To those who once touted the magical body language of our dear president, the current inertia both in the polity and governance as a whole must have come as hard lesson in the danger of overselling a product, the folly of proclaiming heroism when the battle is yet to be engaged, and the tragic reluctance to confront the truth when it matters most.
With barely a year and half to the end of the two-term tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari, state-wide atrophy is now beyond denial – certainly not with the full and untrammelled anarchy loosed on the landscape. Three weeks after some crooks and their enablers in the high places decided to bring in cargoes of adulterated fuel into the country, not only are spasms unleashed on the economy and on the people yet to abate; the administration’s pretences to virtue and performance are being blown on all fronts.
As at the weekend, there were still no suggestions as to when the latest nightmare would end. By this I refer the long queues of motorists waiting for fuel to buy with reports in parts of the country showing that a litre of petrol goes for as high as N400! Now add to these the anguish of our hordes of manufacturers and those in the heavy haulage sector who must now cough out N500 for a litre diesel –the same critical actors forced to endure the latest pangs of grid failure, we are talking of a nation being corralled precipitously towards the slope.
True, Nigerians may have started out with a ‘petrol problem’; what have become apparent in the last few weeks are far more complex than the usual regulatory lapses could explain. For while the symptoms are manifest in the daily pains that Nigerians suffer, their roots lay buried in the pretentious but definitely overrated leadership on which they invested their hopes.
And so to those who once regaled us with the famed body language of Mai Gaskiya – at some point daring to poke the fun on the rest of us – the so-called unbelieving, the joke tragically is on them – a mocking and dramatic twist at that. From a season where forms are glorified over substance, when inanities are allowed to supplant prudence; theirs is now era where the most heinous and intolerable are rationalised since, apparently, their supposed hero have no guile. For the typically questioning and assertive society, suddenly feigning ‘deaf and dumb’ in the face of the hell that living in Buhari’s country has become must have come at a cost of painful adjustment.
Anyone still in doubt as to how bad things are? Take two sectors – the electricity and petroleum sectors which the administration could easily have staked its honour for instance. By now, Nigerians know the story of the refineries only too well – same of the same – or worse. From the familiar statist arguments about retaining control to privatisation and now back to the same point where we started from, the country has been made to go full cycle by an administration that does not seem to know what it wants. Suddenly, the same inept national oil corporation under whose watch the edifices were ran aground, is posturing as their latter-day salvagers with no hard questions asked! And because Nigerians are said to want their refineries back and running –the costs are not supposed to matter –thanks to Buhari’s school of leadership by abdication – we can recline, hope and pray that things turn out right in the hand of the certified undertakers!
Same with the subsidy story; the administration started off with a denial of the obvious; and when the truth sank in, it took some half-hearted measures to address it and soon after relapsed into its familiar inertia. The latest official line is that the burden of the subsidy – as against the baffling inertness of the administration; an administration that had seven years to think through a comprehensive programme to address the situation – is intolerable! Talk of a government that popped champagne on the signing of a Petroleum Industry Act waking up the very next to discover that the very basis of the law does not even exist! How about that for the record?
Last week, Nigerians were finally reminded that they still have a minister in charge of the power sector. If before September last year, they thought they had Mr. Anonymous in charge of the critical sector, the incumbent, Abubakar Aliyu, would seem to have been cut of the same cloth.
Only last week, the minister claimed that the country’s total installed electricity capacity currently stands at 18, 000 megawatts of which 8,000 megawatts is generated daily for consumers’ consumption.
His words: “I’d like you also to take away that we deliver 8,000mw of electricity daily through a combination of Grid, Embedded and Industrial Captive supply of Electricity (not 4,000MW as is frequently reported), much of this capacity added during the life of this administration. These are not my figures; this was an industry study conducted by KPMG recently.”
Well Mr. Minister, the story out there is that things have fallen tragically apart under your watch. Entreating the ill-served electricity consumer to the boring power semantics did nothing to assuage their pains any more than Obasanjo’s revolutionary Power Sector Reform Act has changed the power landscape in any tangible way. Expecting the long-suffering consumers to figure out the meaning of generated power, installed capacity and perhaps what it means to have stranded power in a sector where more darkness subsists than light would seem one additional pain they could do without. All they want is power – from wherever they can get it – stranded or not!
Interestingly, it was the same week that the minister would declare without shame that the erratic power supply currently being experienced in Abuja and other parts of the country is caused by low water level in the hydro dams. Thank God he did not say that some farmers encroached on the water route somewhere in Futa Jallon! After all, stories of serial shortage of gas to fire the power plants in a world leading gas producer have become not only commonplace but routine. One can only hope Nigerians will not be treated to another bizarre tale of snakes taking over the turbines as we once had in the past.
And someone tells me that the administration is not on the lame-duck mode yet. Good heavens!