CHRISTMAS, the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, rolled by last Sunday, without much of the glamour and excitement that had for ages attended the annual celebration. In what appeared to be a throwback to the run up years to the restoration of democracy in 1999, the mood of the nation this Christmas was sombre.
Not heard in my part of Lagos, as we had it in recent years, were the booming sounds of fire crackers, which were enough to keep the lily-livered off the streets if they had no serious business going out in the evenings. Christmas decorations appeared not to have been boldly displayed in both public and pri- vate places as before, while the hamper-giving culture appears to be dead set on following the Christmas greeting cards culture to the world beyond. The culture of sending Christmas and New Year cards apparently lost relevance with the upswing of mobile communication and its text messaging, twittering, what’s happing and Facebooking possibilities.
But, what of the Christmas hamper culture?
Nigerians still very much appreciate receiving hampers, and three four years ago, big businesses were built around this practice, with some exqui- site hampers going for as high as N200,000 to N400,000. But, not anymore.
A new buzzword, economic recession, has taken over. Even the biggest and supposedly more buoyant companies are hanging their fail- ure to spread the goodies around at Christmas as usual on the recession.
As I write, many workers have not received their salaries for months. Some workers in both the private and public sectors, especially state government employees, are yet to get their sala- ries, thereby making their celebration of Christ- mas the way they have celebrated it over the years a Herculean task.
Only last Thursday, President Muhammadu Buhari urged all states owing workers to pay them from the N553 billion refunds made to them from the sums over-deducted from their al- locations for the servicing of their external debts between 1995 and 2002.
At least 27 states were, at a time, confirmed to be unable to pay their workers’ salaries and al- lowances. Some even owed up to a year’s salaries.
Unfortunately, the Federal Government’s ef- forts to get the states out of the problem with the initial N300 billion bailout paid to them as soft loan in 2015 and another N90 billion later paid to 22 states did not fully resolve the problem. Even the restructuring of the states’ N660 billion loans to extend the repayment periods did not get the states out of the woods.
One thing is clear: the government has to put on its thinking cap and address all the problems that combined to give Nigerians a bleak 2016 and a lacklustre Christmas. Nigerians cannot af- ford to carry the unhelpful stories of 2016 into 2017.
This is the time for the authorities to rethink all the strategies that they have been using to address the recession in the country. There is no doubt that one of the major causes of the economic recession is the downward spiral in the price of crude oil in the international market. The price of a barrel of oil crashed from over $100 per barrel to about $40 at a time, thereby throwing the nation’s economy that had foolishly been built around oil ex- ports into a tailspin.
The nation’s appetite for imported non- essential items had been wetted over the years by the free flow of petro-dollars. This deadly appetite had foisted a huge imports bill on the country as hundreds of billions of naira went into the importation of food such as rice, sugar, flour and fish.
To worsen matters, even simple non- essential things like matches, toothpicks, blades, handkerchiefs, underwear, confec- tionaries etc were imported, thereby putting great pressure on forex supply in the country. Our leaders did not seem to think that we needed to develop the capacity to manu- facture these simple things ourselves as the country was awash with petro-dollars.
The net result was the flooding of the country with imported goods while our own manufacturing companies ailed. Many of them either collapsed or relocated to friend- lier climes outside the country.
The result was that unemployment swelled in Nigeria as our own youths could not get jobs, while we kept the factories of countries such as China busy, manufacturing goods for export to Nigeria, and their own youths in full employment.
Beyond the crash in the price of crude oil and our failure to support our industries to keep our workers in employment, crude oil production in the country has significantly declined on account of the activities of pipe- line vandals in the oil-producing Niger Delta areas of the country. This has led to a signifi- cant loss of national revenue.
Unfortunately, the federal government does not appear to have gotten a handle to this problem yet. The news about a fortnight ago was that the government was planning to build pipelines to the Niger Republic, or some such ill-baked idea. This would seem to suggest that the Niger Delta is dispensable in the quest for petro-dollars to run the economy. I do not re- ally think this is so at this time.
What the president needs to do is adopt a policy that will gain the cooperation of the res- tive populations in the Niger Delta and fully bring them on board in his plans to move the country forward. The same policy needs to be adopted in the South-East where the govern- ment does not appear to be on top of the chal- lenge of unrelenting agitation for Biafra.
In addition, the plan to diversify the econo- my that has been gleefully mouthed by virtu- ally every government in the last ten years is yet to take shape, even though the successful rice production stories in Lagos, Kebbi and Eb- onyi states are beginning to bring a ray of hope.
If properly developed and Nigerians firmly resolve to jettison their love for imported rice, the country would save so much foreign ex- change and thousands of jobs would be created for our youths.
I have personally seen the Ebonyi rice and I hope to get some of the Lagos/Kebbi rice that has been tagged Lakeb rice. If they turn out as good as the imported rice in the markets, that is bye bye forever to rice imported from Brazil, Thailand and all such countries for me.
It is the type of attitude and strong resolve by all Nigerians that can help to change the story of the country for the better.
The country’s many other problems, such as those with the Boko Haram insurgency, man- agement of forex, bad roads and troubled edu- cation and health sectors should be frontally tackled to improve the people’s chances of hap- pier times in 2017. Above all, the Chibok girls. Let the government do whatever is necessary to get these girls released to bring a closure to the matter.