Like others before it, 2022 has come and gone. But unlike others, it ended as a year to forget, especially in Nigeria. Although the country is not at war like Ukraine, where Russia has been destroying what it cannot create for the past eight months, Nigeria ended 2022 badly bruised, if not broken.
Nigerians started the year with optimism and the usual uproar reflected in New Year’s resolutions, forecasts, predictions and prophecies from the prophets and ‘witches of Endor’, almost all pointing to a better year than the last.
But the frustration and misery that defined most of 2022 for large numbers of Nigerians demonstrated man’s limited ability to play god or accurately see the future.
The year has proven, without fail, that forecasting the next 365 days in a complex nation like Nigeria, with myriad uncertainties, is a difficult task to undertake. It follows, therefore, that anyone who does it successfully must be a prophet, a scientist, and a crystal ball observer all rolled into one. Nigeria doesn’t have any yet.
But the frustration and misery that defined most of 2022 for large numbers of Nigerians demonstrated man’s limited ability to play god or accurately see the future.
It is a common saying that the morning shows the day. Nigerians learned in early 2015 that they had elected a president who knows very little about economic management and is obviously unwilling to learn. At no time have the consequences of this action been as dire and destructive as they were in 2022.
A volatile macroeconomic regime, heightened insecurity, a natural disaster of monumental proportions reflected in the devastating flooding in September, a protracted strike by university teachers, unprecedented high energy costs, and more, all in 2022, left Nigerians just one step away from the catastrophe.
We share the pain of all classes of Nigerians as they struggled against the crippling impact of a hyperinflation that affected their domestic, official and business lives, destroying and devaluing everything that came as a reward for their daily work to make ends meet.
We also worried, as even the rich wept that the wads of naira notes in their hands were as valuable as a deck of cards, while the poor became even more impoverished, virtually unable to meet the basic necessities of life. , including food, which, overnight, became a problem. luxury object.
The fact that 322 police officers and 642 soldiers were reportedly killed in Nigeria in the previous year reflects several facts that point to greater insecurity in 2022. This year was worse, be it a case of wanton murder or blatant kidnapping for ransom. , which became a thriving business. deal.
For us, nothing could have been more bizarre and terrifying than the ruthless attack on a moving train that left nine people dead and over 100 more taken away and kept in the attackers’ den for months. His freedom, we painfully learned, came at a price.
The growing crisis in the Nigerian forex market since 2015 peaked in 2022 when the naira was exchanged for nearly N900 to the dollar, reflecting a futile and foolish attempt by the Central Bank to rein in runaway inflation and salvage the naira which it sinks.
The Naira-Dollar equation became a case where the more it changed, the more it stayed the same and therefore never balanced. This, to our astonishment, curbed the cost-driven inflation that pushed the prices of raw materials, including those of vegetables and cocoyam, out of reach for the common man.
The currency crisis situation, in our honest view, could have been better managed and therefore less punitive if the management of the main bank had been less subservient to its selfish payers, an act that we consider quite unfortunate and inadvisable.
The rains in 2022 were exceptionally heavy, but the attendant flooding, described as the worst in a decade, might have been less widespread and devastating if Nigeria were not a country in desperate need of breaking free of itself.
We have it on good authority that the flooding was made worse by the annual release of water from the Cameroonian dam, the impact of which would not have been as severe if Nigeria had honored its agreement with the Cameroonian authorities to build its dam to contain the water released from its dam.
We have come to understand Nigeria as a country where ‘prevention is better than cure’ does not make any sense. It is a country that prefers to spend money on relief materials than to implement mechanisms to prevent the causes of disasters.
At the moment, we are not aware of any plans anywhere in government circles to prevent the 2022 type of flooding that affected some 1,411,051 people from happening again; it displaced another 790,254 and injured some 1,546 of them, according to reports from the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development.
While 44,099 houses suffered partial damage, another 45,249 suffered full damage. Similarly, 76,168 hectares of farmland were partially damaged and 70,566 hectares were completely destroyed. These, we believe, are reason enough for concern in a country with a deficit of more than 20 million housing units and on the brink of hunger and food insecurity.
Also Read: FM Review in 2022
Like the preacher, we urge fellow Nigerians to “let the troubles of the day suffice for the day” as we look forward to a better tomorrow: let’s look at the promise of 2023 we see in the change we hope will happen if we achieve our goal . do better in electing a new crop of leaders for our country.
With hope assured, 2023 calls. But we believe that this hope can only materialize if we as a people, collectively, make the February 25 elections a project. This time we must make the right decisions because, as William Shakespeare says, “the fault is not with the stars, but with ourselves who are subordinates.”
Too often, people blame bad leadership for Nigeria’s trouble. But there are also bad fans. In our opinion, it’s a bad following that breeds bad leadership. Otherwise, how can a man or woman, young or old, continue to patronize both parents and participants in a government that has destroyed our economy and imposed untold hardship on the people and still wants to go back?
To a large extent, we see 2022 as a metaphor for the aging and decay of the Nigerian government and it behooves us to urge Nigerians to forget whatever they stand for and wait for the new dawn that is only hours and meters away. . It’s Happy New Year from us.
