By Haruna Aliyu Usman
From far and near, from one region to another are gloomy faces of tired, frustrated, hungry and hopeless citizens who belongs to a naturally endowed entity called Nigeria. The story remains of one minute hope, decades dashed hopes; nothing seems to be working and questions on the lips of hapless citizens who for ages hoped, prayed and worked towards a rebirth of a country on the fringes of collapse as tears dry on their eyes the never ending journey on falsehood continues.
One wonders why the stagnation of the system continues unabated thus it poses a question of either a faulty system or faulty system handlers and no one so far has been able to provide an answer from a bankrupt nation to a false economic revival.
In my opinion , the large chunk of the blame is the system handlers whose appetite for power driven by selfishness, greed and corruption messed up the whole system leaving the poor dried.
Buhari then claimed to have the best economic team who advised him to shut our land borders to push local content with the slogan ‘Let’s eat what we produced at home’. The disastrous team also saw to the promulgation of anchor borrowers scheme where the former president sank billions that went to private pockets. In Kebbi alone, over N15 billion of the celebrated anchor borrowers scheme remains unaccounted for with nothing to show for it except the fake rice pyramids in Abuja and Kebbi.
Though the anchor borrowers gave birth to numerous rice mills but their existence didn’t help the situation because even the staple food rice was beyond the reach of the poor, faced with glaring failure of the scheme. The president recruited massive media propagandists to pacify Nigerians that soon the country will witness bumper harvest to chase away hunger, all to no avail. The pacification agenda continues up until the end of Muhammadu Buhari’s calamitous regime that left us in quandary, hunger, hopelessness and squalor.
Just after Buhari left the stage and Nigerians heaved a sigh of relief, “Ahh Buhari is gone at last” then the brutal blow came that have fractured the bones of the Nigerians who woke up with the sad news of ‘Subsidy is gone’ declared at the Eagles Square by the sitting President Bola Tinubu, though initiated and removed by Buhari but painfully removed by Tinubu without any plan for the consequences.
Certain measures lined up by Buhari government to mitigate the after effects of subsidy removal were practically ignored by Tinubu, and to make matters worst, the president in a consuming economy floated the naira, increase food import duties, removed subsidy on electricity, tighten our already shut land borders, increased taxes on goods and services and hike interest rates in banks and comfortably sits in Aso Rock to watch our economy drifting into further anarchy, pushing double-digit inflation all over the country and making life unbelievably unaffordable to the poor.
Now Tinubu is on a ride on the same road Buhari walked and came out a huge failure, the federal government under him is making huge noise on agricultural revolution in the country with pledges to release monies to farmers through the governors to fight hunger. Your guess is as good as mine that billions are going the drain through private pockets just like anchor borrowers scheme. We thus have reason to believe that our leaders won’t get it right.
Talking about food shortages means our leaders have lost touch with realities on ground go to the remotest village in the north, you will be greeted with heap of raw food as you are being approached by food vendors to woo you to buy but with a huge pocket who returned home with some mudu of rice or maize and other raw foods.
To me, no programme initiated and executed by the federal government will make any difference as long as inflation remains and the way out is to revisit the dreaded IMF policies which the president is bent on keeping despite public outcry. As far as I look, I can’t see any economic reforms the president is claiming to be doing because as long as the naira floats and food import duties remains though now suspended and yet to materialise, no reform will see the light of the day. So I ask, “When will our leaders get it right?” Only time will tell.
Usman, a journalist, writes from Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi State.