Nigeria is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, with inflation soaring, a national currency in free fall and millions of people struggling to buy food. Just two years ago, Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, was expected to fall to fourth place this year.
The pain is generalized. Unions go on strike to protest wages of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate to get bags of free rice. Hospitals are overrun with women tormented by spasms due to calcium deficiencies.
The crisis is widely believed to have its roots in two major changes implemented by a president elected 15 months ago: the partial elimination of fuel subsidies and the floating of the currency, which together have caused significant price increases.
A nation of entrepreneurs, Nigeria’s more than 200 million citizens are trained to manage in difficult circumstances, without the services that states typically provide. They generate their own electricity and obtain their own water. They take up arms and defend their communities when the armed forces cannot do so. They negotiate with kidnappers when they kidnap relatives.
But right now, his ingenuity is being pushed to the limit.
There is no money for milk
On a recent morning, in a corner of northern Nigeria’s largest emergency room, three women convulsed with painful spasms and could not speak. Every year, the emergency room at the Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital in Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city, received one or two cases of hypocalcemia caused by malnutrition, said Salisu Garba, a kindly health worker who ran from bed to bed. from room to room.
Now that many cannot afford food, the hospital sees multiple cases every day.
Mr. Garba was assessing the women’s husbands. The source of nutrition he recommended depended on what he thought they could afford. baobab or tiger nut leaves for the poor; boiled bones for those who are a little better. He laughed at the suggestion that anyone could afford to buy milk.
More than 87 million people in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, live below the poverty line – the second-largest poor population in the world after India, a country seven times its size. And punishing inflation means poverty rates are expected to rise even further this year and next, according to the World Bank.
Last week, unions closed hospitals, courts, schools, airports and even the country’s Parliament, striking in an attempt to force the government to increase the $20 monthly salary it pays its lowest workers.
But more than 92 percent of working-age Nigerians are in the informal sector, where there are no wages or unions to fight for them.
For the Afolabi family in Ibadan, southwestern Nigeria, the descent into poverty began in January with the loss of an electric tuk-tuk taxi.
Forced to sell the taxi to pay his wife’s hospital bills after the difficult birth of his second child, Babatunde Afolabi occasionally took up construction work. He paid poorly, but the family managed.
“We weren’t thinking about dying of hunger,” he said.
But then, he said, the price of cassava, the cheapest staple food in many parts of Nigeria, tripled.
The only thing they can afford now, she said, is a few cookies, some bread and, for her 6-year-old son, 20 peanuts a day.
A country built on gas
Nigeria is a country highly dependent on imported petroleum products, despite being a major oil producer. After years of underinvestment and mismanagement, its state refineries barely produce gasoline.
For decades, the national soundtrack has been the hum of small generators, turned on during daily power outages. Petroleum products transport goods and people throughout the country.
Until recently, the government subsidized that oil to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
Many Nigerians said the subsidy was the only useful contribution from a negligent and predatory government. Successive presidents have pledged to eliminate the subsidy, which drains a large portion of government revenue, then backed off for fear of mass unrest.
Bola Tinubu, who was elected president of Nigeria last year, initially kept his promise.
“It was a necessary action so that my country did not go bankrupt,” Tinubu said in April, at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia.
Instead, many Nigerians are going bankrupt or working multiple jobs to stay afloat.
Mr. Garba, the hospital worker, used to be solidly middle class, even though 17 family members, including 12 children, depended on him.
After his shifts at the hospital, where he is setting up the first ambulance service in the state, as well as working in the emergency room, for which he is paid $150 a month, he heads to the Red Cross. There he occasionally receives a voluntary stipend of $3.30 for helping address a severe diphtheria outbreak.
At night he works in the pharmacy that he and a colleague set up. But few people have money to buy medicines anymore. He sells medicine worth about $7 a day.
Last year, Garba sold his car when gasoline subsidies were removed and now commutes to work in a tuk-tuk. Unable to power the generator, he reads the medication labels at the pharmacy by the light of a small solar flashlight. He can only afford to buy rice and cassava in small quantities.
Life under the previous government was very expensive, he said, but nothing like today.
“It’s very, very bad,” he said.
The situation has become so serious that there have been several deadly stampedes over rice distributed for free or at a discount by the government, including one in March at a university in the central state of Nasarawa, where seven students were killed.
Tinubu promised to create a million jobs and quadruple the size of the economy within a decade, but he has not said how. The International Monetary Fund said last month that the state has started subsidizing fuel and electricity again, although the government has not recognized this.
“There is still very little clarity – if any – about where the economy is headed and what the priorities are,” said Zainab Usman, a political economist and director of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The tapping fad
A series of new crypto mining games that promise to generate income the more the user plays has people across Nigeria spending all day tapping on their smartphone screens, desperate to make a few dollars.
People tap while praying, in mosques and churches. Children bang under desks at school. Mourners play at funerals.
There is no guarantee that any of them will ever benefit from the hours they spend mindlessly tapping.
On the other hand, they cannot count on the national currency, the naira.
The government has devalued the naira twice in the past year, trying to allow it to float more freely and attract foreign investment. The result: it has lost almost 70 percent of its value against the dollar.
Nigeria cannot produce enough food for its growing population; Food imports increase 11 percent annually. The currency devaluation caused those imports, already expensive due to high tariffs, to skyrocket in price.
Nigerians can become poor almost overnight. That’s why they are looking for anything that can maintain their value or, ideally, make them rich.
“People are looking for me everywhere,” said Rabiu Biyora, the undisputed king of tapping in Kano, as he opened one of his five flip phones to add to the 2.7 billion taps on the TapSwap app. “Not to attack me, but to charge me something.”
Biyora, a laid-back, professional 39-year-old followed everywhere by tech-savvy young acolytes, would only say he made “over $10,000” from the previous tapping craze.
He benefits from everyone else’s taps, so he encourages them in social media posts and giving free internet to anyone willing to sit outside his house. Nigerians don’t need much encouragement: Despite the risks and volatility, Nigeria has the second-highest cryptocurrency adoption rate in the world.
So every night, young people in trouble gather at Mr. Biyora’s house and tap.
Pleas for help
In much of Nigeria, it is normal to share with neighbors and give alms to the poor.
Every day, people arrive at the door of Kano’s Freedom Radio station to leave sheets of paper containing sincere requests for help paying medical bills or school fees, or recovering from disaster.
A radio host chooses three to read aloud daily, and often a sympathetic listener calls to pay the supplicant’s bill.
But lately the appeals have multiplied and the offers of help have dried up.
Good Samaritans used to come to the emergency room and pay bills for strangers, Garba said. That rarely happens now either.
Still, Garba said, the number of patients arriving at his hospital has dropped by almost half in recent months.
Many of the sick do not even survive. They can’t afford to ride the bus for 20 cents.
Pius Adeleye contributed to this report from Ibadan, Nigeria.