Election Fever in an Affordability Crisis

with Chidi Amuta

Democracy and adversity are strange bedfellows. Hungry and deprived people either troop out to vote or look the other way at election time. Deprived people who observe the ritual of elections do so in the forlon hope that perhaps a new political cast could alleviate their condition. But more often than not, such hope is repeatedly dashed. Changing political seasons hardly bring about positive living conditions for the masses in these parts.  The pessimism that informs the apathy of voters and leads to low voter turnout is born out of a culture of treachery and habitual betrayal by our political elite. People look back at decades of voting rituals and expectations of sweeter times and can only see disappointment and shredded dreams. Yet our past is replete with seasons of these elections and their accompanying rituals of transitions that lead nowhere.

In this season, something novel has happened. Adversity now wears a new face. There is something called the Affordability Crisis. It is a social and economic malaise that is afflicting different countries. Rich and poor countries alike are faced with a viral inability of majority of citizens to afford the basic things of life: food, gasoline, transport fare, primary medical costs, house rents, access to employment etc.  The affordability crisis is a socio economic epidemic of global proportions. It is meeting nations where they are, whether rich or poor, developed or developing. It does not matter.

Donald Trump in his second term has unconsciously globalized  something now commonplace among nations of the world. Increasingly, more and more nations are  witnessing widespread hardship among the broad majority of their citizens. Living costs are escalating. Basic necessities of life are becoming hardly affordable. Basic indices of normal daily living such as rents, transportation , healthcare and food prices have dramatically shot up.

The specific degree and nature of these increases are of course localised. But in most places, the nature and enormity of the affordability crisis differs. It is mostly an urban problem. In the United States, Donald Trump’s second term has magnified America’s affordability crisis. It is a strange animal called “affordability”. It is no strange economic term. It is now an everyday and everyman terminology. Simply put, it just sums up how affordable basic things of life have become for the ordinary citizen. For a president who won an election on the basis of intending to make life more affordable for the ordinary American, the current affordability crisis in American has taken most people unawares and generated an atmosphere of social and economic disquiet that can no longer be ignore. Affordability has crept into America’s everyday political idiom. It can be heard at the gas station, in the grocery stores, at fast food joints and almost everywhere.

It was recently popularized by New York Major Mamdani as he campaigned for the office in New York. Mamdani campaigned on a message of intending to make basic things more affordable for the majority and he won overwhelmingly. His victory has driven President Trump more to the right, making him more billionaire friendly and distanced from the things that matter to most people. Only the forthcoming mid term elections will prove how far gone Mr. Trump has gone in his alienation from the masses who mostly voted him back into office.

Retaliatory tariff muddles have increased the prices of American basic consumer imports. This situation has been aggravated by Trump’s rudderless involvement in a series of wars, first in Venezuela and currently in Iran. The Iran war in particular has worsened America’s affordability crisis because of its effect on the global oil market and the domestic gasoline prices. The cosmetic gasoline prices have shot up from about $2.85 a gallon to the current average of about $4.65 a gallon nationwide. The ripple effect on the costs of other essential goods and services has eroded consumer confidence and comfort.  The corresponding ripple effect across international borders has spread to nations in the Middle East, Europe and parts of Asia. Suddenly, affordability has become a major political item in many countries. Even the recent electoral ousting of Trump’s friend, Viktor Organ, in Hungary by the leftist opposition has been cited as the tangential  result of increasing hardship and drying affordability in that country.

Nigeria has witnessed the onset of widespread affordability crisis since 2023. President  Bola Tinubu literally inaugurated the crisis at his inauguration. His instinctive removal of the long standing subsidy on gasoline and liberalization of the exchange rate of the Naira were all it took to send the entire Nigerian economy into a terminal tailspin. Gasoline pump prices escalated from less than N200 to over N1,000. The exchange rate of the Naira to the US dollar shot from less than N500 to the dollar to over N1,600. In tandem, tariffs on power, telecommunications and duties on every good including essential drugs have skyrocketed. Tragically, Mr. Tinubu has branded these hardship measures as reform policies. But every reform policy ought to be accompanied by projections as to where the reform will lead and what ‘good’ will accrue to the society after the deprivation. Tinubu and his crew have remained silent on all matters. Instead, they have glorified the imposition of hardship while tales of monumental corruption daily fill front page headlines.

Of course the key driver of affordability everywhere is inflation. Nigeria has had hyper inflation at well over 30% for most of the last three years. In addition to general inflation, food inflation has continued to climb, leading to widespread hunger and starvation in many parts of the country. There have been a few sporadic hunger riots and protests beaten back by police truncheons and tear gas. Governmental compassion has been demonstrated by sporadic distributions of bags of rice and packs of Indonesian noodles. People have either been injured or died in scrambles for these so-called palliatives. Those injured in hungr scrambles have been rushed to hospitals with no drugs to treat them. Soon after the distribution of these palliatives, hunger has returned and general hardship has increased. The death toll in places where some cash was being sprinkled by the rich have been worse. Those with money are holding back for fear of being responsible for unintended injury and avoidable deaths.

Nigeria’s affordability crisis is hydra headed. Our housing deficit is scandalous. Our population which is growing at an alarming rate has overwhelmed public and private capacity to house the multitude.  Nigeria’s housing shortage currently stands at between 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 units. Building material costs have similarly skyrocketed in response to the general upsurge of inflation, leading to a shortage in availability of affordable housing. Rents on available housing have gone up several percentages just as many urban artisans have been thrown out of work. In response to inflationary pressures, agency fees and professional real estate fees have skyrocketed.

It is true that every country’s affordability crisis is usually localised, most often in urban areas. But in Nigeria, both urban and rural areas are steeped in crises of affordability. While our urban areas are subject to inflation driven affordability crises, the northern agricultural rural areas especially are threatened by insecurity driven affordability issues. Bandits and kidnappers are ravaging farming communities. Farmers are being ambushed, abducted and levied by armed gangs. Both planting and harvesting have been made impossible in most northern farming areas by uncontrolled insecurity over large areas of agricultural production. Higher food prices in the urban areas are the logical outcome. Bandits attacking tomato farms in Zamfara have forced up fresh tomato prices at Mile 12 Market in Lagos!

At the moment, what makes Nigeria’s affordability problem more topical is that it is raging in the midst of preparations and rehearsals for the 2027 general elections. A ruling party that unleashed Nigeria’s worst affordability crisis is running for re-election. The great question is that of the electability of politicians and a party who plunged the nation into a historic economic meltdown.   Worse still, the majority of Nigerian voters happen to belong to the worst affected segments of those affected by our affordability crisis. The youth are mostly unemployed. Their parent can hardly pay rents and tariffs. The demographics is heavily weighted in favour of throwing out the incumbent party. In some sense, then, the affordability crisis can serve as a reliable forecast of the outcome of the 2027 contest. But some would say that political outcomes do not always obey socio economic logic.

Democracy thrives on popular participation. All democracies are festivals of life and sustenance. Faith in the continuation of the commonwealth and individual survival in it is what sustains every democracy from season to season. Freedom of political choice dies when people lose hope in their own survival or indeed a better life in the republic.

The critical burden which the 2027 election has posed for Nigerians is almost a religious question: Will there be life after this election? The question has been made more urgent and present by the desperation imposed on most Nigerians by the current crisis of affordability.  Politicians are bracing for a do or die contest irrespective of current living conditions. On their part, the people are prepping for a contest to either oust the current regime of affordability disaster or reaffirm it as a permanent condition by conceding defeat.

Nigeria- the equivalents of warfare. War not against Iran, Venezuela but against the very people who voted,

The things that matter to Nigerians- food

Medications, transportation, housing, school fees, air fares,

A desperate society, the loss of meaning for life, violence and frustration.