The International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICiR) said Nigerians’ growing misery is continuing unabated, as the country plunges deeper into debilitating conditions of lower oil output, rising inflation and insecurity.
A 2021 research on misery index undertaken by Steve Hanke, a professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, United States, which focused on four salient parameters of inflation, lending rate, unemployment figures and gross domestic product, showed Nigeria performed abysmally poor.
Out of 156 economies assessed in the report, Nigeria was the 11th most miserable country. In Africa, it was better only than Sudan, Zimbabwe and Angola.
Despite efforts by the Federal government to generate earnings from non-oil exports through aggressive taxation by the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), oil has remained the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy upon which its budget is benchmarked. Maladministration, weak reforms and corruption in the country’s oil sector have ensured the country is not benefiting from oil sales as it should. For instance, the country is not reaping its due gains from the two major areas of quota production and rising crude price in the global market due to massive oil theft and insecurity in the former, and petroleum products importation in the latter.
A major source of worry for the Muhammadu Buhari administration has been meeting up with the Organisation of Petroleum Producing Countries (OPEC) 1.7 millions barrel per day quota. Nigeria has as a result lost its status as Africa’s top oil producer to Angola as output declined in May.
