Chidi Amuta
12 November 2009
opinion
Lagos — Nigerians may not all agree on so much else. But the crisis wracking the entire system is exerting such universal toll in terms of economic casualties that we all now are in tremendous unison with a common anthem: a bad place is getting terminally worse.
Even the most affluent members of the society can no longer live in the usual denial. If your money was invested in the stock market, I hear it will take the better part of a decade for the worthless pieces of certificates to regain half their original value. If you invested in real estate, don't bother to read the business sections of the dailies because the values are dipping by the day. Your tenant has just lost his job and may not be forthcoming with the rent any time soon.
If you laid your treasure in the bank, the front page photo of your bank managing director on his way to jail may not be enough comfort when measured against the uncertainty of your finances from now on. If you borrowed money from the bank to support your business, you may have to pay back hurriedly through the EFCC and watch the business go up in smoke. Forget your expensive SUVs. The craters on the road will slow you down enough for the armed robbers and kidnappers to hike a ride in the damn thing. You'll be lucky if your wife doesn't have to go borrowing to free you from a kidnappers safe house in the middle of the forest. What is left? Go abroad on vacation? Maybe. That is if you can swallow your pride and join us in the zoo (sorry, economy!) class. But don't forget: your ten days escape abroad is only a temporary reprieve. Nigeria is waiting for you: creditors, an army of mendicant friends and relations, kidnappers and the power of perennial darkness.
For the economically less fortunate, and we are in a comfortable majority, these are times that try even the most hardy stock of humanity. I still believe that Nigerians are some of the most resilient breed of humanity. While the rich can pay their way through private schools, private healthcare institutions and generators, the things that keep the poor peaceful happen to be provided by government: public schools, hospitals, people friendly housing laws and micro credit. The serial failure of governance at all levels has eroded all these and left the poor virtually on their own. The unwritten code of social insurance that kept the urban poor going has evaporated with the decimation of the middle class. Our drivers, security guards, chefs, stewards and sundry others survived by augmenting their incomes from handouts and petty thievery from our bulging wallets. The purse strings are tighter and the wallets have almost disappeared.
Our world is not just these two extremes. There is a sandwich group in between. They are those who live and work in the urban areas. They work for the rich and cater for the poor. Obasanjo thought and said he was building a 'middle class' of bankers, oil workers and telecommunications operatives as well as better paid civil servants. The poor man probably did not understand that his 'middle class' was not quite the way they understand it in the West. This was not middle class as a class of materially comfortable, conscientious workers and empowered electorate, a veritable force of history. Ours was, on the contrary, a class standing in the middle of the road between the excesses of the emergent oligarchy and the increasing misery of the myriad poor. Their role was mediatory: reassure the rich and comfort the poor in the hope that there is something to look up to for themselves and their children.
They were rising from five areas of the Obasanjo economy. First, after consolidation, the banks were expanding: new branches, fleets of leased vehicles, thousands of new jobs, service provides etc. Second, for close to a decade from 1999, oil prices were sky high and local refineries were dead. A new oil economy was booming. Importers of petroleum products were making a kill and inundating the banks with cash. They became the 'real sector' even if no sensible banker admitted that in the open. They, too were hiring staff, building new storage facilities, threatening to build private refineries and offering attractive remunerations. Third, the new telecommunications companies were doing even better. They were expanding opportunities through outright employment, contractors, service providers, product sales and massive marketing campaigns. Fourth, Obasanjo wanted a more pro-active, more professional and better motivated public service. So, he increased the remunerations of federal public servants, monetised their benefits, sold off expensive government real estate to them and generally thought them the dignity of owning and running their own cars instead of ruining fleets of government ones at public expense. They too were witnessing a new sense of empowerment. Fifth, the political industry had arisen as a major cost and expenditure centre: an army of elected and appointed political office holders with their paraphernalia and hangers on arose as a zone of sudden assured prosperity and social welfare.
In the last two years, we have a witnessed a systematic reversal and tragic erosion of even the modest gains of Obasanjo's imperfect reformist economics. Nearly all the banks have failed and are firing staff in droves. Demand for telephone lines has gotten to a plateau and growth in that sector has slowed to a stall. They too have been firing staff and contracting services while the margins on their products have declined with increasing competition and markdowns on rates. Oil prices have gone south while the oil importer oligarchy is under serious threat. They too are firing staff and have frozen benefits and constricted operations. The banks that flooded them with credit have lost big money because the down stream oil industry has taken a hit. Government service and the political industry which depend on rents from oil and gas and easy access to bank credit have paused slightly to understand what is happening. Increased international and domestic pressure on accountability coupled with militant activity have put a strain on oil revenue.
Against this background of pervasive gloom, nearly everyone you meet asks the common question: how country? This is of course short hand for the general exasperation with the performance of the government of the day especially at the federal level. The assumption is of course that since you write a column in a national newspaper, you should know something beyond the reach of the ordinary man. But there is one place where I go occasionally to seek answers to the question. It is the barber's shop at the street corner. In this mini parliament, 'experts' in nearly all matters public and political stroll in and out, each one dropping his thesis on what could be wrong with the country that we all love intensely. There is no book that I have read that contains an explanation for what Nigerians are going through.
When the crowd in the barber's shop look in my direction with the ubiquitous question: how country, sir? My answer? I, too, do not understand anything anymore. I am not an economist. Nor do I understand the strange feast called government as defined by the Nigerian variant of the specie called politician. But I know when a tragedy is graduating towards a calamity.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2009 This Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
