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2016: Nigeria's Year Of Living Nervously

January 3, 2016

Darkness draped Lagos at midnight of December 31st, 2015 like a sky-flag of a failed state. Flashes of lights from petrol-powered generators in some homesteads did not lift the dismal mood of a sullen people ruing at leisure. Nigerians have lost their pursuit of happiness and only just await the wages of sin. They'd long sat on their hands when official thefts racked their hardscrabble country and soared to $150 billion over ten years to create the worst civilization on the face of the earth where ‘success' and ‘stealing' are conflated to mean one and the same thing. But now without the funds for electricity supply, Nigerians will rue for long at leisure.

Darkness draped Lagos at midnight of December 31st, 2015 like a sky-flag of a failed state. Flashes of lights from petrol-powered generators in some homesteads did not lift the dismal mood of a sullen people ruing at leisure. Nigerians have lost their pursuit of happiness and only just await the wages of sin. They'd long sat on their hands when official thefts racked their hardscrabble country and soared to $150 billion over ten years to create the worst civilization on the face of the earth where ‘success' and ‘stealing' are conflated to mean one and the same thing. But now without the funds for electricity supply, Nigerians will rue for long at leisure.

Throughout the past year, Nigeria was slick in blood. Those hard done by fought back; they maimed, they killed, and they raped. They stole too; but not so much for existential needs as to reach a false height of ‘success' set by Nigeria's phalanxes of plenipotentiaries with access to the Treasury - who stole billions of dollars now under probe by Nigeria's freshly elected President Muhammadu Buhari – whom Nigerians lately view askance for lacking in pace and verve to meet a staggering theft epidemic wrought on the country by a slew of official thieves in government offices.

"I am slow just to avoid making mistakes," President Buhari said three days ago, but his anodyne speech hardly attenuated the sorrows of Nigeria's 180 million poorish people; hedonist and unintelligent for the most part, now lost in thoughts, if not at sea, and unable find their way in the dark foisted on the country by thoroughgoing insane thefts. For the nonce and for the first time in history, Nigeria can't finance its 2016 national budget by itself. Nigeria depends on the mercy of its official thieves to return nearly a trillion Naira to balance the country's priority-muddled-up national budget. 

Without Nigeria's official thieves' compassion, about one-sixth of the country's expected funding will vanish and the country's 2016 national budget will go under water. That's a spectre facing President Buhari, who drew up this zany budget with less than 50% chance of success. "I am afraid it will take years to recover the stolen loot since Nigeria relies on foreign institutions and banks overseas for documents to corroborate those thefts before we can legally recover it," President Buhari bewailed on national television in his first media appearance, 30th December. But at snail speed, President Buhari responds to Nigeria's dreadful spectre with nostrums and oddities, including prodigal spending of ₦39 billion budgeted for his own upkeep, feeding, travels and tours, which are raising hackles in his theft-wrecked country.

Curiouser at first how an annual budget could be funded by loot recovery that might take years to complete, as he said, when so far, just about half a dozen official thieves have been brought to court for restitution since Buhari resumed office on 29th May last year. Amongst the malefactors arraigned are four state governors and one Colonel Sambo Dasuki - the past national security adviser of ex-president Goodluck Jonathan - who wangled over a billion dollars from the Central Bank under a guise and went on a spending spree like a drunken mariner. 

In effect of Sambo Dasuki's execrable type flaying the country, Nigerians will now go a-begging. As at June 2015, two-third of Nigeria's 36 states owed workers as much as ten months unpaid salaries; and a good few of those deadbeat states did not pay December salaries to workers at Christmas, despite the federal grants they got four months ago, most of which went into payments of a backlog.  At the fag-end of those insolvents are Kogi and Oshun states - both wholly owing nearly 15 months of minimum wage decreed by ex-President Goodluck Jonathan plus several months of outstanding salaries and allowances owed to teachers and local council workers. 

A less beleaguered state like Lagos itself is in hock and owes ₦520 billion. For that criminal debt overhang, Lagos state suffers 29% direct deduction at source from its monthly revenues. After bingeing on loans and reckless spending under Raji Fashola's thoughtless and reflex-driven administration which squandered or pocketed much of the state's ₦3.176 trillion earned in his tenure; without his reforming a single public school to create a future pool of skills that might self-generate income, it is time to pay the bills for his extreme folly.  

By comparison, the federal government of Nigeria is only slightly better off in Abuja for having some ability to repay overdraft it draws for monthly salaries to its 972,000 federal public servants but that slight ability will soon thin out this year if crude oil price drops to $20 by mid-2016, as projected by the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F).  

Even at $38 per barrel Nigeria has budgeted in 2016, the country still can't pay its bills by itself. Tucked in that federal budget is a fearful $10-billion jumbo loan. A drop by 85% in crude oil price, as forecast by the I.M.F, would spin Nigeria into bankruptcy en route a failed state on those budget metrics. That's how precariously Nigeria hangs by a reed in its nigh-impossible strive amid this rout to preserve its un-civilization of thefts rather than break it down in a hail of gunfire - if necessary. For if the country's theft civilization is to be preserved, it is the working people who will be taxed to pay the cost of irresponsible thefts by past government officials. But that's dire and fraught with risks of likely violent revolts.

Laggard and sluggish, President Buhari mulls his options. He's not decided if and when to arrest ex-president Goodluck Jonathan for the theft of 10-billion-dollars so far suggested by current probe result, although the straws in the wind from the ant-corruption EFCC office is that Jonathan is wanted to answer vital questions.  Last month, Jonathan's Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who herself is fully implicated in these thefts for signing the warrants for the release of the cash later stolen, wrote and signed a letter in self-exoneration, finger-pointing Mr. Goodluck Jonathan as the mastermind. 

That damning disclosure by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala may have steadied President Buhari's hands on the arc to steer the arresting ship gently into the harbour at Otueke.

But while President Buhari dithers on those prima facie facts of premeditated thefts by or under Goodluck Jonathan, his own dilly-dallying chafes against the untold misery ensuing for Nigerians.  President Buhari has been quicker to cancel petrol subsidy and quicker still to throw rice imports out of the less pricey official foreign exchange market - along with 40 other times in his first tranche of prohibited items for funding, so as to ration Nigeria's dwindling dollar cash assets - than he's been to recover the stolen money that's been stinking nauseously all over the country. As Buhari's anti-corruption ‘war' seems to stall for lack of good thinking on how to progress it, fears rise that Nigeria may be on a long and lonely path of a pilotless journey into the abyss.

Starting this first month of the year 2016, sputtering electricity supply will cost twice as much again than when it was less worse supplied to stand-alone private homes, and cost half as much again for middle class homestead under the new tariffs announced on the back of dearer prices of all imported items denied official forex funding, and on the back of higher transport fares to come should international crude oil price rise above its current low price.

For all that, the year 2016 is the YEAR OF LIVING NERVOUSLY for Nigerians. Today, as youth and graduate un-employment remain frozen, violent crimes are expected to soar. In the bedlam, violent death will stalk everyone in Nigeria like an ogre, besides sudden mass deaths still hovering from deadly sleeper cells of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (I.S.I.S) in alliance with the local Boko Haram Islamist militia which has engaged the Nigerian Army in pitched battles for seven years running and ruined what was once the rustic easternmost swathe of north-eastern Nigeria.

 

…………………By Seyi Olu Awofeso (a Legal Practitioner in Nigeria)