By Chuks Iloegbunam
Everyone must keep their eyes on the ball. Muhammadu Buhari has,
with little drama, slipped into Phase
Two of his presidency. Given the texture of Phase One, this new phase could deliver somberness and
dissemblance. For those who didn’t get it, or who pretend after the fact not to
have gotten it, Buhari’s Phase One stressed one point: All that glitters is not
gold. It wasn’t that people were unaware of the possibility of stuff like
clay, rubber and wood glinting on account of some polish. It was that the
hoopla that attended the shimmer of the recycled “gemstone” was unprecedented.
But, as Nigerians would say it, after
the race, the calculation of the distance covered! There were scores of
experts in calculus at the starting point. Strangely, what had been hyped as
one joyous calculators’ adventure quickly came to grief, reason being that
there was precious little to mark on the achievements’ margin. Good promises,
like candy bars, had of course, been made to be broken.
There had been (or hadn’t there been?) a number of warning voices
in those heady days of the change mantra’s eruption, Sputnik-like, raring to
tear into and through outer space. One of such voices – that of Chukwuma
Charles Soludo – wasn’t even oppositional to the touted humankind’s final hope.
This was Professor Soludo a month to the presidential ballot: “The APC promises to create 20,000 jobs per
state in the first year, totaling a mere 720,000 jobs. This sounds like a quota
system and for a country where the new entrants into the labour market per annum
exceed two million. If it was intended as a joke, APC must please get serious…”
“Did I hear that APC promises
a welfare system that will pay between N5,000 and N10,000 per month to the
poorest 25 million Nigerians? Just this programme alone will cost between N1.5
and N3 trillion per annum. Add to this the cost of free primary education plus
free meal (to be funded by the federal budget or would it force non-APC state
governments to implement the same?), plus some millions of public housing, etc.
I have tried to cost some of the promises by both the APC and the PDP, given
alternative scenarios for public finance and the numbers don’t add up.
Nigerians would be glad to know how both parties would fund their programmes.
Do they intend to accentuate the huge public debt, or raise taxes on the soon
to-be-beleaguered private businesses, or massively devalue the naira to rake in
baskets of naira from the dwindling oil revenue, or embark on huge fiscal
retrenchment with the sack of labour and abandonment of projects…
“The presidential election
will be won by either Buhari or Jonathan. For either, it is likely to be a
pyrrhic victory. None of them will be able to deliver on the fantastic
promises being made on the economy, and if oil prices remain below $60, I see
very difficult months ahead, with possible heady collisions with labour, civil
society, and indeed the citizenry.”