FIFA says it has invested more than $1 billion in African football since 2016. Fine. Now publish every contract, contractor, beneficiary and completed project country by country. Development money without public accountability can easily become political patronage.
Nigeria's foreign reserves have supposedly increased to a staggering $51 billion, marking the highest level the country has seen in 17 years.
Unfortunately, this heavily publicized macroeconomic achievement is not something that ordinary Nigerians should be celebrating or congratulating the government over.
This is because a massive, tragic number of local businesses, and independent factories were brutally sacrificed on the altar of the Tinubu Administration's economic policies to make this statistical illusion a physical possibility.
The hard truth is that even though Nigeria's foreign reserves have technically increased from $35 billion in 2022 (under Muhammadu Buhari's administration) up to $51 billion in 2026 (under Tinubu's administration), almost all of this newly added cash came directly from foreign speculators.
To clearly understand this financial scam, you have to remember that when Tinubu first came to power, the base interest rate (the annual profit you expect to make when you buy Treasury Bills or government bonds from the Central Bank) was sitting at roughly 11%. But the very second Tinubu captured power, he aggressively hiked this interest rate to an unprecedented, jaw-dropping 27%.
For relative context, the standard interest rate in the United States is hovering at only about 4 percent. So, obviously, this astronomical increase was strictly done to entice, lure, and practically beg wealthy European bondholders, Wall Street hedge funds, offshore currency speculators, and international capital flight managers to come dump their volatile dollars into Nigeria. While this influx of dollar speculative investment temporarily inflated the Central Bank's reserves, this is nothing but dangerous and highly unstable "hot money."
In 1-3 years, these short-term bonds will inevitably mature, and these offshore investors will aggressively demand their principal and their massive 27 percent interest back, which will rapidly deplete and empty the national reserves even further.
But this is not the only devastating problem. This desperate policy has also violently forced commercial banks to aggressively increase their own lending rates even higher, with many banks now charging local businesses a crippling 35 percent to 40 percent interest on basic business loans. This predatory banking environment has effectively forced countless local businesses, agricultural enterprises, and manufacturing firms to completely collapse. Since many of these struggling businesses depend heavily on short-term bank loans to pay salaries, purchase raw materials, fund daily operations, and maintain their supply chains, there is mathematically no way they can afford to pay these extortionate interest rates to the banks while still maintaining basic operational profitability.
This ridiculously high interest rate, when aggressively added to the painful, continuous removal of petrol and electricity subsidies, has indeed succeeded in artificially inflating Nigeria's foreign reserves to impress Western creditors. But in the exact same breath, it has violently pushed tens of millions of ordinary Nigerians into extreme, multidimensional poverty, skyrocketed the cost of basic food, completely crumbled local industries, and transformed the entire country into an economic wasteland just to make the Central Bank's balance sheet look pretty to the IMF.
But if you import stolen minerals from the third world to make advanced chips and stealth fighter jets, you get to become a superpower right?
So the people of the third world are like whores to you who are good enough to be f*ucked but not good enough to be brought home as wives, right?
Everyone is forced to be in Lagos. And I mean “deliberately” forced to be in Lagos to serve capitalism.
You probably don’t know this because you don’t understand how the capitalist economy of Nigeria is set up to work.
When you extract the value of the whole country and concentrate it in one location, it serves the capitalists, as people will be forced by lack of activities to leave their original location (where they live rent free and grow their own food) to Lagos where they will have no choice than slave for capitalism just to afford to pay for the same rent and food they had for free. Capitalism needs people who are desperate to eat and pay rent to survive.
It was not by accident that every headquarters and every key infrastructure and public service was concentrated in Lagos. It was deliberate. It’s also not by accident that insecurity is trafficked everywhere else before it get to Lagos. It is deliberate.
It’s very important you educate yourself on how systems work, to avoid embarrassing yourself by asking people if they are forced to be in Lagos. Of course, they are forced to be in Lagos.
This shit ain't enhancing no cooperation between shit. It serves as no major facility to boost the relationship between Nigeria and the USA. It's a luxurious slaughterhouse for Nigerian resources, men and women, sociocultural potentials, and human talents.
People will only believe it's a positive achievement and helpful infrastructure because these words are said by a local. The local in question is either a naive commentator on the issue, or a volunteer to serve the predator system at the expense of the collective good of Nigerians.
While we are all angry at the IMF and World Bank for being the Primary drivers of the Current Cost of living Crisis in Nigeria.
Do well to remember that the IMF and World Bank are American Institutions and all American Institutions exist to make your Life miserable
Just in case people are not aware, the removal of electricity subsidies in Nigeria, which has caused the astronomical rise in electricity prices, was directly dictated by the World Bank's to both the previous and the present Nigerian government.
Whether you think electricity should even be subsidised or not (I personally think it should be, because there is literally no serious country in the world where it isn't), what should worry you more than the removal alone is the fact that a small group of unelected, anonymous white men in Washington DC acting on behalf of a foreign state interest (the US govt is the World Bank's biggest shareholder) have the power to determine how much you should pay for your electricity in Nigeria.
The electricity is generated in Nigeria, using Nigerian energy sources and Nigerian labour, and is distributed and transmitted using Nigerian infrastructure, but one group of oyibos you have never heard of who are sitting on another continent somehow have the power to instruct your government to raise your energy bills and complicate your life.
They even offer your government loans that it doesn't need and isn't qualified for, then they make disbursement conditional on increasing your electricity bill by removing the same electricity subsidy that they have in their own country, because Africa's largest population and industrial cluster must not be allowed to have sustained and reliable access to cheap power. If it gets that, the only possible result is industrialisation - which means no more free natural resources and cheap labour to support the existing unipolar economic order.
This is why geopolitics concerns you in Agege. It literally determines the price of your Ikeja Electric units.