Nigeria must “radically” increase its exports to ease shortages of foreign exchange in the oil-dependent West African nation, President Muhammadu Buhari said.
“In a world of lower oil prices and dollar revenues, the only sustainable path is to reduce Nigerians’ over-reliance on imports,” Buhari, 73, who came to power in May 2015, wrote in an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal on Monday. “We must rebalance our economy by empowering entrepreneurs and producers, big and small, to create more of what their fellow Nigerians demand.”
The government will help local businesses by encouraging more investment in infrastructure and lowering taxes on small companies, he said. It will also “eliminate bureaucracy to bring the informal economy out of the shadows.” The central bank will introduce a more flexible foreign-exchange policy, Buhari wrote, without giving any details of plans first announced by Governor Godwin Emefiele on May 24.
Africa’s largest economy has been battered by the fall in oil prices since mid-2014 and a drop in production this year to an almost three-decade low as militants bomb crude and gas pipelines. The economy contracted in the first quarter for the first time since 2004 and a recession is imminent, according to the central bank. Inflation accelerated to 15.6 percent in May, the highest rate since early 2010, the national statistics office said on Tuesday.
In a bizarre, yet not unexpected move, the Nigeria Cricket Federation has sacked the entire men's cricket team and their Indian coach, Shriam Regananthian.
This was after the side failed in the ICC World Cricket League Division Five tournament held last month in UK, finishing bottom of the table.
The team had just one win over Tanzania and lost to Oman, Guernsey, Vanatu and Jersey. The team also lost to Tanzania again to claim the bottom spot. Jersey went on to become champions.
Federation president, Emeka Onyeama added that national chief coach Uthe Ogbimi has also been relieved of his duty with the team. He blamed Ogbimi and the team Captain Kunle Adegbola for the embarrassing campaign. He however refused to blame the Indian level A coach who joined the team on the eve of their departure to UK.
According to him, the team underperformed despite having intensive preparations and increment of their daily allowance to $100 per day from the old regiment of $25- $50 per day.
He declared that the federation would now undertake a rebuilding process where young players from the U-19 team would be upgraded to the national team.
He said a new national coaching crew will be announced in the wake of the proposed North West Africa Tournament and ICC/Africa T-20 tournament scheduled for September.
The Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) has warned Nigerian authorities it may “review our earlier stance of not taking lives” if oil companies continue to operate in the country’s oil hub.
The militant group has launched a series of attacks on oil pipelines and facilities in the Niger Delta, where the majority of Nigeria’s oil reserves are concentrated. The NDA has so far rejected offers of dialogue from the Nigerian government and vowed to continue its Operation Red Economy, the purported goal of which is to reduce the West African country’s oil production to zero.
In a statement published on its website on Monday, the NDA said that the oil companies must not carry out any repair works on the affected pipelines and that buying of crude oil from the Niger Delta must be suspended “as we await the right atmosphere that will engender genuine dialogue.”
The NDA has claimed attacks on facilities belonging to several international oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, U.S. firm Chevron and Italian oil giant ENI. Some of their attacks have shown a high degree of sophistication and have taken down strategically-important pipelines—the first attack claimed by the group was on an underwater pipeline at Shell’s Forcados terminal and forced the company to temporarily shut down the 250,000 barrels per day (bpd) terminal.
Nigerian oil minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu attempted to reach out to the militants earlier in June, saying that the Nigerian military would step back from pursuing the group in order to establish a platform for dialogue. In Monday’s statement, however, the NDA said it would only participate in dialogue with “independent mediators” appointed by the international oil companies working in the region.
Historically, the Niger Delta has been the site of previous uprisings by militant groups, who have claimed that the impoverished region does not benefit sufficiently from its oil wealth. In the mid-2000s, militants led by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) decimated the country’s oil production and kidnapped oil workers, with the insurgency only coming to an end in 2009 with the introduction of an amnesty program for the fighters. MEND has publicly called upon the NDA to engage in dialogue with the government, but the latter group has rejected the former and criticized its leaders for abandoning their cause.
Largely as a result of attacks by the NDA and other militants, Nigeria’s oil production has plummeted from 2.2 million bpd to a 20-year low of between 1.5 million and 1.6 million bpd.
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.
