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By Pius Mordi

He chose an academic gathering to define and redefine the life Nigerians had been living before he became president. “Unfortunately, the good life we thought we were living was a fake one that was capable of leading the country to a total collapse unless drastic efforts were urgently taken,” he said at the combined convocation ceremonies of the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) in Ondo state.

In one swoop, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu blamed Nigerians for the “fake life” they had been living, absolved the government of which his own party had been in charge for over eight years and dubbed himself the messiah. He did not explain what constituted luxury living for Nigerians save for the usual allusion to petrol subsidy and “subsidy” of the naira. But was there luxury living in Nigeria prior to Tinubu’s administration?It is a dubious acknowledgement of the travails the people are going through without taking responsibility. If the economy is much tougher now than it was 10 years ago, does it mean the standard of living then was characterized by luxury? At the time APC dislodged Dr. Goodluck Jonathan and his PDP from Aso Rock, the major strategy was anchored on leveraging on the what was described then as the poor living condition of the people.

In Nigeria, in 2015 when APC came to power, the minimum wage was N18,000 ($91.4), dropping in 2023 when the wage was increased to N30,000 ($66). On the other hand, top oil-producing African countries pay far higher than Nigeria ever paid as minimum wage. Gabon, for instance, pays N376,000 while that of Ghana was N60,000. Countries like Liberia which even Nigeria classifies as a poor country pays $91 as minimum wage.

By the time Tinubu increased minimum wage further to N70,000, its actual value fell to $44. If the extant minimum wage at different times could not let a worker afford a shuttle flight to Lagos or Abuja from other parts of the country, if all he could afford was a 50kg bag of rice as was the case before 2015, then what was the luxury Nigerian workers enjoyed at the time? At every stage of upward review of minimum wage, many manufacturers and entrepreneurs could not afford to pay the new minimum wage due to the high cost of production and running costs. When the minimum wage rose to N70,000 in July this year, only 21 states acknowledged their ability to pay their civil servants the new rate, a continuation of what had obtained previously.

There is no framework for reviewing minimum wage to offset the inevitable increase in inflation as is the case with Vietnam where a five percent increase in salaries is routinely effected annually. Invariably, reviews in the past had never reflected on prevailing inflation rate but on how the labour leaders are were able to arm twist the government to accede to their demands.
“As you are all aware, we took the baton of authority at a time when our economy was nose-diving as a result of heavy debts from fuel and dollar subsidies,” Tinubu said. This is a devious simplification of Nigeria’s debt profile. The President chose to ignore the fact that at some point, precisely in 2004, former President Olusegun Obasanjo had negotiated debt relief with the Paris Club after paying substantial amount of the debt en bloc, effectively freeing Nigeria from the debt trap.
Umaru Yar’Adua, Obasanjo’s successor, took the external debt to $3.5 billion, while the domestic debt was at N5.62 trillion. Goodluck Jonathan added $3.8 billion to take the country’s total external debt to $7.35 billion, while the domestic debt was N8.8 trillion.
But when Muhammadu Buhari and Tinubu’s party, the APC, took over, domestic debt rose from N8.84 trillion in December 2015 to N44.91 trillion in June 2023 while external debt increased from $7.35 billion in December 2015 to $37.2 billion in June 2023.
Tinubu’s so-called “heavy debts from fuel and dollar subsidies” was essentially a mismanagement by his predecessor and party man whose borrow and spend mentality returned the country to the debt trap barely 20 years after Obasanjo did the unusual of weaning Nigeria from the Paris Club and western creditors. The characterisation of Nigerians as having been living in undeserved luxury is an attempt to blame the victim for his travails. As long as Tinubu prefers to play the ostrich on the state of the economy and the living condition of the people, there can never be an altruistic pathway to giving Nigerians minimum comfort.
First, Nigerians had never lived in luxury or fake life. They just barely managed to get by. By glossing over the point at which the debt burden was again foisted on the country along with the wanton looting that characterized the management of the loans, the administration showed it is incapable of evolving a working strategy to alleviate the suffering of the masses. For as long as the former governor of the Central Bank is cast as the scapegoat solely responsible for the ruining of the economy, for as long as the real perpetrators of the macabre despoilation of the country are shielded from accounting for their rulership, the attempt to make ordinary Nigerians, the victims of that era, now the people to blame, Tinubu has not got a road map to bring the country back from the brink.
The true message from President Tinubu is that the real life suitable for Nigerians is the one his administration has plunged the country into. They will have to live with hunger, deprivation and a bleak future. After all, they had lived a luxury they had not earned upfront before he came to Aso Rock.