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| Dr Ibraheem Dooba |
Editor’s note:
The days when the outgoing President Goodluck Jonathan was unanimously praised by Nigerians for accepting defeat at the 2015 polls with calmness and dignity are gone. Analysts and observers are preparing for the president-elect, Muhammadu Buhari’s, era, and use the last opportunity to assess President Jonathan’s years in power. The Naij columnist Ibraheem Dooba says Jonathan is leaving the country in a ‘depressing’ state.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the original author. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Naij.com, its editors or other contributors.
Story highlights:
— As Jonathan prepares to leave, let’s remind ourselves of the depressing statistics that he has gifted us.
— The irony is that it’s Jonathan who promised to make it better. But he only made it worse.
— We’re more corrupt today than at any time in our history.
As Jonathan is singing his swan song, there’s no last hurrah for Nigerians. As he prepares to leave, let’s remind ourselves of the depressing statistics that he has gifted us. Read and weep.
Kaduna, Kano, Jigawa states and some of their neighbours now share two megawatts of electricity. Abuja, which used to have over 30MW, now has 15MW, yet nobody sees any light. Many neighbourhoods go without electricity for as long as a week. Where I live in Abuja, we get about 30 minutes of electricity every 24 hours from the grid.
Last Friday, Dr Igali, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Power [permanent secretary, Federal Ministry of Power, Godknows Igali], told us that electricity has now reached the“unprecedentedly low” level of 1,327 megawatts. The operative word here is “unprecedented”; that means we’ve never reached this level before. South Africa, with a third of our population, produces over 40,000 megawatts. This means we’re producing less than 5% of what South Africa is producing.
The irony is that it’s Jonathan who promised to make it better. But he only made it worse after selling our electricity companies for pennies. The only individuals who take any benefits are the directors of these companies, including the government representatives on their boards (some of whom are paid two million naira per month, a former managing director of a distributing company told me).
Before the elections, Professor Charles Soludo, a former Central Bank governor, gave Jonathan an F mark on the economy: “His record on the economy is a clear ‘F’ grade. As one reviews the laundry list of micro interventions the government calls its achievements, one wonders whether such list is all that the government could deliver with an unprecedented oil boom and an unprecedented public debt accumulation.”
The UNDP ranks Nigeria among the lowest in its Human Development Index reports. More than two-thirds (68%) of Nigerians are living below $1.25 per day. Our life expectancy is 52 years. This means that statistically, if you’re 50 and a Nigerian, you better start packing your things, because you’ll die in the next two years — forget wanting to live to one hundred years.
My friends often take to Facebook to celebrate the birth of their children. Well, I feel bad for those babies because Nigeria is the worst place to be born in. Their mothers, too, can’t escape the mire to which Jonathan subjected their babies, because our country is one of the worst places to be a mother. On hunger, we came second. That is, if you removed whoever is in the first category, we would be the hungriest individuals on the Global Hunger Index. All considered, our healthcare is zilch. That’s why President Jonathan, his ministers and other Nigerian leaders don’t go to our hospitals. As a result, Nigerian Medical Association said that we are losing 600 billion naira to medical tourism every year.
Five hundred thousand Nigerians went in March 2014 to write a 35-minute aptitude test so that they could be recruited into the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS). Twenty three of those applicants never came back home. Half a million people were invited for the test, but only 4,550 vacancies existed. That’s not all. Six and a half million youths applied for those positions, each paid N1,000. Bring out your calculation and do the math: 6.5 million x N1, 000? That’s how much Nigerians paid for death.
Of all the people who orchestrated this scam and deaths, nobody was punished or sacked by Jonathan. The minister of interior, Abba Moro, and other government officials actually blamed the dead for causing their own demise: they didn’t follow procedure, they said. In fact, instead of the three months that Jonathan promised, it took a year for the bereaved families to receive any resemblance of compensation — on the eve of the elections!
Every year, the government budgets over 70% to service itself and its satiated functionaries’ sinecures. The health sector, for example, gets only 1.9% of our budget. Here, allocation doesn’t mean spending, because this amount will go to private pockets and bank accounts.
Recently, the vice president-elect, Yemi Osinbajo, told us that Nigeria is heavily indebted to the amount of $60 billion. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the finance minister, said he was wrong. It is more than that: we actually owe $63 billion.
From the analysis, up until 2007, when Yar’adua and Jonathan came into power, we owed $18 billion. From then to now (2015), we owe another $18 billion. Since Yar’Adua was sickly and wasn’t exactly favourably disposed to borrowing, much of the indebtedness was inspired by Jonathan. To be fair to him, state governments borrowed too, but it was the federal government which led the way. Now, over 21% of our budget goes to debt servicing.
We’re more corrupt today than at any time in our history. Two years into Yar’Adua’s presidency, Transparency International rated us 133rd out of 180. In 2013, two years into Jonathan’s first term, the same body rated us 144th out of 177 countries.
The Agriculture Ministry has been touted as the best-performing agency under Jonathan and its minister, Akinwumi Adesina, the poster boy of Jonathan’s job creation magic. However, statistics have shown that even from that sector, we’ve been assailed with more noise than substance, and growth has actually declined in the sector.
In a blog for Premium Times, I invited Nigerians to reconsider the hype: “Sharing data from the National Bureau of Statistics and the Central Bank of Nigeria, Adamu Bello [former minister of agriculture] said that instead of growing, there had been a decline in the [agriculture] sector since Obasanjo left office. Statistics show that between 2003 and 2007, when Obasanjo left office, the growth in agriculture sector averaged 6.85 percent. The growth started declining immediately after he left office. And in 2013, under Jonathan, growth in the sector was 4.5 percent; the government failed its own target of 8.0 percent growth.”
Considering Jonathan’s limitless poor performance in every sector, it’s apt to end this with Professor Soludo’s final verdict on Jonathan: “If we appropriately adjust for oil income and debt, then this government is the worst in our history on the economy. All statistics are from the National Bureau of Statistics.”
Also, let us not forget that 219 Chibok girls are yet to be found.
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