The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Buhari’s one year: Let Nigerians take capital punishment for corruption and economic sabotage to a referendum

    Given the fact that corruption has become systemic in Nigeria,  I think the time has come for us  to take the issue of capital punishment for corruption and economic crimes  to a plebiscite

    “There is a complex web that links the Petroleum Ministry, the DPR, the Navy, the NPA,NIMASA,PPPRA, DMO, CBN and Commercial Banks in the Oil subsidy fraud. Documents like the sovereign debt statements and the sovereign debt notes flew about and our money kept disappearing. From about 30 companies in the scheme under both Obasanjo and Yar’Adua, the number shot up to 300. Monthly, billions of Naira was paid out to people who have never had any contact with a Jerry can of fuel in their lives. No verification, no authentication, nothing. Money was being paid with reckless abandon. It got so bad that some people will arrange with ship owners…, take a two day hire of an empty ship, move it to Lagos Port, and berth it there. Officials of the PPPRA, Petroleum Ministry, DPR will come there to inspect an empty vessel and certify that the empty vessel carried 10,000 metric tons of petrol, collect their money and walk away. The vessel simply sails away and three weeks later, close to N6 billion will be paid as subsidy when not even a single drop of petrol was brought in”. – Being the online testimony of a Legal counsel in one of the biggest indigenous players in the downstream petroleum sector during the Jonathan administration.Given the fact that corruption has become systemic in Nigeria, leading President Goodluck Jonathan to bequeath both a collapsed economy and an empty treasury to President Buhari, I think the time has come for us  to take the issue of capital punishment for corruption and economic crimes  to a plebiscite. For me, this will also be a logical reaction to the weighty criticisms that are daily being heaped on the APC, but more specifically, on President Buhari. I shall illustrate these insults with the views of one single commentator who praised contestant Buhari to high heavens in 2014/15 but today so viscerally derides him. No, please don’t misunderstand me. I have a thousand and one reasons of my own for which I am unhappy with the President, among them:  his politically amateurish: “I belong to nobody”, his “I can work with anybody”, his sentimental retention of anti-Buhari Jonathanians in government for far too long, leaving his party members helpless and at the mercy of PDP governors all with deleterious consequences; the most being the totally uncooperative National Assembly.  But truth be told, President Buhari did not cause our current problems. Rather, we should look to former President Olusegun Obasanjo as Nigeria’s kill joy. More about that anon.

    In my trilogy of articles: “Periscoping the ideal APC Presidential candidate”, in which I concluded then, and still maintain, that Nigeria needed Buhari more than the obverse, I quoted a young Nigerian Actuary who wrote as follows on 21 September 2014: “WHO SHOULD FLY THE APC FLAG? “The simple answer to this poser is that in the eyes of most Nigerians, evidences of previous electoral contests affirm that the most acceptable of APC’s likely candidates, and who can surely win massively, is General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd). The simple truth is that he is honest and associated with honesty of purpose, and to date, no Nigerian has come up against him with any shred of a shady financial deal in all the positions of responsibility he held. Unfortunately, his weak campaigns did not publicise his personal qualities of honesty, and unalloyed commitment to the public good.” Now, compare the views of that  same individual in an April 2016 Whatsapp message: “Buhari uses 10 jets, runs a large government of 36 ministers, pays politicians the old way they were paid  under PDP, runs huge expenses on unnecessary foreign trips, leaves privatised PHCN entities in the hands of Jonathan and his thieving associates, runs a fake anti-corruption agenda that has failed woefully to date, has no strategic thinking to halt unemployment, carries on with huge number of government ministries and agencies he met on ground.  What then is Buhari doing differently to justify why people elected him? Buhari has no single bill before the National Assembly in his now one year leadership. Can any person reasonably justify Buhari’s continuous occupation of the presidency of Nigeria when he is not solving any problem, has not solved one to date, and has not shown how he would solve any?

    I haven’t the slightest doubt that he was, of course, unduly hasty, sentimental and superficial in his critique of the President given the Augean stable Jonathan left, smack in Buhari’s hands. And this, in my view, is where former President Obasanjo comes in and why I am suggesting that Nigerians should seriously consider capital punishment for corruption.  What, for instance, should make anybody steal billions, if not a pulsating sickness in their medulla oblongata?  Capital punishment for corruption and economic crimes looks like the only thing that can put the fear of the Lord in these crazed Nigerians. Relying on his past knowledge of Nigerian politicians, Obasanjo was particularly hard on the traditionally corrupt legislature.  Unfortunately, he goofed when, in an unprecedented act of one-upmanship, he opted to become the power behind the throne of his successor/s. For that selfish reason he single-handedly inflicted on Nigeria, two pathetically weak successors whose concern in office was how to sustain their rule and be victorious at the next election.

    Hence, they both governed by abdication.

     While Yar’Adua, no thanks too to his frail health, ceded governance to an insular Katsina mafia, Jonathan completely abandoned it to the whims and caprice of his many women. The negative consequences, especially under Goodluck Jonathan, were horrendously colossal. Amongst these, the legislature simply became a monster. They legislators rubbished the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal agency, and took whatever suited their fancy from the national treasury. They went a-borrowing, ballooned their allowances and backdated the unappropriated allowances many years back and promptly became the highest paid legislators anywhere in the world.

    1. Under Jonathan, the Nigerian Armed Forces, once regarded as highly disciplined became a thieving sinkhole with some officers stealing government funds to buy outlandish houses at incredible amounts for themselves and their children. President Buhari should simply haul them, not before any EFCC, but Court Martial’s for trial.
    2. The Judiciary,  always a  troublesome arm of the Nigerian government  with historic sayings like, ‘my hands are tied’  and with decisions barred from being cited as precedents, became a  source of  utter disquiet with hundreds of  senior lawyers shamelessly  accompanying  to court, colleagues  in whose company they should be embarrassed to be  seen.
    3. Under President Goodluck Jonathan, our banks became bribe distribution centres for purposes of altering election results.  But worse was to come.
    4. President Jonathan loved the office as much as he loved his bottle. He completely abandoned governance to others, chasing after re-election. For the latter purpose, he turned the Central Bank of Nigeria to an Automated Teller Machine through which vaporized hundreds of billions of Naira meant for buying the much needed equipments to arm the Nigerian Army against a ferocious Boko Haram. Not done, he went round the palaces, like a possessed marathoner, distributing dollars. By the time you add the scams: oil subsidy, pension, crude lifted but not paid for, as well as the ones stolen, President Jonathan  must have succeeded in multiplying corruption in Nigeria a hundredfold.

    But the man really never wanted to be President, going by his initial body language, until President Obasanjo cajoled, as well as conscripted a decent but certainly, ill-prepared man, to the headship of the most important country in Black Africa. Obasanjo must therefore carry most of Jonathan’s can.

    These are the Jonathan legacies to the Buhari administration and they translated, in turn, to trillions of dollars stolen from Nigeria; a fraction of which should have made our present dire economic circumstances unknown. President Buhari’s government would most probably be selling fuel at no more than N50/Litre today and housewives wouldn’t be buying a single tomato for N100 either. It is to solve this corruption palaver that Nigerians should take a closer look at the death penalty for economic sabotage. Those who said we are fantastically corrupt know exactly what they are saying. The President should let Nigerians debate this proposal for 6 months, and like BREXIT, take it to a referendum.

    And let the peoples’ decision become the Law.

  • Deregulation – in a fantastically deregulated economy that is neither pro-labour nor pro-business

    Deregulation – in a fantastically deregulated economy that is neither pro-labour nor pro-business

    There is great hardship and suffering in the land – and though the burden is overwhelmingly on the poor of the land, quite a good number of the social elites are also drinking from the bitter cup of altogether avoidable national adversity.I saw this in a concrete, existential and rather sardonic form two weeks ago when I was in Uyo to deliver the keynote lecture at the ASUU National Delegates Conference, 2016. A colleague and an old friend of mine who is a retired social science professor in employment through contract at one of the universities in Lagos, took two whole days to decide whether or not to inform a friend of his that he was in town for the ASUU gathering. This friend of my friend is himself a retired academic, a very distinguished clinical professor of cardiology who had been dean at some of the university medical colleges in Nigeria. What was the source of the reluctance? Well, two weeks ago, a litre of petrol was selling for N320 at Uyo and the visiting colleague was not sure of the wisdom of a call to his cardiologist friend that was certain to make the man take to the road in a car whose petrol tank had to contend with N320 per litre. The thing that would make big, important men sneeze will make the poor man to catch a full-blown cold: at N320 per litre, what is admittedly a great inconvenience for a distinguished cardiologist is a matter of bare survival for the poor, both the working poor and the unemployed poor. All the same everyone but the few obscenely and corruptly rich amongst us suffers when the pump price of a litre of petrol hits N320.

    Dear reader, how much is the actual, as opposed to the posted or deregulatedprice of petrol in your part of the country? That is the fundamental question underpinning this short, bitter essay on deregulation and our national economy. Of course, the Buhari administration insists that the new N145 per litre price came from the effects of drastic forex scarcity and not deregulation as such, but we will come to that matter presently in this discussion. In the meantime, a brief circumstantial contextualization is necessary here. For it so happens that after I delivered my lecture at Uyo and went to Calabar by road, I felt a great impulse to travel back to Ibadan (and later, Lagos) by road rather than fly. This was because the road travel from Uyo to Calabar was such a harrowing experience that I wanted very much to see what road conditions were like traveling east to west in the country, a journey that I regularly made in the 80s but had not made in close to two decades. Everyone to whom I expressed this wish promptly dissuaded me from trying it, giving many reasons, not the least frightening being the possibility of being kidnapped en routebefore I got to Lagos, you know a “Harvard professor” and all that is associated with it. The reason that finally persuaded me not to travel by road was, yes, fuel availability and wildly fluctuating price regimes in different localities in the country.

    From a columnist’s diary, I can report that after finally flying from Calabar to Lagos and going by road from Lagos to Ibadan, my experience of diversity and differentiation at the petrol filling stations in the city is worthy of note for the light that it throws on deregulation. In the stations that were selling at the posted, officially deregulated price of N145, the queues were very long; in many cases, they were so long that it took the better part of a half day to get to one’s turn at the head of the queue. At the stations that were not selling at the posted price, there were of course no queues. But as I soon found out by driving around foraging for fuel for my car, this did not mean that one simply went for the available petrol at the unofficial or illegal price. This is because, again as everyone knows, illegally inflated prices could range anywhere from N5 to N20 per litre.

    Of course, not a single one of these illegal price increases was too big for my personal, domestic economy; after all, I am a member of the socio-economic elite. That was not the point. The point was and is that the difference between N5 and N20 per litre means everything to the overwhelming majority of my countrymen and women. Indeed, as many supporters of the government have stated, the new posted, deregulated price of N145 actually lowered the going price regimes in many parts of the country, Uyo in my own personal experience being one of the worst or most unstable cases. Thus, the government’s denial that deregulation had anything to do with the new posted price can only be properly assessed against the background of this overdetermined context in which official deregulation exists side by side and is often in collusion with unofficial, multiple and perverse deregulations, the subject of this piece: a fantastically deregulated economy that is neither pro-labour nor pro-business.

    David Cameron it was that applied the word “fantastically” to corruption in his widely discussed expression of malign disdain for the moral state, the “soul” of our country. But I do admit it: it is from the same British Prime Minister that I have borrowed that word “fantastically”, though of course I am linking it specifically to deregulation in this piece. To his eternal credit, President Buhari did not fall for the cheap, gratuitous and rather puerile insult of Cameron. I do not care for your apology, the President said to Cameron, you and your country are receivers of stolen property and I want only that you return the vast, concentrated loot from my country that is lodged in your banks. In other words, this, in effect, is what Buhari said to the British Prime Minister: the difference between me and you on corruption is that I act on it while you talk but don’t do anything about it.  This observation opens up for our consideration the stakes involved in deregulation.

    For those who don’t know it, there are quite a few other things that separate Buhari from Cameron in the matter of how the affairs of this world, our world, are run. In the present context, the chief one to bear in mind is, precisely, deregulation. Cameron’s Conservative Party and his government are militantly for deregulation, at home in Britain itself and abroad in the world at large. Against stiff opposition from the Labour Party and many segments of British society, Cameron has been pushing hard to end or drastically reduce the scope of the world famous and much revered National Health Service (NHS) of Britain; cut down massively on welfare benefits to the poor; and hold down state spending on education and other social services vital to workers and the poor.

    By contrast, at least so far, the Buhari administration has refused to be compelled by Britain and the forces of Western neoliberalism into full scale embrace or implementation of deregulation.The principal theatres of contention, of war between Buhari’s government on one side and, on the other side, Cameron’s government and all the powerful forces of Western neoliberalism, are devaluation of the naira; privatization of ALL public or state enterprises, especially in the oil and energy sectors; and complete removal of governmental oil subsidy. Given the amount or degree of both open and covert pressure that those media bibles of British and world neoliberalism, The Economist and The Financial Times, have put on the Buhari government to deregulate on all of these fronts, and given also the additional fact that many influential members of the Buhari administration are militant supporters of neoliberalism in general and deregulation in particular, it is nothing short of heroic that, so far at least, the current Nigerian government has remained firm in its stand against the complete and unrestrained deregulation that Western forces of so-called free trade capitalism are demanding of us.

    For those who have been wondering why the government has been so insistent that the new N145 oil pump price came from the effects of severe forex scarcity and not deregulation, what I have briefly sketched above is the answer. My own frank view of the matter is that both the internal and external pressure to deregulate became too strong for the governmentand it has merely sought a cover, an alibi in the foreign currency scarcity explanation. Literally and metaphorically speaking, my eyes were opened to this realization by my encounter two weeks ago with that N320 per litre price regime at Uyo. Who knows if and whether there were indeed other places in the country that the price rose higher than that phenomenal N320? The government had to have known of such places and, knowing this, it apparently felt that resistance to official deregulation no longer made sense when unofficial and illegal deregulation had already made a decisive move – as it has always done for several decades now as corruption, waste and squandermania became the prime motive forces of politics, economy and society in our country. What lessons can we learn from this?

    Official deregulation is the collective name or designation of state policies and acts that considerably lessen regulation and control over prices, the quality and value of products and services, and the movement of finished goods and raw commodities within the country and between Nigeria and the rest of the world. In this respect, official deregulation is the great weapon of neoliberalism: the more you can remove or weaken controls and regulations between a semi-industrialized, economic monoculture like Nigeria and the rich, industrialized nations of the world, the more surplus you can extract from it. Unofficial or illegal deregulation is the product of corruption, especially of the “fantastically corrupt” variety of Cameron’s insult. In the face of this mother of all corruptions, all regulations, all controls, all checks and balances crumble and the looters reign supreme, even over the law and far beyond and above the legitimate interests of workers and of businesses and enterprises. This is why the first line of defense against the official deregulation that neoliberalism is persistently demanding of the Buhari administration is a massive curtailment of unofficial and illegal deregulation through a decisive defeat of the looters and their powerful allies. I call on NLC and all its allies to hold the line against official deregulation and neoliberalism but to rally round the government in its war against corruption. Indeed, I call on the NLC and all patriotic organizations to not only support the government in the war against corruption but to actually claim and own this war. The first demand of this alliance of labour and the government in the war against corruption? Ask that Malami, the AGF, who is clearly not up to the task, be fired and a new AGF who can collaborate with popular forces be appointed to get the job done.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                   bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Is fuel subsidy ideologically inevitable?

    But the hard question that needs to be asked and answered by radical social and economic thinkers is whether fuel subsidy is the best way to assist the poor in our country.

    This piece first appeared last year when public conversation on oil subsidy and citizens’ welfare was as deafening as what obtains today

    Ade Alabi was sick in a village near Ibadan during the first fuel scarcity this year. His neighbour had a car and was willing to take Ade to the nearest primary health centre. Unfortunately for Ade, the raging fuel scarcity at the time prevented his neighbour from having petrol to buy, even though he was ready to pay the prohibitive price of N150 per litre charged by Black Market sellers of petrol in the village.  All efforts to take Ade to the hospital on his own Okada proved futile. There was no rubber hose to transfer petrol from Ade’s Okada into the car of his neighbour. Even though Ade had a brother who could ride Okada, his brother was just as big as Ade. It was not possible to have both brothers on the Okada with a third person to prop Ade up on the machine. While the entire village was thinking about how to get Ade to the hospital, the poor man slumped and died, leaving behind a wife and three children.

    The story above illustrates the danger (to the poor in particular) inherent in the insistence of self-defined socialist ideologues (in and outside the trade unions) on the religiosity of keeping fuel subsidy on account of protecting the poor and workers from avoidable exploitation by a government that is hardly capitalist but palpably thievish.

    Many cases are being made in the traditional press and the social media in support of cancelation of fuel subsidy in the country. Some pundits base their position on evidence of corruption in the handling of the subsidy scheme, citing examples of revelation of irregularities in various reports of committees established to probe the country’s subsidy scheme. Examples of financial irregularity are drawn from Farouk Lawan Committee’s Probe in 2012. This report claims that N232 billion on subsidy was paid to marketers for PMS in 2011 for fuel that was not supplied. The same committee also established that, contrary to the claims of marketers that 60 million litres was imported for each day in 2011, only 31 million litres per day was accounted for.

    Some commentators focus on the Nuhu Ribadu Probe in 2012 to argue for cessation of subsidy on the ground of lack of transparency. They draw attention to the report that NNPC deducted subsidy-related expenses before payment to the Federation Account in 2011. This group argues that NEITI’s audits from 1999 to 2011 also confirmed that NNPC deducted a total of N1.40 trillion for subsidy. Similarly, the Presidential Committee on Verification and Reconciliation of Fuel Subsidy (2012) is cited by anti-subsidy commentators to illustrate that 197 subsidy transactions worth N229 billion were illegitimate and that actual expenditure on subsidy was higher in the same year than appropriated sums for fuel subsidy.

    Economic thinkers of the free market persuasion also argue that natural resources are finite and attract largely time-limited revenues, more so if such resources are sold in the international market where the exporting country has no control over price stability. This group posits that it is not rational for any government to prefer fuel subsidy for citizens across the social spectrum to promoting sustained inclusive economic development through investments that can have multiplier effects on sustainable empowerment schemes for the underprivileged. This group calls for an end to fuel subsidy which its spokespersons believe to be a non-sustainable way of allocating natural resource revenues.

    On the other hand, trade union leaders and self-defined advocates of the poor argue passionately in favour of continuing with fuel subsidy. The trade union’s claim includes the need to view fuel subsidy as a non-negotiable poverty-alleviating policy. This school of thought calls on government to accept the need to make every Nigerian enjoy the fruits of a natural resource that under a unitary system of government is viewed to belong to the entire country, regardless of the damage the exploitation of such natural resource does to the economy and ecology of the communities in which such resources are located.

    Another line of thinking within this group is that underpaid workers, poor,and unemployed citizens need fuel subsidy to mitigate the knock-on effect of their poverty. The same group also argues that it is unfair for the federal government to stop fuel subsidy until the government is able to create the type of transportation infrastructure that exists in more developed countries, where fuel subsidy is discouraged as a policy. They add that the government must repair existing refineries and construct more to bring the price of refined petrol for domestic consumption down to the point of making fuel subsidy unnecessary. The Jonathan government accepted the thinking of labour leaders by creating another bureaucracy, Sure-P, to pacify workers and labour leaders, after agreeing to peg the price of petrol at N97 per litre. Just like the subsidy scheme itself, it did not take a long time for Sure-P to become another trick to occlude financial mismanagement by the country’s venalpolitical elite.

    The position of trade union leaders and believers in social democracy appears unassailable. In a country where there are not many social assistance programmes for citizens at the bottom of the economic ladder, there should be nothing wrong with calls for special assistance to the unemployed and underpaid workers. In terms of fine ideological thinking, trade union leaders and their social democratic supporters are making respectable arguments. But the hard question that needs to be asked and answered by radical social and economic thinkers is whether fuel subsidy is the best way to assist the poor in our country.

    Despite the social democratic credentials of this author for over half a century, I do not believe that there are no better ways to assist the poor than the current fuel subsidy that is as enmeshed in the culture of political and bureaucratic corruption as it can ever be in any human space. In a country in which political parties do not openly embrace any noticeable form of social democracy, just as in countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Norway, where social democracy is a fact of life, there are hundreds of ways to assist the poor without having to attempt to pay some of the cost of fuel for them. In these social democratic systems, the line between the middle-class or middle-income and low-income groups is made clear when policies of social assistance are being crafted. It is not so in the case of Nigeria’s fuel subsidy scheme, which allows upper-middle class professionals to enjoy fuel subsidy that should have been reserved for the underprivileged.

    The argument that fuel subsidy in Nigeria is to protect the poor is spurious. Out of the 145 vehicles per 1,000 citizens in Nigeria, 85 of them are cars belonging to middle-class members of the society. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the car-owning middle-class citizens that benefit largely from fuel subsidy. If indeed fuel subsidy assists the low-income and the unemployed, it is not to the extent that it benefits the middle-class. Definitely, there are better ways to assist the poor and the under-paid.

    For example, the federal government can use the money spent on fuel subsidy to pay for such services as free education, free meals for school children, free health for the poor, social welfare checks for the poor, and free adult education for the poor. In addition, poor citizens can be given social welfare support that they can use to pay for market price of petrol. Furthermore, trade unions can insist that the existing refineries be sold to workers for one dollar each so that workers’ cooperatives can manage the refineries. The federal government can put the matter of removal of subsidy to a referendum to determine what majority of citizens want, as opposed to what paid representatives of labour prefer. Without doubt, if Ade Alabi, referred to at the beginning of this piece and his relations had been given a chance to vote Yes or No in a referendum on removal of fuel subsidy, all of them would have voted Yes, in hopes that the Ade Alabis of Nigeria can be taken to the hospital before it is too late.

    President Buhari and his team should pluck the courage to address this albatross around the neck of the nation.  They should take time to conduct rigorous research on the number of citizens who are poor and thus need social assistance. Even if such people need to get more than N5,000 a month, the federal government should plan to assist such people, so as to free the country from the chains of fuel subsidy barons in and outside government. In addition to initiating many direct social assistance programmes for the poor, the federal government should use the money from the federation account (currently used to pay subsidy charges) to assist the poor in ways that those assisted can use the social assistance funds to solve the problems most important to them.

  • How not to kill the children’s dreams

    Parental Guidance (PG) is only a license given to parents to practice law within the home, not a right to practice the tyranny of indulgence as many of us do presently

    Modern children no longer have any dreams; their modern parents dream for them. Just think. From the time of their conception, it is the parents who decide when and where their children receive formal education. They go ‘We’re homeschooling Jnr. We don’t want him coming in contact with the ruffians they release into schools these days.’ It is the parents who also decide where Jnr. receives his secondary education. So, when Jnr. goes, ‘But all my friends are going to the public school!’ you’ll say ‘You’ll go to this very special school even if it kills you. Your father went there, your grandfather went there, your great grandfather went there. You think you are too special to go to the same school your ancestors attended?’ Then, it’s the parents who get to perform all kinds of experiments on the little ones. ‘Jnr. is getting too big for his shoes these days, not so? It’s because he doesn’t have to struggle for his food. Let’s throw him into my uncle’s house where they have ten children and then we’ll see how he grows up.’ As I read somewhere, there is no dictatorship in the world that can compare to that of a parent.

         Just as parents have learnt to be tyrannous, so children have learnt to be wise. There is no sage in the world, not even Solomon, who can confront the wisdom of children. Children learn early that life is a lot more comfortable and easier when they simply obey mama and papa. They also tend to live longer than the parents. It’s not just the destiny thing at work; it’s the fact that they sit back, relaxed, as they watch their parents sweat themselves out taking decisions about their children’s lives, and then proceed to source for the means to execute the decisions. And so, while the parents are huffing and heaving on how Jnr. can finish school and go to Europe for his Masters, the said Jnr. is setting benchmarks for the town’s social life with his pals who find themselves in the same boat: waiting for their parents to get the money for their trip. Now, tell me, who is wiser?

       Growing up in the habit of not thinking for themselves, our children have gone out of control mainly because their parents have spiraled out of control in their mindless pursuit of relevance in the lives of the poor things. I once spent some early morning hours looking for hostel accommodation for my sleeping son. Many children are not even allowed to think. ‘And what do you want to be when you grow up?’ ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll ask my mum’. Mum says, DOCTOR, and Jnr. returns: ‘I want to be a doctor.’

        One of the most unfortunate things about this country is this lack of policy about anything other than ‘let everyone go and grow up in the best way they can’. Just as there is no transport policy other than ‘don’t ride on other people’s backs’, no housing policy other than ‘make sure your house does not topple on anyone other than yourself’, no town planning policy other than ‘don’t build on Aso Rock’, no speeding policy except ‘speed but don’t get caught’, so also there is no youth policy other than ‘children, go to school’. And so, children find themselves completely at the mercy of their parents and their peers on life’s little advances and rules. Yet, no one is more unequipped to hand out good rules than parents who are caught in the throes of deriving severe pleasures from the tyranny they exercise over their children. To prolong this tyranny, many parents have been known to beg, borrow or steal.

         Why do parents have a compelling need to control their children’s lives in Nigeria? I honestly don’t know. In Europe, I understand children can go make their own way in the world by the age of eighteen, no matter how rich their parents. In Nigeria, however, some unreleased masochistic tendencies are standing in the way of good sense. Did you notice that these tendencies began to manifest at about the same time that the AIDS virus was released into the air? The two have some things in common too. They generally affect men and women, do not discriminate between rich and poor and both are terminal diseases. Perhaps, some parents’ educational-cum-career development processes were so tough in the days of few opportunities that they swore their children would not be so inopportune. Perhaps, and this is my favourite, many parents have realised that the world has been made so unsafe (possibly by them) and so they have to protect their wee ones. Perhaps, modern Nigerian parenthood is now a minefield filled with vanity and ego … Who knows, really?

        Whatever the causes, there are no doubts about the results. Somewhere in the deep recesses or the twilight zones of dreams lie the unrealized ones of these children. Then, those children spend their days in a daze of wonder: what is the next instruction, O Parent Almighty? Worse, they find themselves moving from one dizzying experience to snap-crackle-snap. One such son did, not too long ago. The papers reported how he had been so indulged in drink and drugs that he hardly knew what he was doing anymore, not even being able to account for how he came to have killed an unfortunate young lady. Rather than help him face his demons, however, his all-knowing mother ‘helped’ him to flee justice by parceling him abroad. There, he fared no better, of course, until he was forced to come back home and resume his lifestyle. In frustration one day, he was said to have come to his own eureka – his mother was behind his ruin, and snuffed the life out of her.

        There is yet the story of another young man who had also been indulged from youth because he was the only male among a bevy of female children. Unfortunately, he was not able to resolve his own internal turbulence. That’s right. He set his parent’s house on fire for their tardiness in providing him what he had been used to. I know of yet several stories in which sons (it happens to daughters too, I know) sold their doting mothers’ entire investments of jewelry while both women were abroad. It led to their deaths, at different times, of course.

         Parental Guidance (PG) is only a license given to parents to practice law within the home, not a right to practice the tyranny of indulgence as many of us do presently. When a modern Nigerian parent learns that his recently graduated son has fixed his starting salary at over two hundred thousand Naira in a job interview as we reported on this page sometime ago, does he become outraged? Most of us are not. That is where the problem lies. We should be outraged. In fact, we should be so outraged that we want to spank his graduate behind. Rather, most of us are so proud of his savvy highness that we shake his hand and croon, ‘Well done, son, you are your father’s scion.’ And that is our tragedy.

          Now, most fathers’ scions simply lounge in the sitting room waiting for their fathers to come home with funds pilfered from government coffers. Ah, ah, did we not just hear that a former army chief is said to have built or bought a multimillion Naira house for his son? Naturally, many children’s dreams seem to have been lost along the way in their parents’ pilfering careers Do please let the children have their dreams back.

    • Part of this article was first published in 2011. We have reproduced it here to celebrate this year’s children’s day.

  • Visa: let’s change the narrative

    When last week, I wrote about the inability of organisers and participants from South Africa for a media fellowship seminar to get Nigeria Visa to attend the programme, I didn’t recon with anger of some Nigerians who have been denied or have harrowing experience getting South African Visa.

    The feedback I got from some readers was that the South Africans got what they deserved. ” The South Africans are mean. If you know how they treat Nigerians who apply for their Visa and continue to do till recently, you will not sympathise with them in anyway,” a top media executive said.

    Another reader noted that the inability of the South Africans to get the the visa for the trip could be a continuation of the “un-unending war” between the two countries.

    I understand the anger against South Africa over Visa. I once almost narrowly missed attending a conference in Cape Town due to delay in getting my Visa for the trip. For days, I kept going to the former South Africa embassy in Lagos to join the long queue of applicants left the sun unattended to for hours until the day before my travel.

    I have also been told of Nigerian students and other nationals who have been denied Visas after getting admission and fees some applicants have to pay as a guarantee that they will return.

    However, based on the ease with which I and other Nigerian fellows on the the fellowship programme got our visas to travel to South Africa, every indication is that the South Africans have upgraded their processing of visas as another lady noted in her own response to my piece.

    Unlike before, I don’t have to go the South African embassy to queue. All we did was submit our application through the VFS global Visa and Passport processing service and we got our visas in less than two weeks.

    Considering the status of the South African applicants and travel record in this case, I want to agree with another reader who said the problem could be more of incompetence and unnecessary bureaucracy by our officials and not retaliation for whatever South Africa must has done in the past. Why should the approval of the applications remain unattended to for weeks when other nations have adopted easier procedures for processing visas.

    If we are to make progress we simply have to upgrade our processing of visas and stop denying the country of hosting important programmes which Nigerians and the country have a lot to benefit from.

    Undoubtedly, Nigeria and South Africa still have to improve on their status among countries that allows liberal access through visa. Only eleven African countries, excluding Nigeria and South Africa offer liberal access to African countries according to Gender Agenda Council on Africa. Nigeria is no 65 on the table, while South Africa is 74.

    Instead of indulging in any retaliatory measures over visas, it’s time to change the narrative as one those unable to get the visa said and put pressure on the two countries and others to be true brothers and sisters in all ramifications.

    We can’t be be going through all kinds of hassles to get visas to Europe and America and be still be subjected to same experience in the continent.

  • 2012 and 2016

    2012 and 2016

    It should have been clear to the Nigeria Labour Congress’ (NLC) leaders who called for strike last week that the call was going to end in the fiasco that it did if only they had not luxuriated in self delusion. As a matter of fact, when I was coming to the office on Tuesday, I listened to a radio programme during which the presenter asked listeners to respond to the question of whether they wanted a reversal of fuel price to N86.50 or whether they agreed with the new price of N145 per litre. The responses from majority of the respondents convinced me that if those views represented the aggregate views of Nigerians, then, the strike had failed even before it started. The respondents acknowledged that it was not easy to buy fuel at the new price but then, they could not see an alternative, and that they preferred that if the new price regime would end the queues at the filling stations! When I got to the office, I told some of my colleagues that the NLC had to be careful about this strike because its leaders might sooner than later realise that they were on their own.

    Nigeria has had fuel price increase twice between January 2012 and now.  The 2012 protests took place during the Goodluck Jonathan administration; indeed, about seven months after the president’s inauguration. The second was on May 17, 2016, under the watch of incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari. If the 2012 fuel price hike was greeted by successful nationwide protests when petrol price was increased from N65 to N141 before massive protests forced government to reduce it to N97 per litre, which was reduced to N87 again in the tail end of the Jonathan government (following outcries by Nigerians that this should be a natural consequence of the fall in crude prices), how come the 2016 hike did not witness such protests? The answer is simple: the two fuel price increases were not exactly the same, in spite of the sharp increase from N86.50 to N145 per litre of 2016. Unless the price is reviewed downwards (and depending on the margin); it would be the most audacious fuel price increase in the country’s history.

    Unfortunately, some people have been trying to compare both, which is like comparing apple with bitter kola. It is based on this assumed similarity that they are asking questions as to why the protest and strike called by the NLC flopped now whereas it succeeded in 2012. In other words, they are impugning political or other ulterior motives into the issue, which is not exactly so. My answer to the question is to ask those who are so aggrieved that the opposition organised successful strike and protests in 2012 whereas the same was impossible in 2016 to organise their own rallies and protests, seeing that the one called by Labour had hit the rocks. Here, I am talking particularly about the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) members who are now supposed to be the opposition. There could not have been any better popularity contest than that, instead of bemoaning the failure of an ill-fated strike.

    Was Buhari responsible for the inability of the NLC to call its own members out for strike? It was such a pathetic story to read that Labour leaders were going from office to office to drive people out to protest. This immediately reminded me of the saying that when a king begins to remind his subjects that he is still their king, then that king is in trouble!

    Without doubt, the government’s decision is painful. But, like many of the respondents to the radio programme that I mentioned earlier, it is a better alternative to sleeping at filling stations to buy fuel. I have had cause to mention it on this page that I spent hours at filling stations, waking up to queue for fuel as early as 4.00. a.m. sometimes and not leaving until 9.00 a.m. There was a day I waited till after one in the afternoon from around 5.30 a.m. without getting petrol to buy. So, for how long would one continue to do that? It may appear harmless but one is doing a great harm to one’s system gradually. The fact is, I always felt like I lost some blood whenever I bought petrol at N140 or N150 before the increase. I felt the pinch!

    But it would be unfair to blame President  Buhari for the problem. And I think this was why many Nigerians decided not to heed Labour’s call for strike or protest. This is aside the fact that many Nigerians too are beginning to see the Labour union as a platform by some people to make money for themselves, at the expense of usually unsuspecting (but now suspecting) Nigerians. There is this joke we crack here in the southwest (Nigeria) about a particular town in the region where we had thought there were too many monkeys  (obo), or fools, to be precise, in those days. But today, the last ‘monkey’ (fool) there is riding exotic jeeps! So, let no one call dog monkey for us again! I wish our Labour leaders had listened to that radio programme because these were some of the points mentioned there!

    It is sad that Labour leaders here still think that strike should be the first resort to arm-twist the government. It is sadder still that the Labour leaders think Nigerians are robots that are incapable of independent reasoning to take rational decisions. Or that Nigerians will always troop out to protest simply because some people in the name of Labour leaders asked them to do so. How come the same Labour that has not been able to cripple state governments owing its members months of salary arrears suddenly think they have to vent their spleen on Buhari, because, that, to me, is what their call for strike over the fuel price increase amounted to. That is if it was not a protest being influenced from some other quarters, which had sufficiently lost credibility to the point that it had to look for someone else to fight its proxy war.

    Where was Labour when the country’s treasury was being looted? Did they not know that someone, including their members, would pay for that sometime later? Or, are the Labour leaders not taken aback by the disclosures being made on the $15billion arms funds scandal? If Labour wants Nigerians to come out to protest and expect to get result, it should do so with convincing argument. No one should compare 2012 fuel price increase with that of 2016. They are two different scenarios. In 2012, Nigeria was selling crude for about $112 per barrel. Today, it goes for less than $45; we should not forget that early in the year the price hit a rock-bottom low of $31 per barrel. Worse is the fact that we cannot sell as much as we did in 2012 because of the activities of militants. If crude is Nigeria’s major revenue earner, it should occur to the rational that our income would be affected, and, by extension, our ability to finance our imports, fuel inclusive.

    Former President Jonathan in the aftermath of the 2012 fuel riots promised to deliver four Greenfield refineries; he did not deliver one until he was voted out three years after. Does Labour not know that our salvation is in local refining of petroleum products? For Nigeria to have contemplated deregulation along the Jonathan paradigm was suicidal. It was like telling God that He made a mistake by giving us crude oil. Surely, God could not have given us crude if He wanted us to be importing petrol? Yet, it is not on record anywhere that Labour organised any earth-shaking protest or strike to force the hands of Jonathan to build the refineries he himself promised. Even if the uninitiated are trying to compare the 2012 fuel crisis with this year’s, one expected those who should know to enlighten them; not compound the situation.

    For the first time in decades, a government has come, that may not be doing much generally yet, but is at least looking in the direction of getting more refineries in the country and as well make existing ones to work. Now, Labour that has not asked questions these past decades is asking that same government that is barely one year in office to keep funding imported fuel when it is obvious the means is no longer there. Haba!

    To be sure, one should be unhappy about this development where Labour is gradually becoming a toothless bulldog because it is dangerous. The beauty of democracy is in the checks and balances inherent in it. A strong opposition is sine qua non in a democracy to serve as bulwark for the people. That vacuum ought to be filled by the PDP, the immediate past ruling party. Unfortunately, the party has not been able to find its bearing since its defeat in the presidential election last year. In the absence of a strong political party to play the role of opposition, one can look up to Labour to take that responsibility. Here again, the NLC in particular has become a bundle of disappointment. With two factions taking two opposing sides on the fuel price hike, it should have dawned on the NLC leadership that the congress was too fragmented to win the ‘war’ or speak with one voice on the fuel price hike. That was another reason the congress was humiliated when it called for strike with only an insignificant number of workers complying.

    Our Labour leaders would do well to avail themselves of the soft landing being provided for them to save face, lest they completely demystify themselves. And introspect.

  • A diplomatic kerfuffle from Britain

    A diplomatic kerfuffle from Britain

    it feels like the unkindest cut of all. Many fair-minded Nigerians are aghast. To be sure, the odd political tiff, the occasional diplomatic shindig, is not unusual between a former colony and its former colonial masters. It is in the nature of this thing called international politics. In international relations, there are no permanent coalitions only permanent collusions. A nation is on its own and must fend for itself.

    But even then, there are periods when the handshake goes beyond the elbow, particularly after persistent signals of irritation and disgust.  Coming so soon after The Economist, the influential London magazine, dismissed Nigeria’s former ruler, Goodluck Jonathan, as “an ineffectual buffoon”, this week’s sharp putdown of the nation as “fantastically corrupt” by David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, shows how low our stock has fallen with our former colonial masters.

    The language of diplomacy, not to talk of global statesmanship, is usually polite and coolly understated. But there are moments when the telling tease, the friendly tick off, gives way to the sledge hammer, the severe bareknuckle rap. When a European diplomat to the court of the Russian Czars was asked what he thought the Russians did best, he hesitated for a while and then grunted: “They steal!” General Alexander Haig, an American Secretary of State, once famously dismissed Lord Peter Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, as a “duplicitous bastard”.

    Phew!!! Snooper’s favourite diplomatic putdown is possibly apocryphal. It was alleged that when a serving American diplomat in Karachi finally met the reclusive, dowdy and unprepossessing spouse of the general who executedZulfikar Ali Bhutto, he crowed: “No wonder, he screws the country instead!!!” Give it at least to Nigeria’s military and civilian rulers, most, if not all of their wives, could have come straight out of a beauty pageant.

    Still, it is important for Nigerians and the policy makers not to allow the import and real message of Cameron’s scarifying shellacking to be lost in the thicket of national displeasure and bitter disappointment. President MohammaduBuhari should be commended for rising heroically to the bait with his barbed retort. Coming on the eve of an official visit to Britain, the insult was in your face, an ego-deflating psychological offensive calculated to give maximum offence.

    To be adjudged corrupt is one thing, but to be condemned as “fantastically corrupt” is not a funny matter at all. It connotes gravity-defying sleaze and irredeemable muck; a world-historic despoliation that is beyond the realm of actual reality; a fairy tale phantasmagoria of stealing which calls into question the very notion of national sanity.

    The Brits are known as the masters of the wry understatement, not given to hyperactive hyperbole. But they are also deadly past masters of the rapier thrust in close diplomatic encounters. That their current leader should reach for this extreme metaphor to describe Nigeria ought to be a cause for national anxiety.  If this is the way we are perceived by the outside world, then God helps the nation in the coming years.

    The fact that no retraction was given and none was forthcoming despite General Buhari’s aura of incorruptibility and immaculate integrity shows that Britain means business. Indeed if anything the fact that usual diplomatic gnomes from the storied catacombs of Whitehall insisted that there was nothing to add or remove is indicative of how the western world might have lost patience with this gifted but dysfunctional nation.

    Another way of looking at this is to view it as a typical relapse of a hard pressed Tory government to the old infamous image of the nasty Tory notorious for their lack of civic and cultural compassion and empathy for embattled people. It is this trait that often turns the Conservative Party to a political pariah in most of Northern England, Scotland and among coloured people in Britain.

    Yet when all is said, we need to ask ourselves whether we didn’t bring this historic shame on our own head. Each new day brings such horrid tales of looting that the nation itself has become scandal-fatigued. You begin to wonder whether these people are human-beings at all. The daily tales are so outlandish that you wonder whether this is a nation at all or some armed robbers’ paradise straight out of the most macabre of malignant fiction.

    This is the burden of shame in a nation crying for some catharsis. We do not know what information the British government have on us. But so far it seems they are not impressed by the efforts to cleanse and sanitize the system. It is possible that they feel it is too personalized for their liking and smacks of the loss of institutional ballast.

    But it is also possibly an attempt to arm twist theBuhari administration and makeit amenable to western bidding. The sudden and precipitate capitulation of the Nigerian authorities to the forces of deregulation after months of stiff resistance is an indication of a well-coordinated political psych-op. If General Buhari is unable to withstand these forces, and if he is unwilling to call out for assistance, the situation may be more scary than one had imagined.

    To those from whom much has been taken in the course of an unequal exchange lasting a millennium, there ought to be some charity and generosity of spirit. Britain should not join the league of Nigerian tormentors, or at least should be seen to be resisting the temptation to do so. Apart from being occasionally politically unhelpful in our hour of political distress such as during the June 12 debacle, it has found it economically lucrative to serve as a haven for stolen patrimony from Nigeria and a smiling paradise for Nigerian economic miscreants.

    This is not how a parent colony should treat its colonial offspring that it ought to nurture out of protracted teething troubles. Yet despite the infractions, most Nigerians retain a certain fondness and affection for the parent country. It remains our preferred destination and our first port of call whenever the global wanderlust beckons. Despite adopting the presidential system of governance, the brilliant jousting, the cut and thrust of British parliamentary system, are a source of eternal fascination and admiration for many Nigerian political pundits.

    While it is true that a section of the British ruling class exhibits a sweet tooth for filthy lucre, Nigerians always applaud when other British institutions, particularly an upright judiciary, a stringent investigative body and a truly independent press, rise to the occasion in a redemptive rally. This is the hallmark of a nation that truly functions. When one national institution stumbles and falters, others cover for the loss and lapses.

    Britain should not always seek to tie its former colonies to its political and economic apron strings. This is historically counter-productive and against the longer term interests of the parent-nation. Were the great American founding fathers to listen to Great Britain and remain a vassal and underling of the old empire, it would have been impossible for the new nation, bursting with fresh and dynamic energies, to strike out in a bold and innovative direction.

    Were this to be so, and without the help of this new gargantuan nation and bedrock of liberal democracy, it is quite feasible that Britain would have gone under from the fascist sledge hammer of the German military machine. America came on the world scene precisely at the moment when the liberal democratic project needed to be re-imagined and re-envisioned on a grand and grandiose scale despite the great and roiling internal contradictions of America itself. This was conceptually beyond empire hallucinations.

    Ironically, the only other nation that rallied against the German onslaught and the destruction of the liberal democratic project was Soviet and socialist Russia whose emergence had earlier caused Britain so much trepidation and palpitation. The cunning of history is such that nations often mistake their natural friends and potential allies for enemies and automatic political adversaries.

    The Commandist economy made it possible for the Soviet production of war munitions to outstrip western efforts and the rallying ideology which made it possible for the Russian people to forge ahead as one people proved decisive in the battle for Stalingrad. After the Germans were turned back at this site of historic and horrific carnage, the end of Hitler’s monstrous Reich became a matter of time.

    For a people so deep and reflective in their ways, so alert to the contradictions of historical developments, it is quite bemusing that the British attitude to Nigeria since independence has been a classic example of how to sacrifice longer term interest and perspective for the sake of short-termism and immediate gratification.

    It is in Britain’s longer term interest to help nurture Nigeria through its protracted adolescence, and to help the beleaguered nation achieve its manifest destiny as the Mecca for Black people. If Nigeria were to unravel, the humanitarian catastrophe would be unimaginable in its magnitude and seismic possibilities.  Everybody, including Great Britain, would be hurt.

    It is only those with a misbegotten and incurably racist mind-set who cannot imagine a prosperous and democratically vibrant Nigeria one day coming to the aid of the parent colony. For now, it is not only strategically expedient for Britain to help Nigeria overcome its cripplinglimitations, it is also politically rational to do so. A crumbling Nigeria is a death sentence for so many.

    In this diplomatic duel between colonial father and son, the son appears to trump the father despite being fatally wounded. It is a profound irony that it is the man with the military background famously challenged in the department of verbal eloquence who has carried day with the political cogency of his response and its higher moral clarity and authority.

    General Buhari is right.Nigeria does not demand an apology or retraction from Britain. A receiver of stolen goods is also morally compromised. What Nigeria demands from Britain is the repatriation of its stolen patrimony with or without apologies. A father must not be seen helping to rob his own child however profligate and irresponsible the son appears to be. Even in the amoral world of international politics and diplomacy, this is quite a crushing ethical burden.

  • What a shame

    By the last week of this month, I and some other Nigerian journalists should have played host to some colleagues from South Africa and Kenya at a media fellowship seminar.

    The Lagos seminar is supposed to be the class three of the programme following the first in South Africa and second in Kenya. The South Africa seminar was good, Kenya was better and Nigeria was supposed to be the best. Unfortunately, there will be no seminar in Lagos as earlier scheduled.

    Instead of the Lagos seminar, which our colleagues from Kenya and South Africa have looked forward to, we all are flying to Kigali, Rwanda, for no other reason than the inability of the organisers, based in South Africa and fellows from the country to get visas to travel to Nigeria.

    While the Kenyans can easily get visas ahead of their trip or on arrival in Nigeria, those from South Africa have applied for visas for months without approval earlier enough to ensure that the meeting holds in Nigeria.

    To ensure that the seminar holds in Nigeria like it did in South Africa and Kenya, everything possible have been done to get the officials that could hasten the issuance of the visa without success.

    I understand the need for necessary immigration procedures to be followed in issuance of visas, but I don’t know why it should be so difficult for South Africans to get Nigerian visas when two sets of Nigerian fellows on the programme got South Africa visas in less than two weeks.

    I submitted my application for visa to attend the seminar in South Africa in Lagos last year and got it within a week. I was not interviewed and was not asked for any extra ordinary document apart from the letter of invitation and basic papers.

    Considering the status of the South African applicants for the visas, there is no justifiable reason why processing of their applications should take so long that the organisers had no choice than to shift the venue of the seminar to Kigali.

    I should not have been surprised that applicants for Nigerian visas go through lots of unnecessary hassles and bureaucracy following my futile attempt to assist two American journalists based in South Africa and Kenya to obtain visas to attend the inauguration of the new administration, last May.

    After months of not getting response to their applications, they contacted me to help with contacting the officers at the Ministry of Information who they have been told needed to approve their request.

    I did my best and reached out to top government officials and despite their intervention the visas were not issued. One of them had to resort to applying for tourist visa to visit the country after the inauguration.

    Concerning the aborted Nigeria seminar, I can imagine the disappointment of the organisers and participants about our immigration policy and bureaucracy. The seminar is yet another lost opportunity, for no good reason, to showcase Nigeria.

    At the Kenya seminar, I remember the excitement of some participants about coming to Lagos. They were looking forward to seeing some of the places and people they have heard a lot about: The Lagoon, the clubs, Nollywood and many more. Our loss is Rwanda’s gain in many ways considering how much would have been spent by the organisers to host the seminar.

    I’m sure the country would have missed the opportunity to host other programmes due to immigration issues like in the case of the Lagos media fellowship seminar.

    It is high time we got our immigration service to improve on their operation to enhance efficient processing of visa applications like other countries.

    To enhance better unity on the continent, more bilateral agreements that allow for issuance of visas at points of entry should be signed. It is bad that in some cases, it is easier to get visas to some developed nations than within the continent.

     

  • R.I.P. fuel subsidy

    R.I.P. fuel subsidy

    But can Buhari handle this?

    At long last, the Federal Government last Wednesday summed up courage to remove petrol subsidy which has remained contentious over the decades. Although Vice President Yemi Osinbajo tried to explain the new pump price of petrol away as the result of scarce foreign exchange, what is evident is that, with effect from that day, a new petrol price of between N135 and N145 per litre was announced, up from N86 for Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) mega stations, and N86.50 for independent marketers. Predictably, Nigerians will protest the development, which, really, is about the most audacious in the history of fuel price increase in the country. But, how far the protests would go we can’t tell yet.

    Minister of State for Petroleum Resources and Group Managing Director, NNPC, Dr Ibe Kachikwu, had earlier said this truth that government cannot afford the foreign exchange to sustain it. I had always known this was the issue a long time ago, even when the minister kept promising that fuel supply would stabilise in April, May, or whatever. That was why I said in one of my write-ups that the NNPC was being economical with the truth as usual whenever it said certain cargoes loaded with fuel were at the ports or would soon arrive the ports to take the fuel queues away. The same way I felt anytime they rationalised the scarcity by alluding to smuggling. With the kind of marketers that we have, smuggling could not have been ruled out; but that could not have sufficiently explained the scope of the scarcity. At any rate, how many petrol tankers were they able to catch, if the smuggling theory was that strong?

    I knew danger loomed when crude prices began to rise again about two weeks ago. And that is the tragedy of the Nigerian situation. While people in other crude oil-producing nations were jubilating, Nigerians would be sad because that means more burden for them since they rely on imported petrol. Indeed, last week when I advised that labour would do well by insisting on good governance always rather than keep asking for new minimum wage every five years simply because that is what the law says; I stopped short of saying that fuel prices would soon go up but that the government would still meet with the trade unions after that to fashion out a new minimum wage as proposed by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC). This is despite the fact that many state governments cannot even pay the present N18,000 minimum wage.  As I said then, government would find wage review more convenient than workers demanding good governance. The stage appears set for that.

    But what we are paying for now is the failure, incompetence and corruption of past governments that did nothing about local refineries; they were hell-bent on liberalisation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry on the wrong template of importation because of the fraud that the system engendered. If Labour and the civil society including the media had spoken with one voice, insisting that the previous governments be more responsible, perhaps we would not be where we are now. We would have had some functional refineries, for instance. The Jonathan government promised four Greenfield refineries, it did not even turn the sod of one three years after the promise was made. Yet, not many people raised their voice against the irresponsible manner the country was run then. Here we are, with Labour now threatening that government must revert to the old fuel price. Perhaps if we had reacted appropriately to bad governance in the past, we would have been able to jail one or two oil barons who unjustifiably collected subsidy, thereby sending the appropriate message to others with itchy palms.

    Now, the government says it does not have foreign exchange to keep importing fuel and has therefore asked anyone interested in the business to bring it in. All the government would do is ensure the importers do not sell beyond the allowed margin and, secondly, that they do not bring in sub-standard fuel. With marketers now having to source their foreign exchange themselves, this should free some forex for other uses and even help boost the strength of the Naira. That, however, is, other things being equal. In Nigeria, other things are hardly ever equal. This is why the government should not start celebrating that it would save more forex now if its decision to remove subsidy completely scales through. There must be a conscious attempt to scale down on irrelevancies so that we do not lose the forex saved on fuel import to luxury items for our lawmakers and other politicians, especially.

    It is also because we are in a country where things don’t come out as planned that I do not agree with Dr Kachikwu’s optimism that fuel prices would go down in about six months’ time just because anyone interested in bringing in fuel can now do so. The minister ought to know that things don’t work like that in Nigeria. Moreover, Dr Kachikwu is talking as if he or Nigeria is in control of the international crude market. Suppose crude prices suddenly jump to about $70 per barrel, would that optimism still stand?

    The Buhari government has its job cut out for it. Unless it fashions out ways to protect Nigerians, what we might have at the end of the day is a situation where the people will be the ones to be paying the ‘transferred subsidy’ henceforth. People who have been used to subsidy without delivering products will not want to see that honeymoon come to an end. They cannot be relied on to be fair to Nigerians.

    Therefore, whatever angry reactions that trail the subsidy withdrawal, the government will do well to understand because the average Nigerian does not know his contribution to the problem that he now has to pay for while those who caused the problem are decorated with national awards. Another good reason why Buhari should bear with Nigerians who might protest the development is because all governments will always claim to be doing everything in the interest of the people. The Babangida government, the Abacha government, and even the Jonathan government that we knew the kind of stealing that eyes have not seen took place under the president’s watch claimed it was working for Nigerians. This is why Buhari has to be careful in his reaction to the protests that might follow the decision. Even if the government is able to get away with it, he should realise that a lot of his goodwill would have been invested. And, since goodwill is like deposit in the bank, the more you withdraw without depositing, the less your balance. So, the subsidy withdrawal must bear fruit.

    Buhari’s problems would have been minimal if only his government had been able to chart a reassuring path towards solving any of the country’s multifarious problems. Here, one is not talking of quick fixes but at least enunciation of policies that can rekindle hope that there will be light at the end of the tunnel. This has been so since creation. It is what people see that they believe.“Except you see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”, so says the Bible. The fact is; Nigerians are not happy that it took him six months to appoint ministers; many are not happy too that the budget is just kicking off in the middle of the second quarter. Indeed, the anger of many is that the government is acting as if it is unaware that it has a four-year mandate, out of which one year is almost gone.

    What the government should do now is to treat setting up of more refineries at home as an emergency because that is the long-term solution to the perennial fuel scarcity. Already, the government appears to be doing something in this direction; it should not rest on its oars. As a matter of fact, President Buhari must insist on being updated on this weekly to be sure of the progress in that direction. The present government’s promise should not be like Dr Jonathan’s Green field refineries that never came until the former president himself was rendered jobless.

    As a corollary, the government must come up with a new and effective policy to address the question of militants vandalising pipelines. We have come a long way on this and it is no longer acceptable that government would tell us it has repaired pipelines with billions today only for militants to damage it again tomorrow. This is important because even if new refineries come on board and we have not successfully dealt with the pipeline vandals’ challenge, it would be like the power sector where we do not have gas for the same reason. Today, we would be able to pass crude oil through the pipelines; tomorrow we would not.

    Excuses would no longer do. It is the duty of government to secure its jugular. There must be modern ways of doing this because if we don’t check it now, we may discover that pipeline vandalism too, like Boko Haram, has become another cash cow. That is, if it has not, already.

     

  • Nigeria, corruption and British hyperbole

    Nigeria, corruption and British hyperbole

    REACTIONS to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s execrable putdown of Nigeria as a ‘fantastically corrupt’ country, ‘probably one of the two most corrupt in the world’, have been split virtually 50-50. It is not known how the Nigerian federal cabinet would vote had the matter been put before them for consideration, but between President Muhammadu Buhari and one of his spokesmen, Garba Shehu, the voting was amusingly also 50-50, with the president lining behind the condescending Mr Cameron, and Mallam Shehu extenuating the British hyperbole and feigning some excuses. Mr Cameron is generally voluble. Before the Queen on the day he broadsided Nigeria, with Afghanistan in tow, he was uninhibited. Indeed, he seemed to exult that since Nigeria had a global reputation for corruption, the Nigerian leader’s presence in the anti-corruption summit he was hosting lent credibility and gravitas to the coalition meeting.

    A mortified Mallam Shehu thought the Cameron viewpoint took no cognisance of recent developments in Nigeria. The British prime minister had an old, abhorrent snapshot of the country, the presidential spokesman whined, one completely oblivious of the gains the Buhari presidency had made in the unsparing fight against corruption. The presidential spokesman took umbrage gingerly, perhaps because he was unsure how the president would react, or because he did not want to offend their host. The president was not incommoded at all by the Cameron insult. Asked by reporters last Wednesday at a Commonwealth event in London whether he objected to what many deemed as an unprovoked and unmitigated insult, the president scoffed at the utility of an apology. What he needed, he said dryly, was for Britain and other countries which had served as receivers of stolen money to quickly return the loot hidden in their vaults.

    Many Nigerians were baffled by their president’s nonchalant view of Mr Cameron’s brazen diplomatic faux pas. But other Nigerians, a significant number it seems, lauded the president’s honesty and pragmatism. Nigeria’s corruption, the latter group said, was not hidden and had still not been extirpated, so why deny the obvious? What, however, miffed the first group was the timing of the Cameron putdown, the fact that Nigeria was their guest, and the apparent but superficial differentiation between the Nigerian president and his country. The president ought to be keenly aware of the implication of the insult, whether it seemed to mirror reality or not, the first group concluded.

    It is perhaps pointless engaging in the polemics of British corruption, either regarding their domestic and international politics, when they imposed colonial rule on hitherto sovereign nations and expropriated their resources, or even of the crass internal financial rigmarole within Britain itself. It will have no effect on the British, not to say the unflappable Mr Cameron, to remind them of the centuries of evil and chicaneries they authored and executed all over the world and in the British Isles, a reputation that moved Bernard Shaw to describe them as perfidious Albion. Given their insufferable airs, there is apparently no Shavian criticism of their insularity that will have any effect on them as a people and on their domestic and international politics.

    President Buhari needed to have an understanding of British history, a fundamental appreciation of Nigeria’s past, and a deep grounding in Nigeria’s national pride and essence to formulate a timeless response to Mr Cameron’s indiscretion. The British themselves knew their prime minister misspoke; the Queen, an exemplar of savoir-faire, also knew he overreached himself, and the world press, not to say the Afghans, had unmistakable impression of the prime minister’s uncivilised sarcasm. What is more, though he was a little restrained in responding to the insult, the president’s spokesman had no illusion that a devastating slur had been put on Nigeria’s image before the global community. But President Buhari not only corroborated Mr Cameron’s uncivil impression of Nigeria as a fantastically corrupt country, he even excused it and then impatiently waved it off.

    Mallam Shehu seemed relieved that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, drew a distinction between President Buhari and his country, Nigeria. The president too appeared to be mollified by that distinction, after all, he has dedicated himself to fighting the evil of corruption, an evil that is real, not ghostly. How the president and any other Nigerian could draw a distinction between the president and the country he presides over is hard to say. President Buhari is described everywhere he goes as President of Nigeria, not a president in vacuum. He cannot be right and his country wrong; he cannot exist outside of his country; and he has no reputation outside his country’s reputation. Mr Cameron’s hyperbole was not only unjust and presumptuous, it was an ignorant generalisation about a country where only a privileged but misguided few have caused all the trouble.

    This inability to draw the line properly also afflicted past Nigerian presidents, especially ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, who seemed to have begun the anomalous deconstruction of Nigeria from a proud and ambitious country to a troubled and groveling entity. President Buhari and his predecessors’ inability to draw a line in the right place, not to say the naivety of ignoring the wider implications of the self-immolation they engineered by their self-righteousness and lack of reflectiveness, have had far-reaching consequences. Rather than tighten domestic laws and reform the justice system, Chief Obasanjo set traps for corrupt Nigerians in foreign countries, especially Britain. Today, for the sins of a few Nigerians, a whole generation of Nigerians is suffering stigmatisation and mistreatment. To Chief Obasanjo and perhaps President Buhari, who has masterminded unending publicity on corruption, the pains Nigerians and Nigeria itself go through are not too stiff a price to pay.

    Image is everything, as producers of great brands know. This column has always insisted that there are far better and scientific step-by-step ways to fight societal ills than the impulsive manner Nigerian leaders embrace. In battles, great commanders are mindful not only of how the war is fought in line with the rules of war, they are also mindful of the structure of the anticipated peace. Chief Obasanjo behaved and fought in a manner that portrayed him as ignorant of the future. By refusing to tackle Mr Cameron’s perhaps facetious comment on Nigeria, President Buhari gave no indication he knew he was presiding over a country whose image and reputation he must guard with his life. There were doubtless some truths in the summation of Nigeria’s corruption, but there were also some brazen lies and silly generalisations. The Americans, the president will recollect, bequeathed to the world the aphorism by Stephen Decatur: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” It was the product of patient thinking about national ideals and the responsibility every patriot owes his country, from the president to the common man. The quote still rings inspiringly true today.

    While it is true that Nigeria needs its stolen money repatriated urgently, President Buhari brilliantly standing up to the British prime minister would not have undermined that cause. He did not need to demand an apology; he could have coaxed it from the British depending on the way he framed his umbrage. Had the British not treated Nigeria (and other colonies) condescendingly over the years, had Nigerian leaders not portrayed themselves as House Negroes, had Nigerian politicians not genuflected before whites all their boyhood and adult years, had Nigerian presidents not behaved euphorically when admitted to European and American State Houses, and had their minds not been affected by certain complexes for far too long, world leaders would think twice before stigmatising Nigeria. A president not only embodies everything about his country, his primary job is to defend it even when it is weak, and to project its vision and values when it is strong.

    Former Burkinabe leader, Thomas Sankara, had his faults, but being a gifted man full of finely honed ripostes, it is unthinkable he would have let the Cameron slight go unanswered in his brilliant, inimitable way, as Francois Mitterand found out to his extreme exasperation. It is too late for the remorseless Chief Obasanjo to remedy the offensive and almost uneducated manner he portrayed Nigeria abroad; No one could restrain or shush the late Umaru Yar’Adua from his euphoric admission of joy at visiting the United States White House; it was a hopeless effort to counsel Goodluck Jonathan to desist from humiliating Nigeria by his lethargy and his wife’s melodrama; and now the country is assailed by President Buhari’s misconception of how his private image intertwines with the country’s reputation. Perhaps it is time for a few professors of History to design a course to prickle the weariness of Nigerian leaders once they are elected, and excite them with the highest principles of nationalism. They need to be taught how to fight domestic causes without jeopardising their country’s external image. And they need to be imbued with such inner strength and mental vision that will make them sacrifice everything for the glory of motherland, even if it means losing a few foreign friends and forfeiting some of the funds looted by past leaders.