The 59th Independence Day anniversary of Nigeria has come and gone. But I still want you to share with us what you think about the journey for the country since 1960.
The journey so far appears very redundant and backward. Every year, we seem to do worse than the year before. If we take the current administration, led by President Muhammadu Buhari, we find that in the key areas we can evaluate any government, it has been a slide backward. Several institutions have failed in everything. If we look at the economy, we will see that direct foreign investment has fallen by more than 55 per cent.
If we look at the stock market, it is either the market is at its lowest in about 15 years. You look at the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country which surpassed that of South Africa for the first time in history during the days of President Goodluck Jonathan, it is at its lowest in about 25 years. And of course, because of the weakness of the economy, the national currency, the Naira, is now exchanges between N350 and N360 to the United States dollar.
It is at its lowest in the history of Nigeria. It’s not theoretical; we all can feel it in our own lives. The cost of petrol has gone up, it used to be N87per litre; it is now N145. So, the cost of transportation to the average person has gone up. Similarly, the cost of stable food items like garri, rice and beans has gone up. Kerosene that most Nigerians use for cooking has recorded about 400 per cent increase in price, so the situation has become economically unbearable.
And if you talk about security, I have some statistics from the UNESCO that shows that Boko Haram activities in the North- East had abated to some extent but the insurgents are still alive and active, as well as operating and destroying the region. So, we have not technically destroyed Boko Haram. Bandits are also on the prowl in the North- East. There is no safety in the North- West either. Bandits, robbers and kidnappers are doing their own. In the North- Central, you have killer-herdsmen. We know in the South- West itself that people don›t feel safe to travel on the highways because of kidnappers and attacks from robbers. There are serious security challenges in the South- East and the South-South. So, all these are hurting the economy. The absence of security of lives and property is bound to scare away potential investors and that is one of the reasons the country is in a shambles.
What will you consider as the main lesson Nigeria learnt since independence?
Because of the problems we have encountered in every sector, we have learnt that things must change fundamentally. There must be a structural change. That is why we have to go back to the basic. The only way forward go back to that period of time when things worked in Nigeria.
The system then gave us better results than we have now. That is why Chief Ayo Adebanjo and people of like minds are saying we should go back to the 1963 Constitution because it allowed for true federalism; it allowed for regional development; it allowed different people at different levels to move their own pace and kind of development according to their own culture and resources. Let me give you an example on education. As things are now, the North is always trying to adjust educational standards so that their children can compete with others. So, they are corrupting the system because children from the Southern part of the country are being cheated; they are not being given the same opportunity and by the way, they are also cheating their children.
I am an educator, I know what it is. You cannot give your children a pass mark when they don’t qualify because if you do, they will still have to compete with others after obtaining leaving the university. Not only that they may not be able to compete favourably, you would have put them in a position where they don’t qualify for, so they are likely to bring the system down because of incompetence.
