The Roads Are Empty: Why the Snatch of our Comfort

It was economically tough before the coming of democracy in 1999 and the democratic was welcomed with hope. Most Nigerian workers, especially the civil servants, lived from hand to mouth. The minimum wage was ₦250 ($2.8) per month with an exchange rate of ₦88 to $1. To have a car was a luxury. A guy with a car then is either a banker or a businessman.

When OBJ came into power in 1999, by law, most civil servants earned just a little above the minimum wage in 1981. A dollar was about ₦100. In 2000, the government saw a reason to do something about the general well-being of the people. The salary was reviewed, and a new wage bill was passed to give workers ₦5,500 ($55) from the ₦250 ($2.5).

It was one of the major achievements of OBJ's government that transformed the general well-being of the civil servants. For a civil servant to own and fuel a car that was once upon a time a luxury became a norm. People who needed a car could afford a secondhand (tokumbo) car from Cotonou.

Car was no more a luxury but a necessity. We started seeing cars with big L (Learner). Civil servants were buying cars and learning to drive with them. The so-called "Obasanjo drivers" were plenty on the road. A lot happened between 2000 and 2023, but the minimum wage hardly goes below $55.

President Tinubu came in May 2023 to meet a minimum wage of ₦30,000 ($65). His subsidy removal changed everything. His naira floating policy devalued the ₦30,000 minimum wage by 350% to $18.7. However, he felt we should be able to cope with it and called it a hard decision that we must endure. But incidentally, the political class is shielded from this endurance journey.

After pressure from the labour union, the new minimum wage that is yet to take effect as of September 2024 was grudgingly increased to ₦70,000 ($43.6). The value is still much lower than the value of a minimum of 2000 by $21.4. However, the fuel pump price ranges between ₦1,000 and ₦1,200 per litre compared to ₦20 per litre in 2000.

As our purchasing power gets depleted every day, we get drained more with tariffs, taxes, bank charges, etc. The bank owners are actually smiling. Cronny capitalism is advancing.

The amazing thing is that we are meant to be making progress, but our general well-being has been taken back where we were 24 years ago. We are now told that to be able to afford 3 meals in a day is a fake life. They said our real life is to make do with 1 meal per day. We don MILT, sir. We are on a meal payday. As a matter of fact, those who can't afford a meal are eating one particular wild grass with an unpleasant smell that they say makes one feel full.

The road is empty, and there are no hold-ups because the tanks are empty. They don't need sirens to chase us away from the road. They have strategically sent us away from the road since we can't afford to buy fuel. In an attempt to justify the situation, we are told that the ability to fill our car tank with fuel is fake life; real life is not being able to buy fuel and use our legs.

This reminds me of Buhari's "Sharholiya" statement of 2022. It is becoming obvious that the political class thinks that the people are too comfortable to be ruled and determined to take that little comfort away and push us below the poverty line. They derive joy from the people's misery. We have dropped our cars and we are on our legs. I could not believe that our MILT acceptance value (MAV) was this high.

We thought governance was about the people and their well-being. The people cannot feed, education is in a messy state, public schools are not properly funded, the intellectuals that attempted to put up resistance were dehumanised, public health is in a chaotic state, people have parked their cars for their legs, and kids can't afford the bus to their schools, They have to trek a long distance to school. The little comfort that we had for the last 24 years was snatched away from us.

The country is in a state of general crisis, with the well-being of the people being returned to what it was 24 years ago. We thought we were seeing shege and we got GEJ out and called him all sorts of names. Then we saw the real shege during Buhari's era and made GEJ look like a saint. Now we are on a Shege Promax mode and the government seems confused. We are in dire need of a direction but who is in this government with the magic wand to get us out of this mess?

By

Prof. Abdelghaffar Amoka Abdelmalik, PhD.
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
aaabdelmalik@abu.edu.ng.

11/09/2024

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