“Poverty will clearly deepen nationwide and severe level of unemployment will persist with serious social consequences, if the preferred strategy for rescuing our economy implies further Naira devaluation and outright deregulation of fuel price, as recommended by the IMF and other likeminded experts. (see “Devalue Naira, Remove Subsidy and Kill Nigerians” Rational perspectives: 02/11/2015 www.lesleba.com).

AFTER one year of silence, Vice President Atiku Abubakar seized the opportunity of a book launch in Abuja last week to break his silence. He reviewed the state of the nation under President Muhammadu Buhari, which is what pretty much everyone else has done in the past one week.

Truth be told, President Muhammadu Buhari does not have the easiest job in the world. But then again, no one who runs for the president of Nigeria ever imagines it to be easy. Even on its best days, Nigeria is a very complex and volatile mix ethnic and religious differences compounded by a heritage of political ideas and leadership that has more generally emphasized and intensified these differences rather than create a harmonious idea of shared nationhood. As I have always insisted, a nation like Nigeria, with its many “ancient kingdoms” and “caliphates” contending with the idea of a single organic nation, is a candidate for profound ruptures.

Last week the campaign for Britain to stay or leave the European Union hot up as the leaders of the groups took time off to participate in a live televised Sky TV debate. Although it was not a face to face debate, it was very engaging and also offered the two camps opportunities to reach out to their audiences and also win the undecided voters.

The fall in oil prices alone is enough for the blind to see that Nigeria is financially down. President Buhari must therefore tighten government’s belt and block all leakages. In so doing, he has to have in his sub-consciousness that the Nigeria ghost is special. Thus, the term “ghosts” as used in this article is more than a non-existent entity that functions as though it is alive when in reality it is not. The Nigerian ghost is in various forms and shapes just as it presents itself in several dimensions. Its history easily reveals a rather large figure that is disturbingly high enough to make anyone wonder if there are not more ghosts than the ordinary workers in our public sector. As far back as April 2001, the then Accountant General of the Federation Chief Joseph Naiyeju revealed that there were 40,000 ‘ghost workers’ in the Nigerian government service. Two years later, 24,000 ghosts were identified in the pension’s unit of the Ministry of Defence alone. The Information Ministry allegedly had 40% under-qualified staff and 20 percent ghost workers. The Federal Civil Service Commission authenticated the revelation with a report that over 30 percent of the workers on its payroll were phantom staff.