Okay, so one of the things that has been very troubling for me as a concerned citizen is the normalisation of lies and propaganda by this government and its loyalists, especially those from the same ethnic stock as the illegitimate president.
When telling lies and fiddling with very important data that has consequences becomes a cultural phenomenon, then it should create a real source of concern for all of us.
I say this because, as someone with both professional and academic training in the field of economics, I know that the reality on the ground in Nigeria today is vastly different from the data this government and its loyalists are putting out.
For example, if you do a Google search for Nigeria’s unemployment rate, what you will see for the most recent figures is something around 5%. Anybody who knows the realities of Nigeria of today, who walks the streets of our major cities, knows that practically the whole country is unemployed, so how can the NBS be reporting sub 5% unemployment rate to the point that it has been globally accepted as the unemployment figures for Nigeria?
So, I will look at some key economic stats and how this government of liars, who govern by lies and propaganda, have managed to lie and deceive outsiders into thinking that Nigeria is making progress while in reality, Nigeria has never had it so bad in all its 66 years of existence as a sovereign State.
I will discuss the following: unemployment rate, GDP, inflation rate, GDP growth rate, and debt servicing to revenue ratio.
First, let me remind you that between 2015 and 2023, under Buhari’s 8 years as president, when life was by far better for the average Nigerian than it is today, Nigeria entered recession at least twice in those 8 years.
At that time, the head of the NBS was one Dr Yemi Kale, a fairly decent man at least by my reckoning. One who did not sacrifice his reputation on the altar of political expediency. He produced economics stats as they really were, and that showed the true state of the Nigerian economy.
Unfortunately for Nigeria, Dr Kale left about a year before the end of Buhari’s tenure. And suddenly, economics stats from the same NBS started on a positive trajectory without Buhari having any tangible economic reform to justify the sudden positive figures. Hence, my conclusion is that the NBS became a political tool for propaganda, thereby losing its credibility.
When Tinubu and his gang took over, they quadrupled it. I can tell you for a fact that since Tinubu took over in 2023, Nigeria has not recorded 0.1% GDP growth rate. As a matter of fact, Nigeria has been in recession ever since. Even as we speak.
Take the unemployment rate, for example, some time ago, the Nigerian government, through its NBS, changed the definition of employment. Their new definition is that for someone to be classified as employed, that person should do at least 1 hour of work per week 🤣🤣.
1 hour of work per week is the new standard for being classed as employed by Tinubu’s government. That is how your unemployment rates went from over 40% to about 5% overnight. They solved the unemployment pandemic by simply rewriting the data and definition.
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In 2024, our GDP completely cratered, and we fell to 4th position in Africa with a GDP figure of about $188 billion. What was the response of your government? No need to carry out reforms, let’s just engage in another round of data fiddling exercise – aka rebasing.
Last year, they rebased it by simply changing the baseline year from 2010 to 2019 and then inventing data out of thin air to compute nonsense and arrive at a new figure, which bumped up the GDP by about $60 billion in one year. At least, the NBS did not have Kekere Ekun in their employment; she’s the only one with the skills and experience to promote someone from 4th to 1st. So, the NBS under its current leadership had to console itself with promoting Nigeria from 4th to 3rd position.
And of course, when you perform such heavy manipulation of data to bump up GDP by over $60 billion in less than a year, it simply means that the GDP growth rate will also jump, which explains the over 3.5% growth rates we had last year and now this year as well.
How about inflation rates? They also changed the baseline for its calculation. They made it as short as possible so as not to reflect the significant jumps over longer periods. That’s how they got their so-called inflation declining consistently over 8 consecutive months.
One of the most creative parts of their data fiddling and governing by lies strategy is the debt servicing to revenue ratio calculation. Sometime ago, they were congratulating themselves by claiming that their economic guru (bulaba) had brought the ratio down to less than 50% from the over 90% highs of Buhari’s era.
It was not under their Minister of Finance (Wale Edun) had a Freudian slip that their lie got busted. How did they cook the books? They simply used revenue projections to calculate their debt servicing obligations payments. And because they had a revenue projection of N40 trillion, alongside a reported debt servicing cost of about N13 or N14 trillion, they claimed that they had significantly brought down the percentage of government revenue used to service debts.
However, Minister Wale Edun, in an interview, now slipped by stating that their government actually took in just about N10 trillion out of the projected N40 trillion revenue. The implications are that if they spent N13 trillion for debt servicing last year, while only taking in N10 trillion in revenue, that means the debt servicing to revenue ratio is well over 100%, far worse than what Nigeria faced during Buhari’s era.
Note: the government is no longer paying subsidy, no longer defending the naira, according to them, has practically abandoned funding education and healthcare and almost all other social services, yet the country’s financial health is several times worse now than it was when the government was doing all these.
If you live in Nigeria, you know the extreme economic realities you have to grapple with on a daily basis. The conditions for even the slightest economic growth do not exist. Energy prices are beyond the roof, infrastructure does not exist in any meaningful way, and insecurity plagues the land. Government is practically absent from the lives of Nigerians, and companies are closing down at a record pace.
I challenge these morally bankrupt and truth-allergic clowns who call themselves economists in Nigeria today to come and tell me what the basis of the economic growth figures is. Where is it coming from? I really want to know. Nigeria has been in recession since he took over, and I don’t see any sign that it may come out of it any time soon.
Dr Fortune Nwa
