nigeria as major factors stifling supply, thus fuelling a surge in prices of various commodities which leave the people poorer.

“All of these these unorthodox policies have ensured that inflation remains firmly in the double-digit realm under the Buhari administration, while purchasing power has more than halved, wiping out large sections of the middle class,” the report said.

Read also: Numbers disprove Buhari’s claim on better Nigeria

“These policies have also seen to it that most of the institutional safeguards put in place after the return to democracy to foster responsible fiscal and monetary policy as well as put inflation in check have been disregarded and rendered redundant,” the report added.

The country’s fiscal deficit which stood at N800bn in the whole of 2015 climbed to N7.3trn in 2021.

Nigeria’s electricity grid fails more often than it delivers power and cannot in truth be regarded as a grid anymore. Homes go without power for days in Nigeria including in the capital of Abuja and the rapid jump in diesel from N145/litre in 2015 to today’s N800/litre ensures that even some of the middle class who have power generators can no longer keep their generators running.

Many Nigerians laugh at claims that corruption has been dealt a blow by Buhari. Firstly, the annual corruption index ranking by Transparency International has seen Nigeria drop from the 136th position in 2015 to 154 in 2021, a drop of 18 under Buhari’s watch.

The nation was greeted to an unsavory melodrama weeks ago when the country’s accountant general was hauled into prison while being investigated for stealing a whooping N80bn.

Experts say Buhari’s failure has been exacerbated by the collapse of the economy. In 2014, Nigeria attracted $4.7bn in foreign direct investment. Last year, this figure slumped to a mere $669m on account of Buhari’s policy options that have helped to create an unfriendly investment climate in Nigeria.

On Friday, Bloomberg which first published the president’s comments said “the out-going president may be satisfied with his performance but it is unlikely that most Nigerians, millions of whom have slipped into poverty in recent years, are.” According to Bloomberg, “Buhari’s policies such as import curbs have spurred inflation as they limit supplies of some goods, yet manufacturing is still inadequate.

The country produces way less power than it needs and imports gasoline despite being Africa’s biggest oil producer. Debt repayments eat up almost all of government revenue and the naira has plummeted to repeated lows during Buhari’s time in office.

Nigeria is home to more extremely poor people than any other country, according to a United Nations measure, and the unemployment rate has surged to among the world’s highest.”