One does not need a crystal ball to predict that should the ongoing unbridled looting of public and private warehouses continue, we shall witness a bleak Christmas and new year festivities. And there could also be a rise in criminal acts because the Nigeria Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) was attacked with its warehouse where it stored seized hard drugs as Indian hemp, etc., looted. Several police stations were razed down, their armoury looted; many correctional centres invaded and hundreds of inmates, among them hardened criminals, set free.
Furthermore, easy access to looted cannabis made them lose their sense, emboldening them the more to commit other atrocities as desecrating the palaces of the Oba of Lagos and Soun of Ogbomosho, among others. It left their subjects, the citizens speechless.
It will take millions of naira to rebuild palaces of first-class and second-class traditional rulers destroyed in the south-west. Another million of naira to revamp and equip police stations vandalised nationwide. Yet, another million of naira would be set aside to compensate security personnel that were killed or injured in the line of duty. What about hospital charges? No amount of money can of course compensate for a lost life. It is irreplaceable. Every single life, whether that of a civilian or security personnel, is important.
Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila has asked the executive to make provisions for compensation for police brutality in budget 2021, otherwise it would not be approved by the House, he said.
The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) in the nation’s commercial nerve centre, said that over N700 billion was lost in the first 12 days of the #EndSARS protests. Part of this money would have gone to the federal treasury as value-added tax (the bulk of VAT comes from Lagos state) to be shared by the three tiers of government LCCI’s figure was before the wanton destruction of public and private properties on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.
A Lagos State government assessment of its damages put the amount of properties lost at one trillion naira. Even now it continues to lose money as some revenue-generating organisations are not fully functional yet. Overall, some billions of naira extra would be spent on recurrent expenditure by the federal and state government, money not originally budgeted for, at a time when federal government revenue is dwindling.
Private firms and organisations that were attacked are now forced to shut down and retrench workers. That means hundreds of people are now thrown into the labour market.
What about the multiplier effects, those who service these firms/businesses in one way or the other, upstream and downstream? The end result is decreased in the money in circulation, a cash crunch of sorts. There is also the fact that farm products from the north, the nation’s food basket could not be transported to the south while the protests lasted, coupled with the fact that there are now night curfews in many southern states. As a result, an average-sized onion now sells for about N100 in the south.
The ugly side of the #EndSARS protests can be classed into three phases. First, there was the clash between them and opposing groups resulting to loss of lives and injuries, which cost cannot be quantified in naira and kobo. Then came the uncontrolled destruction of properties by hoodlums that hijacked the protests, which cost is estimated at trillions of naira nationwide; and thirdly, now, looting of warehouses. The cost of this looting of warehouses is yet to be estimated. Nonetheless, it is huge with concomitant ancillary effects.
Victoria Ngozi Ikean, Lafia. ([email protected])
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