Africa’s most populated country and the world’s 26th largest economy is heading for a meltdown as a direct result of envy politics.

It was an election between a multimillionaire pro-business candidate seen as part of the establishment and a self-proclaimed hero of the masses who railed against corrupt elites and promised to fight for the little guy. While this may seem to be the story of pretty much every election nowadays since the shock victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the results of Nigeria’s recent elections contain a very important message from an imperiled country about the dangers of using socialist rhetoric and envy politics as a tool of governance.

It is a story that shows how the populist tactics deployed by Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have infected the global political discourse, becoming powerful tools for emerging dictatorships and incompetent governments to entrench themselves in power. Whether dressed up in right-wing clothes as in Trump’s case or presented as new age “socialism” as with AOC, the basic method is the same – the weaponization of envy and use of scapegoats to achieve political goals at the expense of good economics and common sense.

If the collapse of Venezuela got the world’s attention, the impending collapse of Nigeria, with six times the population of Venezuela, will be positively seismic. This is what happened, and here is how the world can learn from it.



‘POVERTY IS GOOD’
Typically decided along ethnic and religious lines, these elections took on a decidedly economic posture, with the generally prosperous South voting as one for the first time in favour of Atiku Abubakar. This was an economically liberal challenger and successful businessman who promised to introduce comprehensive cryptocurrency regulation in his campaign manifesto after Nigerians were forced to become prolific crypto traders due to the woes of the naira, which fell over 85 percent in 2016 alone. The largely impoverished North, however, voted almost unanimously for the famously statist incumbent Muhammadu Buhari.

Following four years of woeful economic performance, including Nigeria’s first recession in a quarter of a century, Buhari’s campaign message was no longer that fighting corruption would grow the economy – which it clearly failed to do in his first term. The message was something altogether different – that Nigerians should learn to accept poverty as the price for “fighting corruption.”

While this message elicited stunned reactions from many voters, it turned out to be right on the money in terms of hitting the emotional lever of an even greater number of people.

Despite being far behind where it should be on a per capita basis, Nigeria’s $411 billion economy has a significant population of US Dollar billionaires and millionaires, in addition to a large population of middle class professionals in cities like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu and Ibadan – predominantly in the country’s South. This fact is often overshadowed by the preponderance of extreme poverty, particularly in the North.

POPULISM IS GOOD POLITICS
For Buhari’s campaign team, it meant avoiding discussions about real issues like Nigeria’s bloated, inefficient, and excessively powerful central government and the unsustainable nature of its welfarist federal budget.



Almost 70% of Nigeria’s 2018 budget is reserved for recurrent expenditure | Source:Daily Trust

To have such a discussion would mean explaining why amidst the naira’s 85 percent fall against the dollar in 2016, Buhari’s government chose to maintain an unrealistic official exchange rate which was used to subsidise religious pilgrims heading to Mecca for the Hajj.

Such conversations would include discussing the opposition’s stated plan to privatise NNPC, Nigeria’s state-owned oil firm that essentially functions as an independent country on its own, with no practical oversight by or accountability to government. Also included would be the federal government’s opaque and inefficient public contracting, procurement and funds disbursement process.



Rather than discuss a lack of investment in education and healthcare, extremely poor power generation and transport infrastructure, or the lack of proper separation of powers making the executive a law unto itself, the campaign was instead spent attacking the convenient fig leaves of “corrupt people”, “treasury looters,” and “arrogant elites”.

In the absence of reasoned debate or actual policies and achievements, a large vote-buying effort was also deployed, in what some have referred to as the “weaponization of poverty.”
Continu reading......http://tellmystory.com.ng/story/what-the-world-can-learn-from-nigerias-unfolding-disaster