 Welcome, it's time for our second hot topic, Frank Eliana, technology and media news editor at Business Days, my guest. Good morning, Frank. Good morning. Well, Frank has joined me to take a look at Nigeria's rising level of inflation. Nigeria is experiencing her highest level of inflation in 17 years. The rate stands at 22.79%. And 133 million Nigerians are said to be multi-dimensionally poor, looking at 63% of the population. And it's so bad now that last week we heard of what happened in Adama, our state, where people they describe as hoodlums. I don't know if it is right to describe them as such, but reporters describe them as hoodlums who invaded government and private warehouses in search of food. Five people were killed as a result of that. And this morning as I was coming to work, I heard of some women, matured women in their fifties, who robbed a lady at Obalande. It's gotten that bad. Frank. Yes. Well, the causes of inflation keep growing daily. Further, you know, declining the standard of living for Nigerians. Let's talk about this. You listen to the president's broadcast. Yeah. Talk to us. Do you think it has addressed the situation on ground? All right. From the president's broadcast, it will appear he wants to make a run on the inflation that the current, that is currently rampaging the country. But that's on paper, if you ask me. I think what we've had so far with this administration is a lot of movement on paper, but nothing concrete on ground. From where I stand, I think Nigerians are experiencing the inflation. The impact of inflation are much more Nigerians than it is on the political class. From all I have seen, the political class continue to leave a sieve. Nothing has changed. I see every other day is a day used to be, you know, we can go out, buy fuel at the price that we want to buy it. So they've got all the money right now in their hands. They can control it. And so they're not affected, so to speak, by what is happening to the average Nigerian on the street. It's unfortunate, the incidents that you've mentioned. And I also want to agree that it is improper, actually, to call those people in Adamawa looking for food as hoodlums. They are not hoodlums. If you're looking for food and you have to take desperate measures to invade a governmental facility to just get food, you are not looking for money. It's desperation. Then the incident yesterday at Obalinde also talks about or shows us how desperate the situation has become. And yet we have a president who says something on paper and goes about doing something else within his cabinet. We have seen the ministerial list that he recently released. That 47 ministers is the record as in it is the highest that we've had since Nigeria became a democratic entity. 24 years. This is the highest that we've had. Just to give you a clue, President Muhammad Buhari, in his first term, had or appointed 36 ministers in his first term. In his second term, he increases to 42. Then, Good Lord Jonathan appointed or nominated 33 people and then added it with the nine that he inherited from President Yeradwar. Yeradwar himself had 39. Now these were people who were living in times when inflation was not at 22.9%. And even that inflation figure is debatable because the situation on ground shows us that that figure must have been either tampered with or something because we were expecting about 30% inflation rate. But there we are at 22.9%. But even then, this government has not shown any sense that something critical needs to be done. So it is going about jamboreeing everywhere, compensating political cronies, appointing people with questionable characters, and everywhere leader with no technocrats who can do the job. But people who we know have come from compensation from a political background where they had to get everything they want, they get contracts, they do all manner of shenanigans. So what we are looking at now is that the government is on one side and the people are on the other side. The suffering, I know your suffering that he spoke about in his speech is nowhere aligned. If he knows the people suffering, what he should be doing is to show that he knows it. But what's in the cost of governance? But that is not the case. That is not happening. Okay, let's take a look at the speech. Let's break it down a bit. Let some take away from that and then see if you do not think that he's made some conscious deliberate effort. Look at what some of the things contained in his speech is to spend $75 billion between July, 2023 and March 2024 to strengthen the manufacturing sector, increase its capacity to expand and create good paying jobs. He also said that the government will be funding 75 enterprises with great potentials to kickstart a sustainable economic growth, accelerate structural transformation, and improve productivity. He said each of the 75 manufacturing enterprises to access $1 billion at 9% per annum with a maximum of 60 months of repayment for long-term loans and 12 months for working capital. There's a whole long list of that. You listen to that speech and you're saying that this is just simply joy. You're not seeing this making any impact in any way. See, it is a speech with a lot of good intentions, but little to show for it. Okay, for instance, how exactly do they want to deploy the 75 billion Naira? I'm always about the how. It's not about you can come out with good ideas, say a lot of things to make people feel good and cheer you and say, oh, yes, he's making a lot of strides and all that. Don't forget we have been here before. Last year, we saw a speech by President Buhari who said that he has approved $1.5 billion for the rehabilitation of the Port Hakot refinery and that that refinery will be on by July this year. July this year. Please, what month are we? We are in August. July is nowhere feasible. And then that refinery working has not been moved to December. All right. I think it was just a few days ago also. I saw another approval for the Port Hakot refinery. All right. So we have had a lot of all these announcements that sounds very good. Okay. Let's also go back again to the Angkor Broas program. How was that managed? How was it dispersed? At the end of the day, we had the CBN incurring more debt because people were not repaid. Farmers were not repaid. All right. And then we also had farmers who said that they could not assess. They couldn't assess that fund because of some issues that had to do with documentation, some issues that had to do with underhand manipulations from either banks or from, you know, so at the end of the day, the Angkor Broas program did not yield any true dividend that we can point out to say, okay, this is what it has solved. All right. When you come out to make this announcement, you don't just make them. You follow it up immediately with the how. And it's been days. This announcement was made. The next thing we should have heard from the next morning was it has started. It has been kickstarted. And this is what has been put in place. It's what we're seeing. And then we should be hearing some buzz from the manufacturing sector that, yes, we have been called. We have been alerted. Yes, things are happening. So far, I have not heard anything. I don't know if you have heard. If you have heard, maybe you should enlighten me, but we haven't heard anything from that speech being implemented. So there's a lot of coming to, coming on TV to make an announcement, to hold Nigerians for an hour and talk about what you intend to do. We, at the point where Nigerians are leaving, it's not a point of invitation. They want to see action. All right. So if you want to do it, do it already. You should have started a month ago, not when you announced it. You should have been like, okay, we started, and this is the level where we have gotten to. If we don't want announcements right now, Nigerians want action. All right, Frank. There's a video I was wishing we could play right now, but we can't play that video. But it's a senator that was talking about some of the problems they had with the FG care COVID-19 relief fund that was released to the people and how governors in states stole that money. Let's call it what it is. It was theft from 3.2 million Naira to 100,000 Naira. That was what eventually got into the hands of the few people they eventually gave it to. From the list, they kept cutting it down to a very small number. And then the money from 3.2 million, it got to them only at 100,000 Naira individual. Now, when we talk about inflation, the buck does not stop with the federal government. We have to talk about the states. We have to talk about the local government. Talk to us about what you've noticed also with the states. The state governors, some of them have shown themselves to be nothing but thieves, some of them, and I stand to be corrected. So you are absolutely going somewhere there, yes. Listen, what the governors end up doing often comes from what the president himself is doing. If you have an insincere executive or central government, you will not get anything different from the state. If you have a party that comes into office in questionable manner, you will not have anything different from those that it brings out. What we have is majority controlled states by a particular party and we know how they come up and all that. So the team that they select, the people that they bring out to become these governors are also a reflection of who the president is. So what they are acting out is because they know that there's no deterrent. Nobody's going to call them to question. Nobody's going to hold them accountable. Look at what has happened to past governors who stole money, what has happened. We have seen that some of them have been given presidential pardon. We have seen that some of them have been reappointed. We even have a governor who was caught on camera with dollars and putting dollars in his Agbada, who is now the current chairman of a party. There's no deterrent. Nobody goes after them to say you must account for the funds that you received. How many of them have accounted for the FAAC, the FAC allocations that they got during their 10-year-olds and what they used it for? We don't get any account for that. So it is not surprising that when you disperse this money to the governors, they misuse it because they know that nobody's going to hold them accountable to account. The courts, the judiciary is underpaid and many of them are also looking for where to make up for the shortfall of their salaries and the benefits that accrue to them. It's been over years. Their salaries have not been increased. When it is remembered to be increased, it is maybe like 100% or 20% or something like that, something insignificant, something that will keep them subservient to the executive. So when you have a system like that where everything is dependent at the center, then everybody is like, you can do anything you want. And that's why I started from that the ministerial list that we just saw already gives us an idea of where we're going to. It is nowhere. We're going nowhere. Let's put it where it's supposed to be. We're not going anywhere. With this amount of ministers coming in, and majority of them, we're talking about 80% of them are politicians, career politicians. So these guys already have made up their mind. We're coming to sign contracts. We're coming to pay off how much we incurred from running politics and all that. That's what they've made up their mind for. But if we had gone a different route, where if you are appointing a minister, you are appointing a minister that knows his onion, that has a vision for where he's coming from, that also knows the portfolio that he's coming for. The other day, we saw them in the Senate. The question they were being asked were questions about how you went to school here, you went to school there. And that was because of the fact that many of them, nobody knew what they were going to be assigned to. If they don't know what they were going to assign to. So what is that you're asking them questions for? So it is a chaotic system that the governors are enriching themselves from. And that's also why they're not allowing the local governments to work. And even the local governments themselves, once they see themselves a little, once they get a little latitude from the governors, they too misbehave because they feel like, oh, this is our opportunity. Let us grab as much as we can. But Frank, let's also move away from the leaders to the lead. Is it not something that has become endemic, a systemic problem? Is it not something that has become like our nature as a people to enter there and grab, steal, take government properties, nobody's property? Do we even have a register for Nigeria's properties? Do we know everything that really belongs to Nigeria as a people? Do we know all that we have? How is it that Nigerians have come to have this mentality to where you go into office and the first thing you think about is how to steal for yourself or how to steal for you and your people? What does that say about us as a people and as a country and the hope and future for this country? Is there any hope at all? I think there's hope, actually. And that hope still lies with these citizens themselves. What we saw in the last election was what should have ignited that hope. But unfortunately, we allowed, I don't know if it's to say that we allowed, but we saw an electoral umpire who were not aligned with the wheels of the people in order. And at the end of the day, what we saw was what happened. Okay, so there is hope. The hope is the elections that are coming. The hope, okay. If it's not bungled, the elections are not bungled. Yes, elections are not bungled, actually. So I feel that it is up to the citizens to take back their country. How can they do that? How do you suggest that Nigerians take back their country? Nigerians that are not part of the rot that we're talking about. Because as I said, I've come to realize that many Nigerians are corrupt. Many of us, we want to go there and grab. That still lives, that still lives a few. Who are not? Can we project the few? And we need to start building systems that project Nigerians who truly want to work. It needs to come to that. And it needs to go back to the Constitution. What exactly is that Constitution saying at this time? Is this still relevant? Are we still aligned with the first century times in our Constitution? If it's not aligned, it's a 1999 Constitution that they all have tried to redo. But at the end of the day, there's not much concrete change that has come to that Constitution. It is time that we go back to the fundamentals of that Constitution to ask the real questions. Are we truly a people? What type of people do we want? What kind of identity do we want to identify ourselves with? Who is a Nigerian? We haven't even asked a question to ourselves. We haven't even asked that question. Who is a Nigerian? What values does he bring? If you see him on the road, how do you identify him? And you may want to add, do we have a Nigerian dream? Exactly. So from knowing who is a Nigerian, then you start building the dream. Okay, what is the Nigerian, what are we supposed to aspire for? That's a dream. What are we supposed to aspire for? How do we then bring it to the schools? It needs to go back to the schools. And that's why it is absolutely disappointing that at this time we are still, this government is still not talking about what to do about the education system. We have no plan. There's no roadmap yet. The government, the president in his speech, did not mention anything about schools. What is he going to do about the schools? He is not saying it. So until we go back to the schools, revamp it, even if it is to start it all over again, to refresh it, stop what is what we have now and start all over again. You can send the students home. I'm so sorry to cut you short there, but I have to wrap up now. We have to continue with our conversations. Join us next week. We don't know whether Frank is going to come back or not, but we'll continue with these compositions about our country because it's the only country that we have. Frank, Eliana Technology and Media News Editor at Business Day has been my guest. Thank you so much, Frank. Thank you so much. And thank you for being our guests on the breakfast this week. Join us again next week for another series of the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. I am Maureen Menonguiz. On behalf of the team and Nyong'ul, I say have a great weekend.