Beneath the Surface By Dakuku Peterside
Beneath the Surface Dakuku Peterside
There are economic signals that look modest on a government spreadsheet but should sound like alarm bells in the corridors of power. Uber’s departure from Nigeria after 12 years is one of them. It is tempting to file the event under corporate strategy, intense competition, or the natural churn of the technology industry. Uber itself said the decision followed a review of its business, without offering a detailed public explanation. Yet companies do not leave economies in the abstract. They leave behind interrupted incomes, diminished choices, and questions that official statistics cannot easily answer.
For most Nigerians, the economy is not a quarterly growth rate, a reserve figure, or a line on an inflation chart. It is the price of petrol before dawn, the cost of getting to work, the condition of the road and what remains of a salary after the daily commute. It is the civil servant who drives at night to supplement wages, the graduate using a borrowed car to build a livelihood, and the parent relying on a tracked journey for a child’s school run. The distance between economic performance on paper and economic life on the street is where Uber’s exit acquires its real meaning.
