“I assure you we are going to get out of our economic problems..we are going to make Nigeria great again…Our size, our resources will not be for nothing”. President Buhari, during campaign at Edo State on behalf of Obaseki, candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC.

A sudden earthquake is about to hit the whole of Nigeria this month; not the sort of physical tremor which devastates buildings, breaks up bridges and brings down power lines – while destroying lives. Ours will be a social upheaval never experienced in this country for as long as the oldest of us can remember.

Announcement on shop window at Odunlami Street, Lagos Island. Odunlami Street, for those not familiar with Lagos Island, is famous for the shops selling coffins and arranging funerals. The bread shop is stuck between two of those shops. So its announcement concerning the increase of bread price was made with all the finality of a death sentence pronounced by a hanging judge. Bread, as the saying goes, is the staff of life. No food is more universally consumed than bread; the second is rice.

The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, and the Lagos State government have different reasons for desperately averting possible Skye Bank distress. Even the hint of likely distress inhibiting deposits and inviting a run on the bank is not in their interests. For the CBN, the collapse of any bank, at this time, is likely to create collateral damage affecting other banks, governments, the organized private sector and the financial system. So their anxiety on this matter is understandable.

There must be occasions when the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Mr Godwin Emefiele, must feel like the late Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, 1883-1945, who declared that “Governing Italians is not impossible; it is merely useless”. Governing the Nigerian monetary policy sector and its financial systems, rationally, is also not impossible. It is increasingly clear that is might be the closest thing to exercise in futility.