₦airaland Forum

That negative interpretation is my concern here, and it’s premised on buhari’s support for the election of Bola tinubu as nigeria’s next president. It concerns me because I’m fully convinced that a tinubu presidency would not only destabilise nigeria internally, it would damage nigeria globally, making it a big laughing stock, a butt of dark international jokes!

Truth is, next year’s presidential election will have huge long-term implications, its outcome will affect nigeria for decades. Therefore, no patriotic Nigerian should sit on the fence; that patriotism is what underpins this intervention. To be sure, the presidential election should be as much about character as manifesto.

The presidency is too serious an office to be invested in someone with serious integrity deficit. Those ignoring character and integrity should remember the Turkish proverb: “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.”

According to countryeconomy.com, the HDI for Nigeria for
-2020/2021; 0.542,
-2021/2022; 0.548,
-2022/2023; 0.560,
-2023/2024; 0.548,
-2024/2025; 0.548.

The world average is 0.744 points. The HDI for Ghana in 2021 was 0.600; 2022 - 0.602, 2023 - 0.628. In 2022, Seychelles had the highest HDI in Africa, followed by Mauritius, Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia with scores from 0.80 to 0.73 points.

Actually, Nigeria is missing from the 10 most developed countries in Africa. Nigeria has consistently ranked in the 150th position out of 190 countries. The position for 2025 is estimated to be around 161st out of 193 countries, based on the 2024 report. Always among the lowly ranked countries.

According to the HDI.
-Seychelles (0.802),
-Mauritius (0.796),
-Libya (0.746),
-Algeria (0.745),
-Tunisia (0.732),
-Egypt (0.728),
-South Africa (0.717),
-Botswana (0.708).

Lifestone:
Was Oseni not rude with his arrogant posturing? ..Umahi should send his SA on media to answer Oseni questions. ...

The Gross Domestic Product is a common word that countries around the world like to showcase as an improvement or successful outcomes of economic policies. Currently, the 10 richest African countries are South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, Morocco, Ethiopia, Kenya, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and Tanzania.

At the turn of this decade, Nigeria was the number one economy in Africa. This result shows how much we have gone down, and others are taking over. We are in the week of Nigeria’s independence celebration at 65, still with ‘hope for a better tomorrow’ to show for the years!

Last week, we were informed that our GDP has been growing in the last three or four quarters, and the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics affirmed that using the recently rebased format, the economy actually grew by 4.23 per cent year-on-year in real terms in the second quarter of 2025. At the same time, a report also came out from the Central Bank that Nigeria’s external reserves were US$42.05bn on September 19, 2025.

These figures appearing at this time gave the impression that the government is looking for ways of justifying a lavish 65th birthday with some dollar gifts to those in the executive and legislature, whom they feel are the people who made sacrifices to achieve the ‘feat’. I hope not. We will look at more relevant data, like the Human Development Index and the World Happiness Index, for measures of growth and development.

My opinion of Nigerian government managers, whether at the federal or state level, and possibly local government, when they stabilise, is that they make policies with the hope that if it works out successfully to bring in some huge returns, it should be for spending on personal comfort rather than for re-investment in the economy to generate more incomes, employment and consequently economic growth and development.

That is why, for this government, after two years, the huge returns from crude oil subsidy removal and currency devaluation have not filtered down to the citizens to ease the hardship engineered by those policies.

But we have seen affluence in the state of living of the politicians, and they flaunt their wealth in the sight of the citizens. They travel around the world with their families for pleasure in the name of vacation, health tourism, and send their children to study abroad, making sure the graduation pictures of those children are published in the media for all to see.

They import expensive or exotic official vehicles in the form of SUVs instead of patronising our local vehicle plants to assist them in expanding and growing. They share foreign currencies as holiday gifts among themselves, as if we spent such currencies in the Nigerian markets. An indication of the need to travel abroad for leisure.

The current GDP growth is attributed to a rise in oil output with relatively stable demand in the international market, due to the instability in the Middle East. So, the economy is on a knife-edge. The decrease in food inflation, which has been driving inflation in the country in the last months, was caused by the harvesting period and improvement in the security situation in the country, while significant increases in the external reserves are deliberate efforts at presenting a solid economy to our potential lenders. They are all good outcomes of strategies. Hopefully, they are sustainable. Albeit the hardship continues with the populace.

Every year, the United Nations publishes the Human Development Index, exposing citizens’ conditions in all countries in the world. The index ranks countries according to their successes in fulfilling the basic needs of their citizens over a period, usually one year.

The HDI was created by the United Nations Development Programme, one of the major institutions of the United Nations. The HDI was constructed to underscore the importance of judging a country’s well-being and the capabilities of its people, not just by its economic growth alone.

It is more robust to combine health, education, and living standards as measures of development than GDP, which is price multiplied by quantity of output. Thus, the HDI offers a more comprehensive picture of a country’s overall advancement and development, and we use this to evaluate our present economic situation in the second part.

The Human Development Index provides a more comprehensive picture of a country’s overall advancement and development, which we use to evaluate Nigeria’s current economic situation. The HDI assesses the average achievements of a country in the areas of health, education and income per capita.

These three are justifiably regarded as fundamental dimensions of human development. For health, a long and healthy life is measured by life expectancy at birth, while access to knowledge or education is measured by years of schooling and literacy level, and a decent standard of living is measured by Gross National Income or Income per capita.

A mathematical average of the data collected is worked out to give a single number between zero and one. The closer a country’s index or mark to one, the greater the human development, and the nearer to zero the figure arrived at, the worse the human development. Countries in the world are ranked according to their scores.

According to countryeconomy.com, the HDI for Nigeria for
-2020/2021; 0.542,
-2021/2022; 0.548,
-2022/2023; 0.560,
-2023/2024; 0.548,
-2024/2025; 0.548.

The world average is 0.744 points. The HDI for Ghana in 2021 was 0.600; in 2022, it was 0.602, and in 2023 it was 0.628. In 2022, Seychelles had the highest HDI in Africa, followed by Mauritius, Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia with scores from 0.80 to 0.73 points.

Actually, Nigeria is missing from the 10 most developed countries in Africa, according to the HDI. They are Seychelles (0.802), Mauritius (0.796), Libya (0.746), Algeria (0.745), Tunisia (0.732), Egypt (0.728), South Africa (0.717), and Botswana (0.708). Nigeria has consistently ranked in the 150th position out of 190 countries. The position for 2025 is estimated to be around 161st out of 193 countries, based on the 2024 report. Always among the lowly ranked countries

There is also the World Happiness Report, also known as the World Happiness Index. The factors considered include GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and perception of corruption. Interviews and the administration of questionnaires are used as instruments, and the data are statistically analysed before reports are released.

[i]Nigeria ranked 105th out of 147 countries in the 2025 World Happiness Report, while it ranked 102nd out of 143 countries in 2024. Nigeria was in 95th position in 2023. Worsening conditions every succeeding year! Within Africa, Nigeria ranked 10th in the 2025 report. The report is published annually by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solution Network. It evaluates countries on self-reported life evaluations. The current report thus shows that we are going down.[/i]

So, the noise about growing GDP, rise in external reserves, and government revenue from taxes and levies, as well as falling inflation, has not had a positive effect on the citizens. This is because the financial outcomes of the initial policies were controlled by the political class and used for their own well-being.

The American economy, and indeed, the world economy in 2008, when President Barack Obama took office as the 44th President of the United States, was worse than the 2023 Nigerian economy. There was a global depression caused by home ownership activities in the US at that time, but President Obama came on board and took the necessary steps for economic revival. He intervened in the industrial sector, bailing out big ailing industries that were about to collapse through government loans.

He breathed life into them, and within two years, they started paying back the loans. In his first year in office, he generated 134,055 non-farm employment, higher than the presidents before him. He knew what to do and did it for the benefit of America. Our President knew what to do, but did it for his political class, paving the way for easy acceptance by all political parties.

He gave the huge revenues that accrued from the desirable policy actions to the state governors, who invariably started stocking funds in foreign currencies for the 2027 elections instead of investing them in people, waking up state industries from a coma, and investing in agriculture.

The executive and the legislature started the gigantic projects of road construction, refurbishing of buildings at humongous prices, importation of vehicles, airplanes, and other exotic items that can be produced locally, and all sorts of travels with huge contingents. All the money generated internally was spent abroad, generating employment in those beneficiary economies.

The government was looking for foreign investments when it should have first encouraged local businesses and revived public investments through credit interventions, monitoring, and public-private partnerships. It was the initial financial support provided by the government through NNPC that created the Dangote Refinery of today, employing thousands of Nigerians.

That would have been the first level of employment generation and improved incomes for the citizens and government. It would have secured future funds to construct roads, buy airplanes, renovate buildings, et cetera.

Our HDI and WHI indices would have subsequently shown improvement. The GDP will rise both in real and nominal terms. Tax payment and tax revenue would have increased from production rather than rental activities. Inflation will naturally reduce as production and output increase, and Nigerians will truly smile rather than suffering and smiling we are used to.

Up to the 1980s, we were producing a lot of inputs for industrial and home use. The companies have folded up, but some can be revived or reinvented. We were driving locally assembled cars like Peugeot, Volkswagen, trucks, buses, tractors, all produced in different parts of the country. Vono in Lagos was fabricating leather seats for vehicles and desks for schools, among other products. Batteries were produced in Ibadan and Ijebu-Ode, Bauchi was the home of tractors, while Kaduna and Lagos were the homes of textiles.

The Dunlop and Micheline firms were known for tyre production in Lagos and old Bendel State. In the eastern part of the country, we have production of buses and other lorries. Some of these businesses are still there, asking for assistance to recover and to expand.

Currently, the money we pay to service debts is three times more than the budget for education and about six times more than the health budget. Happiness is far from a country that treats education and health with levity. It is not about TELFund, which is desirable and commendable as it is, and will continue to assist the poor to get their children educated locally.

But it is about learning environment, learning equipment, and the condition of the service providers, the human beings rendering the teaching jobs who need good remuneration, continued in-service training, and proper networking with their colleagues in other countries and continents.

It is not about building more hospitals but about establishing more hospitals and making the existing ones provide the required services with advanced equipment and treating the medical personnel as a special species that keep other human resources sound and healthy to continue production. It is not too late to restart economic engineering now, but further delay is dangerous.

"Can an Edo woman be made the Iyaloja of Lagos or of Nigeria?" to highlight perceived double standards in applying ethnic-specific traditional roles across Nigeria's diverse regions..... "

CoronaVirusPro:
The Sanwo-Olu administration will always be remembered for the division he caused in Lagos.

Now we also have a 3rd class Oba talking about cultural misrepresentations. It’s a really a sad time in history and I hope it is being documented by historians.

Never a time in the history of Lagos state as the Lagos state government pioneered hate and division among ethnic tribes.