Occupy Wall Street Protests: Lessons For Nigeria

Editorial

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 America’s economic elite. It was a success economic story in the world’s richest country. The economic wizards in Wall Street were revered for their creativity, ingenuity and ability to create jobs for millions of Americans. Americans believed they deserved what they earned.

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 country’s economy. Not surprising then, protests began about three weeks ago against what protesters call “corporate greed”.

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 companies’ owners plundered all their resources. Most manufacturing companies in the country collapsed and the real sector of the economy was gradually decimated.

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 people’s hard earned incomes. In some instances, bank chiefs bought hundreds of houses for themselves, diverted billions of naira into their private accounts and traded in the capital market with money that was not theirs. As a result, the financial system collapsed in August 2009, rendering many Nigerians jobless and depriving millions of others of their life time incomes.

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 country’s comatose electrical power did not yield any meaningful result. Infrastructure collapsed and our roads became death traps. Other key sectors such as education, healthcare, research were so much neglected that Nigerians began to relocate to Ghana, South Africa or Benin Republic for degrees and India for medical check ups.

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.

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