Senator Udo Udoma, the Minister for Budget and National Planning has just said that he – and probably some other visionary planners and Federal Government goons – have started seeing signs. Signs that this recession plaguing the country will end soon. We say #NaWash!

These are the signs he says he’s seeing:

• Marginal reduction in inflation rate for the first time in 15 months
• Stability in the foreign exchange market and steady increase in the foreign exchange reserves
• Some perceived renewed investor confidence, which has led to the oversubscription of the country’s $1bn Eurobond by eight times.

All these, he said while speaking at a meeting with another Federal Government personnel, Ms Yewande Sadiku who’s the current Executive Secretary at the Nigerian Investment Promotion Council. Our guess is that that meeting had something to do with the ongoing efforts to speed up the measures that the Office of the Vice President has been working in to ease the process of doing business in Nigeria. We cannot fight them for having a positive outlook and speaking sweet words during that kind of meeting and even if we are wrong about the premise of their meeting, that kind of outlook is not necessarily a bad thing. #PositiveVibesOnly

However, when that optimism becomes a little suspect because something is amiss, we take our mandate seriously and call two letters on all the washing. In this case, our radars went berserk when we read how Senator Udoma hopes that these measures (i.e the signs he’s seeing as listed above) for the recovery of the Nigerian economy will be intensified by “maximum cooperation and understanding between the Ministries, Departments and Agencies on one hand, and sustained synergy between the public and private sectors.”

On the surface, as always there’s nothing wrong with that. But when we dug a little deeper, we realised our sensors went berserk because they could not locate us in Senator Udoma’s equation. Us a.k.a ‘The Masses’; ‘We The Nigerian People’.

Aren’t we the ones most affected by the recession? We refuse to be comfortable with the siddon look approach. Been there done that!

So we assigned ourselves a role. To point out all the signs that we are seeing -being the first party beneficiaries of recession – that lead us to the conclusion that Senator Udoma may not have been shown all the signs. We have come up with a list of signs that tell us that Senator Udoma’s predictions are not to be trusted.

Here goes:

How much is a $ today?

While we mean that question literally, we are not unaware of those interesting efforts by the Central Bank to pump billions into the interbank market as a means of balancing out the differences in Dollar/Pound/Euro to Naira rates – or at least that’s what we think they tried to do when Mr Emefiele provided direct additional funding to meet forex demands for personal and business travel, medical needs and school fees a couple of weeks ago.

However, the fact still remains that those were only sweetened short-term measures that have not cancelled out the fact and horrid effects of NOT FLOATING THE NAIRA EARLY ENOUGH OR NOT AT ALL!

We already talked about this so we won’t dwell on it. All we know is that the recession that was looming before this administration came to power was worsened in effect/impact when they refused adamantly to float the Naira and if that problem remains unfixed, as it has, any signs seen by the Minister of Budget and National Planning that the recession will soon be over can only be taken with a pinch of salt and nothing more.

The quality of those directing our financial and other economy-related affairs is still cause for concern

From President Buhari to the Minister of Finance, we find it hard to boast that our nation’s handlers inspire any kind of confidence when it comes to what they are doing. At least Trump lies like he knows what he’s doing. Here, even when we try to fake the belief, Reno Omokri’s bants keep ringing in our heads:

“When you have someone who graduated with a BSc from a polytechnic (University of East London was a polytechnic at the time Kemi Adeosun attended and it was only upgraded to university status in 1992) as your finance minister in a country that has highly educated, skilled and experienced hands from every part of the nation, what you are begging for is a recession.”

It’s hard to believe that we are quoting that man but what are we to do when the Minister has refused to live up to the accent?

Our Budget of Recovery is still sitting somewhere unpassed

Didn’t they promise us last November that the delays that bogged down last year’s budget will not repeat itself this year? How exactly will the recession truly end soon if you have not disbursed all the monies needed to achieve all the lofty goals set to revive the economy?

It does not even help that this 2017 has decided to set itself to time-lapse or was it not February like 2 weeks ago? And now March is almost past tense. The same March we were promised by the Senate President that the Budget will be passed.

Besides,

Peter Obi hasn’t switched positions since he said the recession will last longer than expected in December 2016.

“I laugh when I hear people say the recession will soon end. This is not true. A critical analysis of the 2017 budget will show you that the recession will not end soon.”

And Peter Obi is the only Nigerian we’ll listen to right now. For good reason too.

Governors are still owing us…

And not just salaries. They have yet to make good on that promise they made to reduce excessive spending and their flamboyant lifestyles.

To be fair, though, it’s not that there are absolutely no signs that the recession will end soon. We have this one:

Pastor Adeboye predicts an end to Nigeria’s economic recession in 2017

It’s just that it is difficult to take the word of anyone in this administration seriously these days. Especially not when the person making the promise is the same Minister of Budget and National Planning who will freeze in confusion when asked about Nigeria’s debt profile.

Think we are lying? Enjoy: