The Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Economic Affairs, Tope Fasua has insisted that phone snatching is no longer a significant problem in Nigeria, comparing the country favourably to the United Kingdom and Cameroon.

The claim was made by Fasua at a members-only Coffee Hangout organised by Kay Hikers Club in Abuja, and drew immediate mockery online after a video of the exchange was posted on Instagram on Thursday.

In the video, a woman had confronted Fasua over unaffordable ride-hailing services and rampant phone robberies, telling him that basic necessities had become unaffordable.

She asked further on the safety situation facing ordinary Nigerians.

She asked, “Are you aware of the current situation concerning the safety and the pricing errors in that system? Are you aware that even as a person, you are not safe boarding these cars?”

She also drew a direct link between economic hardship and street crime.

She said, “The gatesmen of your estates, your security guards, they are underpaid. Therefore this is equal to you being robbed or raped as a woman or as a human being. You can no longer walk on these streets without being robbed because they want your phone so they can sell it. Because the common man is coming from a place of survival.”

She urged Fasua to relay the gravity of conditions to Tinubu, and questioned how a technocrat could grasp ground realities.

She stated, “With economists and statistics people, you have to be number conscious. Nigerians are no numbers. We are real people going through real hell. So how is the government planning to mitigate the issues with the grassroots? We are suffering. We are suffering.”

Fasua, responding to the phone-snatching concerns, sought to downplay them by pointing to similar incidents abroad.

“In the streets of London, go to UK, you see phone snatching. One woman was here from Cameroon. Her name is Victorine. She’s a vlogger. She was here in Nigeria. And she tells you that in Cameroon you can’t hold your phone like this,” he said.

He insisted the situation in Nigeria has improved.

“Nigerians have moved ahead from all these phone snatching. It is not a major crisis in Nigeria. I do my walks in the morning. I work everywhere. It’s not an issue. Let’s not look for every excuse to put the country down. It is not every security issue we have.”

A male attendee also challenged Fasua’s framing, accusing him of spiritualising structural problems by invoking “mindset” as a solution.

“I feel like you are now beginning to spiritualise the issues in Nigeria when you say mindset, because it’s not actually supposed to be a mindset, it’s a reality,” the man said.

Fasua maintained that Nigerians could still improve their individual circumstances regardless of government performance.

He said, “There are things that each and every one of us can still work on to be able to survive better than we were surviving. There’s no amount of money that we have that we cannot give a little out of.”

(The PUNCH)

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