January 11, (THEWILL) – Prophet Isa El Buba of the Evangelical Bible Outreach Ministries International, EBOMI, has lamented the deteriorating and degenerate state of the country, crying out loud that ‘Nigeria is Ailing and failing’.
In an address at a World Press Conference to convey a new message, Prophet Isa El Buba noted that all is not well with the country, and the Nigerian masses are the worst for it, especially in terms of poverty and low standard of living.
He said, “I need not remind us of the challenging times and environment that Nigeria and Nigerians have found themselves in. From conflicts and agitations everywhere, feelings of marginalisation and exclusion, a rise in political and criminal violence, porous borders, rising ethnic, religious, and cultural hostilities, weak institutions, food shortages, unemployment, inflation, crumbling infrastructure, deteriorating human development indicators such as infant and maternal mortality, to literacy rates, it has been brutish for Nigerians. Nigeria, everyone agrees, is ailing and failing, its long list of ailments is enough to make the heart skip.”
According to El Buba, “unemployment stands at 33 percent. Annual inflation has risen to 21 percent, with a chronic lack of foreign exchange and hundreds of millions of barrels of oil – which is the country’s main export, lost last year to theft and inefficiency.”
He noted further that “some 92 million Nigerians now live in acute poverty, according to the World Bank, and hundreds leave every day for greener pastures. Flooding in the outgone year has devastated 33 states in Nigeria, killing about 700 persons by some counts, displacing about 1.5m, and affecting 2.5 million people. Already, 5.1 million more Nigerians might have become poor in 2022, according to a report by the World Bank.”
“The flooding”, he said, “will throw millions more into poverty and increase public health crisis”, and that “Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), reports a high Multidimensional Poverty Index of 0.663, with about 63%, that is, 133million of the estimated 200m Nigerians, multidimensionally poor”.
El Buba also contended that “in the same outgone year, many schools and public places had had to shut down based on credible alerts by foreign diplomatic missions of terror attacks in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). The US and UK governments had asked their citizens on non-essential services to leave the FCT as a precaution.”
“In Kebbi”, according to him, “many hundreds have had to flee their communities in Northern Nigeria taken over by ISWAP-Boko Haram terrorists, even as kidnapping and sundry crimes flourish in Nigeria’s southern states. This is not to mention our children who were grounded at home for over eight months in a protracted but resolvable impasse between the Government and University Lecturers.”
Regretting the national economic woes, he lamented that “Nigeria’s economy itself has collapsed and would need more than a team of geniuses to revive and stabilise it. Nigeria is spending more than all its revenue on service debts. This year, even with the most optimistic scenario, Nigeria will borrow massively to service its growing debt. In the proposed 2023 budget, Nigeria intends to borrow about N8 trillion out of its N20.51 trillion national budget to manage its fiscal deficits.
“Nigeria’s revenue”, he continued, “is fast dwindling. Nigeria cannot meet its OPEC allocation of 1.8 million barrels per day. It exports an average of 1.1 million barrels daily, losing close to 700,000 barrels daily to oil theft. Nigeria’s fiscal burden is made worse because it is expected to make a petrol subsidy payment of about N11 trillion at the end of subsidy payment of about N11 trillion at the end of year 2022, more than its projected revenue.
“Nigeria, therefore, got into 2023 quite a weak and unproductive state, terrorised and pauperised, with poor human development indicators to say the least. An indication that the nation is at a threshold with a terrible present, and a future that could be worse.
“The challenges we had with past governments weren’t of this magnitude, yet Nigerians seemed overly critical of them but the ineptitude of the current government has rendered Nigerians rather disoriented”, he noted of the Buhari administration, concluding that “perhaps, this is how life teaches the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly.”
Thus, he said, “Nigeria will hold two very important exercises in the next few months. This is the first time in our recent history that Nigeria will be conducting the general elections and a national census in the same year.”
According to him, “these two exercises, if well carried out, could put the nation on a trajectory of national development and reunification, but will perpetuate the cycle of Nigeria’s perennial problems if mismanaged”.
El Buba believes that “2023 is a watershed year and turning point in our national journey as a people. It is a make or mar year. We must, therefore, be intentional in our decisions in order to get things right especially in the enlistment of only the most competent, accountable, and responsive Leaders into leadership positions at various levels.”
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