DW, the German public service broadcaster ran a news item last night on the economic woes facing Nigeria which they called “the worst economic crisis in a generation” to hit the country.
Reporter Flourish Ubanyi vox popped Nigerians in the market and streets of Lagos who spoke with one voice about unprecedented hardship. She summed up by saying that President Bola Tinubu “promised to fix the economy when he came to office, less than one year later, things are going in the opposite direction”.
The anger from the people that spoke to the reporter was palpable. Following the regime’s floating of the naira and the removal of “fuel subsidy”, the currency has plummeted as prices of foodstuffs and other essentials have shot up beyond what most people could afford. One respondent said “people are suffering, there’s no money”, while another lamented that “things are too hard”.
Ubanyi explained that the middle class now “found themselves poor”. To illustrate, she said instead of using Uber, many now resorted to the cheaper “Danfo” minibuses to get around, while the poor trekked instead.
Many businesses, especially SMEs, were struggling to stay afloat. This is because many rely on imports, which were now unaffordable due to the collapse in the value of the naira against the US dollar.
The chickens have surely come home to roost in a country that has done very little for generations to develop a domestic manufacturing capacity. While this failure is on previous regimes, Tinubu is not exempt from blame as he ruled the richest state in the country (Lagos) for eight years, and his puppets have been in charge of that state for the past 16 years. Tinubu’s party has also been in charge at federal level for the last eight years and he helped install the chronically inept previous president Muhammadu Buhari.
So even if Tinubu is cut some slack for not being wholly responsible for the current economic crisis, rather than halt the decline, he has turbocharged it.
