Delta State Government has said that Nigerians will continue to wallow in pain owing to the current economic hardship in the country. The state’s Commissioner for Economic Planning, Sonny Ekedayen, who stated this during the opening ceremony of the stakeholders’ forum in Asaba on the N936 billion envelope budget for 2025, said that the last 12 months had been tough for the economy and no soothsayer could predict when the country would find its level.
   
He said: “As a country, we are going through one of the most difficult phases. The last time we had this kind of experience was during the former Military President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida’s (IBB) Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). I think that was when we had this kind of chaos, and I don’t think it was up to this scale.”
   
He added that the country was further thrown into a dip valley by President Bola Tinubu’s two unfriendly policies: exchange rate and subsidy removal, as only one is enough to disconnect the country.
 
 “We were not earning much and our debt profile depleted from 97 per cent to 67 per cent. Even the 67 per cent is still high. You imagine someone earning N100,000 a month out of which N67,000 is used to service debt. We are in tough times, and as such, we must begin to adjust,” he further said.The commissioner said that the balance of the envelop budget of N936 billion was an increase of about 30 per cent against last year’s N725 billion.