Category: Olakunle Abimbola

Doomsday as paradise?  That’s a violent contradiction in terms! 

Still, that is the permanent state of people who flee hard thinking to fantasize over fashionable — and inevitable — doom.  Sounds familiar?

That would appear the picture-perfect Nigeria.  Its thinkers.  Its media.  Its opposition figures. Its prophets-turned-cheap pundits, projecting permanent woes.  Its baleful social media warriors.  Its ethnic champions, posing as a reformative army. 

Its academics: bristling “strikers” sans thinkers.  Its lawyers, that bawl rights but crave chaos.  Its students, gangling simplistic soldiers of Aluta. Its retarded organized Labour, shackled to the past.  Not to talk of its much abused hoi polloi, primed to wallow in their misery, in utter hopelessness, by fake messiahs.

What an ensemble!  But no quake of sweet droning can make up for hard thinking!

But let’s break it down.  Do a content analysis of newspapers, radio talks and TV shows: Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan, Buhari and now Tinubu — and what do you find?

Hunger.  Squalor. Poverty. Joblessness. Hopelessness — all 25 years from 1999.

Yes, these are gripping drama of life on which the media must report.  And yes: the government always lags behind the people’s expectations.  In any case, democracy — as against junta rule — is celebrated oomph of pent-up pains.

Still, must negative hyperbole always rule the roost, because that sounds “woke” to milk ever-present misery for whatever motive?  Must our past always be adjudged better than our present — and are they really?

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Take Lagos.  In 1999, there was neither Blue nor Red rail.  Today, Blue is doing daily shuttles.  Red is rearing to go.  In 1999, there was no Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).  Today, BRT is routine.  In 1999, mountains of filth were all over.  Today, they are all vanished, converted to venture wealth, that feeds households, via sustainable jobs.

But more critically on the ideas plain: the punishing thinking and audacious vision, that fired all these policies and programmes, were all post-1999.

Now, beyond Lagos.  In 1999, there was no Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge rail.  No Wasimi rail wagon plant.  No 2nd Niger Bridge.  No Loko-Oweto Bridge over the River Benue.  No rice-milling plants that sprang up, recalling to life long-dead — and buried — local rice. 

And definitely no Dangote refinery, on which about everyone waits for petrol pump prices to crash: to tame inflation and reset the post-oil subsidy economy.

Sadly, all of these were visible post-2015 projects, though to be fair, the modernized rail network plans had their genesis at the tail-end of the Obasanjo Presidency. 

The PDP politicians of that era, though, were too besotted with naked power — PDP … PAWA! — and too comfy with easy money to bother about chores as infrastructure! Now, these blokes, supreme masters of cant, pose as romantic and new messiahs!

Now, you’d understand the government and the opposition playing cat and mouse.  That’s legitimate.  It comes with the democratic territory. 

But why would otherwise deep thinkers, within or outside the media, just latch on to this eternal, mournful hubbub, instead of engage, with rigour, those in power?

A simple answer.  These folks are no — and never can be — magicians.  Yet, they bitterly resent those in government for not snapping their fingers and conjuring magic! 

It’s the ancient Israelites again, screaming and screeching manna, yelling at Moses to take them back to slavery in Egypt!  And old Pharaohs, of the PDP era, wait with zest!

Now, a close x-ray of extant policies, vis-a-vis the present pains.

The Tinubu order must take it — “on its full chest”, as that cheeky, street pidgin lingo goes — that its policy choices are driving the current hardship in the land.

The twin-elephants in the room are clear: the removal of oil subsidy and the floating of the Naira.  But then, in the regnant economic thinking — or lack of it — which swarmed the 2023 presidential election campaigns, what superior alternatives were out there?

But instead of rigorously engaging the government on policy, and forcing it, by sheer force of reason, to adjust where necessary, everyone is clambering onto the easy lane of droning without end; and docking those in government as wicked and soulless.

Those who personalize policy are out of their depths — and that’s about everyone, emotive and loud.  Hardly a crime, though, except that that din distracts folks hard at work to get us out of the jam.

The other day, the Buhari order too was branded as wicked, incompetent, reckless, clueless and antediluvian — for taking loans!

Now, which one is more redemptive: Obasanjo forking out US$ 12 billion to buy “debt forgiveness”, rather than invest that cash in critical infrastructure that can be worked to pay off the debts and after, keep the economy humming? 

Or Buhari — “grow what you eat and eat what you grow” — getting those loans, in periods of harsh adversity, to kickstart that hard infrastructure fight-back?

Why, Chukwuma Soludo, Anambra governor, even blurted Buhari left behind a “dead” economy, near-exclusively on Buhari’s monetary policy.  But how so, for a government that rallied infrastructure and agriculture?  Amusing paradox, isn’t that?

But that’s the normal hubris of the economist.  As lawyers that brand only selves as “learned”, economists dismiss anyone that can’t boast their esoteric theories, as having sawdust for brain.  Hubris!

Sam Omatseye dubs Soludo “boom of the Anambra orchestra”.  Well, Dave Umahi was boom of no orchestra as Ebonyi governor.  Yet, in three years, he had transformed Abakaliki (read the entire Ebonyi) from a dusty destination to an emergent model state, rural and urban!  He’s an engineer who knows infrastructure is the prime driver of the economy.  Not an economist that fetishizes monetary policy!

In tactical error, many a high priest of the Tinubu cathedral had run with the Soludo quip, to sate the sentiment of the moment, demonize the immediate old order, and de-couple the Tinubu order from rational continuity in infrastructure and agriculture!

But lo! Even now, immediate relief winks from the long, hard work of the Buhari years — Dangote refinery for one!

Yet, the administration need not panic. 

Hardly any government, since 1999, had applied more critical thinking; and pushed out more creative ways to get us out of the hole: new super-highways, CNG to exclusively power the local economy, leaving refined petroleum to earn foreign exchange, consumer credit, student loans, and a reformed power market, though still work-in-progress — if only its driving minister, Bayo Adelabu, would think less of the cold market, but more of the people in whose veins blood flows.

As for anarchists looking toward Kenya for (mis)direction, let them have their say, even as the security agencies, eagle-eyed, put them in check. There’s no right without duty.

Kenya President William Ruto is intriguing, though.  Headless youths, on social media, powered him to power.  Same headless youths, on same social media, swear to push him from power.  And after then, what?

It’s sweet journey to nowhere, for modern governance is more grit, less caprice or magic.  One way or another, Kenya will be all right.

It’s time to challenge the Tinubu order with hard thinking, not distract it with ceaseless droning.  There is no quick fix anywhere!