Thread by @sbmintelligence

Plateau’s bloody week holds important long-term consequences for the rest of the country, as does our global poverty profile, the President taking a swipe at restructuring advocates, and the finance ministry’s chest thumping while not saying much.

The #Plateau incident underscores the simmering nature of multiple low and medium intensity conflicts occurring across #Nigeria, a historically certain prelude to a total breakdown of law and order.

Inter-communal distrust has continued to escalate with cyclical patterns of strife in conflict areas.

The pervasive loss of confidence in @AsoRock as a neutral arbiter is a key factor in this escalation as it encourages communities to adopt vigilantism with catastrophic results

On its own part, federal security assets are overstretched, and rural #Nigeria continues to be under-served in the distribution of security resources leaving such places vulnerable to predatory actions by non-state actors.

In the short term, @AsoRock could deploy troops, but there is a real concern that given the multiplicity of conflicts in #Nigeria, there may be no troops left to deploy.

Without boosting the capacity of the internal security architecture especially the long-neglected @PoliceNG,

these conflicts will persist, their impact differentiated only by peaks and troughs in casualty numbers.

The approaching #elections2019 will lend an added volatility to areas such as the Jos Plateau and the Benue Valley where there is significant anti-Fulani resentment.

As we have seen in recent incidents, reprisals against Fulani and Muslim communities could also escalate in an area in which a strong populist tradition of challenging perceived Fulani Muslim domination exists.

The latest figures from @BrookingsInst provide evidence that @AsoRock is failing to lift Nigerians out of poverty, and has also failed to diversify its revenue sources.

The much-touted recovery was in fact driven by the rebound of global oil prices and growth has been sequestered in the oil and gas sector, thus making this growth a “jobless growth” with no increment in employment figures.

The recession was seen in some quarters (including SBM) as a crisis that could spur the diversification of government revenues away from oil and gas.

In hindsight, it is now clear that the administration’s main strategy was to wait for the rebound in oil prices.

@AsoRock has tried to position agriculture as the go-to sector in its efforts at economic diversification.

But #Nigeria's agricultural base remains too vastly subsistence-oriented and rain-fed and with a very low-value addition to drive a boost in employment or food security.

Given the growing impoverishment of Nigerians, there will be some concern as to how these numbers impact on security with rising rural and urban crime and conflict; a spike in the social consequences of poverty is certain to ensue.

The fundamentals of #Nigeria's economy remain unchanged in a world in which oil is of diminishing strategic value.

This means that Nigeria remains vulnerable to global price shocks.

Finally, it is important to keep an eye on population growth which is almost twice the rate of economic growth.

For poverty figures to trend downward, economic growth has to outpace population growth.

Failing to achieve that has important political and social implications.

@HMKemiAdeosun may make vaunted claims about money being released but Nigerians have done well to demand details from her, details which @FinMinNigeria or the accountant general’s office have been unable to provide so far.

In the past, Budget Performance Reports which contained such details were routinely available online.

However, under the current administration, not only are such reports not available, several FOI requests by multiple organisations have gone unanswered.

Until these details are made available to Nigerians, this bragging about figures without supporting context will remain just, chest thumping.

At the heart of the growing calls for restructuring is a reimagination of #Nigeria’s social compact.

Nigeria’s political system has since 1966, steadily concentrated power in @AsoRock while reducing the provincial constituents to recipients of resource disbursements

– a scenario that has guaranteed poor infrastructure growth, left whole portions of the country in economic decline, stunted overall national growth and presaged the rise of many of the country’s security challenges.

For a president saddled with revitalising the economy, wilfully ignoring these realities smacks of borderline delinquency.