(Nigeria state proclivity: genocide, immiseration, collapse)BY Anthony Ogbonna, Vanguard, Lagos, Friday 31 May 2019, 1309 HRS (local time)
The Economist has, in its review on Thursday [30 May 2019], revealed that Nigerians became poorer, and in fact, have become the poorest citizens of a country in the whole world, under President Muhammadu Buhari’s first term in office.
The Economist also said that Nigerians will even become poorer in the years to come as average income per Nigerian, according to it, will continue to fall for the next six years, have[ing] continually fallen for the last four years that Buhari came in.
LIKENING Nigeria’s economy to the long lines of [t]railers on queues heading to Apapa port, The Economist said Nigeria’s economy is “stuck like a stranded truck.” This is despite the growth claimed by the National Bureau of Statistics that “Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by 2.01% (year-on-year), in real terms, in the first quarter of 2019.”
But The Economist claimed that “by 2030 a quarter of very poor people will be Nigerian.” It said while the inflation is at 11%, some 94 million Nigerians live on less than $1.90 a day.
ACCORDING to the report, “Long lines of lorries stretch like tentacles from Apapa port, the largest in Nigeria. Drivers doze in their cabs, feet flung over dashboards; some sling hammocks beneath the chassis.
“Musa Ibrahim, an ebullient trader, says he has been queuing for two days. He gestures at empty buildings. ‘Most of the companies you see here they done close,’ he sighs.
“THE Nigerian economy is stuck like a stranded truck. Average incomes have been falling for four years; the IMF thinks they will not rise for at least another six.
“The latest figures put unemployment at 23%, after growing for 15 consecutive quarters. Inflation is 11%. Some 94 million people live on less than $1.90 a day, more than in any other country, and the number is swelling.
“BY 2030 a quarter of very poor people will be Nigerian, predicts the World Data Lab, which counts such things.”
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Postscript by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe: parts of the concluding thoughts in my paper, “Okigbo, the Africa state, genocide and the peoples”, presented at the Christopher Okigbo International Conference, Harvard University, 22 September 2007, are as follows:
THE NIGERIA state and its allies failed to accomplish their goal… This is why Olusegun Obasanjo, one of the most crudely loquacious of Nigeria’s league of genocidists, has in recent years not minced his words about the Nigeria state’s stated desire to complete its 1966 envisaged task on the Igbo people. But Obasanjo must now know that the Igbo will never go under. Ultimate Biafran liberation is evidently assured. Nothing can stop this realisation. The Igbo will resume the march, started in earnest in 1954, to transform their homeland into an advanced civilisation that will be a beacon to their long-cherished aspirations and those of the Africa World. For all intents and purposes, Nigeria collapsed as a functioning state with any serious prospects or possibilities on 29 May 1966 – in the wake of its launch of the Igbo genocide. Despite earning the gargantuan sum of US$650 billion in oil sales in the subsequent 40 years, an overwhelming proportion of this from occupied Igboland in its Delta, Rivers, Imo and Abia administrative regions, Nigeria has cascaded into a frighteningly degenerative slump politically, economically, intellectually, socially, morally and spiritually. And this terminal status, surely, remains Nigeria’s epitaph in history.
(Mal Waldron Quartet, “Hymn from the inferno” [personnel: Waldron, piano; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Cecil McBee, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: Vanguard Studios, New York, US, 15 August 1981])
*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)
