I wrote this Article below on November 2, 2021…
Those close to Tinubu and his team should share it with them.
Even if Nigeria borrows a new $50 billion without overhauling the whole constitutional, fiscal, institutional, electoral, socio-economic, resource production, and control foundation of Nigeria, it will be stolen and frittered away…
Let’s quit this delusion and get serious….
WHAT BUHARI WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY IN 2015/2016 THAT WOULD HAVE PREVENTED US FROM SLIDING INTO THE FIRST RECESSION AND DESTRUCTION OF NIGERIA’S ECONOMY.
When Buhari took over the reins of power as the President of Nigeria on May 29, 2015, the following were the key economic and financial highlights;
1. The foreign reserve was depleting massively and stood at $29 billion.
2. The foreign exchange rate was officially at N199/$1, and N216/$1 at the parallel market (so narrow window for arbitraging).
3. The total national debt portfolio as of June 30, 2015, was N12 trillion and external debt was $10 billion.
4. The average crude oil price for 2015 was $48 per barrel and the average crude oil output in Nigeria within that same 2015 was 2.36 million barrels per day.
5. The GDP growth rate in 2015 was down to 2.7% per annum, from a high of 6% in 2014, thus, it was an economy on a decline because of mismanagement by the Jonathan regime.
THE NIGERIA ECONOMY WAS TRULY ON A DECLINE WHEN BUHARI TOOK OVER the reins of power on May 29, 2015, with so much political goodwill and fanfare.
For a man who took over the reins of power with so much goodwill and fanfare, the coast was clear for him to hit the ground running as a transformational leader.
But that is not Buhari for you. He came with one agenda… vengeance and dark-hearted clannish goal/agenda to dominate the rest of Nigeria.
For a man who struggled for 14 years to be President, it took him 5 whole months to put together his first cabinet of misfits. Square pegs in round holes.
The first thing he did in office was to initiate an agenda to roll back the Novel Yar’Adua amnesty program for the repentant militants. The elders of the Niger Delta warned him, yet he did not listen.
By the time his ill-advised and recalcitrant clannish actions of bullying the Niger Delta youths were sorted out and resolved by Acting President Yemi Osinbajo (after Buhari took ill for 104 days and was rushed out of Nigeria), the Niger Delta Avengers had blown away our daily crude oil output from the average of 2.36 million barrels a day to 1.2 million barrels a day by May/June 2016.
Nigeria’s daily crude oil output never recovered from these hits.
Before Buhari took over the reins of power, he swore that there was nothing like petroleum subsidies. While fielding a question from a reporter in 2014, he infamously asked that rhetorical question, “who is subsidizing who?”
Thus, providence provided Buhari the golden opportunity to fully deregulate the whole downstream oil and gas sector when in the first quarter of 2016, the prices of the white petroleum products slumped to such a low, that the NNPC was even making more money selling the PMS at N145 per liter.
The landing cost of a liter of the PMS then was N116 per liter and the NNPC under Dr. Kachikwu Ibe was poised to do away with the subsidies regime even after he told us that our daily PMS consumption was 28m to 32 million liters a day, not the Ponzi 47m to 52m liters per day used by Deziani and her rogue marketers to fleece Nigeria.
Note that our annual white petroleum import bill as of that 2016 was about $4.6 billion.
The whole world waited for Buhari as the self-acclaimed man of integrity and Petroleum Minister to announce an end to subsidies, total deregulation of the downstream oil and gas sector, and privatization of the refineries that Obasanjo, Yar Adua, and Jonathan used to waste our resources without fixing them.
However, and most unfortunately, goaded by the rapacious hyenas within his inner circle, rather than do the right things, he brought in the late Maikanti Baru to replace Kachikwu Ibe as NNPC GMD.
Realizing the importance of the NNPC to the usual Ponzi games of successive governments before Buhari, Baru dug in and created worse heist schemes than his predecessors.
Before our very eyes, the volume of daily PMS import and consumption, which Kachikwu told us was then 32m liters per day, outrageously grew to 60 to 66 million liters per day under Baru. The import bills jumped from $4.6 billion to an average of $10 to 11 billion per annum.
Outrageously, the subsidies regime that we thought they would do away with went back to the hundreds of billions and trillion Naira height, even after the pump price of a liter of the PMS was jerked from N87 in May 2015 to N145 in 2016.
Under Maikanti Baru, we wasted over $389 million on failed Turnaround Maintenance programs at the refineries and from then till 2021, they have misappropriated and frittered away over N800 billion as losses at the dead refineries without privatizing them.
Insecurity in Nigeria, which Buhari promised us would be a thing of the past within 6 months in power, has since 2015 increased in scope, theater of operations, and become more virulent. More Nigerians have been driven into IDP camps in the land, and the combined activities of Boko Haram, Terrorist Herdsmen, ISWAP, Fula Bandits, Kidnappers, and UGM have made it impossible for farmers to go to their farms and stalled economic activity and productivity across the land.
If Buhari had not clannishly threatened and gone after the Niger Delta amnesty program to stop it in 2015, the Niger Delta Avengers would not have gone back to the creeks to bomb away our daily crude oil output from 2.3 million barrels a day in 2015 to 1.2 million barrels and less in 2016.
If Buhari had listened to superior reasons by removing the subsidies regime in 2016 when the landing prices of the PMS were far less than the pump price, totally deregulated the downstream oil and gas sector, and privatized the refineries in 2015/2016, by now Nigeria would have been refining all her domestic white petroleum products needs.
If Buhari had liberalized the downstream oil and gas sector, there is no way Maikanti Baru and co. would have had the opaque and sleaze-laden window to outrageously jerk up our daily PMS import and consumption figures to 60 to 66 million liters. Today, under Mele Kyari, we are now being told that the daily import and consumption volume for the PMS in Nigeria is now 102 million liters a day. We now have ghosts who consume our products.
If the market had been fully deregulated and the opacity at the NNPC eliminated since 2015, we would not have anyone telling us such poppycock that Nigeria, with 100 million poor people and 92% of her citizens living on less than $104 income per month or $3 income per day (atrociously low purchasing powers), consumes twice the daily PMS per car consumption rate than the US, Canada, SA, and the rest of the world.
The most annoying lies they came up with is to blame the outrageous ghost numbers on smugglers. They forgot that the total daily consumption of PMS in the 6 contiguous neighboring countries to Nigeria is less than 9 million liters a day.
If Buhari had provided the security of lives and properties he promised us in 2014 and destroyed Boko Haram as he promised us within 6 months, our farmers and active productive population would not have stayed away from the farm and other places of production.
As a result of the above factors, actions, and inactions of the Buhari regime, ably worsened by the activities of the other cankerworms in the 36 states in Nigeria, food inflation in Nigeria had grown by a CGAR of over 300% from 2015 to 2021: The exchange rate of the Naira to the Dollar has moved from N199/$ to N420 at the CBN and N574 at the parallel market.
The number of extreme poor Nigerians had grown from 76 million in 2015 to 95 million in 2021.
Our national debt profile has grown from N12 trillion on June 30, 2015, to over N36 trillion today. External debt has been ramped up from $10 billion in June 2015 to over $33 billion today. Ways and means at the CBN is at over N4.9 trillion and still growing.
Anyone who expected a better outcome other than what we have today, based on the actions and inactions of the political leadership in Nigeria over the last 22 years, especially the last 6 years, must be hallucinating. Whatever you sow, is what you will reap.
If Buhari, the 36 governors, and other political leaders in Nigeria honestly desire to end the misery, decay, and death in Nigeria, they know the simple things to do. The simple things include;
RESTRUCTURE the constitutional, fiscal, socio-economic, security, governance, resource generation and control, autonomous and administrative architecture of Nigeria back to what we had in 1960/1963 (under a 6-region framework).
By doing this, the following will happen;
1. The regions and states will have more autonomy, resources, responsibilities, and self-determination of the people, without the destructive influences of the current quasi-unitary system that we are running that is already polluted by rabid ethnicity and religious divisions.
2. By doing this above, the states and regions will have their own unique police and security architecture (manned by the people who understand the culture, intricacies, and ways of the people being policed). If we have security of lives and properties, we will have stability and be able to adopt a more deliberate and scientific agriculture policy that puts a majority of our working population to work in mechanized and digitized agro-revolution programs. If the Netherlands can produce and export $110 billion worth of food commodities annually, Nigeria can do the same.
3. A RESTRUCTURED Nigeria today where the regions and states control their sea ports and airports as we have it in the US; where they control their resources and pay 50% tax into the Federation account, as we had it from 1960 to 1966 and currently done in the US, will put an end to the many separatist agitations in the land and help the regions and states to look inward in the creation of collective prosperity for all.
4. By doing all the above more, we will be putting our whole active factors of production in the land to positive and good works. This will lead to a net positive surplus in the production of goods and services, security, stability, and prosperity for all.
However, going by the antecedents of Buhari, the 36 governors, and other elitist gangsters masquerading as leaders, they will never do the very simple things or take the elementary actions listed above. It is obvious that they are sadists, who derive joy in compounding the misery and woes of a majority of hapless Nigerians.
Actions and inactions have consequences. So, for those of you asking us what Buhari and the political leadership in Nigeria would have done differently from 2015 to now to stave off the calamity and plagues that have befallen Nigeria over the last 6 years, the answer is contained herein.
FINALLY,
Our daily prayer is for God to keep us alive to see 2023 and the back of these plagues. We have been visited by the worst forms of human plagues parading as rulers ever recorded in the history of mankind. May God provide us with the Goshen cover to survive and outlive them all.
Thank you.
I come in peace.
Nnaemeka Onyeka Obiaraeri
09090900989
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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