The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Grim numbers, even grimmer pains

    Grim numbers, even grimmer pains

    Caveat Emptor: Ripples believes in the Buhari Presidency; and feels structural  pains are inevitable to wean us from the degeneracy of the Obasanjo-Jonathan Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) era.

    So, this is no “wailing wailer”, bleating uncouth and bad-tempered blues.

    Still, it is hard to gulp down the stiff increase of the pump price of petrol, from N86.50 to N145 a litre, despite the grim economics that has made it inevitable.

    It is fruitless arguing with the grim numbers, particularly coming from Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

    Sure, neither Mr. Osinbajo, nor his principal, President Muhammadu Buhari, is an economist, as their opposers would trumpet with glee.  Still, it is arguable if any pair, at the helm the Nigerian state, ever boasted a higher personal credibility rating.

    That high integrity quotient would appear to have helped to deflect part of the anger, and the sense of betrayal, not a few feel, with the hike.

    Still, neither the harsh numbers nor ode to integrity could take away the pains.  Just too many are hurting, simply because the pocket has simply vanished, under terrible economic blizzards!

    The starkness of the vice president’s jeremiad-by-numbers leaves everyone numb; even number by a combined presidential earnestness, never before marshalled in this land.

    The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) could supply no more than a half of local petrol consumption.  The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) doesn’t have the forex to feed oil marketers to import the balance.  In fact, by the Vee-Pee’s figures, CBN must fork out US $225million, from the US $550 million crude oil earnings in April, to do that!

    So, something just has to give — the exponential rise in price; and the marketers can source forex from outside CBN, and still cut a deal.

    “We expect,” the vice president reasoned, “that foreign exchange will be sourced at an average of about N285 to the Dollar, (current interbank rate) and importers will then be restricted to selling at a price between N135 and N145 per litre.”

    But the only hope, from the forlorn economic chambers, is the promise of local refining.

    The Vice President wagers: with more private refineries competing with NNPC’s, which capacity, even at optimal production, can only meet  two out of every five litres consumed, “our target is that, by fourth quarter of 2018, we should be producing 70 per cent [seven out of every 10 litres] of our fuel needs”.

    That sounds heart-warming, especially since the Dangote refinery is expected to come on stream, around that period too.

    But that is precisely the point.  The stiff hike is as much the removal of the much-ballyhooed “subsidy”, as it a stiff price to pay for President Olusegun Obasanjo’s wrong-headed energy policy of deregulation by importation.

    Unfortunately, the hapless people, eternal experimental guinea pigs, not the ever-preening Obasanjo, or the effete Goodluck  Jonathan Presidency, under which subsidy corruption careened beyond control, are paying this stiff price.

    Well, the Buhari government too pays part of it: branded deceitful, harsh and heartless, for bringing forth further pains on the people; and breaking faith with its pro-people “progressive” credo.

    So, if the people thunder, and the defensive government dither, for felt policy incoherence, you should understand the basis.

    If a defensive Vice President says it’s no subsidy removal but dire forex arithmetic; Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, says Nigeria is broke; other party chieftains celebrate the “removal of subsidy” and the capitulation of Labour, President Buhari himself maintains a loud silence, while the opposition mocks the Babel of voices around a funeral presidential quiet, it is simply because you don’t slap a child and expect it not to shriek!

    So, the shriek in the land is healthy.  It is from raw pain — after all, the stiff hike is a thunderous economic slap, from which many would not recover in a hurry!

    But the refinery bit nails the point — and points the way to new hope. Vice President Osinbajo reiterates the Buhari government’s commitment to local refining, eyeing no less than 70 per cent by 2018.

    That is a radical departure from the Obasanjo-Yar’Adua-Jonathan era, which magic formula was full downstream liberalization by importation.  True, these governments gave out licences for so-called Greenfield refineries.  But from their body language, you could tell: it was just justifying all righteousness — or, more appropriately, all unrighteousness!

    That was tragedy foretold — and the present crash of that mis-policy is clear evidence.

    But what if 100 per cent local refining is achieved, the excess is exported, but pump price still stays up?  That would be unlikely, for the production mix would have been without the transport cost of imported cargo.

    But even with that unlikely possibility, Nigeria would still have been better off.  Other things being equal, downstream petrochemical spin-offs would have delivered a far better deal for Nigerians in terms of jobs, a more grounded economy and other opportunities.

    See why the Obasanjo-era policy was hare-brained?

    But still, the troubling question: who pays for the pains for that policy wrong?

    Not the people alone!  The present government should bear part of it.  That is why the N58.5 a litre jack should have been shared between the government and the people, between now and 2018, when the projected substantial local refining target is attained.

    Another subsidy, did you gawk, now that “subsidy” is pure policy heresy?  Too bad!

    In any case, in a democracy, alternative views in public policy cannot be heresy.  Let’s just call it some “parting costs”: to ginger the government to aggressively implement its local refining policy; and to put the people on notice that full deregulation is nigh.

    Labour’s self-slaughter, on the altar of a rash strike?  The Labour aristocrats (to borrow the mighty tag of Tatalo Aremu, the formidable columnist of The Nation on Sunday) had it coming.

    But to celebrate the demise of Labour, just because of the cumulative errors of its leaders, is akin to abandoning the Presidency, simply because Goodluck Jonathan messed up, big time.  Dumb!

    A vibrant organized Labour is vital to democratic deepening, now that the leading opposition, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), appears still too dazed to play vibrant opposition, on reason, not hysteria.

    But beyond Labour’s gloom or glory, political scientists must worry about high capitalism, that flaunts the death of the compassionate state, as some regnant high philosophy.  Beyond corruption, that pretty much explains the demonization of subsidy.  It could have grave implication for capitalism and the state as we know it.

    If the current pricing regime stays — as it appears it would — it would have been due to the President’s perceived personal integrity, added with the Vice President’s candour; and to the economic structuralists, the prospects of local refining.

    It could well mark the president’s last point of fidelity with economically pressured Nigerians.

    If Buhari delivers on refineries, he would harvest reverence, bordering on idolatry.  But if he fails, his words would mean absolutely nothing to anyone.

    It’s a pretty huge gamble with his trademark integrity and honesty — even stiffer than the price hike.

    So, see why Buhari must deliver on local refining?

     

  • Labour’s teachable moment

    Labour’s teachable moment

    For Ayuba Wabba and company, last week’s fiasco must be something of a teachable moment. For a strike that was advertised as a Mother of Strikes, to say that it ended even before any shots were fired would pass for an understatement. It was simply a non-event.  Sunday’s announcement by the Nigeria Labour Congress “to suspend the strike with immediate effect” was for all intents and purposes, superfluous if not entirely face-saving.

    A revelation in labour’s vulnerability; its apparent disconnect and hence poor reading of the national mood; its fixations with old ways and means. Add these to an increasingly cynical and distrustful citizenry – what you get is a perfect recipe for a disastrous outing.  That was exactly what labour got.

    Looking back now, it seems doubtful that Wabba and company took time to read the mood of the people they elected to lead to battle. Had they taken the trouble, they would have realised how far the top rung of the body lagged behind their supposed followers – a case of the falcon being far too gone to hear the falconer.

    Of course, it wasn’t that Nigerians were not aware of how terribly bad things are at the time the federal government announced the new petrol price: the soar away inflation and shrinking real incomes, business foreclosures and the spate of layoffs as indeed the pervasive air of despondency that have reduced the Nigerian landscape to an outsized scrap-yard.

    The problem was the attempt by Labour to recreate 2012 #OccupyNigeria not minding that the terrains have changed. For much as the hike is no less burdensome than the one that provoked the 2012 protests that shook the Jonathan administration to its foundations, a number of intervening variables have since played out between then and now which should ordinarily dictate a more measured approach by Labour.

    First is the crash in the price of crude. At the current price of barely $40 a barrel for our crude, only labour can afford the luxury of pretending about what the grim numbers represent – which is quite unfortunate for a most enlightened body. In this, Nigerians would seem in better appreciation of the situation than labour would care to know.

    Like I noted severally on this page, the simple truth is that the country cannot afford the subsidy bill even if it wants to – much unlike 2012. Imagine the federation account being forced to shell out N1 trillion naira to fuel marketers to the defray cost-price differentials on petrol at a time some 27 states cannot pay wages of their workers! And to further imagine that that was what our activists wanted!

    The second is the context. Agreed, the Jonathan administration attempted to do exactly what the Buhari administration has just done but was frustrated by the 2012 Occupiers. I must confess that I have heard not a few leading commentators charge erstwhile protagonists of the movement with hypocrisy for not supporting the latest strike. Let me put it this way: When the contexts of both situations are factored in, the difference comes out stark clear.

    Nigerians may wish to recall that at the death of former President Umaru Yar’Adua in 2010, the entire annual subsidy bill was no more than N300 billion. Barely six months after President Jonathan took over, the bill shot up to a humonguous N1.9 trillion. In other words, consumption rose dramatically by more than a multiple of six under Jonathan!  That puzzle, unfortunately has remained unresolved till today. My understanding, ( and I am entitled to be sincerely wrong), is that the 2012 Occupiers didn’t risk lives and limbs because they loved subsidy anymore than the idea of shelling out billions of naira in subsidy payouts. It was not so much because they loathed the increasingly amorphous concept called deregulation; rather, it was to protest the licenced robbery that the payouts to Jonathan and Friends Inc. had become!

    By way of contrast, the issue with the Buhari administration is what to do with the subsidy baggage. Clearly, its earlier vacillation on the issue – in the face of the hard numbers – may have been unpardonable, what the administration cannot be accused of is juggling the figures. More importantly is that the administration did not provide a dime in the current budget for the subsidy. Of course, with fuel imports gulping 40 percent of the monthly import bills, and with the reserves barely able to cover four months of imports, only Labour can afford to live in the illusion that the situation was anything but desperate.

    No wonder Nigerians were more sympathetic to the federal government as against Labour that opted to live in denial. Moreover, for an industry that had for all practical purposes ‘self-regulated’, the charge by labour that the federal government sprang a “surprise” can only be described as amusing because the ‘prices’ had long been deregulated by the marketers across the federation – with perhaps the exception in Lagos and Abuja.

    Last week’s outing was therefore predictable.

    However, Labour may have lost the battle; the war far from over, has only just begun. To start with, a multiplicity of importers is not necessarily a guarantee that players will play by the rules. Trust our marketers weaned on the diet of entitlement, they will seek to abuse the system by all means fair and foul. For instance, contrary to earlier assurances that the marketers will use autonomous funds to bring in their products, the feelers are that they are already knocking on the federal government’s doors seeking forex from – you guessed right – official sources! And to imagine that the N145 per litre price agreed was based on autonomous funds rates! That’s how terrible the system has become. Vigilance, both on the part of labour and civil society as indeed the ordinary citizens, will certainly help in the days ahead.

    Secondly, it is time to do away with the current rent-riddled fuel pricing template in use. A starting point is to look at the countless charges on the template that tend to reward wastes and inefficiency. Labour, in may view, has the capacity to undertake this. One of the sore points on the template is the Petroleum Equalisation Funds which seeks to ensure price parity across the board. If you ask me – I’ll say that law has become anachronistic. It is most certainly incompatible with the current move to deregulate the sector. Labour will do well to make it one of the talking points of its negotiation with government if it truly seeks to address some of the distortions afflicting the industry.

    Last word: Was the schism within the labour movement part of its dialectics – a sort of inevitable moment of its own transition? Just wondering.

  • Before #OccupyNigeria II

    Before #OccupyNigeria II

    Moments after Nigeria Labour Congress and its allies served notice on the federal government to either revert to the pre-Wednesday price of N86.5 per litre or have a #OccupyNigeria on its hands, I went into the archives to fish out my earlier thought on the matter if only to demonstrate how very little has changed –in terms of the substance of the subject and citizens appreciation of the precarious times that the nation has found itself. The piece, published in November 24, 2015, titled – Subsidy- Time to let go, was itself an update of an earlier piece published on May 19, 2015. Never mind the well-worn fixations or the semantic exertions which they give rise, the issues have remained practically the same.

    Enjoy.

    “The fuel queues are back – as if you didn’t know that already. The tragedy isn’t just that OPEC’s one-time sixth largest exporter of crude has again suffered another crushing relapse of the familiar plague of dry pumps – no thanks to the feud between fuel importers and the finance ministry – it’s like the nation has come under a spell of some ancestral curses!

    Trust Nigerians for their inventiveness; guess they have since moved on while we are back to the same old wearisome arguments about whether or not the subsidy exists. Our go-go nature appears to have gotten the better of us. Majority – call it the silent ones if you like – it would appear, could no longer be bothered with either the economics or even the semantics of fuel subsidies, they have since swallowed the full pill of deregulation – this time through the back door. Scarcity or not, I know for a fact that you could purchase fuel in some stations in Lagos without as much as breaking a sweat – so long as you are willing to part with N140 for a litre in the deregulated market downtown! Seems one moment when Nigerians wouldn’t mind to cut their noses – even if temporarily – to get going!

    Truly, the subject of fuel subsidy never ceases to fascinate. As in the round leather game of football, it is one subject that every Kasali, Chinedu and Usman would claim, with some air of certainty, some degree of knowledge if not expertise. You know why? Everybody is involved – from the jerry-can clutching vulcanizer to the barber next door; what about the welder or even the ubiquitous taxi driver all of whom the liquid gold has come to mean the difference between life and death?

    Yes, everyone is involved.

    Agreed, subsidy is a touchy subject. I have seen otherwise brilliant minds relapse into some wild, witless garbage when the subject is fuel subsidy. Many would rather be politically correct than risk ruffling feathers. And so argument persists that simply because oil is of nature’s finest gift to us, we can continue to dispense with the niceties of economics!

    I have looked at the contending arguments; it seems to me that the difference between the most vociferous proponents of fuel subsidy removal and their opponents is actually more shadow than real substance! Forget what the marketers and their hordes of middlemen say; the truth is that they want the subsidy regime to continue; it is their surest route to unearned wealth. What about the bureaucrats, the men and women wielding awesome powers over our lives? It is their surest guarantee of raw, invisible power – without control. As one would imagine, the politicians want it for a different purpose; for them, it is a fascinating subject for politricking any day.

    Did I hear the “ogas at the top” describe the subsidy regime as “unsustainable”? What their lucre-addicted lordships meant to say is that they could do with more of freshly-minted wads in the piggy bank to do as they please.

    The irony of course is that a section of the hoi polloi actually believes the lie that the petrol and kerosene subsidy – together with its impregnable infrastructure of graft that services it – actually comes close to their share of the proverbial national cake! That for me is the most tragic part of the raging debate.

    Is there really a subsidy? I have heard the question over and over again. To the question I say – we wouldn’t be who we are if we are not found debating whether or not the weekend May 14 Platts reference price of $718.49 per metric tonne (that is N105.55 per litre) is real! Note that this is not yet reflective of distribution costs as well as the marketers’ margins!  With petrol price officially pegged at N87 per litre, the above should ordinarily solve the arithmetic.

    Next question – why can’t the federal government build new refineries? Or its variant – why can’t the government compel the International Companies (IOCs) to build refineries in the country? Or still, get the private sector to build new refineries? Good question – all of them!

    Let me proceed from the known to the unknown. Again, as if we don’t know, the reality is that OPEC’s leading crude oil exporter refines only a miniscule fraction of its domestic fuel needs. Daily requirement for petrol is said to range from 40-45 million litres daily of which the four refineries combined is said to deliver a miserable 10-15 percent. To bridge the gap, we rely on imports at deleterious costs to our foreign reserves and the larger national economy. From an ordinarily hefty subsidy bill of barely N250 billion in 2011; the nation has since the literally broken the banks – spending close to a trillion on kerosene and petrol alone annually!

    So why can’t the government build new refineries? The answer: the same reason the government is unable to bring back the national carrier; it’s the same argument about government’s inability to fix the multiplicity of our roads; the reason the power sector is considered as jinxed! I daresay here that the old cliché about the government not being good at business is true only to the extent that our government lacks both the means and the discipline to run a modern enterprise! The tiny Island country of Singapore is a living exception to that rule!

    As for getting the IOCs to build new refineries, it seems rather too easy to overlook the terrible effects of government’s meddlesomeness on the downstream sector. Does anyone still remember that the first refinery in the country was actually built not by government but by Shell? It seems aeons ago when the motorist in Lagos bought fuel at a different price from his compatriot in Maiduguri! That was when market ruled – long before our leaders pronounced that money was not our problem but how to spend it!

    To my main point. There comes a time in the life of a nation when citizens just have to make hard choices. The current season would appear such a time. The simple truth is that the nation cannot afford, even if it wants, to sustain the current regime of price support called subsidy. Something simply has to give. Moreover, I have stated elsewhere that the subsidy regime is unfair to the extent that the burden is regressive. In short, it is time to let go! Agreed, it is not the end; it’s one sure step on the path to dismantling the infrastructure of fraud currently sapping the nation’s vital juices. That done, with supporting policies, the goal of local refining might actually be closer than many would dare to imagine. I rise!”

    Need I say more?

  • Avengers, scavengers, disaster

    Avengers, scavengers, disaster

    Trouble sleep, Yanga go wake am, wetin e dey find o?
    Palaver, e de find; palaver, e go get … — Afrobeat King, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti

    When do “Avengers”, of felt injustices, become scavengers for trouble?

    When self-ruin and needless disaster beckon!

    That would appear the long and short of the latest unrest in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, with a group that calls itself the Avengers blowing up key economic infrastructure and getting a kick out of it.

    When the Avengers get kicked, as viciously as they are kicking — and enjoying it — now, what happens?

    Perhaps then, the one-shoe-fits-all human rights muses, the lucrative NGOs, their media siblings and allied romantics, conveniently dumb right now, would find their voice in a rush.

    Then, agitated and animated, lyrical and poetic, they would drone the alchemy and metaphysics of citizens’ rights, the manifest evil of a hard crackdown in a civil jurisdiction, and the bogey of “dictatorship” in a democracy!

    But who dictates what?  If the Avengers dictate, from the blues, unforced violence (like  “unforced errors” in tennis), should the state just buckle over and surrender its legitimate rights?

    Legitimate rights?  Yes.  This might sound trite but it bears restating.

    At the basis of the modern state and government, its chief agent, is the Social Contract.  That contract presumes everyone in a jurisdiction agreed to forgo parts of their rights to a central Leviathan, in exchange for general security.

    That Leviathan is the government. The jurisdiction is the state.  The contractees are the people.  So, between the people and trouble, the Leviathan interfaces as a shield.

    That is why the Police are there to protect the people from everyday criminals.  That is why too, the government usually has a standing army, to shield citizens from enemy bullet, in case of war.

    And that is why, by the way, the state has a monopoly of lawful force.  Anyone that contests such with the state strays into outlaw territory; and faces the full and devastating consequences.

    So, if a body that calls itself Niger Delta Avengers starts blowing up oil installations; and causing innocent citizens needless pains, sabotaging gas-powered electricity supply nationwide, it is infringing on the legitimate right of the state to care for other lawful citizens, who have committed no crime.

    Only a castrated state would take that lying low.  But then a state castrated, to the point of not imposing its will, is technically no state.

    So, beware of sowing the wind.  You just might reap the whirlwind!  That is what the so-called Avengers should take home — if they are not too far gone!

    Still, a state is inviolate only when it obeys its own laws.  If it does not, the cheated and infuriated may just risk taking up arms to contest its monopoly of legal coercion.  It is called loss of legitimacy.

    Somalia is the contemporary classic on this sad score, resulting in equal-opportunity anarchy.  The Somali government raped and raped its own laws until a virtually mono-ethnic state convulsed and collapsed under rival arms.

    Rwanda (which melted under a hideous genocide) and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (within which murderous ISIS fanatics now roam free), groaned under minority domination:  the Rwanda Tutsi dominating the majority Hutu; and the minority Sunni, the slightly majority Shiite.

    In pre-Civil War Nigeria (1960-1966), ethnic tension was it.  A so-called Igbo officers’ coup that toppled a corrupt civil order, led to ethnic triumphalism, which provoked the heinous Igbo pogrom in the North and a revenge coup and killings of Igbo officers in the Nigerian Army, which ignited Igbo insecurity and anger, and climaxed in the Civil War, and a defeated Biafra (1967-1970).

    Stretch this unfortunate history further and reach for the tail end of cruel military rule, and the unconscionable devastation of the Niger Delta; so much so that that region “died”, so the greedy oil hustlers, in cahoots with greedy elements of the Nigerian state, could live and wallow in conscienceless money.

    That was the moral justification for the first wave of Niger Delta militancy, which President Umaru Yar’Adua ended with the Amnesty Programme.  But that is if you discount the Isaac Adaka Boro 12- Day Revolution, which birthed on 23 February 1966, but collapsed 12 days later.

    Ironically, however, what Yar’Adua’s amnesty has delivered is stupendous wealth to the so-called militancy “generals” — smart alecks that milked their people’s collective misery for private treasure! —  with their obscene mansions scowling down at shanties; not a better deal for the majority, who still grind in pre-militancy penury!

    Indeed, the way these over-fed “generals” growled and barked of the Armageddon to come, should “our son”, Goodluck Jonathan, lose the presidential election, and how they would take “our oil”, you could feel their divine right of the minority, to trump the majority, in a democracy!

    Gentlemen, that Armageddon is here!

    Still, if a few rogue elements could launch an Armageddon, why not a counter-Armageddon from the state — if only to assert itself, and wean these criminals from their grand delusion?

    The so-called return of Niger Delta militancy, through the so-called Avengers, is history repeating itself as farce.  That is clear from their rather infantile charter of demands.

    But the Avengers are only one side of that farcical coin.  The other side is Nnamdi Kanu and his Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) project.

    Kanu throatily campaigned for Jonathan, a sentiment awesomely popular in his native South East.  That is democracy.

    But when Jonathan lost, he launched his IPOB project, assured of the infinite gullibility of many a Nigerian — or, as he would prefer in his grand reverie, Biafran!  That is criminal mischief, bordering on treason.

    So, the difference between Kanu’s IPOB and the so-called Avengers: the one launched its own stampede very early; the other delayed its until now.  Talk of two sides of the same farce!

    Still, between history and farce is the cold motive.  Pray, if Biafra 1 went to war on the soulless Igbo pogrom, what excuse would Biafra 2, of Kanu’s IPOB, give?

    If Niger Delta Militancy 1, romanticized by the likes of the late Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, and given muscle by Tompolo, Asari Dokubo and co — a trio that by the way, bloated while their people wilted — what reason would the Avengers’ Niger Delta Militancy 2 give?

    That Goodluck Jonathan lost an election he lacked the numbers to win?

    And didn’t these blokes boast they would ground Nigeria should their own lose, even when clear Jonathan’s was fast becoming an undertaker presidency, by that government’s sheer incompetence and abominable corruption?

    In terms of equal opportunity justice and fairness, Nigeria is no model.  Almost every section of the country has its own grouse.

    But what concretely did Jonathan, Nigeria’s first minority president, do to forge structural corrections, along minority aspirations?  His election-eve Constitutional Conference?  That was a laughable Trojan horse!

    So, criminal bands playing to the gallery, hunting for personal fortune hidden behind collective good, are execrable.

    That is what the so-called Avengers epitomize — and they represent no one but their greedy selves!

    That is why the Nigerian state must assert itself, and spare no effort to bring these criminals to heel.

     

  • That infernal ‘subsidy’, again

    That infernal ‘subsidy’, again

    For the past 28 years or so, virtually every measure trumpeted as a solution to the instability in the supply and pricing of gasoline has turned out to be a gigantic swindle.

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

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

    What subsidy?

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

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

    They could provide no coherent answers

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

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

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

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

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

    And why make genuine, honest-to-goodness consumers pay for the sins of syndicated smugglers?

    Nor were they yet done.

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

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

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

    Whether framed as “correct pricing” or de-regulation or under any other label, this has been the standard litany, with a few variations here and there, whenever the government has needed to raise revenues during the last three decades.

    The more they cut the alleged subsidy, the more remains to be cut.  It reminded me of what they said of the whale found beached in Lagos in the early 6os that the more they hacked away at it, the more remained to be hacked.

    Gasoline pricing has been the first resort and quite often the only one. The “subsidy” has to be cut or abolished; if not the economy will collapse.  Humongous figures are conjured up as revenues that will accrue to the exchequer from cutting the subsidy.  Committees are set up to manage the cash inflow and to ensure it is put to the most judicious use, and palliatives to cushion the average person from comprehensive  price increases that will follow are announced.

    Those measures sprang more from panic than from sound reasoning.  Within a year, the “mass transit” buses running on subsidised fares vanish from the roads.  A striking project here, thriving scheme there, but much of the money goes the way of other state money — to satisfy the awoof proclivities of officials high and low and their confederates.

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

    Rather, the existing refineries are patched up to function fitfully at best, at costs that defy all reason.  Periodic Turn-Around Maintenance (TAM) gulps a huge fortune but the only thing that actually turns around is fortune of the contractors and the supervising officials.

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

    Organised labour and civil society rouse themselves, wowing that the cuts will not come to pass. The government says there is no going back.  The scene is set for a titanic encounter between an irresistible force and an immovable object.  Government yields a little ground, and so does organised labour and civil society. A prolonged crisis is averted, but the seed of future conflict continues to germinate, undisturbed, until the subsidy phantom stirs again.

    And it did just that last week, in an ambush that President Muhammadu Buhari sprang on the public.  Buhari had valiantly resisted all manner of pressures to devalue the Naira, saying it would inflict incalculable pain on the poor.  He had vowed to hold oil prices steady for the same reason, and had even cut prices in a surprising departure from the standard practice of his predecessors, and as a demonstration of his good faith.

    Then, without warning, without consultation, without provocation and apparently totally unmindful of the consequences, the government announced a more than 80 percent increase in the price of gasoline.

    Administration officials say the increase has nothing to do with cutting the alleged subsidy but is being undertaken only as an effort to align the offshore price of the petroleum products, still largely imported, with the official onshore price. Just another step in the “de-regulation” of the downstream sector, they say.

    At N145 per litre, the new price, though much higher than the old price of N86.50k per litre, is a bargain compared with the N200 –N300 per litre that desperate consumers were willing to shell out just several weeks ago to obtain gasoline.  But nothing had prepared them for the latest increase. Importers and retailers on the other hand have got so used to gouging the public that they are loath to accept the new price regime.

    In the end, the government seems to have managed to wrong all parties at once.  It will probably wriggle out of this one, but at a high cost in public goodwill.  The importers and retailers will regroup and look after themselves.

    But this ambuscade is bound, at least in the short term, to vitiate the attentive public’s waning faith in the administration’s credibility, its avowed intentions and its ability to translate them into the beneficent change on which its election campaign was predicated.

  • Herdsmen and specialists

    If this headline echoes Wole Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists, fulsome apologies to Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature.

    Still, can you differentiate the “sane” and the “insane” between these two : the homicidal herdsmen, a band of criminals that must be condemned by all;  or the torrent of no less irrational reactions, to this national tragedy of monumental proportions?

    The grisly murders, on an impunity beyond scale, and the grim reactions, on an emotiveness beyond measure, speak of equal-opportunity insanity, in a vast, vast sanatorium.

    Yet, the answer to the problem is simple: crime and punishment, to borrow the title of Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic.  The state must punish every crime.  When it fails, it fosters the impunity to commit more.

    That is the long and short of the herdsmen madness.  The moment the Nigerian state cracks down, and brings to book the criminals, this crime, of wilful murder of innocent citizens, would vanish.

    The killer herdsmen are mad — and it wouldn’t matter whether they were Fulani, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Itsekiri, Ijaw or Berom.  However, a clinical execution of the law will, posthaste, cure them of their madness.

    But so too are the specialists (again, apologies to Prof. Soyinka) — the Fulani of the cattle herding lobby, that tend to push odious cultural chauvinism, if not outright imperialism; and rationalize the wilful massacre of innocent citizens, simply because the killers are kith-and-kin.  Such obduracy hardly edifies their civilisation.

    No less so are the other specialists — Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw, Edo, etc, with a shrill media: the southern cauldron seething with understandable rage and hurt, given the gruesome and soulless killings.

    But what is not understandable — nay, should be intolerable if the motive is to solve the problem — is the emotive criminalization of every Fulani, starting with the president of the Federal Republic; and the demonization of Fulani culture, on account of a few Fulani criminals.

    Trading mutual hurt and exchanging mutual insults would grab sensational headlines.  Pushing savage reprisals would milk explosive passion, guaranteed to end in mutual ruin.  But  to solve the problem, just go after and punish the criminals.

    Crime, after all, has no ethnic coloration!

    Indeed, it is commonsense to de-ethicize criminality: you don’t attack a person’s treasured essence, and yet expect that person to listen to you.

    Take President Muhammadu Buhari.  Criminals, allegedly of Fulani stock, have gone on a binge of killings — utterly condemnable and despicable.

    But then, the mass anger in the land illogically suggests the killings are a Fulani project, to which the first citizen may well be complicit!  If a man is unfairly tried and practically found guilty, how would he be primed to do his duty by law?  And that job he must do, if the menace must vanish!

    Besides, would any Nigerian leader, past or present, merrily hug an unfair slur on the essence he holds dear?

    Obafemi Awolowo?  Awo declared he was Yoruba first before he was Nigerian.  So, if you attack his Yoruba essence, you can predict how far you would go with him.

    Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa?  The duo were, not unfairly, accused of being champions of northern interests — hardly illegitimate — to stave off southern domination at independence.  Therefore,  their northern core was manifest. Attack that, and you are almost always sure of a negative reaction.

    Nnamdi Azikiwe?  Zik was born in the North, of Igbo parentage, was a smooth and lovable “Lagos boy” for much of his adult life and was an unfazed champion of the “Nigerian”.  Yet, when broke out in 1967, and until Zik made a dramatic appearance in Lagos in 1969, he could not pull himself off the trauma of his Igbo people.

    Sure, Olusegun Obasanjo, in his Not My Will, mocked Zik’s alleged “descent”, in old age, from the Zik of Africa to the Owelle of Onitsha.  But with all due respect to the former president, that attack was offensive, immature and baseless. Zik followed a natural progression from cradle to grave, which neither diminished his “Nigerian-ness”, nor compromised his Igbo-ness.

    In other words, his Igbo nativity only complemented his Nigerian nationality.  That is how it should be.  The two need not be mutually exclusive.

    Obasanjo?  Perhaps only Chief Obasanjo would entertain that grand delusion: that his Nigerian-ness is everything; but his Yoruba-ness is nothing.  Yet, even Obasanjo, the ultra-nationalist, would appear to enjoy his bitter-sweet moniker of Ebora Owu!

    As Awo would say, you need to be first a good Yoruba man before you are a good Nigerian!

    But the point in all of these is simple: Nigerians, even in times of extreme national crisis, must learn to be cautious, polite and clear-headed.  The ethnic profiling of tarring everyone with the criminal brush of a few, only compounds the problem.  That is manifest in the herdsmen killings.

    The result is silly and over-generalized accusations — from the enraged; but equally asinine and bland rationalization of criminality, by victims of such ethnic profiling.  It is a shame.

    How much simpler would it have been, had crime been isolated and condemned by all!  How much simpler, had the ethnic bogey, by accusers and defenders, not cropped up, to create a needless but costly distraction!

    Still, it must be declared that this extreme reaction has resulted from a Nigerian state that has, for too long, abandoned its sacred duty of citizen security and protection.  That must stop.

    Besides, the notoriety and hostility that have greeted Fulani herdsmen come from perceived unevenness, over the years, in the government’s handling of inter-ethnic matters; so much so that some feel so privileged they could virtually do and undo; while others feel so brow-beaten they can only gawk at injustice.

    If the so-called Fulani herdsmen have been so unconscionable in their killings, it is because they have permitted themselves the delusion that they could always get away with crime because of their ethnic connections with the powers-that-be.

    Too bad — and just as well the president has told the security agencies to swoop on the killers, even if that order appears rather superfluous.  The Police and others should need no especial orders to crack down on criminals.

    But then, so skewed is contemporary Nigeria that, without that presidential order, not a few would swear, if not at presidential inactivity, then at presidential complicity!

    Still, it is high time the Nigerian state exploded that costly illusion, bring these criminals to book and be clearly seen to have done so! The state’s primary function is citizen security.  That is the basis of the Social Contract, which itself is the basis of government and the modern state.

    Let the Nigerian state, therefore, use the killer herdsmen to reassert itself, and give anyone or group that threatens Nigerian life a bloody nose.

    That is the only way to show these criminals that crime attracts serious consequences.

  • Matters Miscellaneous

    Matters Miscellaneous

    It is miscellany time again, Matters Miscellaneous being the rubric I patented more than three decades ago to take editorial notice, in broad strokes and short takes and in no particular order, of some events that might otherwise get lost in the glut of occurrences, and of some personages that might otherwise feel ignored.

    First, the Budget.

    To everyone’s relief, President Muhammadu Buhari drew the curtains on the 2016 Budget Drama last week as he signed the Appropriations into law.

    While it lasted, it was the most riveting drama in town, outpacing even the Bukola Saraki corruption trial in interest and incident.   Whereas the latter involves one individual seeking desperately but vainly to cast himself as an innocent person being persecuted vicariously for the Senate over which he presides, the other has as its subject nothing less than the long-awaited financial blueprint of the Change Agenda on which Buhari was elected, with expectations of deliverance from the ruinous era of Dr Goodluck Jonathan.

    If they take their self-assigned brief half as seriously as their audience takes them, the compilers will by now have entered Nigeria’s 2016 Federal Budget into the Guinness Book of Records.

    It may not count as the budget with the highest expenditure outlay, or the one with the biggest deficit, or even the one with the longest gestation period, though it scores high on all three. It will qualify as one of the most contentious – think, as an example, of whether or not it provided for the Lagos-Calabar rail line — and definitely as one of the least innovative, what with sections of it being no more than photocopies of budget items and expenditures from previous years, being themselves photocopies of items and expenditures from the years before.

    But it will be the first to go missing, and then to resurface, only for the best authorities to declare that it was never missing in the first instance.  It will also be the first to be disowned wholly or in part by ministers and department heads, on the grounds that what they had submitted had little in common with what the lawmakers were debating.

    They finally found a portion of the provision for the Lagos-Calabar project hidden between the lines, and recovered the remaining portion from appropriations the lawmakers had made for all manner of projects for their constituencies, among them town halls and public toilets.

    So, more than a century after the amalgamation – regarded as the Mistake of 1914 and not just by Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto and his adoring followers — the two most storied cities in colonial Nigeria are to be linked by rail.

    Expectations run high that the project will create thousands of primary and secondary jobs, boost inter-state commerce, ease travel and boost tourism. Its execution will bring change  the public can see.

    It must not be just another declaration of intent.

    Switching gears, it must not be like the electricity that Dr Goodluck Jonathan (remember him?) promised to make available yanfu yanfu well before he was due for re-election, to the point that generators would become sentimental archaisms, like oil-wick lamps.

    I took Dr Jonathan for his word and was looking forward to snagging for the house upcountry one of the better sets that Aso Rock would ferry to the dump site, only to come to grief like everyone else who took him seriously, except those political conjurers who could get him to sanction the withdrawal of hundreds of millions of Naira from the Central Bank by waving across his face any document purporting to contain the key to his re-election.

    Today, the power situation is as dire as it ever was, despite the increased tariffs.

    Dr Jonathan earnestly believed that he could engineer a technological and industrial revolution and transform Nigeria without a dependable electricity supply.

    Time is running out for the Buhari administration to convince Nigerians that it does not share that belief.  The official targets for power generation are ridiculously low.  Meeting them is not going to bridge the yawning gap between supply and demand.

    Better to think big, really big.

    It would be an unpardonable oversight if this miscellany did not include Ekiti Governor Ayodele Fayose, far and away Nigeria’s most frequently reported and most frequently cited public figure.

    There is nothing so bizarre, so sophomoric, so egregious, so indecent and so repellent that you will not find Fayose doing it.  There is no thought so coarse, so vulgar and so prurient that you will not find him giving it robust utterance.

    His strictures on President Buhari have been unceasing and unsparing, but not entirely unwarranted.  The trouble is that his everyday conduct manifests all too disgustingly what he so stridently condemns in Buhari in and out of season.

    Some commentators who would like to say the things Fayose says but cannot for all kinds of reasons bring themselves to say have conferred on him the status of “voice of democracy” and “conscience of the nation.”

    Fayose as “voice of democracy,” this man who is a living refutation of virtually everything that democracy connotes – this fellow who converted seven of the 27 members of the House of Assembly into a majority, who prevents the judiciary from sitting, leads his thugs to beat up court officials, supplants the Assembly to announce passage of budget proposals it never had a chance to discuss and runs Ekiti as if it were his private estate?

    Fayose as “conscience of the nation?”  Our modern-day Tai Solarin and Gani Fawehinmi?

    Is this what Nigeria has been reduced to?

    Phew.

    A country that has Fayose as its “conscience” and an exemplar of “democracy,” howsoever defined, is well and truly finished.

    You’ll never guess who turned 80 the other day.

    Chief Ernest (ha!) Shonekan, head of General Ibrahim Babangida’s so-called National Interim Government, the fìdìhè  contraption that was mercifully interim but was not a government and was not national.  He doddered on for 83 days before the loathsome dictator Sani Abacha put him out of his delusion and supplanted him.

    Probably more from duty than conviction, Ogun State Governor Ibikunle Amosun took a full page in this newspaper yesterday to mark the milestone and to praise Shonekan for heeding “the call to higher national service” at a critical moment in Nigeria’s history.

    What Shonekan heeded was a treacherous call to subvert the sovereign will of the Nigerian people as expressed clearly and eloquently in the June 12, 1993 presidential election which no sane person now disputes that it was won by Shonekan’s Egba kinsman, Bashorun Moshood Abiola.

    The advertorial goes on to hail Shonekan as a “national treasure.”

    Some treasure.

  • Enter Bailout 2.0

    For federal and state governments, the month of March would herald a new low on their fiscal calendar. With a total N299.75 billion available to be shared for the month – the lowest allocation in more than five years – the fiscal crisis had clearly gone beyond pelting showers of rain to an overwhelming deluge.

    With 27 states in arrears of between three to five months, and with the piggy bank showing no signs of imminent recovery (the figures for January and February were N370.4 billion and N345 billion respectively), we may have finally arrived at that proverbial tipping point.

    Here is what I wrote on the looming wage crisis nearly a year ago: “Somehow, everyone seems to imagine that a bailout therapy would do some magic. Here, the argument goes that the Federal Government, as lender of last resort, can always get the Central Bank of Nigeria to use the traditional tool – ways and means – to fix the problem in the short term. So what happens in the medium to long term? Put the affected states on the life support until things get better? And how far can we go in the use of the ways and means instrument which is basically about printing new notes without going the way of Zimbabwe where you require a glistening one hundred trillion dollar bill to pay for a lunch pack for two?”

    That was before Bailout 1.0 which came via the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) special intervention fund of N300 billion to help the states to defray their backlog of salaries; also in that package was a debt relief programme coupled by the Debt Management Office to help the states restructure their commercial loans put at over N660 billion.

    Unlike the first package which involved cash handouts, Bailout 2.0 came vide a ‘gracious approval’ by President Muhammadu Buhari of the recommendation of the 66th meeting of the National Economic Council, NEC for the suspension of the deductions from the allocation for March. The gesture, expected to pool some N10.9 billion into the states’ coffers would give the states a breather of sorts to enable them grapple with the crisis fostered by dwindling oil revenues.

    As  Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun would explain: “We (federal government) are not able to guarantee that all states will be able to meet their salary obligations, as each state’s situation is dependent on its own cost profile and other obligations it may have; but this initiative is to better position them to do so.”

    While letting it be known that there are  ‘conditionalities’ attached, subsequent deferrals of loan repayment obligations, according to the minister “would be subject to the agreement of a Fiscal Restructuring Plan to be prepared by each state with clear measurable objectives”. Underlying this is “Enhanced financial transparency by the publication of audited accounts and submission of debt profile…”

    I have argued that bailouts, in the circumstance in which the nation has found itself, is sensible and pragmatic. The alternative is to let the states drown in the fiscal crisis and hence risk street riots. For while we can make all the fancy arguments about the fiscal recklessness of some of the governors as being substantially responsible for the crisis, the pervasive air of despondency accross the states is such that makes doing nothing impracticable. This is even more so for a federal government sworn to reflate the economy, and to get things working again. At the moment, the choice is unenviable: most certainly, it cannot afford to have 27 out of 36 states locked in the current fiscal mode without risking the collapse of the economy; but then, it cannot be seen to reward the club of errant governors whose bad decisions threw the states into crisis. There is a third reason why the government cannot afford inaction. It is the farce – the cespit of corruption – that the public service has become.

    I understand that any talk of rationalisation of the workforce would be regarded as satanic at this time. The reality however is that the number of active-ghosts on our payroll are perhaps as just as many as the number of on-duty workers. Of course, this is as true in the federal bureaucracy as it is of the states. Across the board, the story is the same of ghost workers, ghost pensioners and perhaps ghost parastatals – all of them drawing their sustenance from the public till.

    Some examples would suffice. Today, it is public knowledge that the verification in the federal civil service yielded  312,000 ghost workers! Yes, the same federal government currently imposing conditionalities on the states!

    Another interesting example comes from the first round of the bailout. Some states, according to reports, for obvious reasons, were alleged to have padded their payrolls perhaps to get more of the bailout fund.

    And then this from Kogi State, which has just concluded a verification of the workforce ordered by its interim governor, Yahya Bello. Although I have not verified, I am told, that the exercise yielded 973 fake schools spread accross 20 out of 21 local governments. One local government alone is said to have generated 142 fake schools!  All of these schools, I presume have principals, vice principals, teachers, messengers/cleaners etc. That in a state with miserable internally generated revenue. That obviously is the level to which our public service has sunk.

    Having brought the situation on themselves, the states deserve to swallow any bitter pill that the federal government may deem fit to impose. Harsh? May be!

    Still want to know the way out? A good start is to determine those who claim to be working for us as against the ghosts sucking our blood. That should not require rocket science.

  • Workers seek not yet repose

    Workers seek not yet repose

    With virtually all socio-economic indices showing red, it was expected that this year’s Workers Day celebration would be a particularly sombre one. At a time some 24 or so of the 36 states are in arrears of payment of salaries to their workers, and coming barely a week after their Excellencies congregated in Abuja for the second round of bailout to settle workers wages, the situation would ordinarily demand no less.

    Unfortunately, if one expected the grim background to have reflected in this year’s observance of the workers’ day, this was barely evident. As in previous years, no aspect of the festivities was missing; not the talk shops which have increasingly become hollow year upon year; the march-pasts, parades and photo-op sessions; certainly none of the annual ritual of presentation of the shopping list of workers demands to employers was missing. Not even the fact that this year’s anniversary fell on Sunday – Christendom’s worship and hence work-free day – made any difference; workers all – public and private – got a freebie with Monday, the next day, declared work-free in a nation that is for all practical purposes, permanently in holiday mode!

    For me, the high point was last Wednesday’s formal demand by Labour for a new minimum wage of N56,000. At this difficult time?

    At a news conference on Wednesday in Abuja, Ayuba Wabba, the NLC president had announced: “I can say now authoritatively that as of yesterday (Tuesday) we made a formal proposal to the Federal Government of N56, 000 to be the new minimum wage”. Acknowledging that the economy was not doing well, the labour chief nonetheless insisted that “the law stated that wages for workers must be reviewed after every five years”. “The issue”, he said “must be looked into by the Federal Government and workers should not be seen as sleeping on their rights.”

    On the surface, the position of Labour is unassailable even if, less understandable at this time. By serving notice on government, Labour has, of course done nothing outside the law or its own conventions. By citing the provision of the law which allows for review every five years, it merely reminds that it is not acting in any way, arbitrary. When it cites the impact of inflation and hence the cost of living which has made nonsense of the N18,000 which it negotiated some five years ago, Organised Labour most certainly couldn’t be accused of acting outside its mandate of advancing the interests of the workers.  After all, the minimum wage which was then US$163.6 at the then exchange rate of approximately N110 to the dollar is today less than a third of that value – at US$56.25.

    Even at that, the above is only one aspect of the progressive devaluation of the Nigerian worker as indeed the average Nigerian citizen. Across the board – whether in education, health and general social welfare, Nigerians continue to suffer not just a severe degradation of the quality of life, but all the consequences of general regression on developmental indices. In that context, labour as indeed every Nigerian – whether employed or not – deserves much more than they are currently getting.

    Unfortunately, the reality out there is grimmer than labour would care to admit. Indeed, merely broaching the idea of a wage review at this time would seem to suggest something fundamentally wrong with labour. It tends to give out the group as completely out of touch with the reality; one steeped with its old ways and methods.

    Talk about the current economic realities, it is obvious that not even the private sector is spared the general meltdown. At the moment, capacity utilisation in the manufacturing sector continues to shrink – no thanks to the generally inclement environment, the legendary lack of adaptability of the sector and lately, the restrictive monetary policies of the apex bank. With every passing day come real prospects of more factory closures and layoffs. As if to underscore the grim prospects which lies ahead, the same week that Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) were serving notice of the new minimum wage, one of the nation’s top lenders, First Bank announced plans to cut about 1000 jobs citing an 82 per cent slump in profit in the 2015 financial year as reason. Much earlier, Royal Dutch Shell had announced its plan to cut global staff strength by 10,000 within the current year. Back home in Nigeria, the company also announced that it would defer its final investment decision (FID) on the Bonga South-west deepwater project in Nigeria, citing the need to cut operating costs and capital investments. Other oil majors have similarly announced plans to shed jobs while also reportedly putting new investments on hold – again of them blaming falling commodity prices and rising costs.

    At this time, a general, across-the-board upward review in wages at this time would be the surest recipe to disaster. It would end up as a case of cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face. First, the strains would further plunge the system into trauma. Second, given the possibilities of job losses, the development will spiral into another round of crisis that would take years to solve. Above all, it will certainly not address the fundamental issues of falling real incomes, and the downturn in general socio-economic welfare.

    I must say that had labour been less stuck on the old ways and means, we would be talking of more creative and less disruptive means outside the episodic demand for higher wages (which employers have increasingly proven to be unable to afford) to enhance the welfare of citizens.

    I will cite some examples.

    Today, for ill or good, the Contributory Pensions Scheme has become a revolutionary development in the nation’s pension management. As those under the scheme will readily testify, not only are the days of endless verifications gone forever, the contributor can rest in peace assured that his contribution is far beyond the thieving hands of some bureaucrats.

    In the same vein, Labour can push more aggressively for a complete overhaul of the nation’s mortgage system to enable their members’ access cheap funds to build their homes. The reason is simple: an overhaul of the mortgage sector, aside holding the key to unlocking the vast treasures in the housing sector, is one sure path to relieve the workers of the pressures of getting their homes.  Second, Labour can partner with the federal government to ensure broader coverage for the National Health Insurance and hence make health services more accessible.

    These, in my view, would be far more beneficial than stuffing workers pockets with more naira notes whose purchasing power are not only increasingly suspect, but are more often than not, guaranteed one-way fare to the labour market.

  • War and love

    War and love

    War and Peace, Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, entitled his historical classic.

    It called to the honour, and the glory and the folly of war in Czarist Russia; with the young and vain Czar Alexander locked in mortal combat with peacocky French Emperor, Napoleon, and his formidable La Grande Armée.

    That was the first two decades of 19th century (1805-1813).

    Sam Omatseye’s fiction, based on the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), he called My Name is Okoro.  But Omatseye may well have called his own novel  War and Love.

    It was war, all right: a Nigeria, under Yakubu Gowon, fending off secession from a Biafra, under Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu.  War — the celebration of the most pernicious hate.

    Yet, from the coupling characters, Okoro, the protagonist, and Clara; Abdullahi and Nkechi; and Nneka, Okoro’s war-lost wife and Captain, came something tender.  Terrible beauty of wartime liaisons?

    Okoro, went in search of Nneka, his pregnant Igbo wife, in her native Umueze.  But he got trapped in Umunze, a captured territory, with a camp for war refugees, under the command of Lt. Abdullahi.

    Fate pushed Okoro into the bosom of Clara, another war refugee, from riverine Okolu, near Port Harcourt, in the aborted Republic of Biafra, but outside the Igbo heartland.

    Clara lost, to the war, her sister’s tot, Florence; with her when she fled, with Nigeria fiercely battling Biafra, in Okolu.

    Florence was  smothered.  With a Nigerian battalion nearby, and insect-bitten Florence screeching, the rattled adults decreed the baby must die, for them to live!  Cruel logic of war?

    But Clara found another abandoned boy, 10 months old.  With the boy, named Victory, Okoro and Clara made a war “family”, though initially, they were no more than co-refugees.

    With bouts of coitus wetting their perched bodies and gnarled soul, however, they would became a war couple.  That was an open secret in their Umunze camp.

    Meanwhile, Nneka had, with her mother, fled Umueze.  That drove her into the arms of a man Nneka, only in passing, called Captain.  But even with the war-time anomie, Nneka’s pregnancy for a man, not her husband, sounded her mother’s death knell.

    The moment her daughter told her about the pregnancy, she died; and was hurriedly buried in a bush grave, never to be identified again.  Yet, it was doubtful if Nneka and Ifeanyi, her son by Okoro, would have survived the war without Captain’s protection!   Another painful wartime pathos?

    Meanwhile, as Okoro eventually united with his wife and son, he also got gifted Precious, his wife’s love child with Captain.  Even though the author was coy about it, creatively floating the idea, Okoro too probably had a love child with Clara; for when Clara re-joined her folks, she was also vomiting, a sign of morning sickness and putative pregnancy!

    A two-some that would never know their two parents, as hundreds of other wartime babies?

    But the most dramatic of the war love stories would appear that of Abdullahi and Nkechi.

    The story opened at the height of the pogrom in Kano, with Abdullahi leading a prowling band, hunting down the Igbo in the North.  The band ordered Okoro to pronounce Toro, three-pence in the pre-Civil War Nigerian currency of Pounds, Shillings and Pence.

    Though Okoro sounds a generic, if pejorative, name for the Igbo of the defunct Eastern Region, this Samson Okoro (pronounced differently) was Urhobo from the defunct Mid-West (now Edo and Delta states).

    His Toro was linguistically permissible — it didn’t sound Igbo — since Okoro’s American accent came to his rescue.  He had an American foster father and had just returned to Nigeria to invest and re-settle shortly before the war.  He escaped with a savage slap from Abdullahi.  But he retched at the slain and gorged all around him.

    Okoro’s lot was the tragic neither-nor that plagued many Midwesterners during that war.  Abdullahi’s mob could easily have killed him for being Igbo, if he had not claimed he was American, supported by his sweet accent.

    But even in Igboland, in search of his wife, he was fair game for Biafrian brutes.  The first time, a Biafra band rid him of his car and fulsome provisions for darling Nneka.  The rascals said they needed everything for the service of Biafra!  Much later, another band seized his haul of roasted python meat, which he and Clara had hoped would give them animal protein for weeks!

    Brig-Gen. Godwin Alabi-Isama (rtd) echoed a similar identity crisis in his own Civil War account, The Tragedy of Victory.  Born of a Midwestern father but raised by a Yoruba mother from Ilorin, Alabi-Isama could probably have been neither-nor in both Nigerian and Biafran camps — but for his Yoruba acculturation!  He was raised in Ibadan.

    Between the pogrom and Okoro’s second meeting with Abdullahi in Umunze, the lieutenant  had morphed from the brute of the pogroms and merciless rapist of the early seasons of the war, to something close to the quintessential officer and gentleman.

    He could have had Nkechi, 19, the Umunze belle before whom every man literarily drooled, since he ruled over her village.  But instead, he  professed to her his undying love.

    With that package came generous provisions and protection for the Nkechi household, comprising Ngozi, her mother, Chioma 17; and Ifeoma 15, her no less ravishing sisters, all living in the household of Chief Agwudagwu, Nkechi’s father’s friend; who was out at war, and no one knew if he was alive or dead.

    Why, Abdullahi even agreed to circumcision, to prove his good faith.  But all came to tragic naught, for Nkechi took her own life on the eve of consummating his love for the love-torn soldier, who she often humoured as “My General”.

    She was too much of a Biafria patriot, a proud Igbo girl who would not pawn her innermost treasures for any subversive generosity.  But Abdullahi was something close to Barnabas, the tragic hero in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.  He was disappointed, the only time he was earnest.

    My Name is Okoro speaks to collective and individual tragedies.  Take Udeze, Nneka’s younger brother.  He symbolized the sudden flicker, and even more sudden extinction, of the Biafra flame.

    He piloted his mother to safety from Kano, even when younger brother, Okey, was martyred by cruel Hausa weapons, bent on looting his family’s patrimony.  He was there, in those halcyon days of Biafra’s group-think, when emotion rushed to war but reason, viciously shouted down, dictated otherwise.

    He was there at Ore, when disillusion started setting in; and even had to shoot Chukwu, a friend who had boasted  he would rather take his own life, than fall to the bullets of Ndi Hausa.

    His last gambit was a failed spyng mission, to poison the water supply of the dreaded Third Marine Commando, under Benjamin Adekunle. Yet, at the end of it all, all he felt was emptiness!

    War is no tea party.  But for man’s seeming eternal insanity, it is best avoided. That is the grand message from My Name is Okoro.