Time to Change Our Tastes

This country is facing its biggest economic crisis since the 1980s with plummeting revenues for all levels of government in the wake of the crash in international crude oil prices. The three tiers of government used to share more than N700 billion from the Federation Account every month but are lucky these days to get […]

This country is facing its biggest economic crisis since the 1980s with plummeting revenues for all levels of government in the wake of the crash in international crude oil prices. The three tiers of government used to share more than N700 billion from the Federation Account every month but are lucky these days to get half of that. Governments are struggling to pay their workers; overheads have been cut to the barebones while capital projects are at a standstill all over the country.
Apart these areas, the impact of the economic downturn has so far been felt most severely with respect to the naira’s value against foreign currencies. With the nation’s foreign reserves down to $30 billion, the Central Bank of Nigeria [CBN] has been grappling with different ad hoc solutions in order to conserve forex and maintain an artificial exchange rate. At the Bureaux de Change and on the black markets the naira dipped recently to N400 to the dollar. Even though it has since rebounded, no one knows if this rebound will last and for how long.
This state of affairs has created a situation that calls for astute response from the government and also citizens. Government and CBN should do whatever they can to conserve scarce foreign exchange, allocate it as efficiently as possible and with the minimum corruption. Government is also responsible for reversing our adverse economic fortunes, identifying other resources that we can fall back on as well as implementing a plan to diversify the economy and insulate it from future shocks in the oil or any other commodity market.
However, all that is by the way. The focus of our comment today is what Nigerian citizens themselves can and should do in response to this challenge. Nigerians like to blame leaders past and present for the ugly state of our economic affairs. We agree that leaders must accept most of the blame because they are the ones with the power to direct affairs and to deny certain choices that citizens want to make. Yet, millions of Nigerian citizens partook in the national craze, waste and squander-mania that was the Oil Boom era. We have only ourselves to blame for completely changing  our tastes to foreign-grown food, foreign-made clothes, an insatiable desire for foreign manufactures from electronics to vehicles, not to mention foreign-made sweets, beers and medicines.
What has happened has happened so the concern today is not to sit down and lament but what we must do as a people. President Muhammadu Buhari has more responsibility than any other person for finding a solution. In addition to whatever plans he has, we urge him to add to it a concerted campaign to change Nigerians’ tastes which developed over the years due to cheap and easily accessible forex. This is especially true of the super rich and the middle classes but to some extent even of the poor.
The first target for change should be food and the priority there should be imported parboiled rice. If Nigerians must eat parboiled rice then we need a crash national program to grow, mill and if necessary parboil the rice but for now, since we can no longer afford to import millions of tonnes of it from Thailand, citizens must be encouraged to turn to other foods. All other imported food items that over the years came to define Nigerians’ wastefulness should be done away with forthwith.
The next target should be clothing. Whatever it has control over, such as school uniforms, NYSC uniforms as well as the uniforms of soldiers, policemen and paramilitary agencies, government should stipulate that they must be of locally made fabrics. Next, government officials should be made to wear locally made fabrics so that other citizens will take their cue from there. School textbooks should be the next target. Any foreign publisher who desires to sell his books in Nigeria should be made to partner with a local book publisher. The same should apply to foreign music and films.
Public agencies should also patronise locally made vehicles or vehicles with a high level of local input. This used to be the case when Nigeria’s Heads of State once rode in locally-assembled Peugeot 504. The culture of public officials riding around in imported BMWs and Mercedes cars, some of them bullet proof, should end forthwith so that hopefully citizens will take a cue. In recent years too, the availability of cheap imported tokunbo cars has created a taste whereby every middle class family wants several cars for itself, aided by subsidised fuel. This habit too has to end and a concerted effort to develop public transportation will help to end it. Super rich Nigerians’ propensity to import private jets must also be shelved.
Then there is the issue of medical tourism. While our rich people have always been going to Europe and USA for their medical needs, in recent years the middle classes found slightly cheaper outlets such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India and Dubai. Nigeria has lost billions of dollars to this craze for medical tourism which steadily worsened until it reached a stage where Nigerians go abroad to treat minor ailments. Related to this is the craze for sending children to foreign schools. From Europe and North America this craze has now extended to the Middle East, Asian and even African countries including Ghana and Benin Republic. The reason parents often give is that ASUU strikes prolong kids’ stay in school. One way or another, it is time to reverse this situation.
Nigeria is in a deep hole and we must first of all stop digging by jettisoning all signal acts of national waste, excess, profligacy and conceit.