By Kayode Emola
One of the basic requirements in life is to have a financial fiscal discipline; and when your expenses exceed your income, prudence calls for reflection and re-evaluation. When this is allowed to occur on a national level, then the nation needs to look critically at its strategy for financial management.
For many countries, January is a time to assess the expected national revenue and the promise of what the government aims to do for the citizens based upon it. Other countries may have two or three tiers of annual budget. The UK, for instance, used to have its budget twice each year. This continued until recently when the Chancellor cancelled the autumn budget in order to allow greater focus on the spring budget prior to the end of the financial year in April.
Many of Nigeria’s civil servants and workers look forward to the annual budget, as nearly everyone is either directly or indirectly affected by what the government has to offer the people. However, many people do not ask what the national budget means for the sustenance of the country.
In the UK, there is a certain level of debt that the government can accrue. Successive governments have placed their focus on not relying heavily on borrowing to run their day-to-day functions. Before David Cameron became the UK Prime Minister in 2010, the UK was facing its highest level of borrowing in peacetime, which was unsustainable. A large number of the citizens were on government-provided benefits, so Mr. Cameron’s agenda sought to get these people into work.
Getting people into work is universally advantageous, as it not only reduces the burden on the government’s benefit system, it also provides national revenue through tax, which can then be used to fund essential services enjoyed by the people.
In the case of Nigeria, one may wonder what the principle of our national budget even is, given that more than half of the budget is funded by government borrowing. For instance, last week the President signed the 2022 budget of over ₦17 trillion (seventeen trillion), equivalent to USD $42 billion. Yet, we can see from the National Bureau of Statistics’ report that the total generated by all 36 states and the FCT was around ₦849.12 bn (equivalent to USD $2.12bn) in the first quarter of 2021. Extrapolating from those statistics, we can infer the Nigerian federation would have made around ₦3.5 trillion (equivalent of USD $8.5bn) throughout the whole year of 2021.
Unless there is a money tree growing somewhere, then this deficit of ₦13.5 trillion can only be filled by increasing national debt, which is utterly shambolic. Already the proposed budget has a deficit of ₦6.25 trillion, approximately 3.39% of GDP. I cannot see how on earth a country that does not even generate up to $10bn per annum can be budgeting spending of over $40bn, and yet still have nothing to show for it.
Nigeria spends over 80% of its revenue on servicing domestic and foreign loans. Considering this, one might have expected the government to create an environment where businesses can thrive, in turn creating jobs for the teeming population. Borrowing money instead, to service the budget and to pay salaries, will not bring about the financial independence that the country desperately needs.
This all indicates that unless something urgent is done, Nigeria is on its way to being recolonised by another superpower. China currently seems to be happy to loan Nigeria as much money as it requires to run the country. However, we should all be wary that this sudden goodwill of China towards Nigeria is not necessarily because China has nothing better in which to invest their money. Once the opportunity comes, I am certain that China will not hesitate to show their true colours.
The Chinese government has been asked to provide security for the Nigerian government against insurgent terrorist groups for a while now. At the current trajectory, it is only a matter of time before the Chinese army will outnumber the Nigerian army on our very own soil.
The only way to bring Nigeria back from the brink is not another round of elections – these will achieve nothing but to further enrich the elite and impoverish the poor. Rather, we need genuine dialogue focusing on bringing about wholesale change. My fear is that, since the central government has ignored these calls for a round table discussion for so long for obvious and selfish reasons, this is unlikely to alter soon. Yet continued attempts to sweep these pertinent issues under the carpet will be disastrous not only for the Nigerian people, but the entire global community.
Nigeria is currently under the worst form of governance that it has seen in decades. Many people are looking forward to the next election, yet in reality this will do absolutely nothing to solve the present predicament. People dubbed the Goodluck government as the worst government Nigeria ever had. Then subsequently, they said the same of Buhari’s government. It would appear that every government to come to power in Nigeria is always the worst government when measured against their predecessors, until another one comes into power to overtake the record.
If this structure of bad governance in Nigeria is the genesis of all our problems since independence and the military government takeover in 1966, then perhaps we the Yoruba people need not endure such hardship anymore. We do not deserve what Nigeria is giving to us, considering all the achievements of self-rule we had in our own Western Nigerian government between 1951 to 1960. We need not leave this unpayable debt that Nigeria is incurring to our children and the children after them, enslaving them in perpetuity to the Europeans and Chinese.
The time has come for all Yoruba people to know that there is only one simple solution to this situation: for us to have our own independent nation, outside of Nigeria. Several countries, such as Yugoslavia, have experienced similar fates to ours, and when they have eventually broken up, the individual nations have gone on to thrive. If Nigeria were to be de-amalgamated, the Arewa north would be able to focus on what makes them stronger without the south interfering; and the Yoruba would be able to build their own future outside of the external barriers that are currently dragging us down.
I urge all Yoruba people to look critically at the menace going on in Nigeria, and then ask ourselves if, given the composition of present-day Nigeria, we truly believe that it will ever work again? If the answer is no, then there is nothing to be gained by killing ourselves trying to rebuild a country that is already sunk. We need instead to redouble our efforts towards emancipating ourselves from the shackles in which Nigeria has confined us. We need to campaign vehemently for our own independent Yoruba nation, a nation where everyone can have the opportunity to develop their talents and skills for the betterment of the nation as a whole.
