Udo Eteem🐐

A minimum wage of ₦500,000 is not too much for Nigerian workers. Police officers, soldiers, teachers, doctors, nurses, and other public servants deserve a living wage and those in critical sectors must earn additional allowances for the risks, sacrifices, and essential services they provide.

WE COULD HAVE BEEN SENEGAL TOO Shall I Begin? The night before the dawn of 2022, Nigeria had already written her own obituary - the budget told the ugly truth our rulers were too shy to admit. Nigeria initially budgeted for N443 Billion for fuel subsidy payment. Before the year shut its eyes, the government returned seeking an additional N4.39 Trillion Naira. Ten billion dollars. For appropriate context: The entire national budget for year 2022 under review was N17.3 Trillion. A staggering N4.39 Trillion of that was budgeted just for an unproductive, wasteful and retrogressive subsidy regime. Approximately 20% of our national budget squandered just to sustain an expensive lie of a cheap fuel to earn the applause of a largely ignorant population. For a more effective context and this is where it gets interesting or should I say annoying: The budgetary allocation for: Health - N711B Education - N1.3T Infrastructure (Transport, Works, Power, etc) - 1.45T Housing - N500B COMBINED - N3.97T But Fuel Subsidy alone was N4.39 Trillion - Far higher than the 4 most critical sectors of the economy combined. The rot was more expensive than the remedy. The poison was better funded than the cure. Generation after generation, we fed the trap and called it governance. By 2023, the calculations had grown obscene. N18.4 Billion per day. Not for teachers. Not for surgeons. Not for asphalt or electricity or the crying farmer under a failed irrigation system. Just - fuel subsidy. Every single day. Madness. No wonder our Universities were poorly funded and went on strike for a cumulative 59 Months between 1999 - 2023. No wonder our infrastructure decayed without renovations and reinvestment and no federal road was motorable. No wonder our hospitals became glorified mortuaries due to poor funding and inadequate investment. No wonder km long fuel queues consistently plagued us. No wonder State governors became professional beggars going bowls in hand to the Villa for bail outs just to meet salary obligations. No wonder that even at the height of our oil prosperity, we still couldn't record formidable achievements. Until a true leader emerged and did what cowards catalogue as impossible. He took the bull by the horns - bare-handed, in broad daylight, before a nation that had mistaken poison for provision. He damned the consequences. Risked the applause. Staked his re-election on an altar and courageously pulled the trigger. He removed the subsidy. And with that singular, seismic, long-overdue act - he did not just balance a budget. He lanced a boil that had been festering for four decades. He healed the nation of its fastest-spreading cancer, even as the patient screamed that the surgery was the disease. Without that decision, Nigeria today would not merely be struggling. Nigeria would be a cautionary tale that other cautionary tales whisper about - worse than Senegal. And yet - it was Senegal who got the young president. The photogenic revolutionary. The crowd's favourite. The one Twitter fell in love with. Good Evening Severally...

Let me tell you how it happened. Nigeria’s ginger export hit zero from N26 billion within 3 years. The official story blames fungal blight. But here is what actually happened. When Nigerian farmers lost their indigenous seed supply, grant-aided interventions arrived with replacement seeds. An associate professor at Lagos Business School flagged publicly that some of those interventions involved GMO organisms that weakened indigenous crops and compromised soil health. That is not a conspiracy theory because it is a documented academic concern. Now that Nigeria spoke got destroyed by the GMO seedlings….what is not the result? Nigeria was forced to import ginger from China to fill domestic demand. Chinese ginger has none of the pungency, oleoresin content, or quality that made Nigerian ginger a global premium product. And the ginger now sitting in Nigerian markets tastes like wood because it essentially is wood. The two indigenous varieties that built Nigeria’s global ginger reputation, the Tafin Giwa and Yatsun Biri, had decades of soil relationship and quality built into them. Once the soil was degraded and those seed varieties were displaced, the product that returned was a pale imitation. Nigeria did not just lose a market. It lost a seed. And without a National Ginger Seed Bank, which nobody has built, it may never fully get it back.

BREAKING: Nigeria’s 🇳🇬 Ginger export went from N26Billion to zero in the last 3 years Source: Businessday Nigeria