Nigeria braces itself for 2015

It was the season of gloom. In December 2014 - less than two months before elections - the Nigerian government forecast that growth in Africa's biggest economy was going to stall in 2015. At a market in Lagos, inflation is already driving up prices. Consumers like Joy Agbonifo are worried about how they are going to survive the next 12 months.

"Prices are going up every day, yet some government workers in some states haven't been paid for three months," she told DW.

Back in November the regional governments of all 36 Nigerian states asked the federal government for an additional $2 billion (1.7 billion euros), saying they were struggling to pay salaries and meet other commitments.

The regional governments were responding to the crunch in revenue which followed the fall in the price of crude oil. Oil sales account for 70 percent of Nigerian government revenues.

In December, the federal government slashed its 2015 growth forecast from 6.35 to 5.5 percent.

Impact of insurgency on election

These economic woes, which include depreciation in the value of the naira which in turn is making imports more expensive, are accompanied by further concerns for Nigerians. Boko Haram's armed fighters and suicide bombers continue to abduct, maim and kill. In spite of the outrage caused by the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok by the militant Islamist sect in April 2014, the Nigerian government appears no closer to securing their release.

Betty Abah, child rights' activist with the Center for Children's Health Education, Orientation and Protection, said the New Year had started on a wrong note simply because the girls hadn't returned.

"I was wondering the other day if they [the girls] knew it was Christmas," she told DW, explaining that 80 percent of the abducted girls were Christian.

Nigeria is divided into a mainly Christian south and Muslim north.

Abah said the girls' plight "said a lot about the state of security in Nigeria."

In six weeks Nigerians are set to vote in a general election. Sylvester Odion Akhaine from Lagos State University fears this could contain the seeds of yet more upheaval. The electoral process in Nigeria is characteristically violent and marred by malpractice, he said. Couple this with Boko Haram's bombings and armed assaults and "if the election is not seen to be free and fair for a country already ravaged by insurgency, it could engender another round of crisis and violence in the country that will disturb stability," Akhaine said.

The International Crisis Group said in a report in November that the political rhetoric from both government and opposition in Nigeria needed to be significantly lowered to reduce the prospect of unrest.