Many Nigerians today, even some children, know the key problems facing Nigeria – insecurity of lives and property, little or no electric power supply, an unproductive economy, corruption, a supposedly federal system of government operating a unitary constitution in a country made up of many nations, a collapsing education sector, a collapsing health care system, etc.
Shamefully, national hunger has been added to the mix of Nigeria’s problems. A serious government should pick at least one of those key problems and solve it.
Unfortunately, since the beginning of this Fourth Republic, with the exception of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, every government that had presided over the affairs of Nigeria had beat around the bush. A government beats around the bush when it avoids the key problems facing the country, but instead concentrates on the minors. Politicians do that when they have nothing to offer.
For instance, among the key problems that confronted Nigeria in 1999 were a crushing debt burden, weak capital bases of commercial banks, military interventions in politics, etc. For a better understanding of the above three key problems, Nigeria’s external debt stood at $28.54 billion as at September 30, 1999, with external debt servicing retained at $1.5 billion.
By 2009, when Obasanjo warned at the International Labour Conference in Geneva that the huge debt burden hanging over African countries was stifling efforts at economic reform and development, Nigeria’s external debt was officially put at $35 billion.
“We were able to secure debt relief from the Paris Club,” Obasanjo later explained. “By 2006, our quantum of debt had come down to about $3.6 billion from almost $36 billion, only about 10 percent of what it was before we got $20 billion relief, and we paid a little over $12 billion to the Paris Club…”
Back home, the capital bases of Nigeria’s Deposit Money Banks were so weak that Nigerians could hardly sleep with their two eyes closed after depositing their hard-earned money in the banks. It was a common experience at that time for Nigerians to put their money in a bank one day, only to return the next day to find a big padlock on the gate of the bank – the bank had fallen into distress!
And in the event of bank failure, only N50,000 was immediately paid to a depositor by the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation. The balance was paid as liquidation dividend, as NDIC received proceeds of liquidating the bank’s assets.
Given those risks, the Obasanjo administration embarked on recapitalisation of banks up to N25 billion in 2004. It was since that time that Nigerians could sleep with their two eyes closed after depositing their money into a Nigerian bank.
On the problem of military intervention in politics, Obasanjo explained that he retired 93 military officers in 1999 because “they were used to what is called the chummy chummy life in government house, and if I had left them in the military they would have been the ones that would have created more problems for us, and our democratic dispensation would not have lasted as it has.”
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