Happy New Year 2016

As we enter the New Year 2016 today, we congratulate our countrymen and women on our survival as a people and as a nation even as we look forward to greater and more prosperous things ahead. The old year 2015 was a very difficult and very challenging one for the people of this country. It […]

As we enter the New Year 2016 today, we congratulate our countrymen and women on our survival as a people and as a nation even as we look forward to greater and more prosperous things ahead. The old year 2015 was a very difficult and very challenging one for the people of this country. It began on a note of tension and high anxiety last January with the onset of general and presidential elections and a time when more than 20 local government areas in three states of the country were under the brutal control of Boko Haram insurgents.
The 2015 election also promised to be the most competitive since 1999 with the newly formed mega opposition All Progressives Congress [APC] set to lock horns with the Peoples Democratic Party [PDP] that had been ruling the country at the federal level since 1999. Insurgency and a general election aside, the year 2015 also began on an inauspicious note with the steep fall in the international price of crude oil, for long the mainstay of our government’s revenues and the country’s top foreign exchange earner.
With the help of God and the determination of Nigerians, things went on well in two of the three fronts. As last year ended, our gallant military and security forces had succeeded in reducing the once formidable Boko Haram army to ragtag pockets that are being chased from one foxhole to another. The insurgents no longer control any territory in Nigeria and their so-called Caliphate has vanished even from their propaganda statements. However, remnants of the insurgents still use Improvised Explosive Devices [IEDs] against soft targets such as mosques, markets and bus stations. Besides, two million people internally displaced by the insurgency are still living in camps and are unable to return home.
The 2015 general elections also succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. For the first time in Nigeria’s history a ruling party at the federal level was defeated in an election. President Muhammadu Buhari and his APC party came to power last May and have since been trying their hands at solving the country’s myriad of problems. The 2015 elections were nationally and internationally acclaimed as probably the best ever in the country’s history and they greatly improved this country’s image in the comity of nations. Their peaceful ending and the concession by former President Goodluck Jonathan also set a very good example for all of Africa to follow.
It is the third one among the triad of problems, economic crunch, that however defied solution in the outgoing year and promises to dog this country well into the New Year. Oil prices have since fallen from more than $100 per barrel in mid-2014 to the low thirties by last week. As a result, there has been a sharp drop in government revenue and many state governments are even finding it difficult to pay staff salaries. President Buhari has responded with a N6 trillion federal budgets intended to reflate the economy this year.
Government has warned that Nigerians will have to endure many hardships this year due to the measures put in place to arrest the economic decline. Among such measures is the restriction in access to foreign exchange as well as the possible end to fuel price subsidies this year, which for a time will be covered up for by the cheaper cost of importing refined fuel. Our advice to our countrymen is that as a nation and as a people we have been through even worse times before, economically and security wise. We survived and even prospered in the face of the earlier challenges. Just as surely, we will survive these ones too and will probably come out even stronger, given the government’s determination to diversify the economy and ensure that it is no longer dependent on a single commodity in the future. We urge all Nigerians to persevere in the face of these challenges and to rededicate ourselves to the tasks ahead. We wish all our readers and all Nigerians a happy New Year.