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What This Recession Will Cause …

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Yes, Nigeria is recession, but who doesn’t know that?

The uncertainty and fear in which many wake and sleep daily have ensured that no one is insulated from the pervading gloom.

You can hardly move from A to B without one recession enthusiast springing out from the shadows to attribute the latest human fumbling to you know what. Even those who cannot spell the word carry on as though they invented it. 

From the amusing to the brazenly ridiculous.

‘So why did you come late to work today?

‘Madam, it’s this recession.’

‘And how is that?’

‘Oh, you know when I was coming to work I was so worried about the recession and was thinking about the steps I think President Buhari should take going forward that I didn’t realize the cab driver had left Abuja and was on his way to Kaduna.’

Never mind that he is a certified lifetime loafer.

Are you laughing? Please don’t. Nigerians are creative like that.

The Devil is finally getting that reprieve it had always asked of us; to leave him out of our epic failures and transgressions.

Recession has stepped into that role.

What about the experts? Suddenly this group has all the answers to our economic woes. Yes, they know why we’re all in this mess, how we got in and what the government should do to get us all out.

Each time members of this group sit to share the blame cake, usually flavoured with enough drops of grand hypocrisy, not even a crumb accidentally falls on their pristine plates. Why? Because apart from being so knowledgeable, they are also completely blameless. Everyone else gets a share of the blame except them.

None has ever bothered to ask how his actions, or otherwise, could have contributed to digging the dingy hole in which we are huddled like day-old chicks whose mother had been snatched by a hawk.

It doesn’t matter that some of these ‘experts’ won’t be caught dead with made-in-Nigeria products  no matter how good they are,  unless it’s tuwo, amala or banga soup.  These experts have children barely out of their diapers schooling in high dollar-paying international primary and secondary schools all over Europe.

Tell me, which other country deserves recession as much as Nigeria where we produce little to zilch and consume everything so long it comes with that little tag, ‘imported’?

And we claim we didn’t know where the rain began to beat us?

Fat lie! But that is story for another time.

I bet that when we finally exit this self-induced recession, we would be confronted with a different kind of epidemic.This time it would be our hospitals, including mental homes, filled with disillusioned emergency investors who had lost whatever they would have conserved for the rebuilding after.

It is unfortunate that a difficult period like this has once again thrown up the dregs in our cup of humanity; people bent on scamming even the helpless under the guise of financial freedom.

Tune in to any radio station and hear the voices of these messiahs who have come to deliver us from recession. They come with all sorts of investment options, promising eternal financial freedom within weeks.

Trust Nigerians and the allure of cheap wealth, they plunge in, blaming recession for their greed and stupidity. Or what else would make one invest in a business deal with no known products and services.  How then do you generate money when no value has been created?

Looking inwards has never been our forte. But that was exactly what many Americans did between 2008 and 2011. 

In his article, ‘5 Ways Americans Are Surviving the Great Recession, published in www.alternet.org, Joshua Holland talked about resort to ‘insourcing’.

Simply put, many of them learnt to do those things they once gladly paid others to do.

How did they know that? Holland wrote that, “Sales of starter sewing kits shot up by 30 percent at Wal-Mart as families forgo the tailor. Landscaping companies suffered a seven per cent drop in revenue over the past year. Procter & Gamble said that it had noticed more questions from customers about how to dye their hair at home to match saloon colouring.”

Many Americans began to grow their own food in order to avoid high food prices.

But my people would rather spend on phantom ‘high yielding investments’ than roll up their sleeves and see where they can create real value.

Yes, we are also smart like that.

However, for our clever ‘recessionpreneurs’ smiling to the bank today by collecting from the gullible, the return of the seeds of grand deceit you are bent on sowing today under the cover of recession will certainly not be too long in coming. Like those judges whisked away at night by the state security operatives recently, you won’t see it coming. It will be packaged like a doctor’s prescription; one in the morning, one in the afternoon and one at night, with multiple tablets.

It is called karma!

Written by The Interview Editors

The Interview is a niche publication, targeting leaders and aspiring leaders in business, politics, entertainment, sports, arts, the professions and others within society’s upper middle class and high-end segment in Nigeria.

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