(By Ogaga Ifowodo) - An Apple A Day Keeps Our Dollars Away
Can’t recall now when the Apple became the official fruit of Nigeria, announcing its newly begotten status along every main road and at every street corner, stacked one on top of the other in green or red pyramids in trays or on the importation cartons, taking the pride of place in the produce section of every supermarket. The Apple has also staked its claim to our appetite in the more traditional open markets, as I learnt the other day driving past and seeing an apple stand somewhere, it seemed, between the meat and fish stalls at Utako Market in Abuja! A reminder, I suppose, to shoppers not to forget to get their natural vitamins and anti-oxidants which, presumably, only the Apple can supply, along with their proteins.
When the apple, a temperate region fruit, began to rule our tropical palates? My guess is the late eighties. Shortly after the Gospel of No-Alternative-to-SAP according to military dictator General Ibrahim Babangida and his finance minister, Olu Falae, had led to capitulation to the IMF/World Bank. The result was that trade liberalisation and the removal of tariffs, not to mention devaluation of the naira (we are still talking about that today) and cessation of social or human capital spending—in other words, all commonsense measures to protect the domestic economy and the people—came to govern, like an implacable god, every national economic policy. The goal was clear enough to the imperialist designers of those “conditionalities” and to anyone not willfully blinded to the truth: to make dependent economies, the postcolonial ones especially, facing acute shortage of foreign exchange to service their debts, become even more dependent by being forced to import just about everything when their national currencies become so weakened they render local industries comatose and unable to compete with the manufacturing giants of Europe, North America and Asia.
