The mood and the look on the faces of most Nigerians in this year’s yuletide season is a relative indicator of the daily challenges of the average Nigerian, battling multidimensional poverty with a higher misery index compared to December 2023, for example, when a bag of rice still sold for less than N40,000.
Most of them have forgotten the joy that ordinarily accompanies the dying days of a year and the festivities of the season, looking forward to a new year with hope, as it were.
With this year’s “Renewed Hope” budget of N27.5 Trillion, the everyday Nigerian seems to have his hopes unrenewed, at least, not with the 35% “runaway” inflation that reduced the purchasing power of the meagre income for those that earn and a depleting hope and increased beggarliness of the unemployed.
Within the category of the unemployed, we have the “unemployable”: the destitute, the fatally disabled, those in Orphanages and the vulnerable elderly persons. All of these people are expected to survive within the same troubling system that has no safety nets for social security
Many Nigerians are undergoing frustrating experiences that are making daily survival a Herculean task. In a country where 70% of income, for those who earn regularly, is spent on food and with a growing rate of unemployment, it is relatively becoming tougher for the average Nigerian family to weather the storm.
Even with the paltry sum of N362.9 billion, representing 1.32% of the entire 2024 budget allocated to Agriculture, the menace of insecurity has driven farmers away from the farmlands, adding to the prevailing hunger in the land. Subsistence farming which most rural families depend on is threatened by insecurity as most farm roads have been turned into killing fields by ravaging killers from hell.
Between January and November 2024, it is on record that innocent Nigerians have paid a whooping sum of N1.2 trillion in ransom for kidnapped victims across the nation. Stories have been told about poor families who couldn’t afford ransom payments and never got their loved ones back.
The above scenario paints a gloomy picture of an imminent danger to food security and its likely consequences. Apart from undernourishment and famine, food insecurity leads to civil unrest as a result of hunger and scarcity.
Until and unless the often-declared and widely proclaimed performers’ indicators that showed growth and progress in our troubled economy touch the everyday Nigerian, the gloomy look on their faces, especially in festive seasons such as we are now, is not about to abate. A nation must learn to take good care of her everyday people.
