FOR some time now, life has been extremely difficult for Nigerians. Naturally, the Federal Government and the subnational governments have been harping on the various efforts they are making to ensure that Nigerians have some relief, but indications are rife that such efforts are yet to yield concrete results. Amid the ongoing pricing and supply crises in the downstream sector of the Nigerian oil industry, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently urged the Federal Government to prioritise building and accelerating social safety nets that protect vulnerable citizens. The Resident Representative of the IMF in Nigeria, Dr. Christian Ebeke, who gave this advice during a television programme, acknowledged that Nigerians could still contend with further increases in the price of petrol, a major factor for the pains they are currently experiencing. Said Ebeke: “I think this upward adjustment of petrol price at the pump comes at a time Nigerians are already feeling significant hardship. There is a lot of pain for Nigerians coming from multiple shocks, compounded shocks, including high inflation, high food inflation. Now, the country is dealing with devastating floods, among others. So, the upward adjustment to pump rice comes at that particular moment when the economy is also dealing with multiple shocks, and Nigerians are feeling this pain. I would advise, as we clearly stated in our annual review of the Nigerian economy that we published in May— and our advice is very clear— that it is important to strengthen social protection in Nigeria. It is important to accelerate the mechanism and the disbursement of this support to the most vulnerable so they can cope with these multiple shocks they are actually facing now.”
Even if the IMF had chosen to be mum about the horrendous conditions in which Nigerians are currently trapped, it would have made no difference. Nigerians bearing the brunt of government policy know that they are embroiled in existential crisis. The very fact of democracy being a government set up by the people for their own comfort, with governance guaranteeing what the sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, used to call Life More Abundant, should have precluded the very idea of the government needing statistical agencies or other organisations to tell it to rise up to its responsibilities and halt the deep immiseration of the populace. The thrust of the IMF’s argument, namely that the government should protect the poor, is plausible. Governance would be untenable if it did not protect the poor and downtrodden, which is why responsible governments measure the impact of their policies on the people and tweak them in line with the need to guarantee a fairly decent existence.
The fact that the IMF, of all organisations, could acknowledge the grueling effects of the Bola Tinubu administration’s policies on the poor underscores the severity of the trauma that the masses are going through. Certainly, the essence of governance is the pursuit of good for the greatest number of people, and not to inflict hardship, aggravate the people’s sorrow, and imperil their survival. But wait: isn’t it the very policy prescriptions of the IMF that the government has been implementing? Is it not gratuitous that the IMF, which had been at the forefront of the advocacy for the current atrocious economic policies of the Tinubu-led government in Nigeria, is now the one saying that the government should protect the poor against the biting effects of those policies? For years, the IMF, contrary to the reality of life around the world where governments subsidize energy consumption, agriculture, the auto industry, and so on, kept telling Nigerian leaders that subsidizing fuel consumption was a wrong-headed policy, that the expenditure on energy and fuel meant to make life bearable for the vast majority of the populace was “not sustainable,” and that the solution was quite simply the embrace of market forces. What was the IMF expecting to happen after encouraging the Nigerian government to adopt policies that would cripple production? Why deliberately seek to make Nigerians poor through such atrocious policies, then later pretend to care about the poor? And what is the so-called ‘care’ anyway? For the government to keep giving handouts to the poor in the form of palliatives, as if that is a viable substitute for productive engagements?
We think that the government and its IMF backers are simply toying with the lives of Nigerians. It is illogical to believe that anything positive could come out of economic policies that are anti-production and with deeply negative effects on the purchasing power of the people. Now that the IMF is already acknowledging the deleterious impacts of some of its recommended policies, the government should come to the realisation that the policies have been increasing penury across the length and breadth of the country, and undertake a prompt, critical review. It must dump the policies and adopt more development-oriented policies going forward. Giving handouts to the “poorest of the poor,” as the Federal Government typically does, cannot advance Nigeria’s development narrative in any way.
With the attainment of independence in 1960, Nigerian leaders did certain things that made life bearable for the vast majority of the citizens. There is nothing shameful about learning from the past. Nigerians should be allowed to breathe. The IMF’s tongue-in-cheek prescription for relief isn’t the way to go. There must be a review of government policy.
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