While the banks describe the retrenchment as part of a “renewed drive for optimal performance” and “market re-positioning exercise”, it’s widely believed the layoffs are a stark reaction to unfavorable economic headwinds in Africa’s largest economy. With a high non-performing loan rate in the banking system as well as the institution of a Treasury Single Account which required banks to pay all government cash in their coffers to the Central Bank, local banks reported profit declines in the first quarter of the year.
The layoffs also compounds Nigeria’s unemployment woes, with half a million people said to have lost jobs in the first quarter of the year. The increasing lack of job security has heaped even more pressure on the president Muhammadu Buhari who is faced with fixing a shrinking economy. In reaction, Buhari’s party, the ruling All Progressives Congress described the layoffs by banks as “sabotage” to discredit its government under which unemployment has spiked.
For its part, the government is hoping ease the unemployment crisis by rolling out mass recruitment exercises. Earlier this week, it flagged the hiring of 500,000 unemployed graduates into teaching positions. Similarly, at the start of the year, the government kicked off a recruitment exercise into the police force but the response was likely chilling evidence of the scale of the problem at hand as nearly a million people applied for the recruitment exercise which only listed 10,000 positions.
Along the way, they are apparently snapping up upscale property, private education and luxury consumer goods—in between jaunts to the city’s most exclusive nightclubs.
The latest hagiography of these Nigerian transatlantic trust fund babies, is a one-hour TV documentary featured on the UK’s Channel 4 last week (June 7).
“In London’s poshest neighborhoods, Nigeria’s super-rich are moving in,” the narrator breathlessly declares in the opening seconds of Lagos To London: Britain’s New Super-rich.
All against the backdrop of a dark blue Bentley Coupé parked next to a classic Georgian townhouse, a row of the ‘mansion block’ apartments found in many upscale corners of the city and a snippet of a 200-head banquet held at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park hotel, that turned out to be a graduation party and not a wedding.
“Hey, some people have graduation photos – we just happen to have magazines,” pipes up the celebrant Florence ‘Cuppy’ Otedola next. She’s the 23 year-old ‘DJ’ daughter of Nigerian oil magnate and Forbes-lister Femi Otedola, who likens herself to a latter-day Marie Antoinette—only with diamond-encrusted Beats headphones. And the bill for her party? Apparently the equivalent of “two nice cars.”
“We follow a new generation of Nigerian elite as they live, work and party—between Lagos and London,” the show’s narrator goes on to promise.
Except that we largely don’t. What we mostly see is the progeny of high-profile Nigerians working hard at spending easy money at places like Harrods. “I try to make it a point of duty to have a personal shopper in different states,“ Lagos ‘media personality’ Toke Makinwa earnestly informs us. That’s London and New York by the way.
Out of all of the characters featured in the program, only one—British-born Alex Amosu appears to be close to doing anything that resembles ‘work’ and being ‘self-made’ as the world mostly defines it.
Is he the creator of some disruptive technology that aims to change the way we live? Solar power perhaps, that will bring Nigerian industry and society literally into the light? No. He sticks 14-carat diamonds onto mobile phone sets—and sells them on to other wealthy Nigerians.
And then you have the 28 year-old Mbadiwe twins Ozee and OC, about whom it is never really clear what they do—other than bask in the light of their distinguished family name, in between selfies.
The show—and Twitter—provided the perfect sounding board for comment and opinion – a heady mix of admiration, aspiration and outrage – among Nigerians at home and in the diaspora.
But arguably the most cogent online commentary on the program could be found away from the twittersphere.
But just how much of an alternative are these narratives? Do they seek to pursue a higher truth for a nation misconstrued? What is clear is that they are utterly at odds with the daily monetary experiences of most Nigerians at the moment.
Nigeria may be Africa’s largest economy, but it’s an economy in a mess.
With more people living in poverty than in any other African country, Nigeria is on the brink of recession, the naira is in freefall against the dollar with imminent devaluation a real possibility, and inflation was at 13.6% in April, a six-year high.
Stories in western media of young Nigerian playboys and debutantes spending their inheritance via armies of personal shoppers stationed from London to New York via Dubai are a rather unsavory counterpoint to the life lived by Nigerians at home and their attempts to get a grip on an out-of-control economy.
The irony in last week’s documentary is that it featured the grandchildren of some of Nigeria’s late prominent statesmen—former Lagos State Governor Sir Michael Odetola and Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe, a minister of the First Republic. But there was a saddening lack of awareness of their own legacy and what their lives say about a country that could be so much more than it is. None of them had anything to say about their homeland, other than perfunctory references to the ‘family business.’
As obsessed with Instagram as they are with instant gratification, the Lagos-to-London super-rich are akin to a gaggle of Nigerian Neros—fiddling while home burns.
Nigerian elites presenting as shallow, luxury goods-obsessed dilettantes provides no more context to the story of Africa’s most populated country than the ubiquitous tales of economic crises, religious fundamentalism and corruption.
Nigeria's government will next week pump much of the 1.76 billion dollars earmarked for capital projects into its economy. The spending is part of efforts to stimulate activity after a 0.4 percent contraction in the first quarter of this year. Nigeria is going through its deepest crisis in decades, brought on by the fall in crude prices. Last month Nigeria's central bank governor said a recession appeared to be "imminent". President Muhammadu Buhari signed the delayed 2016 budget into law last month. The record $30.6 billion budget triples capital expenditure compared with the previous year. But with Nigeria's heavy reliance on oil sales, which comprise about 70 percent of national income, it is unclear how this will be achieved.
Tomato Pastes manufacturers in the country including Dangote Farms, Erisco Foods Limited and Savanna Farms Thursday told the House of Representatives Joint Committees on Health Care Services and Drugs and Narcotics that over 91.1 percent of tomato pastes in the country were fake and substandard.
This is just as the House has condemned the alleged importation of dangerous killer tomato pastes imported into the country and promised to carry out investigations into the matter.
Meanwhile, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, has fined the Erisco Foods what it called administrative charge of N1 million for an alleged unauthorised advertisement of Erisco range of products without getting clearance and approval from the agency.
The Speaker of the House, Yakubu Dogara in his address at the one day investigative public hearing stated that the House should not consider lightly allegations injurious to public health.
The Speaker who was represented by the Minority Leader, Leo Ogor stated that the public hearing centred primarily on importation of fake substandard and cancer causing tomato paste into the country. He said what was “worrisome is the unpatriotic attitude of some companies and individuals importing fake, substandard and cancer causing tomato paste into the country at the expense of the health and wellbeing of Nigerians.”
