Now consider the following scenario — you are moving house, you see a place that you really like, and pay the rent. Then you find that the house has no mosquito nets, in this, malaria endemic region. You fail to buy nets, and move your family in, then worse, do not administer antimalarial drugs to your kids.
Two things, when the kids eventually come down with malaria, as they will, who should you blame for their predicament? The landlord? The former tenant? Or yourself?
For the third time in the last four months, last night, some of the sycophantic supporters of our FG dredged up a tweet that I made three days before the last general elections. The motive of course, is to cast me in a negative light for being harsh in my criticisms of the government’s economic policies. It is quite unfortunate that too many people in my generation are incapable of independent thought.
There’s no denying that the last government left us on a precipice. That is the reason so many of us were swayed to not only vote for the current one, but to actively campaign to see that “change” happen. What we did not campaign for, or vote for, was to keep hearing, 18 months in, about how bad the last government was. We knew, which is why we had them replaced.
Sadly, Mr. President, your government has behaved like the person in the analogy I described. We are in a recession. The recession started 15 months into your tenure. We all saw slowing growth over the last eighteen months of the previous government, and in getting us to vote you in, you promised us that you’d jump start the growth. Instead, growth kept on slowing for nine months while you dailied on making critical appointments, and then went into negative territory for another six months after some not-so-well-thought-out appointments were made. It’s on you Sir. If you’d taken the required mosquito net that was contained in the Ahmed Joda Committee report, or given our economy the required antimalarial drugs in terms of the right monetary policies when they were needed, the worst that would have happened is that the slowing growth would not have accelerated into negative territory, and by this time we’d have seen a possible turning around of things.
However, who or what caused the recession, is not the issue. The issue is how we will get out of it, with the right steps, and not with platitudes. So let’s stop all the blame game and buck passing. We are all in this together. How do we come out of it? Please don’t tell me that It’s by selling off performing government assets like the NLNG without the required reforms. We’ve been there with NEPA, and I’m typing this to the sound of a gen.
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