Hardship and insecurity cloud Nigeria president’s first year

Lagos — Nigerian Josephine Akiga looks around her empty restaurant in Lagos, where a sole customer sits eating, and longs for the days when the place was filled with people.

Business has been so tough since President Bola Tinubu took office a year ago that she sometimes lets customers pay what they have for a meal just to keep business ticking along.

“When you have not sold anything since morning, it’s better to have that money than to allow the person to go,” Akiga said. “So you just ask the person to sit and then give him food for the money he has.”

Since taking office in May last year, Tinubu has implemented reforms including slashing fuel and electricity subsidies and devaluing the naira currency twice to try to increase investment and boost output. He says the policies are necessary to put Nigeria on a long-term growth path.

But the economy is growing well short of the 6% annual expansion targeted by Tinubu, while the reforms have driven inflation to a 28-year high, worsening a cost-of-living crisis. Analysts say economic hardship is also fuelling crime which is hurting people’s livelihoods.

Bismarck Rewane, an economic analyst who was appointed to Tinubu’s economic council in March, agreed with the need for economic reforms but said more attention should have been paid to their implementation.

“The reforms came too quickly but there was no concrete plan to deal with the impact these reforms would have on the people,” he said.

The end of the fuel subsidy, which for decades made petrol cheap for Nigerians, has hit people particularly hard. Petrol is widely used in the country to power not only cars but also generators for small businesses and homes.

Anthony Idowu, a 47-year-old bank employee, said the cost of filling his car had nearly quadrupled to 36,000 naira ($30) since the petrol subsidy was removed last year. He now runs his petrol generator at home for only four hours a day to save money even if it means sleeping without a fan in the sweltering heat of Lagos.

The government has also been criticised for not doing enough to sort out the country’s security problem, which some people say is affecting their livelihoods. The government insists the security situation is improving, saying it has eliminated thousands of armed gang members and Islamist fighters.

Abdulrasheed Isa Gora, a 32-year-old petty trader and farmer in the Birnin Magaji area of northwest Zamfara state, said attacks by armed gangs were on the rise, making it difficult to farm or travel to other communities to sell his wares.

Earlier this week, he and members of his community paid 50-million naira ($42,000) to free 18 family members and some residents who were kidnapped on March 10. Forty others remained missing, he said.

Nigeria has long struggled with insurgency and attacks by armed gangs who kidnap for ransom in the north, where poverty levels are higher. Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project showed the number of kidnappings doubled to 7,086 in Tinubu's first year in office. Security analysts say economic hardship and the allure of ransom payments are driving mass abductions.

“That could well be the case,” information minister Mohammed Idris said, when contacted by Reuters. “That is why the president is encouraging everyone not to pay ransom because when you pay ransom you are going to continue on this cycle of violence,” he said.

Back in the restaurant, it was economic uncertainty that was at the top of Akiga’s worries. From daily sales of 100,000 naira ($84) a year ago, she was hardly making 20,000 naira ($17) now and that was quickly used up buying more stock.

“Any money you make you take it back to the market,” she said.

Reuters