Emerging from a tumultuous 2018, Nigerians look forward to the New Year with mixed feelings. As always, an election year promises to be a volatile period for the country, invariably leading to predictions of a possible break-up along the numerous ethnic lines. This is even more so as the country‘s politics is often seen as a do-or-die or a winner-takes-all affair. In 2011, when the incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari, lost his third bid for the presidency, post-election riots claimed more than 800 lives in 12 northern states of the country, according to Human Rights Watch. This year, will political gladiators and state institutions do anything differently? This will test Buhari’s often-repeated pledge of ensuring free, fair and credible elections.
However, this year’s elections promise to be among the most bitterly-fought and the politicians will be expected to re-enact their pastime of flooding voting venues with gun-bearing thugs. Ballot box-snatching, which has become an integral part of the polls over the years, will return; it has managed to defy all redemptive security measures. In the same vein, there is nothing to suggest that electoral materials will reach election venues at the right time. Already, doubts are being expressed about the possibility of free and fair elections following the refusal of the President to append his signature to the 2018 Electoral Amendment Bill. It has cast a doubt on the use of the card reader, one of the technological innovations capable of reducing rigging.
The judiciary will come under close scrutiny as jaw-dropping verdicts tumble out of the temple of justice, just as the lawyers will continue to laugh all the way to the bank. It is a period when unscrupulous judges will also make money beyond their imagination, the type that made the late respected jurist, Kayode Eso, to describe them derogatorily as “billionaire judges.”
Part of the reasons for the rising tensions in the country is insecurity, which has become a very serious challenge. Exactly 10 years after the Boko Haram sect first bared its blood-stained fangs in Borno State, leading to the death of over 800 people, the threat is expected to persist, especially with the military reduced to repelling the attacks of the religious extremists, instead of taking the battle to their strongholds and flushing them out of their hideouts.
The situation is expected to get more frantic with the regrouping of the Islamic State fighters in the Lake Chad region under the name of Islamic State of West Africa Province. This has been attested to by the military authorities who claim that Boko Haram has been decimated, while IS, dislodged from the Middle East, has found solace in Nigeria. Already, inhabitants of Baga, a town that once suffered the massacre of over 2,000 people by Boko Haram, are now seeking refuge in different parts of Borno State after a recent assault by the terrorists.
It would have been easier if the activities of the Islamists had been the only security threat to contend with; in other parts of the country, unchecked bandits and kidnappers will have a free rein. Fulani herdsmen that have devastated farming and business activities in the North-Central and North-West regions may resume their carnage. With our dangerously unsuitable centralised policing system, kidnapping and bank robberies could further spike nationwide.
On the economic front, the outlook, according to experts, ranges from gloomy to outright anxiety. While the government has set optimistic targets of over three per cent GDP growth, expansion in agriculture and the non-oil sectors, development agencies are more modest. Initial optimistic forecasts had been anchored on higher oil prices, stronger performance in agriculture and non-oil sectors, diversification and improved revenue collection. Like the Bretton Woods institutions, the African Development Bank has seen its projections of 2.1 per cent growth in 2018 and 2.5 per cent in 2019 hobbled by headwinds that delivered only 1.8 per cent by Q3 2018. Recovery from recession will be slower than expected, arising from poor fiscal policies, insecurity, poor revenue and tax administration, power shortages and inability to stem rising poverty levels put at 80 per cent by the African Development Bank.
Unlike 2015, militancy in the Niger Delta may not pose a serious threat to the economy since the two main contenders in the presidential election are from the North. In another clear sign that the economy is beginning to falter, oil prices have been going downwards once again, plunging below the $60 per barrel on which the 2019 budget is anchored; rain and flooding had disrupted farming and harvests, with over 100,000 hectares of rice farms destroyed in Jigawa State alone and many more in other states, according to the Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria.
Nothing so far suggests an upbeat in the labour market. Add the 55.4 per cent youth unemployment, inflation that may worsen soon when government caves in to a general wage increase demand, 40 per cent of federal revenues going to personnel costs, N2.4 trillion earmarked for debt servicing, an increasingly unsustainable public finance system and economic model where states exist to share oil revenues to pay salaries, contractors and maintain public officers in luxury, then, the omens are bad. Strikes and threats of more are underway that will disrupt productive activities.
Unless Nigeria stops importing refined petroleum products (subsidising petrol with N1.5 billion daily), while maintaining loss-making refineries, thereby crowding out the private sector, this sector as well as the financial sector, will not stimulate growth, boost non-oil exports or mop up the 20.9 million jobless. However, by curbing debts, which totalled N22.4 trillion by September, reducing personnel and overhead costs, improving revenue and tax collection and privatising state-owned enterprises, there is hope that the economy can stem capital flight, attract Foreign Direct Investment, create jobs and stimulate production. Power, at a meagre 5,000MW at its peak, cannot lift Africa’s largest economy. And if the government continues in its fiscal waywardness, the dire prediction of contraction by the IMF’s Global Economic Outlook may hit Nigerians this year and further entrench misery.
As with past budgets, the leeway for corruption has been provided in the 2019 estimates of N8.8 trillion: bogus constituency projects for lawmakers and recycled items like cars, computers and kitchen utensils are ever-present. In fairness, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission secured the convictions of two former governors, yet many high profile corruption trials are still likely to be enmeshed in cyclical delays. Partisan politics may becloud the EFCC’s activities in the election year, further slowing down the anti-graft war.
Education will remain at a cross-roads in 2019 with strikes of trade unions within the system. The Academic Staff Union of Universities has since November 2018 been on strike; and has resolved to make it indefinite following the Federal Government’s inability to implement the 2009 agreement, renegotiated in 2012. Trade unions, which are not on strike, are bristling for action. Since government has failed to harmonise labour issues in the academia, other unions might pick up the gauntlets where ASUU left off.
As in the educational horizon, uncertainties also becloud the health sector, which has N315.6 billion in the 2019 budget. The Joint Health Sector Union, comprising nurses, pharmacists, laboratory technologists in tertiary health institutions, is likely to resume its suspended strike, should government respond to the demands of their counterparts in the education sector. The union has a September 2017 pact on adjustment of salary structure. Its observance in the breach led to a two-month strike, which paralysed healthcare services in 2018, beginning in April.
In all, as it finds it difficult to project authority over its territory and peoples and cannot protect its national boundaries, Nigeria will continue to struggle against the dynamics of a failed state. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says a strong state provides core guarantees to its citizens and others under its jurisdiction in the three interrelated realms of security, economics, and politics. The governing capacity of the state in these areas may be further attenuated if the election goes awry. Not much will be done in reforming Nigeria’s feeble and flawed institutions. Progress is, however, possible if the Nigerian people are determined more than ever before to demand good governance from elected officials. To hold governments accountable, people need to be organised, informed, able to claim the political space and to influence the public services that affect them. Without this, 2019 is a cloudy horizon.
