There is acute suffering across the country as the present economic downturn worsens, CHUX OHAI writes
These are not the best of times for many Nigerians who have been struggling against all odds to make ends meet. Many believe that the economy is damn too bad.
There is acute poverty and hunger in the land. Within the last few months, many people have lost their jobs because their employers could no longer cope with the downturn in the economy. As a result, a lot more people than imagined, skilled or not, suddenly found themselves back on the streets without the slightest idea of where to get their next meal.
The spill-over effect on the poor and less privileged, to say the least, is quite excruciating. Much more alarming is the fact that this unhappy development has thrown up despair everywhere, ripped apart otherwise peaceful families, shot up the crime rate in different parts of the country and turned many, especially among the poor, into beggars.
Growing army of dependent Nigerians
The present economic situation has overnight spurned an army of helpless and needy people who are forced to depend on charity and the goodwill of other Nigerians or organisations to survive the hard times. A single mother of three children and a native of Uromi in Edo State, Patience (surname is withheld), belongs to this class of people.
Aged 26, Patience lived with the father of her children, Efe, until three months ago. One day, he sneaked out of their one-room apartment in Akute, Ogun State with his few personal belongings and left without notice.
“I didn’t know when he left. He did not leave any money behind for our feeding. I did not know that the rent for the room was due, too,” Patience tells our correspondent. It was not until she had waited for almost one week without a word from him that it dawned on her that she had been abandoned.
Life with Efe, Patience says, had not been all that smooth. They quarrelled and fought most of the time over money, especially housekeeping money. He was an okada rider (commercial motorcycle operator) and never seemed to earn enough money for their upkeep.
Apparently, Efe had been unable to cope with the pressure from Patience and, so, he decided to flee. After he left, she was confused. Stuck with three young children – the youngest was four-years-old – and not having any money, she did not know what to do, where to go and who to turn to for help.
Eventually, help came from the church that she attends every Sunday.
The church now takes care of Patience and her children. It has provided them with shelter, in addition to a monthly stipend and regular rations of food items. Yet, she wishes that she could turn back the hand of the clock.
“I never knew that my life would come to this. I never expected to find myself in this kind of situation. How long will I continue to depend on the church?” she asks.
However, Patience managed to find a job in a small restaurant, which is a short distance from the church premises. But the pay is very small – a little under N10,000 and not sufficient to cater to the needs of her family.
Unlike Patience, Janet Akpan, who is also a single mother, had a job until four months ago. She used to work as a secretary with a marketing outfit based in Victoria Island, Lagos. The company was forced to retrench some members of its staff in order to stay afloat and she was affected. Life had then taken a turn for the worse.
Although Akpan and her 10-year-old daughter now live with a female cousin in the Ogba area of Lagos and she does not have to bother about food or accommodation for now, other matters keep her worried nearly all the time. One of them is the payment of her daughter’s school fee.
“My daughter was recently sent out of school because I had not paid her fee. I couldn’t ask my cousin and her husband to lend me money. That would be asking for too much. I didn’t know what to do and who to go to for assistance. But then, God intervened. An old friend of mine suddenly came, as if from nowhere, and offered to help,” she says.
Adetayo Obafemi, 44, has not been as fortunate as Akpan. With a wife and five children to feed and very little hope of getting a new job, despite roaming the streets for several months, his burden appears to be three times as heavy.
Fortunately, a friendly property broker, who lives in his neighbourhood, has made him an offer. All that Adetayo is required to do is scout around for available property and find a willing buyer. For his effort, he gets a certain percentage of the proceeds.
Adetayo, of course, thinks that the offer is good and likens it to a glimmer of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Yet, there is a little snag: he always needs money for transport.
“Poverty has already turned me into a debtor. And I am tired of begging other people for financial assistance. The only option left for me is to borrow from them. But, who will be willing to lend a jobless man some money?” he says.
No longer ‘happiest’ people
Buffeted by endless social and economic crises, Nigerians can no longer lay claim to being the happiest people on earth. A combination of factors, including the effects of the failing economy, has effectively dulled their zest for joyful living.
Instead of deep-throated laughter, there is growing anxiety and fear of tomorrow. Nowadays there always seems to be a reason to worry about the future, especially against the backdrop of rising costs of living, unpaid salaries, mass retrenchments, rising unemployment rate, galloping inflation, soaring crime rate and insecurity.
Prices of goods and services keep rising every day, leaving the average Nigerian further drained of his meagre resources. Hunger continues to ravage the poor as some basic food items, including tomatoes, garri and rice (which now sells for N14,000 per bag), are no longer within his reach.
In some states, workers are being owed several months’ salaries. Some of the affected persons have been in the service of their employers for many years and they have a lot of dependents. Still, there is no end to their dilemma in sight yet.
The worst affected, perhaps, are those who have been borrowing money to keep body and soul together these past months and, thus, incurring a lot of debts. A case study is the academic staff of the Tai Solarin College of Education, Ogun State.
Lecturers turn ‘kunu’ sellers and okada riders
Investigation shows that lecturers in the TASCE have not been paid salaries for a total of 13 months. According to the chairman of the local chapter of the Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union, Dr. Dan Oludipe, the lecturers only got their salaries for the months of January, February, March and August in 2015. They have not received any salary since the beginning of 2016.
To survive, our correspondent gathered, many of the affected lecturers have resorted to borrowing from their friends and relations. And to avoid being seen as parasites, others now engage in menial jobs, operate commercial motorcycles or sell local food drink, ‘kunu’, in spite of their positions in the society, just to survive.
Despite such courageous efforts and determination to provide for their respective families, some of the lecturers, including Oludipe, have remained so financially challenged that they can hardly fulfil all their responsibilities.
In his own case, Oludipe had to choose between paying the rent for his apartment and his children’s school fees at the same time. He chose the rent and, afterwards, withdrew his children from a popular private secondary school in Ijebu-Ode.
He says, “I have to do menial jobs and work as a part-time teacher in a private secondary school in order to make ends meet. Even at that, since I have not been paid my salary for close to 14 months, I cannot meet with many of my responsibilities. I have enrolled my children, three of them, in a public school, because I can no longer afford their tuition fees.
“My rent is now in two years’ arrears and my landlord has issued me a quit notice. So, I am moving back to my father’s house in Ijebu Ode.”
Another lecturer in the institution, Daniel Aborisade, admits that it has not been easy surviving without being paid his salaries for over 14 months.
Like Oludipe, Aborisade has resorted to doing menial jobs and selling water-melon and iced blocks in Ijebu Ode to keep body and soul together. Also, his two children were recently sent out of school because he was unable to pay their tuition fees.
To compound his predicament, his friends and relations have not been answering his phone calls because they fear that he might be calling to request financial assistance.
He says, “I cannot go to them for help because they are already fed up with me. What I do now is sell water-melons and iced blocks in Ijebu Ode. I know that, under normal circumstances, I should not be doing this. But I have to survive. So there is no shame in it. I can no longer pay my rent. I had to withdraw my children from school because I could no longer pay their school fees.”
More beggars on the streets
Although the presence of beggars on the streets remains a subject of much concern to many Nigerians and state governments, the prevailing economic situation in the country seems to provide the impetus for their existence.
Clearly driven by desperation, more people have turned to begging in order to survive the hard times. On the streets, the picture is expanded by the arrival of new breeds of beggars.
Apart from the regular physically-challenged and destitute beggars, who are part of the physical landscape of the major cities, there is the ‘corporate’ beggar known among the ordinary folk as ‘fine bara’. It is easy to spot this type of beggar in a crowded place. He is usually well-dressed, usually speaks fluent English, pretends to be a professional of a sort (most likely, working in a bank or oil company), claims to be stranded through no fault of his and often prefers to wait in a strategic corner for his next victim.
Nowadays, another group of beggars that you are likely to encounter on the streets, especially in places like Lagos and Ibadan, are surprisingly young and able-bodied men. Often mistaken for street urchins (or ‘area boys’), they sometimes position themselves around busy areas to beg money from passersby.
Begging itself is not a crime, so many Nigerians think, but the problem is the tendency to encourage laziness among the youth and those who see it as an alternative to hard work. The real danger, it is believed, is that a culture of begging is being gradually foisted on the society.
‘We are the worst affected by the economic crisis’
Interestingly, even those that are still gainfully employed and earning regular salaries are forced to bear the burden of the present economic crisis in such a way that many Nigerians may not understand.
They are ceaselessly pestered by less fortunate neighbours, friends, associates and relations for handouts or other forms of financial assistance. Despite the implication on their personal resources, they cannot turn down such requests.
Director, Marketing and Communication, Babcock University, Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State, Joshua Suleiman, is one of such people. Every year, he makes out time and resources to attend to the needs of the poor, widows unemployed and less privileged in his hometown.
“This period has been so excruciating for everybody. Apart from dealing with the regular people that I meet their needs, for example, there are some who manage to get hold of my phone number and, from nowhere, they start calling to request financial assistance from me.
“Some people even come to my residence to tell me that they have not had anything to eat for awhile. On Tuesday morning, I received a text message from somebody that I hadn’t even met before, requesting N25,000 to pay his children’s school fees,” he says.
Joshua describes the rising pressure from such needy people as a product of the “horrifying” economic situation in which Nigerians have found themselves. He notes that it is so serious that before receiving the next salary at the end of the month, he would have already spent a large chunk of it.
Deputy Provost of the Nigeria Institute of Journalism, Ogba, Lagos, Mr. Jide Johnson, had a similar experience on Monday night. When he got home from work, he found a pregnant woman, whose children attended the same school with his neighbour’s kids, pining for assistance. It turned out that the woman was in distress because her children had not eaten all day and her husband was nowhere to be found.
“I think that we are the worst affected by the present economic crisis. The pressure on those of us who still have jobs to provide for the less privileged is becoming too much. In a week, for instance, I spend about N8,000 on fuel at N145 per litre. In a month, that amounts to N32,000. If you remove that sum of money from my monthly salary, it will leave a large hole in my pocket.
“Don’t forget that there are other basic expenditures to sort out, such as rent, feeding, school fees, children’s clothing and more. I have to deny myself certain things that I enjoy in order to accommodate the demands from friends, relations and others that are prone to economic hardship,” Johnson says.
Another Nigerian, the Chief Executive of Chibenz Travel Agency, Mr. Chibuike Ebenezer, has been having his fair share of demands for assistance, whether financial or otherwise, from non-relatives. “As I am speaking with you, there are six people who have been putting pressure on me to respond to their requests for cash or jobs,” he says.
After fulfilling his obligations to his family, especially his parents whom he has placed on monthly salaries, Ebenezer regularly doles out almost N50,000 each month to other people in dire need of assistance. The demands keep rising, he notes, but he cannot go beyond a certain point in his spending.
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I think it is insensitivity and misplaced priority on side of our govt.you don’t take a kwashiokor or marasmus patient to boutigue to buy clothes for him when you can easily buy him nutritious food in a restaurant