Economic crisis confronts new government

Ask any Nigeria how they survive, and the usual answer is “God dey” (the will of God). From rampant unemployment to collapsed social services, decayed infrastructure, crime and perennial fuel shortages, the list of woes confronting ordinary Nigerians is staggering. “It’s a miracle we manage. I would describe the plight of the average Nigerian as more hellish that hell,” the director of the NGO Shelter Rights Initiative, Eze Onyekpere, told IRIN. “Your regular job doesn’t pay you a living wage, you struggle on public transport that is falling apart, you live in very sub-standard housing with no electricity and running water.” In the late 1970s, when annual budgetary expenditure was around US $30 billion, Nigeria was widely touted as the world’s next newly-industrialised country. Today, after years of mismanagement and systematic corruption, per capita income is around US $250, and Nigeria is classified as one of the least developed nations - despite abundant natural resources and an energetic and inventive population of 110 million. Things are likely to get worse in the short term, analysts say. Apart from the structural problems of an oil-dependent economy Nigeria’s new civilian administration will inherit on 29 May, it will also be confronted by the fall in world fuel prices which could almost halve revenue earnings this year. To ease potential instability, international donors are preparing a US $1.5 billion aid package. It is conditional on the new government backing the free-market reform programme initiated by current military ruler General Abdulsalami Abubakar. Among donor demands are a “credible, transparent privatisation programme and the elimination of corruption”, a Western embassy source told IRIN. Both presidential candidates, Olusegun Obasanjo and Olu Falae, have endorsed the need for reform and the tackling of corruption. “But I’m not so confident a lot is going to change,” says Onyekpere. “A lot of the faces managing resources under the military will be the same people under the civilian dispensation.” In a country where the public sector minimum wage is just US $30 per month, a culture of bribe-taking has become entrenched at all levels of Nigerian society. “Corruption festers in an environment in which economic crimes are very rarely punished, and the ones who should do the punishing are part of the bribe-taking environment,” Clement Nwankwo, director of the Constitutional Rights Project, told IRIN. “Nobody lives with the illusion that when the politicians come they will perform miracles,” notes Abdul Mahmud-Aminu, a lawyer with the Civil Liberties Organisation.”We need honest, genuine and patriotic leadership that will seek to lead by example.”