Yuletide: Nigerians groan as basic needs exceed real income

• We are dying of hunger, citizens cry out • Minimum wage earners to spend 90% of income on rice
• I pretend there’s no Christmas, says school teacher • Improve business environment to create jobs, FG urged
 
Many households are not finding it easy as the ability to purchase daily and basic needs is becoming a tall order for many amid rising inflation and falling incomes.

   
The households, mostly those in the low-income level, have lamented that nearly 100 per cent of their earnings are now spent on food, whose prices continue daily.
 
Recent data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed that Nigerians spent N61.08 trillion on food and other household items and services in the first six months of 2023.
  
According to the latest Nigeria Development Update (NDU) report, an estimated four million Nigerians were pushed into poverty between January 2023 and May 2023 on account of high inflation.
 
This is just as the soaring inflation continues to eat deep into the purchasing power of many Nigerians, taking staple foods from the table of millions and increasing the poverty level.
  
NBS said 89.8 million Nigerians fell below the poverty line at the start of 2023. With an additional four million the NDU claimed were thrown into the net in the five months of the year, the number of extremely poor numbers would have reached 93.8 million at the end of May. The figure is about 43 per cent of Nigeria’s 216 million population.
 
Food inflation is currently over 30 per cent, according to NBS. But beyond data, Nigerians feel the pang of rising prices across the board daily.  
When President Bola Tinubu came into office on May 29, Nigeria’s inflation rate was 22.41 per cent but it has risen to 27.3 per cent as of the last consumer price index (CPI) reading in October. The food price crisis is the worst for staple food baskets. For instance, the prices of rice have increased about 120 per cent since May 29 when Tinubu assumed leadership, with a 50kg bag rising from N27,000 to N60,000 on average.
 
As the yuletide season approaches, The Guardian market survey shows that general food prices have risen astronomically. A basket of fresh tomatoes, which was formerly sold for below N20,000, now costs as much as N100,000 while a 50kg bag of beans costs as much as N50,000. 
  
Plus the N35, 000 wage award, the earnings of an average civil servant can only pay for a fraction of what the N30,000 minimum wage could buy about five years ago. In December 2019, one bag of foreign parboiled rice was sold for about N22,000 while the local variant sold for about N18,000. This means a minimum wage earner would need to spend about 70 per cent of his take home to buy a bag of rice.
 
Today, the same minimum wage earner will need 90 per of his salary and wage award to have a bag of rice for his family.   With limited policy responses to check the spike in prices, many Nigerians may be sinking into misery as low and stagnate income do not cope with rising prices.
  
Wale Kayode, a level eight civil servant and father of four, who spoke with The Guardian lamented that his salary (N86,000) can no longer feed his family today.  

 Kayode used to give his wife a monthly upkeep allowance of N30,000 while the balance went into savings for rent, school fees and transportation. The house upkeep allowance barely pays food bills for a week, leaving a wide hole the family has been struggling to fill. 
 
The breadwinner said feeding his family, paying rent and school fees since the beginning of the year have been major challenges for him. He said the N35,000 wage award had only been paid once since the removal of the fuel subsidy and that the add-on is a drop in the ocean when compared with the changes seen in the prices of essentials.
 
Sharing his ordeal with The Guardian, Kayode said due to economic hardship, he had to make a tough decision to move his kids from a private to a public school as he can no longer keep up with the bills. He prayed the economy would bounce back to normal otherwise he would relocate his family to the village.
  
Tina Amos, a factory worker, in one of the manufacturing firms in Lagos who earns N28,000 monthly for a 12-hourly job, said she had to join her colleagues to trek home after work daily to be able to save something after feeding at work.
 
“When I just started work I took a tricycle to and from work, I saw that I had nothing left with me at the end of the month. Since then, I joined others to trek home and I feed on cassava flakes (garri) during lunchtime. We have sugar because we produce biscuits. If I should feed well, I will borrow to pay debts at the end of the day.
 
“Government should please come to our aid and make things easy for us. A lot of my colleagues are falling ill due to a lack of good food. I work to save while I await admission into a polytechnic. But I can’t even save anything as the cost of living has taken all my earnings,” she pleaded.
 
Amaka Okafor, a mother of three who sells shoes in Lagos, also lamented that business is not only slow but that it is also very difficult to break even due to the economic situation in the country. She said there are days she would commute from home to the market but would not mark a single sale for the day.

 
“Imagine paying almost N3,000 for daily transport without selling anything to cover the daily expenses. How can a mother of three children put food on the table and provide for the needs of her children in a situation where prices are making things unaffordable?” she asked.
 
She said even as Christmas is fast approaching, there are still no activities to commemorate the season due to the level of deprivation in the country.  
 “Today, many Nigerian families only pay attention to food even when many cannot provide good food for their families. The number of people begging in the streets of Lagos is increasing by the day due to the bad economic situation. I boarded a commercial bus yesterday only for a full-grown man to approach me to beg for food because according to him, he had not eaten for close to two days,” Okafor lamented.
 
A cleaner, Mercy Amos, in one of the private schools in Lagos, said her N20,000 monthly take-home could not afford her to provide her three children healthy meals due to the rise in the cost of food and transportation.
 
“My children attend public schools and it is anything I could lay my hands on that I bring to feed them, they are not eating healthy food. My salary is so meager that after I remove transportation and feeding, nothing is left to save. And my rent will be due soon; my landlord is already reminding me.
There is no wage award for us from the government or the schools where I work. Fuel subsidy removal is a disaster for us. When my kid reminded me of Christmas, I could not muster a word, because I knew my income level,” she lamented. 
 
For many households, experts said, rising inflation poses a significant challenge. Higher prices, they said, continue to erode the value of real wages and savings, leaving households poorer. 
  
While poorer households struggle to find a balance, wealthier households are hedging their savings by leveraging foreign currencies, a trend that has continued to put pressure on naira and complicate the inflation challenge.
 
They argued that the decline in the value of the naira, insecurity, loss of purchasing power, distorted forex market and fuel subsidy removal have caused untold hardship for many Nigerians. 
 
Director-General of the Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA), Adewale-Smatt Oyerinde, said if the government creates an enabling environment for businesses, there would be more jobs, which would eventually create wealth.
 
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Cowry Asset Management Limited, Johnson Chukwu, also hinted at strategies workers could use to navigate the difficult economic time.
 
According to him, Nigeria must improve food security through the improvement of agricultural productivity. He said there is a need for improved transport systems, energy supply communications and infrastructure. He called for access to quality healthcare, access to quality of education, clean water and sanitation.
  
The economist said there was a need for broad-based economic growth with job creation opportunities and targeted support to the most vulnerable in society, through subsidised houses, skills acquisition, free basic education and conditional cash transfer, among others.
  
Chukwu advised families to create multiple streams of income and there must also be secondary means of income. He also advised families to have an investment income that would grow with interest, dividends and capital gains.
 
An economic expert, at Pan-Atlantic University, Prof. Olalekan Aworinde, said Nigeria’s inflation was increasing at an aggressive rate, a reality which spelled tougher times for working-class Nigerians, many of whom lived on a fixed income.
 
He said Nigeria’s worsening inflation crisis would lead to a high cost of living, low standard of living, weakened production and more job losses. He said: “People are not able to meet up with the standard of living in the economy, which will leave them in abject poverty and that is what we are experiencing in Nigeria. You will discover that people are not able to meet up with the necessities of life.
  
“Those employing individuals will not be able to produce up to the maximum capacity and the implication is that they will sack some workers, which means there will be a loss of jobs.”
Many households are not finding it easy as the ability to purchase daily and basic needs is becoming a tall order for many amid rising inflation and falling incomes.
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