By Tagbo T. Ufondu
Democracy in Nigeria is in the throes of debt. It appears that the elections into the office of Nigerian president have in the last 23 years if registered on critical economic indicators as beeps, pips and static tones will tend to show a flatlining, on imaginary electronic monitors.
In short, Nigerian presidential elections, especially the recent 2023 elections, are periods of time when democracy goes into a debt, or death, rattle. This article is placing the causative agent as being the mountain of debt piled up since 1999 by different governments, and also paid off or rescheduled.
Debt is also injurious to democratization when it becomes unhealthy and over what is necessary for proper balancing of the treasury of any nation-state. Debt won the 2023 presidential elections in Nigeria, leaving the opposition parties divided unable to make sense of their 24 states majority out of 36; unable too to mobilise a large voter turnout, even a 63% super majority was cowed by a ruling party 37 per cent win.
How did the ruling APC party of former president Muhammadu Buhari and incumbent president Bola Tinubu pull off what the opposition have called an electoral heist?
The answer has always been hidden in plain sight. It is age old, it is foundational to economics and politics, it is what builds great nations, and it is what causes those great nations to collapse spectacularly for the history books: debt, is what is actually polarising Nigeria along two extremes, or many extremes, it is why the PDP and Labour Party could not strategise to use their strength and bases to capture power in a despondent populace reeling from the worst economic malaise since independence.
Tribal, ethnic or ideological politics are secondary factors here, debt was the independent variable resulting in the choice of candidates at the parties presidential conventions and it was the reason a fractious opposition lost, it was also the reason the election can be described as the least democratic exercise in popular Franchise.
Nigeria spends 96 per cent of her revenues on servicing her debt overhang. This Sword of Damocles, about $150 billion in foreign notes, translates into a staggering N77 trillion in Nigerian currency and in a country where an estimated 133 million is living under abject poverty, according to The Africa Report of November 2022. This same report points further to a $7 billion intervention in social investment programmes by the APC Buhari government beginning in 2016, which apparently is not helping the steady poverty slide.
In eight years a N68.8 trillion expenditure was made, of which a deficit of N36.8 trillion financed strictly by debt, or borrowing. The national debt has risen, since 2015, by about 267 per cent, which excludes other categories such as the central bank ways and means. The icing on the cake for mounting debt in APC Nigeria is the ease of using government revenues to instantly service debt, a very vicious cycle indeed. The first four years of President Buhari is very stark compared to his last four years: deificits more than doubled between the two terms, soothed by debt.
Another recurring malaise in the Nigerian economic model, apart from debt driven by government revenue deductions, is the issue of subsidies. Well known is the subsidy on fuels and the subsidy on Nigerian financial institutions or commercial banks.
While the eight years of the Buhari government between 2015 and 2022 saw the administration spending a whopping N9.34 trillion on fuel subsidy payments alone. This whole issue of subsidy payments is shrouded in corruption so opaque that there is no authoritative financial statements anywhere on it.
Some officials of the Nigerian government frequently sound the alarm that fuel subsidy does not exist and those that attest to its existence usually shrug off questions even under parliamentary oath that borders on quantities of fuel imported, the quality imported and the paid amounts to private companies contracted to do the business on behalf of government.
The Buhari APC administration came to power because of debt in 2015, and the president Goodluck Jonathan PDP government lost power because it did not have a sweet tooth to pile on more debt prior to that year.
The president Olusegun Obasanjo government between 1999 and 2007 weathered the storm of politics of debt, but at a cost that saw the governors humiliate him at his party convention in 2002 before the 2003 second term vote. He was made to promise at the convention ground to use his vice presidential running mate Abubakar Atiku in his second tenure.
However Mr Obasanjo after his successful reelection swiftly turned against his vice president and his cronies governors of the ruling PDP and the opposition. He quickly constituted anti-corruption agencies on financial crimes, re-registered members of his PDP party, and at gunpoint forced party leaders and bosses to toe his line or to resign from their positions. To be continued tomorrow Ufondu is a Political and Social Writer in Lagos. tagboufondu@yahoo.com