The protracted fuel and naira scarcity furnish a panoptic of Nigeria’s political succession wars. It’s a blood feud taken to the extreme. Some would call it a perfidious game of thrones, a despairing caucus’ last hurrah against the hurricane that would consume them.
In a recent interview, Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, said some non-state actors would prefer an interim government as an outcome of the ongoing political transition. El Rufai characterised the culprits as elements whose conduct is consistent with plans to subvert a civilian-to-civilian transition after the next presidential election.
“What is happening is that there are people around the president that had their presidential candidates. They had two candidates that they preferred to succeed Buhari – Godwin Emefiele from the South and Ahmad Lawan from the north – and they got neither.”
To their chagrin, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu (BAT), two-time Lagos governor, emerged as victor at the All Progressives Congress (APC)’ presidential primaries.
Consequently, “It turned out that some of the wildest stories of conspiracy to derail the transition at best for APC to lose, preferably for the whole system to result in no election leading to an interim arrangement began to rear their heads,” said El Rufai.
And what better way to incite chaos than to contrive fuel shortage and naira scarcity? The major victims, comprising the working class, rural dwellers, unemployed and large swathes of the impoverished, are subjected to sustained hardship allegedly because some political actors dread the possibility of Tinubu’s victory at this month’s presidential polls.
They fear that he would entrench true federalism. They fear that he would immortalise his name in gold via humane and astute governance. They fear he would raise a new breed of young, patriotic, visionary leaders. They fear that he would change the class and culture of political patronage. They fear he would attain peerless repute by achieving what none of them could achieve all through their dalliance with power.
At the underbelly of their plot is avarice. Greed, wielded by these enemies of Nigeria, manifests in their sacrilegious scarring of the country’s fertile womb to protect their ill-acquired wealth.
There is no gainsaying Nigeria’s rape cycle is rooted in its cutthroat politics, surpassed only by the citizenry’s penchant for malice and sculpting of spite into an oratory, in praise of their oppressors.
The possibility of watching the ongoing crisis snowball into unimaginable proportions is scary. Thus the governments of Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara states resort to judicial intervention via the Supreme Court before the citizenry turns against each other and everyone.
The governors’ intervention, however, translates to a sterile reprieve as the Federal Government and CBN flagrantly flout the Supreme Court’s February 8 order of interim injunction, restraining both the commercial banks from suspending or ending on February 10, the usage and circulation of now older versions of the N200, N500, and N1000 denominations as legal tender, pending the hearing and determination of the plaintiffs/applicants’ motion on notice for interlocutory injunction.
The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, February 15, reasserted the ruling following a complaint by the lawyer to Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara states, Abdulhakeem Mustapha (SAN), that the Fed Govt and its agencies have failed to comply with the order and have allegedly directed the rejection of the old notes.
Consequently, the local economy and citizenry suffer unimaginable hardships. Amidst expectations that President Muhammadu Buhari would resolve the matter in seven days as he promised in the wake of the crisis, CBN governor, Emefiele, has admitted that the apex bank does not have the capacity to print adequate new naira notes.
Even so, he insisted that there was no need to shift the deadline despite a Supreme Court last week ordering the Federal Government and CBN not to enforce the deadline.
Pundits are having a hard time intellectualising why Emefiele and the Federal Government felt the need to rush the implementation of the new naira policy and invalidate the now older notes.
His insistence that there was no need to shift the deadline despite the Supreme Court’s order to the contrary, resonates ominously; it’s somewhat imperious, a caper of fiendish conceit and bursting insolence against the rule of law.
Predictably, several politicians, the media, and civil societies sympathetic to the plot attempt to intellectualise the grisly motif. Yet there is no excuse for hardships imposed on Nigerians via a policy borne of gall and executed in malice. There is equally no justification for the surges of aggression birthed by the new naira policy.
The ongoing exploitation of Nigeria’s underprivileged divide unfurls like a Darwinian spectacle favouring fangs and claw over fur, a pratfall of predatory structures and agents of the State. The CBN and commercial banks, purportedly working to assert the whims of puppeteers tugging at the strings of all actors in the crisis, have mopped up trillions of cash only to dole paltry sums back into the system, thus creating an avoidable naira scarcity and impoverishing defenseless masses.
Commercial banks have virtually shut down operations, refusing the old naira while denying impoverished citizenry access to the new notes; and while the citizenry laments their fate with the banks, the neighbourhood POS operators subject them to a greater ordeal by charging exorbitant fees on every withdrawal they make.
The informal economies of the suburbs and metro business hubs consequently suffer massive contractions, due to the CBN’s stifling of the cash flow required to drive and sustain them.
For the umpteenth time, Nigerians witness a grotesque politicisation and perversion of the CBN and commercial banking operations. Against the backdrop of these realities, the citizenry (curiously in southern Nigeria alone) engages in heated protests, leading to avoidable deaths and imperilment of the country’s fragile peace.
Lest we forget the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)’s recent lament that if nothing is done to address the cash crunch caused by the CBN policy, INEC would find it difficult to deploy staff and materials for a successful election.
There seems to be a deliberate attempt to incite the citizenry to mayhem and prevent a peaceful transition from this civilian government to another. It’s about time Nigerians neutered the blooming anarchy; all stakeholders – every Nigerian inclusive – must cooperate to prevent a situation where the country implodes; where state power, lusted after by brigands, is defiled and entangled in a heap of corpses.
In the intense struggle for presidential power, national ethics gets assailed by pagan instinct. Yet Nigerians must begin to ask some crucial questions: Why are supposedly rival candidates in sudden cahoots to endorse the CBN’s ill-timed policy? Why is the CBN governor on a feverish quest to implement the policy amid dire circumstances? And why is Tinubu the only candidate speaking for the people?
The enforced naira and fuel scarcity highlight the manifestation of oligarchic power in its crudest form, the subjugation of popular will by aggression. The resultant violence becomes both medium and motif by which frantic oligarchs, or the cabal if you like, sustain their choke-hold on political power and perpetuate the enslavement of the Nigerian populace.
In one of the viral videos showing violent protests in Edo, a spectator laments that there was no need for the mob to destroy a bank building. “Our people don’t know. Dem wan take style cancel the elections,” he noted. More reason for Nigerians to persevere regardless of the miseries contrived against them.
It’s just a few days to the general elections. Nigeria must survive the plots of infernal groups and actors.
