Nigeria’s Economic Hardship Predicted to Last 5 Years

The current spate of economic hardship in Nigeria has been predicted to span the next five years.

The prediction was made a former presidential candidate, Prof Kingsley Moghalu, saying the current economic hardship and its effects will last for a minimum of three to five years.

The former Central Bank Deputy Governor listed ‘unprecedented corruption and incompetent policy response’ as primary factors driving Nigeria’s distressed economy.

The political economist said this while presenting a keynote address at the ‘Leadership Newspaper Group 2024 Conference and Awards,’ which was held in Abuja on Tuesday.

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Moghalu said today’s Nigeria’s economy is a ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold,’ and a combined consequence of the choices we have made as a country.

He further listed hyperinflation, the crisis of the value of the Naira, debt distress, revenue challenge, unemployment, and extreme poverty as direct consequences of an economy that had been mismanaged for a long time.

He said, “The past 10 years were particularly ruinous. They were the years of the locust, marked by unprecedented mismanagement of fiscal policy, unproductive external borrowing, unnecessary budget deficits, illegal Ways & Means lending by the Central Bank of Nigeria to the federal government to the tune of N30tn, and unprecedented corruption.

“Earlier, a combination of oil price shocks and an incompetent policy response from the CBN, in the form of an attempt to fix the exchange rate, all helped give us two recessions within seven years. Many of these things happened because, as we witnessed, there was a successful political assault on the independence of the central bank, with the storekeeper willingly handing over the store keys to the marauders.

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“Nigerians should first have been educated on the economics of why these subsidies had to go, and on what steps the government was taking to mitigate the anticipated impact; that is, with a subsidised mass transportation system across the country.

“The forex reforms at the central bank should have benefitted from prior, in-depth consultations with institutional investors who are the movers of global capital and in the absence of robust revenues from oil, influence forex liquidity through capital importation.”