Cushion The Effect Of Economic Hardship

Nigerians are no strangers to economic pain. But what the country is experiencing now , a cascading crisis of fuel price shocks, runaway inflation and collapsing purchasing power is testing the limits of endurance for millions of families who were already stretched thin.

When President Bola Tinubu removed fuel subsidy and liberalised the foreign exchange market, the expectation was that the short-term pain would give way to structural stability. That has not happened. And now, with the eruption of conflict in the Middle East sending global oil markets into turmoil, the situation has deteriorated sharply. Fuel prices that hovered between N750 and N800 per litre have surged past N1,300 in many parts of the country. In an economy where the price of petroleum is the baseline determinant for virtually every good and service, the consequences have been devastating.

Transportation costs have spiked. Food prices are climbing at a rate that makes weekly budgeting meaningless. Small businesses that survived the initial subsidy shock are folding. Market women, artisans, daily wage earners , the people who constitute the productive backbone of the informal economy are being crushed. This is not abstract macroeconomic distress. It is the lived reality of a population where, as President Of Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote pointedly observed after meeting with President Bola Tinubu in Lagos, many people “if they don’t work that day, they won’t eat.”

Dangote’s warning that the Middle East crisis could force African countries back to COVID-era work-from-home restrictions may sound dramatic, but it captures a real vulnerability: Nigeria has no fiscal cushion, no strategic reserves to absorb external shocks of this magnitude.

Let us be clear. This newspaper has supported the principle behind the removal of the fuel subsidy. The old subsidy regime was a cesspool of corruption and waste, enriching a cartel of importers while draining the treasury of resources that could have funded healthcare, education and infrastructure. We do not advocate a return to that system. But the removal of subsidy was supposed to be accompanied by a coherent transition plan ,investments in refining capacity, reliable mass transit alternatives, targeted social protection for the most vulnerable.

What Nigerians have received instead is a series of announcements with little evidence of implementation on the ground.

Take the much-publicised rollout of compressed natural gas buses. The government has repeatedly pointed to CNG conversion as the answer to high fuel costs, a cheaper and domestically abundant alternative that would ease the burden on commuters and transporters alike. On paper, the logic is sound. Nigeria sits on some of the largest natural gas reserves in Africa.

Converting public transportation to CNG would reduce dependency on petrol and bring down operating costs. But where are the buses? The vast majority of Nigerians, particularly those outside Abuja and Lagos, have not seen a single CNG-powered vehicle in their communities. The conversion infrastructure remains skeletal. Filling stations equipped for CNG are scarce.

For a policy that was presented as a cornerstone of the government’s mitigation strategy, the gap between promise and delivery is staggering and frankly, it is insulting to the intelligence of citizens who are being told to be patient while their purchasing power evaporates.

There have also been calls for the federal government to pay wage awards to civil servants as an immediate cushion against inflation, with the expectation that the private sector would follow suit. This is a reasonable demand. When the naira was devalued and fuel prices quadrupled within months, the purchasing power of the existing minimum wage was effectively destroyed.

Workers who were barely managing before are now unable to meet basic obligations – rent, school fees, feeding and health bills. A wage award would not solve the structural problem, but it would provide breathing room. It would signal that the government recognises the severity of what its citizens are enduring and is willing to share the burden rather than simply passing all the cost of reform onto the poorest segments of the population.

What is most troubling about the government’s posture is the absence of urgency. There is a lethargy to the policy response that is difficult to reconcile with the scale of the crisis. Prices are rising weekly. Families are making impossible choices between meals and medicine. Yet,  the interventions remain stuck in the announcement phase ,press conferences, committees, pilot programmes that never scale.

Governance in a crisis demands speed, coordination and a willingness to deploy resources where they are needed most. It demands that leaders treat the suffering of ordinary citizens with the same seriousness they bring to political negotiations and power calculations.

Nigeria cannot afford to wait for the Middle East conflict to resolve itself before acting. The government must accelerate the delivery of CNG infrastructure, release emergency wage support for workers, and expand cash transfer programmes to reach the households most affected by the price spiral.

State governments too must step up rather than hiding behind the federal government. Governors control significant resources and have the proximity to understand which communities are hardest hit.

The social contract between the government and the governed rests on a simple premise: that those who ask the people to sacrifice will ensure the sacrifice is not in vain. Nigerians accepted the pain of subsidy removal on the understanding that better days would follow. The government has a duty to prove that faith was not misplaced. Rhetoric will not feed families. Only action will.