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Sani Garba, a Nigerian artisan, has not had an order to build a metal gate or door, the mainstay of his one-man business, for six months.
He still turns up at his small, tin-roofed workshop each morning, hoping for the best. But with Nigeria in the grip of its worst economic crisis in decades, he understands the reality of the market.
“No one is building anything these days,” he says, sitting waiting for business with friends outside his shop in the northern town of Daura, birthplace of Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s president.
His bleak comments are backed up at a steel rolling mill in the nearby city of Katsina, which is operating at about a quarter of its capacity because of low demand, says a manager who did not want to be named. “The government has not released funds from the budget and no one is spending money,” he says.
As oil-dependent Nigeria slides towards recession for the first time in more than two decades, the effects of the downturn are being felt across the country — in local markets, factories, government offices and among informal traders.
The International Monetary Fund last month sharply slashed its growth forecast for Africa’s largest economy, saying it would contract by 1.8 per cent this year, down from its estimate in April of 2.3 per cent growth for the year.
The slowdown was triggered by tumbling crude prices and is heaping pressure on the government of Mr Buhari, who took office 15 months ago amid huge expectations following the first democratic transition of power to an opposition candidate in Nigeria’s history.
Finance officials told his cabinet late last month that revenue for the first half of the year in Africa’s top oil producer had come in at about half the government’s projection. The shortfall suggests the government’s plan to boost the economy through increased spending on infrastructure will struggle to take off this year.
Kemi Adeosun, Nigeria’s finance minister, said that infrastructure projects would go ahead in the fourth quarter of 2016, once the country secured funding from abroad to plug the $11bn budget deficit.
The west African nation, which had been one of the continent’s star performers during the oil boom, depends on petrodollars for about 70 per cent of revenue and 90 per cent of export earnings.
“We need to put more money in the system and it needs to flow round to the critical sectors in order for things to start stabilising,” said one minister.
But he added that recent policy changes — including easing the naira’s peg to the dollar — would not yield results for at least six months.
