•Say, many people on the streets are walking corpses
•Can’t bear the hardship for 15 years
•FG’s reforms harsh, elitist, unsustainable — Professor Uremadu
•World Bank advice misguided, insulting to millions of Nigerians — ActionAid
By Emma Amaize, Regional Editor, South-South, Sam Oyadongha, Jimitota Onoyume, Egufe Yafugborhi, Akpokona Omafuaire; Emem Idio; Steve Oko; Gabriel Ewepu; Ibrahim Hassan-Wuyo
Last Tuesday, October 15, 2024, Nigerians got the shock of their lives even as they grappled with hunger and pains occasioned by government policies. The World Bank Senior Vice President, Indermit Gill, declared in Abuja that it would take at least 10 or 15 years for President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms to transform the economy and advised the Federal Government not to waive but continue with the reforms in the said years ahead.
In his special remarks at the Nigeria Economic Summit, the World Bank official said among others that the “oil wealth that should be used for the welfare of all Nigerians, has for too long been used to benefit just the elites. The elites are also being hurt by these reforms that started last year, but they have done very well in the past, and they have built big buffers.
The ordinary Nigerians are being hurt even more, and they were hurt much more by the policies of the past. Nigeria will need to stay the course for at least another 10 or 15 years to transform this economy. It’s very difficult to do these things but the rewards are massive.”
This advice from the World Bank has provoked many Nigerians who rejected it. Nigerians from different strata of life have therefore warned President Bola Tinubu that he would face the threat of implosion by angry citizens should the Federal Government go ahead with the World Bank’s advice to sustain the prevailing stinging reforms for the next 10 to 15 years. They urged President Tinubu to ignore the World Bank, saying there was experiential evidence worldwide, including Nigeria, that the financial institution was not delivering the sustained economic growth, prosperity, and better standards of life it promised with its package.
Nigeria on the throes of catastrophic collapse – Prof Ochonu
A Nigerian academic, historian, author, and professor of African History at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America, Prof. Moses Ochonu, asserted: “We may be on the throes of an implosion, a showdown between suffering Nigerians and their rapacious and unfeeling leaders. The 10-15-year timeline of sustained hardship suggested by the World Bank is humanly impossible to bear or adapt to.
It may come down to a choice between predictable, defeatist death by hunger and heroic death by mass social upheaval, and I warn that it is not too late for Tinubu and his people to defuse the ticking incendiary device of hardship they have cultivated, incubated, and unleashed on Nigerians.
They can still change course and remove the impossible choice of death by hardship and death by uprising. Any people, no matter how resilient and creatively adaptable they may be, have their limits. People are not machines, even machines break down when subjected to stress and tension over a long period.
The World Bank is notorious for prescribing a self-annihilating path of economic reforms to developing countries whose leaders depend on loans to support budgets that are largely mismanaged projects. This pattern of subservience and dependence emboldens the World Bank to recommend harmful reforms to our leaders. The World Bank, we should remember, is a distant hegemonic player with no empathy for Nigerians.
Its only interest is to push for so-called reforms and adjustments that fulfil the ideological fantasies of its Western funders and principals. Past Nigerian presidents since 1999 and even before proved themselves pliable, to various degrees, to the World Bank’s manipulative influence and allowed the institution to influence some aspects of their fiscal, economic, and monetary policies. Sadly, President Tinubu has taken this to unheard-of levels. He has essentially outsourced every facet of his government’s economic policy to the World Bank and its neo-liberal agenda of stripping the poor of subsidies, cushions, and state-funded opportunities to increase the pool of revenue available to political elites and to repay dubious multilateral loans.
Source: Vanguard
Have a press release, feature, article for publication? Send it to us via Whatsapp on +233543452542.
