The Buhari administration has floundered much of late. The suddenness of the onset and sheer scale of the disruptions wrought by the coronavirus pandemic would account for some of the slippage. Especially given the paucity of infrastructure ― healthcare and social security systems ― that would have helped better manage the crisis. But even before March last year, the administration’s crown jewels were beginning to lose their sparkle.
And examples abound. From the closure of the nation’s land borders, designed, we were told, to curb the parallel imports of goods that were hurting domestic productivity and capacity in agriculture and hence driving up prices, to the ban on the registration of new SIM packs by GSM operators, until existing subscribers had obtained a NIN and linked this with their current phone numbers, three phenomena were observable.