By
Hon. Rahman Owokoniran
Let the poor people breathe couldn’t have been funny but rather a nice concept to capture the imagination of government and the stakeholders to Nigeria’s economic realities of today.
Who are these poor People being referred to?
1) The people waking up in the morning to hustle for their daily meal every day
2) Those who go to bed hungry not knowing where the following day’s meal will come from
3) The homeless without a place to lie down
4) Those who are jobless, although having the capacity to work, but cannot find work, and those who cannot work for reasons of handicap and other reasons
5) Those working with the private sector in the lower cadre and their counterparts in the public sector, these are the category of people who cannot live off their salaries not to talk of raising a family. Same goes for the middle level workers who are hardly surviving on their paychecks.
6) Professionals who can no longer survive on their wages, thus they are either checking out for greener pastures across the globe or living a life without future promises.
7) The informal sector that continues to be raped by the authorities taking advantage of them repeatedly raiding their markets and displacing them without compensation.
The few people at the helms of affairs within the structures of government and those CEOs are the less than 1 percent nouveau riche reaping all the benefits.
So when the Senate or any organ of government reminds themselves to allow the poor to breathe, it becomes imperative that they be given the benefit of hindsight. The poor people who are demanding to be allowed to breathe have increased in volume and seize. They are over 90 percent of the population.
Distinguished Senators and Most Distinguished President of the Senate, your subjects are bleeding profusely and hurting very badly. Since we can’t follow His Excellency, the President of Nigeria Bola Ahmed Tinubu because his transformation agenda did not elaborate on the details of the economic programme, especially pertaining to petroleum subsidy removal, currency devaluation and simultaneously hiking the tariff on all essential commodities. Government is still on the same frequency increasing taxes on all fronts of the economy.
If Nigeria is in a state of war, this magnitude of constraints, which can be regarded as citizens’ Death Pill, can be understandable. But this is peace time. We can calculate and measure our prospects and make decisive decisions. Only God knows how many people are committing suicide every hour because of this government policies introduced with blatant disregard for people’s opinion and welfare. This does not account for the teeming masses of the people migrating out of the country daily.
So over to you Distinguished Senators, can you come up with a blueprint on the way out of this quagmire?
We are not asking for palliatives, which will not solve the problems.
We are asking for the specific economic policies that the President has in mind for resolving our economic crisis. Parading a class captain to head a committee or a correction institute will not be acceptable either. We want a well-articulated policy and programme, intended to address the economic issues –not the contaminated copy-and-paste policies and programmes of the IMF and World Bank.
Our cultural and social differences with other climes make it difficult for those policies to work for us. So continuing along this track will lead us to nowhere.
Get your facts out of your constituencies and put it together to come up with a realistic policy for the people. This grandstanding is not working for the people and the President has given no inclination to make the people believe that he has any clue to resolving the problem.
Asking for calm and hope for a better tomorrow will not work. Bola should speak to what he has in mind to solving the problem. Blaming the previous administration doesn’t cut it either. Didn’t he tell the whole world that it was his life ambition to become the President? And more so that he has been at the corridor of power for ever.
Moreover, Bola was the mouthpiece for his party’s presidential campaign in 2015 and 2019. So he is not a stranger to The Villa.
As the President, he owes the entire nation the duty to deliver on his promises with the support of his National Assembly.
Stop handling this matter with kid’s gloves. It will burn.
Hon. Rahman Owokoniran is PDP South-West Zonal Secretary