If you have been reading this blog, you would find the thought behind this write-up quite familiar. It is so because nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed to fault the narrative as stated.
See, people have been reeling out economic statistics about Nigeria that I wonder whether they are really talking about Nigeria. Sometimes I get the impression that they are just imagining what’s going on. Nigeria never had an economy. Nigeria never worked on an economy. Nigeria never did anything on economy on any ground. What we were doing was basically sharing oil money. The oil money formed the fulcrum of all the rigmarole that we call economy.
If the crude oil price doesn’t rise substantially, I’m looking at $75/barrel, and militants don’t cease the attacks there’s nothing the system would really do. Without money, Buhari is just there as figure-head. He cannot do anything. We have gotten to a situation where the grammar has stopped working. In calculating the $75/barrel, I have put into consideration the corruption that must happen. In Nigeria, the government officials remove their money at source. It doesn’t matter if the remaining balance is sufficient to do the work or not. Speak all the grammar you want to speak, that’s what they would do.
If government announce an award of contract of $800 million, be sure that the same job could be done in India, China or Qatar for less than $300million and it would be on schedule. I can assure you that in our case the $800million for the contract is the initial estimation. If and when they decided to magnanimously finish the job, you should be lucky if the total spent it’s not more than US$2 billion. That’s the way things are done here and you must make provisions for that kind of eventuality. If you never did so, then, you’re just joking. That is how things work here. It’s the crude oil sales that account for this kind of “robbery”.
Here in Nigeria, recurrent expenditure would always be far higher than capital expenditure. You cannot run away from that fact. That’s the only way to get money out without much audit detection. A state government would tell you that she has 35k civil servants in her employ. Ofcourse you and I know that this is baloney. The actual civil servants in the state might not be up to 10k. The remaining 25k are mostly ghost workers whose salaries are collected in bulk by the governor and his henchmen. Whenever a governor is talking about detecting ghost workers, be sure that he’s feeling double-crossed by people inserting their own “Ghost workers” into the system. That is a scenario which crude oil money must cater for.
You have banks jostling for forex from the CBN. If you think the forex is to help manufacturers and genuine importers then you are living in dreamland where fantasies reign. CBN sells a dollar for a bank at N305/dollar and you expect the bank to “dash” it to a businessman at N320/dollar when the mallam across the street is selling it at N490/dollar? Who is fooling who? The banks would just do the round-tripping themselves and make cool money without stress. Ofcourse the funding for this misnomer is from the crude-oil sales. Just imaging the bleeding in this instance!
I can go on and on. What we need to do now is to go payer-warrior-mode and invoke the powers of the almighty that the crude oil price continue rise up to the point of “equilibrium”. At this point we would settle both the big-stomach and the tiny ones. Then we can then breathe. For now we don’t have enough to share…
I have joined the prayer warrior group and it would happen….Ewolewoo!!
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Ik Uremeh
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