Olatunji Ololade
Politicians boast of turning scorched earth to gold but all they do is dull precious metal to dross. They promise to turn the underdog to overlord, but all they do is make street-sweepers of the strapping and sewage cleaners of the literate.
More impatient youth get by in the shadowy political economy as goons, assassins, career protesters, and internet hooligans. Those who fall outside the bracket of patronage end up as armed robbers, kidnappers, drug mules, and human traffickers.
Thus is the fate of the jobless, the burly segment comprising Nigeria’s 23.1 per cent unemployed and 16.6 per cent underemployed youth, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. With over 20 million jobless youths, the catacombs of Nigeria’s unemployment maze are infinitely dilated for the incumbent administration’s gothic drama.
On President Muhammadu Buhari’s watch, you win some, you lose more. But while his lackeys preach sacrifice as a necessary ritual of riddance of the afflictions wrought by previous administrations’ corrupt leadership, let them desist from making his government food for worms – that we might know if Buhari is truly in charge and he means well.
Presidency groupies, waving a flag of integrity, highlight “change” and the “order of sacrifice” as infinitely matchless and preferable to the previous administration’s “transformation agenda.” But how do they define sacrifice?
Does their definition address the legislative, executive, and judicial officers receiving outrageous salaries and illicit benefits even as the nation cowers in depression? Does it ignore and downplay troublesome political and ethical ambiguities of Buhari’s leadership?
Is their demand for maximal sacrifice from the country’s working class, the unemployed and underprivileged divides matched with commensurate sacrifice by the nation’s ruling class?
On Buhari’s watch, governance dissolves into a Darwinian spectacle, a cycle of turbulent energies: giving, denying, hindering, cherry-picking, name-calling, scaremongering, cajoling, looting, devouring.
Yet public officers, party chieftains, and career rodents of the corridors of power cheekily request “sacrifice” in a tenor that would resonate, weary generations later as deceptive, sycophantic, and naive.
How much was anticipated from the current leadership? How much has it delivered? Consider, for instance, President Buhari’s recent approval of the temporary employment of 774, 000 unemployed youths to sweep the streets and markets, and clear sewers for three months.
The initiative, labelled the Special Public Works Programme (SPW) in the Rural Areas, will be funded from the N60 billion COVID-19 Intervention Fund and will last from October to December 2020, according to the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed.
No skills or formal education are required for the SPW programme. The target areas are rural communities, and beneficiaries would earn N20, 000 monthly.
Enthusing about its benefits, the Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo (SAN), said the scheme targeted 1,000 youths each from the 774 local governments across the country, calling it one of the biggest social intervention schemes to be carried out within a short period of time by any government in the history of Nigeria.
In a nutshell, the government has legitimised “innovative corruption,” as most of the beneficiaries would be ghost workers created by shady elements within its ranks and file. The scheme is yet another crafty means to swindle Nigeria of funding meant to tackle the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The initiative is condemnable; going by Mr. Truth’s simple arithmetic: 774 local governments multiplied by 1, 000 youths multiplied by N20, 000 = N15,480,000,000 billion monthly, from borrowed money, “to clean gutters in a country without road and gutters but political gutters.”
By Mr. Truth’s narrative, if the government spends N15,480,000,000 billion on healthcare every month, foreigners will troop to the country on health tourism and bring us revenue. If the government spends N15,480,000,000 billion on agriculture, monthly, for two years, Nigeria will undoubtedly emerge as the food basket of Africa and the nation’s jobless youth will be gainfully employed.
The borrowed money that is about to be squandered by the Buhari administration could be put to better use developing essential infrastructure and the nation’s agriculture economy. Such money could be used to eliminate structural impediments of unreliable power supply, non-existent and dilapidated irrigation systems, overcrowded ports, and bad roads. For example, it takes an average of six to eight days to move a truckload of tomatoes from Jibiya in the far north to Lagos in the southwest. Unless the cargo is refrigerated—and invariably it is not—it will perish before reaching Lagos port.
At the moment, poverty has risen in Nigeria with almost 82.9 million people living on less than one United States dollar per day, according to a National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) May 2020 report.
According to the report, 52.10 per cent of rural dwellers are living in poverty; little wonder many youths are deserting farming to seek menial work in the cities. Many become commercial motorcyclists and several others simply take to crime.
They know that as farmers, they would not have access to a market for their goods due to underdeveloped value chains. The absence of adequate storage facilities means many farmers must sell immediately after harvest when prices are at their lowest or allow their produce to rot.
For instance, Nigeria’s estimated demand for tomatoes is 2.2 million tons per year, notes the CSIS/APP, while annual production is 1.5 million tons; almost half—that is 0.7 million tons—is lost post-harvest, due to poor storage.
The head of a U.S. social enterprise working to boost agriculture in Nigeria notes Richard Downie, rightly observed that “when it comes to food, Nigeria doesn’t have a production problem, it has a processing problem.”
Rather than make jobless youth sweep the streets and clean sewers during off-farming seasons, the government could engage them productively in processing, marketing, and construction along the value chain of the agricultural economy.
To make agriculture very attractive to the youth, the government should go beyond increasing farmer access to credit via initiatives like the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP) and address high levels of post-harvest loss via an electronic warehouse receipt scheme and strengthening of the warehousing system, in part by leasing and rehabilitating government grain storage facilities.
For a small fee, farmers can deposit their produce at these facilities, confident that it will be safely and securely preserved. In return, they receive a receipt grading the value of their produce that can be used as collateral. So doing, participating farmers can hold back their produce and sell when the price is right, rather than immediately after harvest.
The ABP and capitalization of Nigeria’s Bank of Agriculture were some of the visionary steps taken by the Buhari administration to stimulate and increase the flow of credit to farmers, but there is still much to be done, and the government’s initiation of the SPW smacks of an insidious lack of integrity, personal and institutional ethics.
Buhari’s SPW resonates a terrible contradiction: he purportedly wishes to free governance from corruption but SPW will shackle him to the corrupt, and pronounce his government’s domination by chthonian nature. At every turn away from the infernal, he runs right back into its dark embrace.
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