Honey Badger

I hold a BSc degree in International Relations and a postgraduate degree in Financial Management. I have a fair understanding of the current happenings in Nigeria, and I believe that anyone comparing Tinubu's administration to previous ones is demonstrating economic illiteracy. For anyone to say Jonathan or Buhari's administration was better than Tinubu's, or that Abacha or Obasanjo's time was the golden era, is to completely misunderstand how an economy works. Nigerians suffer from what I call Past-Glorification Syndrome - we judge today with yesterday's price tag while forgetting yesterday's poverty. Let us be factual. 1. You Cannot Compare Price Without Comparing Income, Population and Structure. They will tell you bread was 50 naira under Obasanjo and fuel was 75 naira. Yes. But what was minimum wage then? 7,500 naira. What was the average salary of a graduate? How many Nigerians earned 100k in a month? Today minimum wage is 70,000 naira, corps members earn 77k, even a POS attendant makes 40-50k. The numbers have moved because the economy has moved. When a bag of cement was 200 naira, how many Nigerians built a house? Less than 10% owned a decent home. When Peugeot 504 was 2,000 naira, how many families owned a car? One car in a whole street was celebrated as a rich man. The car was cheap on paper but unaffordable in reality. Today a bag of cement is 15,000 naira, but look around Lagos, Ogun, Abuja - every month, thousands of new houses are being roofed. Nigerians are building more now than ever. Today a Toyota Corolla is 25 million, but every street has 20 cars, young boys of 24 are buying Benz and Lexus. Why? Because access to income, credit, business and opportunities has expanded, even if the price tag looks high. Cheap price does not mean prosperity. Abundance at a high price is better than scarcity at a low price. 2. Past Administrations Ate The Future That Tinubu Is Now Paying For. What Obasanjo, Jonathan and Buhari did was borrow time. Obasanjo met almost zero external debt after Paris Club,Jonathan met $340bn in foreign reserves and oil at $120 per barrel,Buhari met a system where we were still pretending fuel subsidy was sustainable.What did they do?They printed subsidy. They kept Naira at 200, 400, 750 artificially while CBN was bleeding billions to defend it. They kept fuel at 87, 145, 195 naira while NNPC was owing trillions and not remitting to FAAC. That was not good economy - that was postponement of doom.If Obasanjo were president today with population at 240 million, oil production at 1.3mbpd instead of 2.5mbpd,debt service taking 98% of revenue as it was in 2023, and no subsidy removal, this country would have collapsed completely. Things would be far worse. Tinubu came and did what every serious economist said must be done: remove the fake subsidy and unify the exchange rate. It is painful like surgery, but surgery is not wickedness;the disease is wickedness. 3. Population Has Doubled, But Productivity Did Not. In 1999 when Obasanjo came, Nigeria was 110 million people. Today we are over 230 million. Same land, same epileptic power grid, same ports, but double the mouths. In Abacha's time,we were 105 million, many in villages farming. Now over 60% are in cities, all wanting fuel, housing, import, dollar. You cannot feed 230 million people with the economic formula of 110 million people. The past administrations never prepared for this explosion. They never built refineries, they killed textile mills, they destroyed Ajaokuta. Now one administration is expected to fix in 4 years what was destroyed in 30 years? 4. Why Nigerians Live In The Past. It is psychological. When things are hard now, the past always looks easy because you have forgotten the pain of that past. During Abacha, people queued for fuel for 3 days, phone call was for the rich - NITEL landline was 80k. People died because you could not make a call. But today because life was managed then, people say "Abacha was better."