Olu Ekundayo: At the University of Ibadan then, the Gowon regime had a policy that you will not have to spend more than one naira for food every day. We paid 20 kob for breakfast, 30 Kobo for lunch and 30 kobo for supper then. That was when the oil money was kicking in. The failures began with Shagari. Problems related to that failure actually began to take hold under Babangida. I remember the Naira went from 1 naira to $1.6 to about 6 naira:$1 and Buhari was trying to roll it back. I also remember buying my first car for about 3,500 Naira, brand new sand colored beetle from the assembly plant (1979-1980). I then earned 1,500 naira a month as a house officer at Ijebu Ode General Hospital. By 1985-86 it had jumped to $1:30 naira and climbing, after accepting the imf loan that even market women were against. Then the beetle went up to 30,000 naira, used. Now I dont know if you can get any new car for 1 million naira. I remember clearly after Babangida got into power and accepted the imf loan, I had a 10 hectare farmland at Sawonjo, near Igbogila in Egbado area that I had been allocated by the government in 1984 at 150 naira per annum. I had started cultivating 1 hectare at 500 naira for corn then. After babangida got that loan, the cost jumped overnight to 5,000 Naira per hectare. That put an end to that farm enterprise. I think if the real stories of that those days were told by the ordinary people and you plotted a graph to illustrate it, one would only see a downward trend, descending steeply into hopelessness for the vast majority of Nigerians. That slide started with Shagari and the steep decline actually began with babangida. I remember then my professors at Ibadan started moving to Saudi Arabia to practice and teach medicine.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 12:44:51 +0000
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