On soaring cost of living and the need to tame ugly trend
It is no longer news that since the removal of fuel subsidy, cost of living in Nigeria has skyrocketed. Virtually everything ranging from staple food to other basic needs of an average family in the country has gone out of the reach.
The oil subsidy removal, as soon as it was announced on May 29th, 2023 by the current President of Nigeria, Ahmed Bola Tinubu shortly after his inauguration, automatically pushed up prices of everything to where they are today.
For instance a litre of fuel that prior to that time sold at N159- N250 suddenly jumped up to N550 and now over N600.
In the same sequence, transportation fares have tripled from its previous level to the current charges to match with the present cost of petroleum products prices. For instance, a trip from Port Harcourt to Lagos that used to be N10,000 by bus, now costs as much as N27,000 to N35,000. Other items like cooking gas, building materials also followed suit. For example, one bag of cement is now sold at over N3,000.
As if that was not enough, electricity tariff also followed the upward review sequence. It has been reliably gathered that the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has also approved the hike of pre-paid meters by 40 percent from its previous cost. Consumers have equally been made to pay more for electricity consumption. The list is endless. The question is how did we get here? And how do we liberate ourselves from this self-inflicted torture.
President Tinubu has repeatedly appealed to Nigerians to exercise patience,vas plans according to him are on top gear to address the situation. But the question on the lips of every Nigerian is how long will this patience last?
According to them, there are no clues indicating that the end of the sufferings are in sight. It is important at this juncture to look at possible remedies to this perennial high cost of living in the country. Many people have suggested and rightly so, that the only panacea to addressing this malady is bringing our four existing refineries back on stream and possibly establishing new ones. This is doable and possible.
The refineries or petroleum products are like a tripod upon which every economic activity revolves. What that practically means is that any negative touch on its pricing, automatically translates to increases on other offshoots.
Another antidote to the freightening hyper-inflation in Nigeria is repositioning our focus in terms of diversifying our economy. A rat that has one hole, they say, does not live long.
Nigeria is over sixty years old now as a nation and its economy is still solely based on crude oil. Worse, we watched our refineries rot beyond repair to the extent that we import all refined petroleum products with hard currency.
This poor economic policy inevitably plunged Nigeria into heavy debt, courtesy of the birth of the oil subsidy regime.
This, of course, was hijacked by a few influential merchantalists, popularly referred to as cabals, who used the opportunity to impoverish their fellow citizens in the name of making profits.
At this level of our nationhood, one would have expected our leaders to have diversified the country’s economy outside oil. What happened to agriculture and its allied businesses? Even the solid minerals in the country remained largely untapped and all concentration was on crude oil .
There has not been any tangible attempt by the previous administrations to industrialise the country, to save us from being perpetually dependent on Western nations.
The only way to achieve that is to formulate deliberate policies to develop our own home-grown technology to solve or satisfy our demand, that must be tailored towards industrialisation. It has been repeatedly said and proven too that technology is not transferable, it is either developed locally or stolen.
It is therefore incumbent on our leaders to do the needful and go beyond mere repairs of aged-refineries and develop our own technology to manufacture our own goods, which will of course serve as a permanent solution to high cost of living.
Japan shut its borders for one hundred years and when it was opened, they rolled out Japanese cars, electronics, and other miracles of engineering. It is not too late to start, for a man’s beginning is his morning.
