Editorial: Year 2016 Now Gone, How spent?

Yesterday,  January 1,2017  the world and indeed Nigerians will bid farewell to the year 2016. Like all the years before it, 2016 would be remembered by many in very different ways. While some countries would remember it with fortuitous glee and nostalgia, not many Nigerians would count themselves as too lucky with its embrace. The reasons are not hard to find. Majority of Nigerians would not forget in hurry, the economic recession and hardships.  Matters were made worse by the fact that many state and non-state actors have succeeded in Balkanizing the county’s polity with their reckless utterances and even actions that continue to create an overwhelming sense of siege and political insecurity all over the country.
Moreover, the raging Boko Haram insurgency in the country’s northeast and the continuing militancy in the Niger Delta region helped to add more fodder to an already volatile situation. Such  sense of anomie  was compounded more by the growing poverty and unemployment among Nigerians brought about by the falling Naira and lack of foreign and domestic investments.
For the majority of Nigerians, the near comatose state of the economy has remained the biggest albatross weighing them down. Even at that, they are not consoled by any significant improvements now or in the future. The situation is made all the most galling by the fact that the country is endowed with vast natural and human resources.
Yet, the paradox of a rich country but poor people has become the lot of Nigerians. Incidentally, the Buhari administration is yet to administer any shock therapy to reinvigorate Nigeria’s dwindling fortunes.   About 40 percent of Nigerians are estimated to be very poor, which translates to 70 million people living below the poverty line in a country that has earned at least 1trillion dollars from oil in the past 50 years.
Incidentally, 2016 would remain a year the country failed to change it’s over dependence on oil for revenue and embrace other promising sectors as agriculture and solid minerals development. For this negligence, Nigeria has continued to suffer the consequences of the “Dutch disease”. For now, the country is stuck in the quagmire of partisan politicking between the two major parties of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC) to the detriment of the citizens’ welfare.
Sadly the enduring political developments in Nigeria have unearthed the true depth of the underlying spirit of her nationhood, even as it has also put to test, the character of our political leaders; who are supposed to be advocates of sound democratic political culture. Even in 2016, the parochial interests of the nation’s political, tribal, and religious leaders have made nonsense of the character of sound political leadership.  As Nigerians wait the era of a new tiding in 2017, they would wish their leaders to embrace the spirit of statesmanship, national reconciliation, justice and service to all. It would be a disservice to the impoverished citizenry in their leaders would continue playing politics at the expense of the peoples’ welfare.