Nigeria is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, with skyrocketing inflation, a national currency in free-fall and millions of people struggling to buy food. Only two years ago Africa’s biggest economy, Nigeria is projected to drop to fourth place this year.

The pain is widespread. Unions strike to protest salaries of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate for free sacks of rice. Hospitals are overrun with women wracked by spasms from calcium deficiencies.

The crisis is largely believed to be rooted in two major changes implemented by a president elected 15 months ago: the partial removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the currency, which together have caused major price rises.

A nation of entrepreneurs, Nigeria’s more than 200 million citizens are skilled at managing in tough circumstances, without the services states usually provide. They generate their own electricity and source their own water. They take up arms and defend their communities when the armed forces cannot. They negotiate with kidnappers when family members are abducted.

But right now, their resourcefulness is being stretched to the limit.


No Money for Milk

On a recent morning in a corner of the biggest emergency room in northern Nigeria, three women were convulsing in painful spasms, unable to speak. Each year, the E.R. at Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital in Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city, received one or two cases of hypocalcemia caused by malnutrition, said Salisu Garba, a kindly health worker who hurried from bed to bed, ward to ward.

Now, with many unable to afford food, the hospital sees multiple cases every day.

Mr. Garba was sizing up the women’s husbands. Which source of nutrition he recommended depended on what he thought they could afford. Baobab leaves or tiger nuts for the poor; boiled-up bones for the slightly better off. He laughed at the suggestion that anyone could afford milk.

A young man with a worried look carrying on his back a young woman, in a hospital.
A woman suffering from hypocalcemia, caused by a lack of calcium, in a hospital in Nigeria. Food prices have shot up and Nigerians are not eating enough.

A man in a white coat silhouetted against a window with blue drapes puts on a pair of rubber gloves as he prepares to treat a patient.

Salisu Garba, a community health worker, treating patients at a hospital in Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city, last month.

More than 87 million people in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, live below the poverty line — the world’s second-largest poor population after India, a country seven times its size. And punishing inflation means poverty rates are expected to rise still further this year and next, according to the World Bank.

Last week, unions shut down hospitals, courts, schools, airports and even the country’s Parliament, striking in an attempt to force the government to increase the monthly salary of $20 it pays its lowest workers.

But over 92 percent of working-age Nigerians are in the informal sector, where there are no wages, and no unions to fight for them.

For the Afolabi family in Ibadan, in southwestern Nigeria, the descent into poverty started in January with the loss of an electric tuk-tuk taxi.

Forced to sell the taxi to pay his wife’s hospital bills after the difficult birth of their second child, Babatunde Afolabi turned to occasional construction work. It paid badly, but the family managed.

“We had no thoughts about starvation,” he said.

Women in colorful hijabs and men in tunics and pants wait outside a white-painted hospital building.

Patients wait to be seen at the Murtala Muhammad General Hospital. The crowds are thinner than they used to be, as many can no longer afford the bus fare.
But then, he said, cassava — the cheapest staple in many parts of Nigeria — tripled in price.

All they can afford now, he said, is a few biscuits, a little bread, and for their 6-year-old, 20 peanuts a day.


A Country Built on Gas

Nigeria is a country heavily dependent on imported petroleum products, despite being a major oil producer. After years of underinvestment and mismanagement, its state refineries produce hardly any gasoline.

For decades, the national soundtrack has been the hum of small generators, fired up during daily power outages. Petroleum products move goods and people around the country.

Until recently, the government subsidized that petroleum, to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

Many Nigerians said the subsidy was the only useful contribution from a neglectful and predatory government. Successive presidents have pledged to remove the subsidy, which drains a hefty chunk of government revenue — and later backtracked fearing mass unrest.

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nlfpmod mynd44 frontpage boss

Sincerely speaking we've never had it this bad before, Tinubu has turned Nigeria upside down

A simple definition of "from grace to grass"

As usual the govt sponsored hypocrites will make U believe you have to suffer first before you enjoy

2aces:
A simple definition of "from grace to grass"

More like rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory at the last election.

NIGERIA IS JINXED.


ORISA37
THE WORM THAT DESTROYS THE BODY IS IN THE BODY.
GOD WILL SURELY PERISH WHOEVER IS DOING THESE TO NIGERIA.