26th October, 2011
The “Occupy Wall Street†protests are taking place thousands of miles away in New York but recent developments in Abuja may just bring them closer to Nigeria.
For long, Wall Street in New York represented Americaâ€
But as their paychecks skyrocketed, the poor grew poorer and inflation reached to the skies. In the end, the inequality gap became unsustainable with the majority of the poor unable to purchase products manufactured by the rich and as a result, the American economy tumbled in 2008, leading to a global financial crisis around the world.
Today, the richest one percent of Americans are said to possess 40 percent of their countryâ€
The protests have now spread to other parts of America and other countries around the world. For decades in Nigeria, we followed the same inglorious path. With a series of deregulations and privatisations in the 1990s, companies that once belonged to the government were given away to a few individuals. Many of these companies ended up closing shop and hundreds of thousands of Nigerians were rendered jobless after the new companiesâ€
As the real sector evaporated, the richest Nigerians began to invest their money in the financial sectors of the economy. The money went to the banks, the capital markets and Forex trading among others.Staff salaries ballooned in these sectors. Bankers earned 20 to 50 times more than what others earned. The huge over bloated salaries did not seem to satisfy them and they began stealing the peopleâ€
As all these took place in the financial sectors of the economy, in government, billions of naira were embezzled. Critical projects such as revamping the countryâ€
The planned removal of fuel subsidy by the Federal Government is likely to hit Nigerians hard again and act as a catalyst that may just bring the Wall Street protests to Abuja. Nigerians are already steamrolled by squalor. The President Goodluck Jonathan administration must not add salt to injury. The president must look for genuine ways to revamp the economy, create jobs, reduce inequality and make Nigerians laugh again. The current move may just be the opposite and it must be avoided in order not to trigger violence of cataclysmic proportion. Nigerian leaders must learn from the Arab Spring revolution and Wall Street protests.