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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wasn’t that what economists call an opportunity cost?

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

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

How so?

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

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

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

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

Nor were the authorities done yet.

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

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

Then they tried to sugar the pill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your move, President Muhammadu Buhari.

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

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

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

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

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

That is new and unsettling

By Olatunji Dare

By the time Bashorun Moshood Abiola clinched the Social Democratic Party’s ticket for the June 12, 1993 Presidential election and named a fellow Muslim, Babagana Kingibe, as his running mate, he was already widely perceived as the front runner.

Because of the duplicitous nature of military president, Ibrahim Babangida’s political transition programme, its labyrinthine twists, and turns, few could vouch that it would run its advertised course. Babangida reserved unto himself and the bureaucracy he had staffed with his proxies the power to ban or disqualify any candidate before, during, and after the scheduled elections.

That power could not be challenged at law.

Hundreds of aspirants to elected office were banned, unbanned, and re-banned without rhyme or reason.  You could be banned without even knowing it.  An official circular helpfully advised any aspirant unsure of his or her status to clear with the election authorities.

Few could vouch that a programme so fraught would run its course and culminate in the democratic election of a president.  And there was no shortage of rumours calculated to raise doubts about an aspirant’s good faith and thus give Babangida reasons for disqualifying the person.

Not that he needed help. But in moments of vacillation, damaging reports, whether founded or contrived, could bring down the axe on a candidate’s head – or the election machinery itself.

Such rumours swirled around the presidential candidates. It was bruited that Bashir Tofa, of the National Republican Convention, had dodged the National Youth Service Corps and stood to be disqualified on that ground if he won the race.  They said his candidacy was allowed to stand for that very reason. He would have no ground to contest his defenestration even if the law allowed a challenge, which it did not. He was no fighter anyway.

By far the most damaging reports entered on Abiola. One had it that, if he won, he would retire from the armed forces all officers above the rank of colonel. Having planted that rumour, they left the basic human and organizational instinct for self-preservation to finish the job.

Another rumour had it that, if he won, Abiola would relocate the federal capital back to Lagos from Abuja, severely devaluing the material, social and cultural assets that millions of individuals from all over Nigeria had invested in it and driving them back to the congestion and tumult of Lagos.

It made no difference to the purveyors of the fib nor those who embraced it that the location of the federal capital was a constitutional matter.  You could not move it — or the headquarters of a Local Government Area for that matter –to another location without amending the constitution, a process that requires the approval of two-thirds of the members of the National Assembly, plus the approval of 24 state assemblies and the Federal Capital Territory.

To mobilize that level of support behind even the most compelling objective would be difficult indeed.  No elected government would invest its hard-won mandate in such a harebrained scheme. The proposal would have died on the threshold.  Indeed, it would be political suicide for any political party to canvass that goal in its portfolio to start with.

In our dispensation, such a change can be wrought only by military decree.  But Babangida’s rule seems to have conditioned not a few Nigerians to believe and accept that a president can do just about anything.

And so, today, nearly 30 years later, the same rumour is being peddled assiduously, and not just by fringe elements.  The APC presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, they are saying, has committed himself and his party to moving the federal capital back to his familiar haunts in Lagos as soon as he takes office.

Expect such unfounded rumours to proliferate.  They are the stuff of propaganda, disinformation and misinformation, driven by the misnamed social media.  And the more they proliferate, the more they are likely to undermine confidence in the processes leading to the General Elections.

That, it is being said, is precisely the intention of the authors of such dark rumors and their field operatives.

In 1993, it required a huge leap of faith to believe that the presidential election, the final act of the transition programme, would be held.  It held against all odds. But Arthur Nzeribe, the arms merchant and political wheeler-dealer, Clement Apamgbo, the cardsharper who served as Babangida’s Federal Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, and a retinue of kept judges in Abuja, conspired to abort the entire scheme.

Searching for clarity, I met the  Secretary for Information, Comrade Uche Chekwumerije one week before the poll in my capacity as editorial page editor and chair of the Editorial Board of  The Guardian,  and as a person whom he held in considerable esteem.

I asked him directly:  Would the presidential election hold?

He said that he did not think it would.  He promised to get back to me later in the week with a definitive answer.  He never did.  He was caught up in the annulment tide that overran Abuja and other collaborating centres, and morphed seamlessly into a strident propagandist for the cause.

As Abuja was finessing its plot to scuttle the poll, the United States  Government weighed in, saying in effect that postponement of the election would not make for good bilateral relations.

The election was held, in a manner that won praise from accredited domestic and international observers.  At that point, the skeptics, among whom I counted myself, rejoiced.  The final act of the transition had been concluded.  Certified results indicated that Abiola and the SDP had pulled off a staggering victory, the kind that Nigeria had not seen before and would probably never witness again.

They annulled the election and turned one of the shiniest moments in the nation’s troubled history into a nightmare that haunts and rankles even today.

I cannot confidently assert that 2023 will be a reprise of 1993, but some parallels are worth noting.

I have already mentioned the rumours circulating that if Tinubu won and was allowed to become president, he would relocate the federal capital back to Lagos.  As it was in 1993 with Abiola, so it is with Tinubu in 2022.

Now, as in the final stages of Babangida’s transition, spirited moves are reportedly underway to remove or replace key officials at INEC so as to secure, it is being said, some particular election outcomes.

The willful destruction of INEC offices should not be dismissed as incidental.  They should be  seen as intimations of a larger plot to paralyze the election infrastructure, thereby subverting the capacity of the nation to hold credible elections.

Elections have consequences, as ongoing developments in Osun State have shown, even without the new executive governor Ademola Adeleke apostrophizing them with the trademark choreography that freaks you out just watching him do his thing.

If anything is certain, it is that the General Election will produce changes that will upend many calculations and presuppositions and generally shake up the way of doing political business in Nigeria.  A great many of our influential compatriots and those who look up to them do not like that prospect and will stop at nothing to block its eventuation.

The widening gyre of syndicated and freelance banditry, kidnapping, assassination and general insecurity that the authorities have not been able to contain will be advanced as compelling reasons for ditching the elections.

Not everyone entertaining these fears, I can report, is a dupe of conspiracy theorists.

My Senior Brother:

Your recent missive met me with a luxuriating sense of paroxysmal titillation and titivation after an understandable intermissionem.

I must enter a confession post-haste, that the sui generis privilege of hearing from you once in a while, is always salubrious and Aristotelian cathartic and this should not be maniacally bewildering in the least to any soul personality that takes immutable cognition of the fact that the art of leaving in Nigeria de die in diem, can be at once a corrosive macadamization and a pestilential pestiferous business, permitting me that alliteration.

This is all the more so even now that we are confronted with our periodic electioneering imperative which is a hallmark of bourgeois democracy with its concomitant imperfections of throwing up all sorts of political harlequins, reducing serious issues of statecraft to a political commedia dell’arte.

You can see SIR, why your excogitations in your seminal and cerebral missive came again at the right time for its analgesic and anodyne effects on my encephalitic ceramics.

Nigeria’s soporific, supine, and democratically pusillanimous political parties have thrown up different presidential contenders from the sublime to the ridiculous. It’s my considered view that whereas we have three presidential candidates in contention (Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi), we have just the APC and PDP as the two political parties in serious contention for the presidential trophy.

The OBISTIC OBIEISM which has been referred to as the obedient movement is for me a welcome development to the extent that it has become an emblematisation and a political egregore, coalescing the rejection by the Nigerian youths, especially of the politics of prebendalism, mercantilism, and octopoidal soulless capitalism that has been our miserable          lot for a period of the aeon.

But whereas I do understand and dialectically situate its historical and sociological fons et origo, it is my humble submission that Peter Obi himself has been a prominent item in everything that has been fundamentally erroneous with Nigeria.

Read Also: Thoughts on religion and politics

Was he not the vice presidential candidate to Atiku Abubakar not too long ago and did he not contest for the presidential ticket of PDP of which he was a prominent member until he recently migrated to the Labour Party?

So, for me, the fallacious and hogwash peregrination of habilimenting him with a messianic halo is Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I also hold the opinion that the Labour Party is still too nationally inchoate to compete with the two major political parties.

For me, therefore, OBISTIC OBIEISM as a political tendency within the current presidential matrix is a political effervescence. My objurgations notwithstanding, his simplicity finds congruence with my palate.

Am sure you have heard Sir that the presidential ambition of Atiku Abubakar which was insensitive to the centrifugal proclivities of Nigeria has torn the PDP apart and their centre can no longer hold. You must have been regaled like most of us with the regular vitriolic verbal acerbity, asperity, causticity, pugilism, and acidic remonstrations from Governor Wike who speaks for the G5 Governors and his group against Atiku Abubakar and his torn, shattered, tattered and battered political party.

I think the goddess of Nemesis is at play here against the background of what Atiku Abubakar himself did to former President Jonathan. I have since discharged and acquitted Governor Wike of being a “mandibular walkabout”, given the fact that his indignation is righteous in my opinion.

The verbal diarrhoea of Iyorcha Ayu has not helped matters for the PDP. Most people hold the view that Atiku Abubakar has become inordinately ambitious to the extent of not only violating the provisions of the PDP constitution as it relates to the rotation principle on the presidency but would even go to the unscrupulous and unconscionable extent of urging northerners not to vote for an Igbo or Yoruba person as president of Nigeria.

That leaves us with Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC.  Given the way the APC has been able to delicately and gingerly manage its post-presidential primaries with all the governors of the party rooting solidly behind him, it’s my opinion that, ceteris paribus, history beckons on Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu to become the next President of Nigeria.

Do I think he would perform if he is so favoured by the Great Geometrician of the Universe? Given his track records in Lagos State with his knack for harnessing men and women of grey matter with robust cultivation of the regime of the mental magnitude, I hold the opinion that he has the capacity to lift Nigeria from the bootstraps of its current political quagmire and economic phantasmagoria.

Just like you Sir, I was a visceral admirer of the mental exertions, intellectual lucubrations and philosophical depth of the transited Emmanuel Obahiagbon but the bonds of consanguinity were not an agglutinant. Am excited to hear that your intellectual paths did merge. Thanks for your panegyrics on him. He was indeed an illumined mind. Don’t also know if during that period you encountered other cerebral Edo minds like Iro Eweka and the now transited Reverend Father Uwaifo?

This reply from my humble piazza will not be brought to a terminus ad quem without thanking you profoundly and profusely for finding me worthy of your time once in a while to share your thoughts with. I have really asked myself what qualifies an intellectual Lilliputian like me to enjoy this regular exchange with a mentor’s mentor and an intellectual colossus that you personify.

Thanks for the privilege and honour, SIR.

Osahon Obahiagbon.

There you have it, the epistle according to Himself the Master of Hyperpolysesquipedalianism, and proud legatee of the Igodomigodo.

I told you he never disappoints.