Hardship: Govt must look beyond unsustainable palliatives to long term solutions

Echoes of the woes of the Nigerian economy have remained reverberating, particularly as the biting hardship posed by the removal of subsidy on premium motor spirit (PMS), popularly called petrol, has created conditions which have posed difficult times before Nigerians.

Recent resort of the government at different levels to addressing the acute hardship in the country have largely seen attention paid to distribution of food palliatives. Although the distribution may be seen as a measure of social intervention in a welfarist perspective, the sustainability of the measure and the impacts of the long run effects should speak to reason rather than merely the immediate concerns.

Speaking recently on this note, Niger State Governor, Mohammed Bago, warned that the Federal Government’s palliative cannot address the hardship imposed on Nigerians by the removal of fuel subsidy. He advised the government and Nigerians to seek alternative means of tackling the current economic hardship the country is going through, saying the subsidy palliative is not sustainable.

Bago who gave the warning at the flag-off of the distribution of farm inputs to wet season farmers from the 25 local government areas of the state, said, “I want to use this medium to thank President Bola Tinubu,  the Commander in chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria, for coming to the aid of vulnerable Nigerians.

“But we must be honest with ourselves; the palliative scheme cannot be sustained, we have to go back to the farm to reinflate our economy.

“In Niger State, we are poised to make agriculture become the focus of our administration in addressing poverty and food security.”

It is essential that the government become rational in its intervention to address the prevailing hardship in the country, giving credence to long term impacts rather than short term and unsustainable measures.

The posture of irrational resort to short term reliefs with long term negative impacts have over time borne more of adverse effects on growth. The government should rather have subjected the policy of subsidy removal to a more robust empirical test before the moves were declared.

Such an approach would have taken care of sundry issues in preparation for the offshoots of impacts. It is necessary for the government to consider such an approach in future attempts at policy redirection.

From all indications, the inadequacy of food and other strings of palliatives remain unsustainable for the economy. The need for the government to prioritise concerns to salvage the economy from collapse calls for a broader perspective, with a more elaborate and overarching system of responses to address the situation in a holistic approach.