The Disappearance of Hope

And the end of E go better

Edition No #4 of The Relevant Information

During the weekend, I published the third edition of The Relevant Information News, titled “2027 Is Our Last Chance”, in which I urged you the reader, to understand that a second Tinubu term at the helm of affairs of this country will most likely kill off any viability this country ever had of succeeding. If you missed that piece, you can find it embedded below.

A few associates and friends of mine read that piece and messaged me their thoughts, privately. One associate through their private comments reminded me of the very reason why I ultimately decided to set up a Substack and start writing a newsletter, which is the disappearance of hope amongst the everyday forgotten Nigerian. What they said is reproduced below with permission

I don’t buy into the argument that people will forget. These are unprecedented times. No one forgets pain like this.

In years past there was hardship, but the common man knew that he could rough things up and God Will Provide.

A bricklayer gets N3,000 daily and he is satisfied because that’s enough for foodstuff so he could ‘afford’ to forget some of his immediate pains in exchange for (a pack of) spaghetti on election day.

But now? fewer houses are being built so even less income (than the N3,000 daily). And the income is no longer enough (given the stratospheric price increases in basic goods).

It is really dire.

These are unprecedented times in our nation’s history. Speaking as someone who was alive for Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) years, and whose family today suffers the fallout from what SAP did to this country; who was wise enough during the Abacha years to understand the political and economic impact that military dictatorship had on our growth; and who had prepubescent children of his own by the time Buhari’s ineptitude was stumbling into office; these are unprecedented times.

I travel frequently across the country and I engage with ordinary people, satisfying my natural and professional curiosity to understand what people think, feel, experience and express, and over the last eighteen months it has felt like my engagements with regular people has become like having a front row seat to the disappearance of hope from the Nigerian psyche.

For the first time ever that I can remember, people no longer have any hope in this country’s present, and neither is there any hope left in its future.

The Nigerian mind has always inherently believed that this country possess a lot of repressed potential, that would blossom beautifully if the chains weighing it down were removed. There has always been that widely held belief that some day, one day, Nigeria will make it. Somehow E go better.

No matter how unrealistic that hope might have seemed, the Nigerian psyche almost from birth, was programmed to believe that there’s a silver lining to this darkness of a cloud.

That hope made the analogical bricklayer in my associate’s telling, content to brave the rough living of today and manage the provisions that his analogical N3,000 daily wage would pay him.

And now it’s gone.

Every regular person outside the upper and middle class bubble that I interact with during my extensive and frequent travels, are people existing at the bottom of the Nigerian socio-economic ladder, already lacking any form of survival safety nets.

Now even the little comfort of “e go better” and a bit of purchasing power that ensured that they could afford to buy new clothes, shoes, eat poor quality but affordable food, use low end Chinese smartphones to connect with the world or build digital microbusinesses and so on, has been taken away.

What I see in increasing volume day after day, is poor people already surviving on poor quality but relatively affordable food, unable to afford to eat. People increasingly unable to afford even low-end dumb phones, losing their connections with the world, and the economic opportunities that come with being on the internet.

I see fathers ashamed of their inability to feed their families, despite how hard they work. I see mothers in despair that not only are they no longer able to buy the extra comforts for their kids to be happy, they and their husbands can no longer even afford to ensure their children are able to eat to their stomach’s content.

I see single mums facing homelessness, panicking over what to do because despite how hard they are working - many in so called good jobs - they are struggling to juggle exponential increases in school fees, house rents and food prices.

I see grown men, grown women, hardworking people, deathly terrified of falling ill because they cannot afford the literal cost of healthcare, combined with food, rent, transportation and so on.

Nobody I talk to thinks e go better, not today. Not anymore. People are just clinging on to survive one day to the next, with no hope for what that tomorrow will bring.

All of this, one hundred and ten thousand percent of this, can be laid at the feet of an administration that has acted with reckless abandon, focused solely on securing its hold on power, even if it comes at the expense of the very people that they rule over.

If there was a point to this suffering, if there was actual planning on how this suffering would be a stepping stone to Nigeria not only recovering from the disaster that were the Buhari years, but actually climbing on the road of accelerated development, I would be telling people to be patient and bear it for the time it would take.

However, there is no point, there is no national interest planning, there is nothing that points to this being a situation where the President and his team are inflicting necessary suffering on the Nigerian people, in order for the country’s economic growth engine to be kickstarted.

What there seems to be, is a state capture-style plan like with the Guptas in South Africa, but in this case our Guptas may be the Lebanese-Nigerian Chagoury clan and the Tinubu Organisation.

There is OVH Energy Marketing taking over NNPC Retail, after NNPC claimed to have bought OVH, with OVH’s people allegedly now the ones dominating the new company.

There is Tony Elumelu’s - the President’s friend - Transcorp Power taking over Abuja Electricity Distribution Company.

There is Aliko Dangote’s refinery getting choked out of selling his product in the local market. That situation has by default forced Dangote Refinery to sell to foreign buyers, led by international commodities trading companies like Trafigura and Vitol can buy his stockpile of refined petroleum products, and - allegedly - certain Nigerian companies can buy those same products, do ship to ship transfers just outside our territorial waters and then land in Lagos claiming they are bringing in imported diesel and petrol.

Coincidentally Vitol happens to be one of the two companies that Oando (owned by Wale Tinubu, the President’s nephew) divested its equity in OVH Energy Marketing to, shortly before NNPC Retail supposedly acquired OVH.

There are all sorts of little things that over time add up to a consistent picture of the economics of the country being set on fire and hacked to pieces to support the President’s structure, at the cost of the welfare and hopes of the Nigerian people.

My worry, and one major reason why I started this newsletter, is that Nigerians who are everyday losing hope, do not fully understand the deliberateness of the destruction of their purchasing power.

The fact that so many people are working hard, with jobs or businesses, and yet can no longer afford to do something as basic as eat two meals in a day, is not an error or some mistake, it is the side effect of deliberate decisions taken by this administration.

That major cities and towns across the country are undergoing involuntary shutdowns, with city centres empty during peak business hours, is not some flawed policy at work, rather it is what our President and his organisation have decided will be the new normal. For their own agenda’s sake, and agenda that prioritises the naked control of power over everything else.

The big question some of the people who read the previous newsletter and spoke to me privately keep asking, is can this administration be stopped? Can its grip over the country’s neck be pried open before it chokes Nigeria to death?

I say yes.

There has to be a civic mobilisation against the 2027 elections, to ensure that this experiment we did not sign up under this administration, does not get to wiggle its way into a second term.