A concerned supporter of President Muhammadu Buhari has dropped a rejoinder to an article titled "The Sorry State Of Nigeria Under President Muhammadu Buhari" in support of the First Man of Nigeria.
President Muhammadu Buhari
Read the interesting piece in support of the All Progressives Congress-led government written by one PassingShot titled: "Only if there was honor among thieves!"
Without wasting time, let’s liken Nigeria to a young family man who worked for sixteen years on very decent monthly salary of N1,000,000. In the sixteen years he earned N1M monthly, the said man has acquired taste for luxury life, living in a duplex in Ajah Estate with all the good things life could offer.
This man was living large and had little or nothing in savings. Then one day, he lost his high-paying job and could only manage to secure another one which offers a third of what he used to earn. His new job only pays N300,000 monthly!
Without being told or advised by anyone, the man must realize that he can no longer house his family in the Ajah duplex they’d lived for sixteen years even if there was savings let alone when there is no reasonable savings. He must therefore scale down on EVERYTHING about his living and that of his family. He will need to change his children’s school.
He will need to move into a 2 or 3 bedroom flat in Ikorodu or Agege. He will need to ride a smaller car. If his family used to go on weekly/monthly picnic, that also must stop. His and his family choice of food will change. In fact, he must engage more in DIY (Do It Yourself) than ever before for some tasks. Such man will have no one to blame for needing to scale down on his living except himself!
If we all agree that the man in the example above must cut back on his spending with a lot of sacrifices, there should be no reason why any reasonable person will fail to understand why Nigeria is in the current economic mess or what sacrifices Nigeria must make to weather the storm.
OBJ, with all his flaws, managed to build decent external reserves ($45bn ), created and built the excess crude account (above $20bn) for rainy days and was able to hand over good economy to Yar’Adua. Yar’Adua was on the same trajectory before his creator decided to take him away.
GEJ inherited $47bn in foreign reserves plus another $20bn+ in ECA. During the over five years he spent as president, crude oil which is the major source of income to Nigeria (responsible for more than 90% or our dollar earnings) sold for an average of $100 per barrel, yet the hugely incompetent man from Otuoke found a way to plunge the reserves to an abysmal level of $29bn as at the time of his exit and went on borrowing spree (which was also looted) even when there was no need to.
In fact, GEJ and his gang r*ped Nigeria without mercy such that the FG had to borrow money to pay its workers in Nov 2014 and March 2015 just because crude price crashed from $100 to $76 a barrel. Sane minds can only imagine how such regime could have fared, or how much we would have suffered, if they were in charge of our affairs when crude crashed further to $27 a barrel.
Let’s not even talk about the ECA which his supporters will be quick to blame the governors for asking it to be shared. Though they will pretend not to know that the request of the governors made perfect sense for the fact that GEJ and Ngozi were fond of stealing from the account which jointly belonged to the FG and the states, they know in their mind that there argument lacks merit.
Is there anything happening in Nigeria today that was not foreseen, predicted or that we were not warned about? The answer is a resounding NO.
Let us refresh our memory with the warnings and predictions about today’s hardship and economic woes perhaps a few minds will be more objective and more reasonable.
1. OBJ warned Jonathan in Nov 2014: Extracts from the report:
"Sooner or later, the Naira will have to be drastically devalued without any advantage to our one commodity economy but with horrendous disadvantage to already impoverished Nigerians. We will all sink deeper in poverty except for those who have corruptly stashed money abroad and who will start to bring such illegal and illegitimate funds back home to harvest more Naira. All the economic gains of recent years and the rebuild of the middle class may be lost.”
“In the end, more businesses will close down, business men and women, entrepreneurs and investors will incur more debts. Foreign investors may temporarily stop investing in a downturn economy.
“Because of the Naira depreciation, workers, particularly in the public sector, will ask for pay increase, which may be justified but will sink us deeper in the swamp.
“The scenario, which may sound alarmist, is hard to imagine but the signs are there and it would appear that those who should act are dancing slow foxtrot while their trousers are catching fire”.
2. Sanusi, the then Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria warned too!
“Over 20 billion dollars unremitted to the federation account, and if nothing is done, by 2015 upward Nigeria will know what economic crisis is.”
When he was invited by the Senate to substantiate his claim, he said;
“It is established that out of the 67 billion dollars crude shipped by NNPC between January 2012 and July 2013, $47 billion was remitted to the Federation Account. It is now up to the NNPC to prove that $20 billion unremitted either did not belong to the federation or was legally and constitutionally spent. There is no dispute that $20 billion out of the $67 billion has not been paid into any account with the CBN,” he said.
We all know how Sanusi the whistle blower was sacked by the fisherman.
3. Oby Ezekwesili sounded the alarm bell in 2013:
“Our reserve is depleted and our savings are squandered. Our nation is in trouble.”
She later stated: “The key FACT is that even by the time of that crisis when Soludo had to defend the Naira with our Foreign Reserve, he spent about $15b of it and still left behind about $45b when he departed as Central Bank Governor in 2009!!!
Now imagine that since that time oil prices have averaged between $95-$100 per barrel and we export an average of 750 million barrels per annum. How then can the Foreign Reserve only now be starting to grow back to the same size it was in 2009 after such hefty earnings of the last 4 years? The FG numbers do not add up at all and we need to know why!
The citizens need an explanation and that’s why I called for accountability. It is simply a patriotic call which should not result in the name calling by officials of government."
4. Jonathan Lacked Political Will to Save – Ngozi Okonjo Iweala
And madam Gele finally agrees to her and her boss’ gross incompetence by saying:
The former finance minister and World Bank president, who spoke on “inequality, growth and resilience,” with Chile as an example of a country with a saving culture, said:
“We tried it in Nigeria, we put in an oil price based fiscal rule in 2004 and it worked very well.
“We saved $22 billion because the political will to do it was there. And when the 2008 /2009 crisis came, we were able to draw on those savings precisely to issue about a five per cent of GDP fiscal stimulus to the economy, and we never had to come to the Bank or the Fund.
“This time around and this is the key now, you need not only to have the instrument, but you also need the political will. In my second time as a finance minister, from 2011 to 2015, we had the instrument, we had the means, we had done it before, but zero political will.
“So we were not able to save when we should have. That is why you find that Nigeria is now in the situation it is in, along with so many other countries.
Now that we have seen that today’s economic mess was created by GEJ and his thieving gang, it makes no sense for anyone to blame PMB for the current situation.
If anything, PMB deserves commendations for being able to provide bailouts to states owing salaries before he came on board, for being able to provide additional budget support due to reduced allocation to state, for being able to increase our foreign reserves despite that crude price is still at around $50 per barrel, for being able to build roads that those who earned billions in dollars couldn’t touch, for being able to start N-Power project employing hundreds of thousands unemployed youths, for being able to complete abandoned Kaduna-Abuja rail project, for being able to restore life in the NE that was ravaged by Boko Haram due to GEJ’s incompetence, for being able to bring some past looters to justice (Dasuki, Andrew Yakbu, Diezani, Bafarawa, Akpobolokemi, etc), for being able to restore some sanity in our ultra-corrupt judiciary, for ending fuel subsidy scam, for working towards self-sustenance in rice and other staple food production, for working to make Nigeria refine her own crude locally by 2019, etc.
GEJ and his gang of looters raped Nigeria without using condom or any form of protection. The product of such violation is today’s economic hardship.
Had PMB not become president, Nigeria would have completely failed. I have no doubt about that happening and it’s based on what have now been revealed in the numerous looting of our common wealth.
God Bless PMB/VPYO
God Bless Nigeria.
Written by PassingShot on a popular online forum as part of heated political debate.