Tinubu to Inherit Security, Debts, Infrastructure Liabilities

 

By Nurat Uthman

From ongoing insecurity, inflation and infrastructure deficit, the incoming administration of Bola Tinubu has its work cut out as it bids to hit the ground running to meet the high expectations of Nigerians.

Terror linked to the Boko Haram activities in the North-East and level of banditry never seen in the history of the country, especially in the North-West, are some of the challenges the incoming administration must now figure out how to deal with.

Deadly and well-coordinated terrorist gangs continue to abduct people for millions of naira in ransom to oil their criminal activities with Zamfara, Katsina and Kaduna states remaining the epicentre of these dastardly crimes.

The North-Central, especially Benue State, continues to experience unrelenting killings and displacement attributable to farmers/herders clash.

Similarly, the incoming government will be confronted with unresolved activities of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), extra-judicial killings, cultism, armed robbery, and other violent crimes linked to politics, high unemployment and the proliferation of small arms that have compounded the general insecurity.

The Tinubu administration will also be inheriting the boundary of about 150 out of the 276 girls of the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, who have been  in Boko Haram captivity since April 14, 2014, as well as Leah Sharibu abducted February 19, 2018 in her school in Dapci, Yobe State, still remains in kidnappers’ den.

Tinubu will also inherit a struggling economy, which has seen debts rise to as much as N77 trillion and inflation hitting 22.04 percent in March 2023 from the about 9.0 percent met by the outgoing administration in May 2015.

Uncontrolled inflation under the outgoing administration has led to the increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy such that each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services, resulting in reduction in the purchasing power of money.

Economists say the devastating effects of inflation on the economy, coupled with other variables culminated in pushing many Nigerians into poverty under President Buhari’s watch,  which will now be passed on to the incoming government.

The World Bank 2022 poverty and prosperity report holds that Nigeria contributed three million people to global extreme poverty, while the country has been tagged: “home to a large share of the global extreme poor.”

Also, Nigeria was ranked 103 out of 121 countries in the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI).

The report, which ranks countries by ‘severity,’ gave Nigeria a score of 27.3 – a hunger level falling under the “serious” category.

In November 2022, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released a report which showed that 133 million people (63 percent) living in Nigeria are multidimensionally poor.

It put the national MPI at 0.257, meaning that poor people in Nigeria experience just over one-quarter of all possible deprivations, a situation that is certain to give the Tinubu administration a lot of worries.

From N12.12 trillion attributed to the country by the Debt Management Office (DMO) as of June 2015, debt has climbed to N44.7 trillion while  “Ways and Means” borrowing advances from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) have been put at N22.7 trillion.

According to Paul Alaje, a senior economist and partner at SPM Professionals, “President Buhari’s administration will also be giving a debit cheque to the incoming president, Senator Bola Tinubu, which of course will be between N70 trillion to N77 trillion debt. This is worrisome because the president met this debt at less than N20 trillion.”

The incoming administration will also have to deal with the high unemployment figure being handed down by Buhari’s government, as well as the lingering fuel subsidy, which the Buhari government failed to remove despite promises.

In the area of infrastructure, the Buhari administration is leaving about 26,000 kilometres of federal roads across the country to its successor to attend to while it is also handing down 11 housing sites amounting to 3,198 units under the national housing programme yet to be completed.

Other liabilities the outgoing administration will be passing on include the 2nd Niger Bridge; railway projects including Kaduna-Kano, Port Harcourt-Maiduguri, and Kano-Maradi (Niger Republic) lines.