EVIDENTLY, President Muhammadu Buhari is torn between two worlds: if he gets too tough, people will easily conclude that he is back to his 1984 elements. But if he relapses into his “born again” stance of democracy, he will be seen as the Go-Slow President. The erroneous conclusion is already being drawn in some quarters that Buhari is fast walking himself into becoming Nigeria’s weakest President ever.

What all these discoveries point to is that Nigeria is in very deep trouble; how can an economy survive with this level of liquidity outside the banking system?

SURVIVING life in Nigeria is about gradual desensitisation to all things which ordinarily would make most people in any other country scream.

That the Nigerian economy has been in recession since last year is no longer news. In 2016, overall economic output regressed by a factor of -1.8 per cent, the worst since the height of our tragic civil war in 1968. External reserves dwindled to a dangerous $27 billion while exchange rate nosedived to N493 to the US dollar on the BDC market. Public debt has risen to an unprecedented high of 5 per cent of GDP even as inflation rose to a high of 18.9 per cent.

WHAT people call magic is in fact, an illusion. When a magician puts a woman in a box and saws the middle of the box; one expects her to be cut in two except that this does not happen. The magician shouts some incantation and behold the lady is standing untouched by the mechanical sawing blade. In many respects, the operation of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, NNPC, Petroleum Equalisation Fund, PEF, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, and its Forex policies, the Pension wahala are all magic – abracadabras, total illusions. What is not illusion is the heavy cost to the economy and the people.