Category: Sanya Oni

One of the more positive correlates of the so-called silly season is the wave of activism that leaves neither room for ambivalence nor indifference.  Call it the binary season: you are either in or out. You are either boarding the train moving to the next level or on signed to team sworn to get Nigeria working again. Whether you are talking of friends turning frenemies sometimes over nothing of substance; the ever-widening chasm over inanities between the so-called tribe of wailers and their hailer-compatriots;the debates over alternative facts and public morality; and now, the sundering of otherwise cohesive groups over base, atavistic politics of convenience; not only are both symptoms of the same binary flu afflicting the polity, neither, unfortunately,  would appear to offer tangible guarantees that our country will emerge stronger and better.

Muhammadu Buhari or Atiku Abubakar? That practically is what is on the table. Considering the array of threescore plus 10 candidates that the country has to choose from, it comes pretty close to a distinction without a real difference particularly with the leading alternative quite frankly reviled; making the return of the incumbent looking more like a reward for performance rather than a rejection of that perilous path to which Nigerians swore Never Again – in 2015.

That, most tragically is where we have found ourselves – today.

Has the administration therefore failed? Failure is certainly not the word to describe the administration that came in with a good dose of goodwill in 2015 but somehow failed to measure up to expectations. In any case, if there is any case of failure, it is precisely one of inability to match citizens’ hunger for development, the quest for inclusion and justice with its appetite to make things happen. Admittedly, it came in with bagful of challenges chief of which was a treasury plundered by a departing Jonathan administration. Not only did it inherit a war in the Northeast which it must fight to win or risk the disintegration of the country, it met a vastly depleted and dispirited army no thanks to greedy Generals that saw the war as an opportunity to amass illicit wealth to themselves. And this was at a time the price of oil had long dipped and production severely curtailed by militants in the Niger Delta which held the nation by the jugular. For an import-dependent country, the tightening of the forex regime not only shrank production, it eventuated in the players in the real sector coming to grieve with the economy predictably – tanking.

That was the situation then. Today, the debate is whether the country couldn’t have beaten a different path to achieve a vastly different outcome had the administration been less tardy in its response or less out of depth when the problem surfaced.

Now, that is taking nothing away from the administration’s heroic efforts in some areas. One such area is in the Northeast where the war against the Boko Haram terrorists continues to rage; surely the administration cannot be accused of lacking the will despite the persistence of the scourge. The same is true of the northcentral where clashes between herdsmen and farmers, kidnapping and other forms of banditry have festered; the administration may have misjudged the wave of the criminality at the initial stage, there is some sense that the monstrosities are being dealt with. While the question of whether the administration could have done more would remain an open one, the charge of abdication as we had under the clueless PDP administration of Goodluck Jonathan, will certainly be hard to sustain.

The same can be said of its war against corruption. Unlike the PDP administration which made graft the directing principles of state policy,the Buhari administration has certainly done well to focus attention of that lethal virus that continues to undermine and weaken the nation’s institutions. While it might seem an exaggeration to aver that Impunity Inc. is dead and buried, there can be no denying that the virus has been substantially tamed despite growing charges of administrative overreach by the administration. On this, while most Nigerians will readily agree that the latter will be infinitely better than doing nothing, the administration, contrary to its public averments, is yet demonstrate how scrupulous fidelity to due process can be injurious to its anti-corruption battles.

However, while the administration’s claim to have been able to do more with less may have found validity in the array of projects scattered across different parts of the federation, it is precisely on grounds of underperformance of the economy that the Atiku challenge finds great relevance. For not only are the stats sobering, there is pretty little that the Buhari administration has done to hint at a future, coherent direction to which the economy is headed.

What do you expect in the environment of vacuity of policy? Talk of course. And Atiku has been talking.  Why should anyone be surprised that an Atiku, whose claim to economic wisdom is not only suspect but utterly dubious, sell Nigerians a pig for the poke? So, selling NNPC – the national oil that has turned rent collector – is big deal? To who?

By the way, who remembers the corporation’s prospecting arm – the National Petroleum Development Corporation (NPDC) – an agency that does no more than sweet ‘strategic alliance’ deals on behalf of the powerful?

Once upon a time, the agency bled the nation to the tune of billions of dollars in unremitted funds? Do we wait for the next level to get the funds back in the kitty?

Forget Atiku and his grandiose economics. If you ask me, I will say that the man is overrated – simple. He’s nowhere close to the new thinking required to get the country working. However, taking Nigeria to the next level –whatever that means –requires more than the catchy sloganeering on offer by the incumbent. It calls for a radical, new thinking on how to get Nigerians back to work. The problem with the Buhari administration goes beyond itsfixation with fighting corruption; then trouble is that it hasn’t even begun thinking through the problems let alone enduring solutions – sadly with only few months to the end of its first term.

Finally, the clouds appear to be gathering over a key element in the automotive policy enacted by the Jonathan administration in October 2013.

I refer here to the ‘punitive’ 35 percent levy on imported vehicles. A week after Comptroller General, Nigeria Customs Service, Col Hameed Ali (retd.), called for a reduction of the 35 per cent levy on imported vehicles to curb smuggling, Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry has also lent its voice to the call. Whereas both fundamentally agree that the policy has failed to work the magic either in terms of its stated goal of growing local capacity in auto manufacture; they are also of the view that the policy has become a major drawback to the government’s drive to grow its revenue base.

LCCI, speaking through its Director-General, Muda Yusuf,  was rather point bank: Five years after its proclamation, “the policy had not only failed to achieve the desired outcomes but had adversely impacted the cost of doing business, the welfare of the people, government revenueand the capacity of the economy to create jobs”.

The duo is certainly not alone. Minister of Finance, Hajia Zinab Ahmed had in January echoed the same sentiments when she told leadership newspaper in an exclusive interview that the policy was currently undergoing review.

“The auto policy”, she told the newspaper, “is presently being reviewed because neighbouring countries are giving incentives to vehicle importers to bring in their vehicles through their port because of our own rate.” In other words, at a time our federal government would rather maintain a punitive tariff regime to keep car imports – used and new – at bay, and this supposedly to grow a non-existent automotive industry,neighbouring countries continue to provide safe havens for vehicles destined for the country through unapproved routes. Even that would seem a mild headache when the stated goal of the policy which is to foster growth in the auto sector, and the abuses that have characterised the tariff regime, are taken into account.

The chicks, as they say, have come to roost; time to count the costs of the false hopes kindled,time to reflect on those phoney assumptionsfreely traded by Olusegun Aganga and his cohorts in the industry ministry at the time, and flowing from this, the exaggerated outcome that the government projected. It is unfortunately the case that Nigeria would have to wait for five years to discover what yours truly had described in July 2014 as a journey to nowhere.  Today, whereas the country is nowhere near the stated goal of the auto policy, the same cannot be said of the multiples afflictions the country and the people have suffered either in terms of the desolation of our ports, the level of smuggling that have attenuated the policy and the unmitigated losses in revenue year in year out – which of course explains the frustrations of the CGS.

Four years ago, I had written of the policy as being dead on arrival. I thought the absence of critical infrastructure rendered the policy a non-starter; I highlighted the dearth of support industry, critical skills pool and what I called the still-in-the-works financing infrastructure among other factors. I didn’t see the big deal in a policy that seeks to punish one segment of the auto market when the structures for take-off of the other segment are not yet in place. I couldn’t understand how Nigerians could have allowed a policy, which was to me a brainwave, whose main assumptions are not only questionable but flawed, to go unchallenged.  And then my conclusion: The question which our policy wonks have hardly bothered to address is whether the nation can actually sustain a competitive auto-industry at this time. The problem here isn’t so much the desire to return to the “good old days” of Peugeot in Kaduna, Steyr in Bauchi, Leyland in Ibadan, and ANNAMCO in Enugu but whether the conditions responsible for their exit are any different today than what they were in the 80s.

Let me say this: I have nothing against the National Automotive Policy 2013. The idea, as I understood it is to bring back the vehicle assembly plants such as we had in the early 80s. That will most certainly be a good thing not just because of the size of the Nigerian market but the massive economic spin-offs it would engender. However, I also understand that it is not always how it seems; not only would it require huge forex outlay, the virtual absence of any local addition makes the prospects a non-starter as the final price will be far beyond the reach of the prospective Nigerian consumer. For a country that once boasted of capacity to produce tyres, windscreens, batteries and other components, it beats me that the government wouldn’t think of reviving these ancillary industries before resuming the so-called quest. A case of no lessons learnt?

And to even imagine that no one is yet thinking of developing the financing infrastructure in a country where the cheapest locally assembled auto costs about N10 million!

With or without the punitive auto-levy; Nigerians desirous of a car will most certainly get them. After all, the thought of a new car for most Nigerians is at best a dream. Unlike the car assemblers who can approach the government for forex or credit as necessary, the ordinary Nigerians simply desire a contraption that could to take them places without the government riding on their backs. The exactly opposite, unfortunately, is what the policy seeks to ensure with the five year-old policy with its punitive levy of 35 percent – in addition to the 35 percent duty on imported vehicles. Now, having shut itself in the foot, the government has been moaning about lost revenue.

Well, the government cannot eat its cake and still want to have it at the same time. It has no right to complain that the neighbouring countries offering their territories as transit for smuggling. Rather than complain, the way to go is to make our ports truly competitive and our fiscal policies humane. Of course, it goes beyond mere revenue; it is about what truly serves the greatest number as against the interest of a dubious club of auto- assemblers. Perhaps, the latter needs to be educated that the marginal auto-market, which is what the tokunbo car market segment represents, is not the same with their exclusive club. Not only do they operate different paradigms, their characters are certainly not the same. The latter will do well to remember this as they go about their lobby even as the federal government proceeds to review the jaded policy.

It is like a typical market scene: Everyone is talking at the same time even no one is listening let alone comprehending. A straight chapter from Achebe’s Things Fall Apartin which the fabled falcon had long gone past hearing the falconer. A time whenalternative facts rule and the niceties of old time respect for others’ opinion are increasingly a distant memory, when the delicate threads holding brothers and sisters together have long sundered.Welcome to Nigeria’s season of polemics – a season when everyone claims to be a plaintiff, defence, attorney – all rolled into one depending on space, time and circumstances!

As the immortal Fela would say – this season, surely will bring out either the best or beast in us!

Afternearly week of verbal gymnastics most of which were couched in arcane legalese, it is increasingly hard to remember where the brouhaha started from let alone the issues at the heart of the disputation. Unfortunately, were the situation not so tragic – or better still – were the country not dealing with a crisis as graveas touching on our collective claim to being able to discern between right and wrong as indeed the very essence of constitutional governance, one would be tempted to simply relax and enjoy the circus going on.

See what has happened – all in a space of a fortnight. On January 7, a civil society group, Anti-Corruption Research Based Data Initiative (ARDI) petitioned the Code of Conduct Bureau accusing  Onnoghenof failure to properly declare his assets according to law. Exactly a week after, the CJN was dragged before the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) to answer to the charges. In between, the embattled CJN was alleged to have admitted to omissions so grave as to constitute a terrible violation of the law.

Not so – at least in the eyes of some lawyers who reduced the matter to one of finding the loopholes not to serve the ends of justice but tom exculpate the self-confessed offender. And so began the judicial rigmarole – first at the CCT over an ordinarily settled issue of jurisdiction; and thenthe high court, the industrial court and finally the Court of Appeal in what would become one of the most inglorious circuses ever seen in these parts. And then the federal government, as if to compound the serial travesty, going for a power grab, following a curious order procured at the CCT.

To describe what happened last week was a multi-layered tragedy is to put things mildly – for want of a better phrase. Just imagine the individual, who is not only the High Priest but in normal times would personify the majesty of the law, to get kicked off the sacred stool for grave financial malfeasances. As if the self-confession of amnesiais not troubling enough for a man who, like the Caesar’s wife should be without blemish, the anti-graft bodies have since determined that they would not hold back from roasting him in the African sun even if it means putting the institution of the judiciary on the spot. With revelations being splashed out daily in newspapers and the electronic media about the man’s net worth, it is doubtful that anyone among the vociferous throng chanting ‘due process would dare to swear on their mother’s grave that those humongous sums in various currencies found in the accounts of their ‘beloved’ Honourable Justice Walter Onnoghen, GCON , were actually products of honest day’s enterprise.

Which is what makes it hard to fathom why the man wouldn’t take a bow when it was still possible to salvage whatever was left of his honour.

Hardly a way to end a career spanning a little over four decades – if you ask me.

As for the Nigerian Judicial Council, it used to be said that you do not have elders around with the neck of the young sticking out of joint. Even if we leave out the minor drama of the embattled CJN putting off the meeting of the august body indefinitely, what I cannot understand is how the body of eminent men would so readily acquiesce – without as much as a whimper– to a forced abdication by a leader whose moral credentials have been so terribly assailed. Esprit de corps? That none of the wise men saw the looming disaster, nor took steps – even if informal – to stave off the national embarrassment seems to me another variant of the same tragedy.

The lawyers we know too well. Once upon a time, our learned fellows used to be described as ministers in the temple of justice. Not anymore. At least not here. So is their claim to being ‘learned’ just as questionable. Much as they have a job to do, it is their penchant to defecate in the communal pond that many find galling. Could any case be ‘worse’ than the celebrated O.J Simpson trial in the United States? Many of us watched the trial of the former National Football League (NFL) player, broadcaster and actor on two counts of murder for the June 12, 1994, deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman on television. I didn’t see his high-profile defence team, referred to as the “Dream Team” attempt to bring the judicial institution down.  What wason display throughout the trial was class, intellect and elegance. In the end, justice, rather than technicalities won. Nearer home, one remembers the trial of Oscar Pistorious, the South African sprint runner who made history in 2012 as the first amputee to compete in track events at the Olympics. Accused of murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, the trial which opened in High Court of South Africa,Pretoriaon March 3, 2014 was initially concluded on September 11, 2014 even as global audience watched the legal fireworks on prime time television. Here, our lawyers would, rather than apply their rigour to the trial process, shunt the process!

Was the federal government right or wrong to have asked Onnoghen to step aside? On this, Nigerians are as sharply divided as on the notion of what is right and wrong, and whether the endgame should trump the process. Trust Nigerians in their indignation to latch on to whatever aspects of the law that suits them,the issue really is who has the authority to sanction the erring CJN. In an ideal setting, the weight of public opinion would ordinarily suffice to force the embattled CJN to do the needful. This was not the case was simply a case of failure of private and public morality. As for the lawyers, they did not help matters by their frivolous applications designed to obstruct the process of trial even as the NJC, in a demonstrably false sense of moral solemnity went on sabbatical.  And so an indignant even if opportunistic presidency, sure that the prospect of immediate sanction stands no chance with the Senate,and increasingly disdainful of the slow legal and bureaucratic safeguards,went for the option of self-help. Talk of the ultimate symptom of society in free fall.

Troubling times, surely, lie ahead.

These are exciting times no doubt. A sure proof is the current national frenzy over last weekend’s debate between five vice presidential candidates which many have since reduced to a spar between Vice President Yemi Osinbajo of the governing All Progressives Congress and Peter Obi of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party.  In a country where citizens are more often than not hung on the ‘bored mode’, it would seem that the only point of agreement was that the night provided some excitement, or if you like, entertainment, for gladiators on either side.

Never mind that a number of the claims are as outlandish as they can get, or that a number of the contributions made little sense in the context of the complex issues daily confronting the ordinary citizen, it seems entirely doubtful that the sparing parties, aside further reinforcing earlier prejudices, won new converts to their positions which of course leaves one wondering whether the public cause was truly served.

Days after – and thanks to the nation’s legion of Netizens, we have just about now as many scores awarded as there are scorers!

It’s truly the season of unreason.

Now, thanks to Presidential spokesman Garba Shehu, another storm, ready-made for the season, appears to be brewing. Yesterday, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, on Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily, reported President Muhammadu Buhari as ordering the Statistician-General of the National Bureau of Statistics, Dr. Yemi Kale, to “change the high unemployment statistics and reflect the rising rate of employment in the agriculture sector”.

He claimed that the nation’s chief statistician confessed (my word) to the Federal Executive Council that the unemployment figures were not only overstated, but it focused only “on the creation of white collar jobs and not the agriculture sector and the informal sector”. The President, he said, “subsequently told him to go and admit his error to members of the public and make appropriate changes”.

To further quote the online medium Premium Times: “When he finished addressing the federal cabinet last week, the government asked the DG of the NBS, go out there and tell the Nigerian public, you are just saying to us now that Jigawa, Zamfara, Kebbi and Ebonyi are recording the lowest unemployment rates in the country on account of agriculture”.

He added, ostensibly for proper effect, that Rice Producers Association of Nigeria had created 12 million new jobs- and as if to prove the body’s claim was inviolate – as against that of a dithering NBS – he would swear that nobody has challenged them up until that time!

The story would change – few hours later when the NBS chief, in what amounted to a pointed, clear-headed rebuttal on Twitter simply stated that he made no such submissions to anybody at any time:  “Assuming what you claim was said was actually said” he fired back, “then I make it very clear that neither the statistician-general nor NBS ever made any such admission at any time to anybody,” Kale reportedly told another online medium, The Cable, on enquiry.

Trust newshounds not to let such slips pass, Shehu, when confronted with the rebuttal, would not yield ground: “There is nothing wrong with what I said on sunrisedaily, this morning. I spoke about the very bright picture of jobs creation by the Buhari administration Mr Yemi Kale gave last week.

He went on: “Mr. President, who had complained many times about employment figures reflecting mostly white collar jobs and therefore unfairly underplaying the millions of jobs his administration has created in the farms, must have felt a sense of vindication.

“The response by the government was, go and put this out, address a world press conference to correct the wrong impression for all to know how well we are doing in creating jobs. We hope there will soon be a date for that press conference.”

Talk of oddities, there must be countless here. But first things first. Who to believe between Shehu and Kale? A lot of course depends on what happens in the coming days. It is of course clear that both cannot be right at the same time.

Hopefully, the proposed press conference as announced by Shehu Garba should help clear all doubts. Sure, you know by who! A press conference to right the supposed wrongs or one to cook up figures to please the masters in the Villa? So what happens to the supposedly professionalized entity after? It ought to be troubling that the presidential spokesman will so cavalierly cast the institutional integrity of a professionalized body like the NBS to the swine.

Flowing from that of course is the dangerous mindset that assumes that the administration not only has the final say on all matters under the sun but that expert opinions are also subject to the whims and caprices of political actors. Such mindset is of course responsible for the benign suggestion that the administration can only accept those set of statistics that fits squarely into its own parameters of performance.

By the way, is it mere coincidence that the last time unemployment data was released was that of the third quarter of 2017? While it would seem understandable that the administration would be worried by the prognosis, given that the unemployment rate then stood at 18.8 per cent– the highest since 2010 – or even the more troubling part, which is the revelation that the unemployment rate actually more than doubled since 2015 when President Muhammadu Buhari took power, the idea that the administration can get NBS to sex up the figures to please the fancies of those in power would seem a new one.

As it is, the story may have only begun to unfold. Only last month, the NBS was forced to cry out over lack of critical funds needed to embark on the same unemployment survey being complained about! Then, many of the administration’s critics had quickly concluded that it was not only deliberate but politically motivated. To the charge, Kale had quite reasonably demurred:  “there are other equally or even more important work competing for same limited funding. I assume when funds are available we will be funded”.

I hear. The planned press conference will hopefully address that also.

It is certainly good news that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Bankers’ Committee have not relented in their bid to seek innovative ways to deepen financial inclusion and to fight the scourge poverty in the continent’s biggest economy. Rising from the 10th Annual Bankers’ Committee retreat in Lagos on Sunday night, the body agreed to set up a committee headed by chief executive officers (CEOs) of commercial banks to create a strategy that will stimulate lending in the domestic economy. According to this newspaper, the committee is to”ensure that lenders deploy key intervention funds, including the N210 billion Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) fund, N60 billion SMEs fund from five per cent annual contribution from banks’ profits, N500 billion Export Stimulation Fund (ESF) among others, to promote credit access”.

For youths in particular, CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele spoke of a scheme under which they may be asked to deposit either their National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) discharge certificates or degree certificates with the banks to enable them have access to the loans.

That should be good news for our teeming youths most of whom, despite the strictures of finance, continue to churn of sterling accomplishment in the entertainment industry, information technology and software development sectors.

The story is no different for the small and medium scale enterprises – a sector known to be perennially ill-served by the commercial banks; there is now a promise of a new National Microfinance Bank to help in the disbursement of the intervention funds to borrowers. Now, think of the N210 billion Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) fund already in the kitty; the additional N60 billion SMEs fund from five per cent annual contribution from banks’ profits and another N500 billion Export Stimulation Fund all exclusively for the so-called marginal players in the economy.

And that is merely one half of the entire picture of on-going intervention. In fact, this would amount to merely a tip of the iceberg when compared with what the federal government, through its rather ambitious National Social Intervention Programme (NSIP), has done or proposes to do to deepen financial inclusion and to reduce the scourge of poverty. For instance, we know for a fact that the federal government has in the last three years budgeted a total of N1.5tn to address the same set of concerns (only N220 billion was reportedly disbursed): the most vulnerable in the society, those in dire need of credit for medium small and micro enterprises (MSMEs), all with a view to reduce inequality and wide disparities in access to such social goods as education and health services, among others.

Perhaps, the two that has got every Nigerian talking are the Market Moni, interest-free loans ranging between N10,000 andN100,000 for owners of micro-enterprises, and the Trader Moni – both initiatives launched under the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) in partnership with the Bank of Industry (BOI) whose implementation is being personally driven by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. Under the latter, very small scale traders are availed loans starting fromN10,000 which on pay back qualifies them to move progressively to N50,000.

Understandably, there have been questions not just about the intent of the initiative, coming so close to the 2019 elections but also whether the amount can actually make any difference to the beneficiaries given the state of the inflation and the presence of other dire factors in the environment.

Talk of a sterile, elite debate in a country where 86.9 million is currently said to live in extreme poverty – nearly 50% of its estimated 180 million people, and where issues of financial exclusion have remained a tough nut to crack. The flip side is whether the federal government can afford to fold its hands and do nothing –when, not too long ago, the same federal government had to shell out nearly a trillion naira to save the financial sector when a bunch of delinquent, self-indulgent actors took the sector to the abyss.

Talk about one, after plundering and plunging their sector into ruin being asked to go and sin no more; another being called a leech for no other reason than being offered a fair chance to move up the social ladder! That was as bad as things could get.

For sure, poverty would be a major issue in the 2019 elections. And this would not necessarily be because one foreign body – the Brookings Institution, sourcing its data from the World Poverty Clock,gratuitously claims that Nigeria now has over 87 million people living in poverty, or as some would rather gloat, that Nigeria has claimed the trophy of being the world poverty capital. One recalls that our own National Bureau of Statistics actually painted a worse picture in 2016 when it reported that no fewer than 112 million Nigerians live below the poverty line. With nearly three out of five able-bodied youth out of gainful employment, and with no chance of anyone escaping the derivatives in the deadly scourges of terror and anti-social acts that poverty breeds, it is a reality that we inextricably bound. And now it is said that whereas the poor can’t sleep because of the pang of hunger, the rich too can’t sleep because of the groans of the poor! Very true.

Which is why Nigerians will need toscrutinize closely what the leading candidates seeks tooffer as antidote. Drawing ideological lines between Atiku Abubakar and Muhammadu Buhari on the issue, I must confess has not been quite easy let alone straightforward. Atiku campaign, a friend pointed out to me, is fighting on an unabashedly neo-liberal platform, a throwback to the discredited structural adjustments programme. Those were his words shortly after stepping out of Southwest meeting  of Buhari Support Organisation in Ibadan last week.  Such pathway which he insisted saw to the abolition of the commodities boards with its debilitating effect on the rural economy and incomes as well as the pruning down on investments in the social economy – education, health and welfare, are sure roads to disaster, he concluded.

On the other hand, he thinks Buhari’s social intervention programmes are much more in tune with the realities of the current time. To him, while it is convenient to decry schemes such as tradermoni, he refers to the establishment of the Cooperative Bank in the Western Region in 1953 as a response to the absence of financial inclusiveness and the inadequacy of the Anglo Saxon banking model with its emphasis on short termism!

My thoughts?

The country requires extraordinary measures to beat back the poverty scourge. The social intervention programmes thoughabsolutely important, are only a necessary first step. What is needed at this time is an entirely new economy driven by the energies of the youth – a far cry from the current one steeped in rent. It must start with deliberate efforts to retool and re-orientate our youths while creating opportunities for them to blossom.

Again, my penny thoughts.

The Nigerian nightmare is back – fully. Just when Nigerians had thought that the daemon behind the fuel-marketers-induced crisis has slipped into oblivion, it staged a grand re-entry Sunday night with the same old pledge of making the yuletide season hell for Nigerians.

Fuel marketers, comprising the Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria, Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association and Independent Petroleum Products Importers, IPPI, according to reports haveall resolved to lock up their depots nationwide in the coming week. The issue: subsidy debts owed by the governmenttotalling N800 billion remains unpaid.

Says Patrick Etim, Legal Adviser to IPPI:”The only way to salvage the situation is for government to pay the oil marketers the outstanding debts through cash option instead of promissory note being proposed”.

“The oil marketers”, he said, “have requested that forex differential and interest component of government’s indebtedness to marketers be calculated up to December 2018 and be paid within next seven days from the date of the letter sent to the government.”

Say what you may of the notice which effectively translates to potentiallyshutting down an already traumatized economy, it says a lot about how little have changed that the staying power of the fuel cartel shows no signs of diminishing. Whereas the pathology that their stranglehold on the economycontinues topresent in different shapes and in their mutant complexities, they are almost in equal degrees, as lethal and opportunistic depending on time and space. A sample is the current semantic dilemma over what to call the differential between the import price of petrol and the price at the pump, which yours truly wrote about on this page last week. For an equation so simple as not to require a secondary school credit pass let alone a degree in economics to understand, and one that economists and other die-hard practitioners of global trade and commerce would more appropriately recognize as plain subsidy, the federal government not only insists on living in denial,it opts to couch it elegantly as under-recovery, hopingostensibly against hope that the hefty burden of the differential which, at the last count is said to have consumed a record $1.0billion from the NLNG dividend account, would somehow dissolve!

Difficult country – you say?

Now to the figure in contention – N800 billion – we must admit is a lot of money to owe more so in a sector which runs strictly on cash. Considering the sector’s absolute dependence on forex also makes it subject to the vagaries of exchange rate fluctuations, the marketers situation comes to a double whammy.

When all of these are added to usurious lending regime forced on them by the lenders, it takes little to imagine the burden being shouldered by the marketers in their daily striving to keep the pumps wet.

Today, whereas the story of the toxic assets on banks’ balance sheets are all too familiar and with it the now recurring but ineffectual tactic of ‘name and shame’ routinely unleashed on the so-called chronic and pathological debtors, the other half of the story,less talked about, is the equally humongous debts being owed by the government to this class of players.

Talk of the stresses and strains that the financial services sector has suffered in recent time;one wagers that the situation is no less contributory, but is also known to have sent many an otherwise thriving entities out of business!

Faced with a recalcitrant federal government, the marketers’ tacticof weaponising the only effective instrument they have – choking off fuel supply at yuletide–if not entirely justifiable, might seem understandable. It’s an old trick mastered by martial artists to disable attackers by using a simple but forced push on a pressure point.

One course assumes that the debts actually exist or were truly deserving of payment. Or that the supposedly feuding parties actually agree on the limits of the liabilities and what constitutes the parameters. And so while we hear of nebulous concepts like “forex differential and interest component” being bandied around, what is hardly admitted is that their ‘co-efficient of elasticities’ are as high as the claimants make them to be!

It is a tough, opaque business – no doubt.

Which of course begs the question of whether the federal government would readily yield to the blackmail of accepting the patently one-sided –or if you like – open-ended determination of the liabilities – as it sometimes does, unfortunately;or whether the marketers on their part, stand any real chance of winning the argumentlet alone the war.

To begin with, few Nigerians actually believe the marketers tale.How can Nigerians forget the fraudulent claims for petrol subsidy made by 21 firms for which they were indicted by the Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede-led Presidential Committee on the 2011 fuel subsidy scam. By the way, whatever happened to the N382 billion they were asked to refund which they wrongly collected as subsidy in 2011?

Moreover, if Nigerians find the penchant by the marketers to exploit the vulnerability of the people even when it means plunging the economy into ruin somewhat reprehensible, their experience in the hands of the unscrupulous players under every cycle of supply disruptions and which have come to mean more money than they could ever have made were things to be normal, obviously stands out as a class act in conscienceless profiteering!

To be sure, yours truly refers not just to the roadside peddlers of fuel for whom the shutdown of the depots promises a boom time, but the back channel marketing by the players guaranteed to deliver far beyond expectations, via the emergency ‘deregulation’ of product prices so created! Either way, they win – massive, while the rest of us, left at their mercies, are left to do what we do best – complain!

How did we get here? By this I mean the current situation in which a few economic actors will continue to hold the entire country hostage at every drop of a hat?

It is a question for which the nation has long found the answer but also unwilling to accept: we have left undone what should have been done aeons ago!

Whereas subsidy, for which the nation is inextricably caught in its web, and which currently consumes nearly 40 percent of our forex earnings is the price to pay for our myopic leadership, every other thing, including the current  pretences about market forces meaning nothing; the believe that costs can somehow become irrelevant so long as there is a piggy bank available to service all manners of purposes under the sun, are merely derivatives.

Which is what makes latest fuel-marketers-induced crisis at best a reminder of that road not taken.