Author: Dare Olatunji

Just about the only thing that Nigerians agreed on in the run-up to the General Election was that it was going to be the “most consequential” in the nation’s history.”   Just how consequential it would be, they had not the slightest inkling.

Two weeks after the final results were announced, the consequences have merely begun to unfold.   Many a rampart fell, verities that had endured for ages collapsed, and the political map of Nigeria has taken on a new shape. For political gain, desperate actors invested religion and ethnicity with far greater salience than they had ever possessed, corroding both factors in the process and setting up the country for an implosion.

Never has the country been so divided, in the home and in the workplace.  Civility has become a stranger, and yesterday’s neighbour has become an object of suspicion, if not loathing.  A return to anything resembling amity is unlikely to occur anytime soon, I fear.

Resentments are hardening and deepening, and everyday language is coarsening in private and public intercourse.

It is a far cry from the carnival atmosphere that characterised election season, especially from the party conventions to the post-election jubilations of those who had cause to celebrate.  Call it the time of politics as carnival.

And what a jolly time it was, and how rich its sartorial heritage, not forgetting its symbols.

Even in the present distemper, I can still see much of it with my mind’s eye. I can still see the blizzard of brooms fashioned from palm fronds, held aloft by the APC party faithful, their ends dipping and cresting and swaying as their handlers desired -handlers who, at the end of another long, tumultuous rally, showed nary a sign of fatigue nor a loss of enthusiasm.

It was not inconceivable that an object designed to symbolise the party’s commitment to sweeping the dirt-strewn landscape clean could in a moment be turned into a weapon of brutal offence, given the intended or accidental provocations that can occur at such events.

But it never happened.   The crowds were too disciplined for that.

The greater surprise was that none of the other 17 registered parties said a kind word about the palm trees whose branches were hacked down for the brooms, nor about ecology, the sustenance and health of which the trees are a crucial factor.

None of them sought a court injunction restraining the APC from hacking down palm tree fronds to knit into brooms just to gratify the party’s iconolatry.    None among them invoked national or international environmental law to move the APC to cease and desist

An environmentalist with whom I raised the matter said it centred on a renewable resource; that its exploitation would do no lasting damage, and that criticism would have seemed out of place given more pressing issues, such as the crippling currency crisis.

But what about sustainability, given the furious pace of exploitation?  Where, at any rate, are the brooms today? 

Are they being warehoused in readiness for the inauguration of the President-elect and governors-elect on May 29, assuming the courts would not have voided the elections as some people are demanding?

It would be a pity indeed that they had to hack down hectares upon hectares of palm tree plantations across the country again just to make new brooms, unless they are for sweeping away the APC itself, according to the environmentalist aforementioned, a die-hard Obedient.

The contractors who supplied the brooms couldn’t care less about the environment   They were trooping merrily to the banks every day until the governor of the Central Bank, Godwin  “Mefi” Emefiele, crippled the nation’s financial institutions by way of retaliation for his own lack of courage to pursue his misbegotten presidential ambition,

Broom merchants and retailers of consumer goods found themselves grappling with an issue that could never have cropped up even in a hallucination:  How many brooms would retailers take for a tablet of toilet soap, a medium-sized packet of detergent, a pint of palm oil or beer, a bottle of aspirins, a can of baby formula, or a family-size piece of yam?

For that matter, how many truckloads of designer brooms would translate into a 50-kg sack of rice?

They would have had to employ the most abstruse algorithms to figure out the equivalencies. 

How the other parties must have envied the APC its good fortune, having no symbols that could be deployed to produce stunning visual effects at will, rally after rally!  Umbrellas cannot be massed to that effect even when it is raining; they may have the compactness of brooms, but they don’t come cheap.

The sartorial legacy of the period is just as memorable.

I am thinking of the distinctive uniforms in which the faithful were decked out at national, state, and local engagements; the fetching styling, the ornate embroidery, and the matching caps and headgear.  I am thinking of the hectares upon hectares of fabric from which they were made, the lucky merchant who supplied them, the tailors who fabricated them, the storekeepers who kept stock, and the contractors who handled distribution.

This was a massive logistic undertaking that the main political parties executed seamlessly, and a pointer to what Nigeria can achieve if mobilized for common purpose.

One image in particular clings in my memory:  the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, decked out as an Eyo masquerade without the mask, after his party had won resoundingly in Lagos, and was on the cusp of capturing Alausa outright.  It was truly captivating.

Some of the caps featured in the rallies told stories of flexibility and adaptability.  At the risk of getting lost in the crowd, Tinubu gave up his signature knitted cap with the mathematical symbol of infinity embossed at the rim for a modest version of the Zanna Bukar Dipcharima cap of the First Republic which lapsed when its depth came to symbolize the excess of the Shagari years. 

Just as startling was the sight of many APC governors in the North wearing Tinubu’s signature cap without any sign of unease.  Benue Governor Samuel “Ortomatic” Ortom’s rainbow cap added colour to the proceedings of the Group of Five, with the maestro himself, the combustible Nyesom Wike, at the helm.

Now that the festivals are over, what is to become of the party uniforms? 

It has been suggested, I gather, that they be preserved for future use.  But where can appropriate storage be found?  It has also been suggested that they be donated to the poor and needy.  They will in all likelihood find them unwieldy.  Even if they cut them up, would they have the resources to make them into less ostentatious clothing?

One proposal under active consideration, I have learned, is to store samples of the most striking outfits in a designated museum of political artefacts, for the benefit of historians, moviemakers, and the general public.  Not a bad idea, if the facility will not suffer the fate of such depositories across the national landscape.

What of the mountains of vile, incendiary and treasonous audio-visual material that poured ceaselessly into the mainstream from discredited politicos and their proxies, not forgetting the venomous outlet they call “social media,” though they are anything but social?

Some of it should be preserved, too, if only as examples of how not to build a nation.

The piece that follows was my column for December 4, 2018, under the “Matters Miscellaneous” rubric.

If there is anything one can predict unerringly in Nigeria, it is that yuletide will bring with it crippling fuel shortages and disruption in the movement of persons, goods and services, and in social intercourse on a scale that only a civil war or major natural disaster can fully explain or justify.

The signs that we are again headed that way are in the air.  In anticipation of their seasonal kill, oil suppliers are already whetting their voracious appetites. How they relish holding Nigeria over a barrel (pun intended)!

Last week, the Lagos State chapter of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN) threatened to cripple some 900 filling stations in Lagos and parts of Ogun from December 11, accusing the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) of undersupplying its members with petroleum products and frustrating them on an earlier agreement to supply to them at N133 per litre.

Only yesterday, MOWMAN, the umbrella organisation of importers and marketers of oil and petroleum products entered the fray, warning that it would paralyze supplies nationwide unless the Federal Government cleared an outstanding N800 billion debt within seven days.

No promissory notes, please; only cash, the type you can touch and count and put away in and retrieve on demand from one of the better banks, not those shady banks that cannot account for the humongous deposits in their vaults nor even make a pretence, however shambolic, of justifying them as proceeds of legitimate business.

It is that time of year again, when the only thing guaranteed is a gnarling of fuel supplies.

Contemplating this perennial dread, a concerned citizen has suggested in earnest that we suspend yuletide for a few years to begin with, and abolish it subsequently.  With yuletide out of the way, there would be no need for millions of Nigerians to embark on the obligatory migration to their hometowns only to rush back to base scarcely a week later, and no need for marketers to manipulate fuel supplies to create an artificial scarcity.

With yuletide out of the way, the fellow said, all those horrific road accidents that proliferate during the so-called ember months and reach their climax around yuletide, earning another discomfiting entry for Nigeria in the international misery index, would be distributed equally throughout the year.

The fellow was obviously not reckoning with the National Assembly.  What made him think that the members would for any reason in the world forgo yet another recess and the hefty grants and bonuses, statutory and contrived, that go with it?

That, at any rate, is the kind of desperate solution to which the perennial fuel crisis has driven even some usually serious people to embrace.  The redeeming grace is that it has also bred a great deal of creative entertainment.  I missed out on much of the fuel crisis art of the last yuletide, but among the few that came to my attention, there is one that is simply unforgettable.

A riff on the refrain of “The First Nӧel,” one of the best-known Christmas carols, goes thus:

No fuel, no fuel
No fuel, no fuel
There is no fuel, Buhari.

There you have it – a hilarious instance of the capacity of Nigerians to defy adversity, and of Nigeria’s fabled resilience.

In the more than 30 years that Nigerians have lived with crippling fuel shortages, the authorities have never been short on excuses.  At first, it was turn-around maintenance (TAM) of the local refineries.  While the exercise lasted, petrol had to be imported to bridge the gap.  But more by design than co-incidence, TAM was for the most part carried out at the end of the year, the peak travel season.

Despite its huge cost, TAM maintained nothing and turned nothing around, except the fortunes of complicit contractors and their local supervisors. If they produced at all, the refineries were producing at far less than full capacity, the gap between supply and demand widened, and more and more fuel had to be imported to fill the gap. Oil supplies grew more and more unstable, and so did pricing.

Since then, virtually every measure trumpeted as a solution to the problem has been a swindle.

Like most swindles in Nigeria’s recent history, it began during the era of the military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.   The country was set to take a loan from the IMF, and as a sop to that latter-day Cerberus, the currency was to be devalued, import restrictions were to be lifted, and anything remotely suggestive of a subsidy was to be abolished immediately.

Gasoline came to be identified as the scapegoat for Nigeria’s underperforming economy. It was grossly underpriced, they said, because it was heavily subsidised, with the pernicious result that a gallon of gasoline cost less than a bottle of soda or milk.  One image that clings in my memory of that time is of the engaging news correspondent Chris Anyanwu, now a Senator, peddling that false equivalency night after night on national television in her smooth, silky delivery.

The subsidy was the difference between the price of a gallon of gasoline in Lagos and the same gallon of petrol in Fargo, North Dakota, they said.

Wasn’t that what economists call an opportunity cost?

If the cost of getting a gallon of gasoline to the pump exceeded the retail price, you could perhaps talk about a subsidy. What were these relative costs?  And whatever happened to comparative advantage and all that if Nigerians were to pay for gasoline produced on their soil the same price as consumers half a world away were paying for it? Was the whole thing not at bottom a tax?

Shifting gears, they said gasoline was so cheap that it was being mindlessly wasted.

How so?

Were Nigerians washing their hands with petrol after a meal, or to prepare their vegetable stew in place of regular cooking oil, or as a beverage to entertain their guests, since it was so much cheaper than Coca-Cola?

Shifting gears still, they said because gasoline was so cheap in Nigeria, it was being smuggled to neighbouring countries to reap windfall profits.

Now, you could not do that on any meaningful scale by lugging 50-litre petrol cans through bush paths.  Only motorised tankers driving on paved roads across international frontiers manned by immigration and customs and security officials had that capability.  Those vehicles had to be owned or controlled by political and military officials with guaranteed access to refined petroleum products.

Why was it, then, that not one operator of those vehicles had been arrested and charged with this illegal traffick, only a few stragglers transporting smuggled gasoline cans in leaky dugout canoes or in rickety trucks across the border?

Nor were the authorities done yet.

Gasoline was so cheap, they said, that it was being adulterated.  When substituted for kerosene in hurricane lamps and stoves, the adulterated mixture caused horrific explosions that maimed and sometimes killed entire families.

Why not make kerosene cheaper than gasoline, then?  In any case, why would anyone adulterate a product that was already obscenely cheap?  Whoever heard of adulterated zinc?

Then they tried to sugar the pill.

From the funds to be realised by abolishing the subsidy, the existence of which was never proven, new oil refineries would be built not merely to satisfy growing domestic consumption but also for export, to generate foreign exchange.  Those long, snaking lines at filling stations would be things           of the past.

They conjured up in galactic figures the revenues that would accrue to the Exchequer from abolishing the subsidy.  They set up committees to manage the expected cash inflow and to ensure it was put to the most judicious use.  They came up with palliatives to cushion the average consumer from the comprehensive price increases that would follow.

In less than two years, the “mass transit” buses charging subsidised fares vanished from the roads. A striking project here, a thriving scheme there, but much of the money went the way of other state interventions, SURE-P being the latest example, to satisfy the awoof proclivities of political officials high and low, and their confederates.

The one thing that never got built is a new refinery.

When the refineries produce at all, their output is shipped several hundred miles from the loading platform and returned as imported fuel, to reap windfall profits in “subsidy” reimbursement for an untouchable criminal syndicate.

It must stop, this syndicated fraud that has inflicted great pain and misery on the many while enriching the few.

Your move, President Muhammadu Buhari.

The foregoing was published on this page four years ago, on December 4, 2018.

To his credit, Buhari has since unbundled the NNPC and turned it into an ordinary corporate body.  But the effect may be just as beneficial to the larger society as the unbundling of the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), amounting thus far to little more than a distinction without a difference.

The authorities “discovered” a parallel oil petroleum industry that has been operating in the shadows of the NNPC for decades with less sophistication but far greater profit to its stakeholders.

They rediscovered the Alkaleri Oilfield in Bauchi, first discovered in the1990s.

A shadowy armed outfit of the Federal Government has been warning suppliers in sepulchral tones  to flood the market with oil or face unspecified consequences.

That is new and unsettling