Nigerians Are Angry With Govt Officials – Shettima Admits

Nigerians Are Angry With Govt Officials — Shettima Admits

By Daily Hint

As hardships and the cost of living continued to escalate in Nigeria’s unprecedented inflation, Vice-President Kashim Shettima has said the poor in the country are angry with government officials and other members of the elite, who constitute the minority.

The vice-president dropped the hint at the graduation ceremony of the Executive Intelligence Management Course with 16 participants from different security agencies and nominees of state governments in Abuja on Saturday. The event was organised by the National Institute for Security Studies.

This is the first time a senior government official is admitting the biting hardship in the country, which has been aggravated since President Bola Tinubu took over the reins of government on May 29, 2023.

In his inauguration speech, the President had declared that subsidy on petrol was gone for good, and hours after that statement, the pump price of petrol jumped from N238-N263 per litre to a minimum of N500. It currently sells for between N580 and N615.

As Nigerians were adjusting to the new reality and the attendant increase in the prices of goods and services, including transport fares, the Federal Government announced the decision to allow the exchange rate of the naira to major international currencies float and be determined by demand and supply.

That decision immediately led to a significant depreciation of the local currency, which peaked at N465.07 against the United States dollar just weeks before Tinubu’s inauguration. The scarcity of dollars and other major international currencies led the naira to climb to over 1,000 against the greenback.

Just on Friday, the naira fell to an all-time low of N1,099.05/$ at the official Investor and Exporter forex window to cap what had been a turbulent couple of months for the national currency.

This signifies a 30.36 per cent decline from its closing rate of N843.07/$ according to data from the FMDQ Securities Exchange. That was the lowest rate that the naira had closed since the Central Bank of Nigeria moved to adopt the I&E window as the official trading channel for the currency.

That day, the currency began trading at N844.10/$ before closing at N1,099.05/$. Since June, the naira has lost more than 40 per cent of its value, adding to inflationary pressure in the country.

Saturday PUNCH reported that many families risked celebrating the approaching Christmas and New Year in hardship due to the hike in the prices of goods and services, and were devising life-changing ways to cut costs.

Shettima, however, said on Saturday, “All of us here belong to a tiny segment of the Nigerian population. And you don’t need a soothsayer to tell you that the poor are angry with us. Go to the slums and mingle with the poor. I am a native of Maiduguri (Borno State Capital). Anytime a rich man brought a new car to his house, it (the house) used to be a place of pilgrimage.

“People (used to) go and see not out of anger, but out of admiration. But now, as we cruise around in our bulletproof cars, one will see contempt in the eyes of the poor. We have to improve the quality of governance. And what we have is a tiny window of not more than 10 to 20 years. Let’s improve the quality of governance.”

He also noted that creating jobs and giving hope to the populace would help curb insecurity in the country.

The VP added, “Let’s create jobs; let’s give hope to the populace. And once we create jobs, all this madness of insecurity will disappear. There won’t be Boko Haram and banditry if this is done, especially for us from the North. We can blame the bandits, but we in leadership positions owe it to posterity to address this.

“They (the poor) are the most neglected segment of our society. You can hardly differentiate between them and their animals. Even the animals they rear belong to those in the city. So, there have to be kinetic and non-kinetic solutions to all the problems. Be it the IPOB agitation in the South-East; be it the challenges in the South-South; be it Boko Haram or rural banditry in the North-East, North-West, and North-Central.”

He, however, urged the citizens to be patient with the President and support his efforts to reposition the country.