“May your road be rough, may you have a hard time this year” – Tai Solarin (of blessed memory), 1 January 1964
In this season of emergency messiahs, it is meet to x-ray that Nigerian penchant to chase shadows, when common sense — hardly ever common — dictates you stick to the substance, no matter how grinding.
Might that have inspired the late Tai Solarin’s iconoclastic wish, quoted as prelude to this piece, as relevant today as it was on 1 January 1964 when it was released, in lieu of the conventional “happy new year”?
Indeed, may your road be rough! In there lies any grain of natural progress.
But most times when that happens, and Nigeria seems at a serious crossroads, a flighty ensemble gallops into town, and with thunderous roar from the dim, start vending fake magic.
Most times, however, that easy way always forms the root for a future gnashing of teeth, in a vicious merry-go-round.
Former President Olusegun Obsanjo’s latest fancy, the “non-partisan” Coalition for Nigeria (CN) fits pat into that umpteenth pattern — and Ripples gave his take on the Owu fox’s latest gambit in this column last week.
Still, that would appear a crescendo to a well-calibrated mirage, masterfully conjured to hook the unwary and sucker the simplistic. Unfortunately, the Nigerian space teems with such in their millions.
That brings the discourse to the day’s main menu: between IBB and Atiku.
To Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (IBB), former self-named “military president” and Abubakar Atiku, former elected Vice President of the Federal Republic, Muhammadu Buhari would appear a constant.
In Babangida, it is how, after Buhari, a past got so frightfully awry, with a mess that climaxed in 2015; with both IBB and new, self-promoting messiah, Obasanjo, playing more than active roles.
In Atiku, it is how, again after Buhari, a future could turn so spirally wrong; so much so that it could well nigh be beyond redemption. Again, an Obasanjo is huffing and puffing; pawning old poison as new elixir.
During the military era, IBB postured easy comfort, from the Buhari-Idiagbon Grim Republic, after emerging new “military president”, after a palace coup in August 1985. At the end, he delivered nothing but sweet peril, that forged this present lament.
Before Obasanjo barged into his party, with his CN Hobson’s choice, Atiku was staking his claim as some rosy future, after Buhari’s grim present — if not a contemporary Nigerian Pericles, the greatest of the Greek old lawgivers, then certainly a Solon, the wisest of them all.
Indeed, Atiku postured as the latest neo-Fulani progressive-liberal in town, at home with state police (the battle cry of the fringe of those craving a rebirth of Nigeria’s skewed federalism); is comfy with “resource control” (the war cry of the Niger Delta) and absolutely in love with “restructuring” — the turn-defeat-into-triumph gamble of the Afenifere grandees of the South West.
In this high-pitch Atiku circus of colourful nothings, you could never lose! Whoever gains anything from the rainbow of a soap bubble — except the thrill of its final pop?
Perhaps the “new” Atiku sent Baba Iyabo scampering to his new CN gambit. Perhaps it was, from the Buhari angle, that eternal panic of being out-shone by anyone in the contemporary Nigerian cosmos, especially on the anti-corruption front, that stampeded Baba into the fray.
But whatever it was, something is escaping the duo: the high presidential institution they sunk in the mud, by their roforofo fight based on nothing but empty ego, is being restored to its full lofty heights, by quiet grace, by an incorruptible duo.
With Baba sounding so hollow on the anti-corruption front, “federal character” in presidential appointments is his new game — hardly a crime!
But back to IBB and Atiku in the Nigerian economic debacle.
As a University of Ibadan undergraduate in 1984, Ripples never liked the Buhari junta’s political policy.
The treatment of the ousted politicians was too draconian, back then hallmarking the most vicious face of military rule ever. The arrests were also lop-sided, with a penchant to punish, just for punishment’s sake. Thirty-four years after, that impression remains unchanged.
But not so, the economic policy. Back then as at now, the thrust was self-sufficiency, no matter how hard at first, to build a real local economy. But the avant-garde experts back then, pumped full with self-underdevelopment theories, courtesy of their Western teacher-ideologues, balked.
Buhari lost out. IBB, charming the gullible — which was about everyone, including the media — sided with these Nigerian “expat experts”, to echo Prof. Wole Soyinka’s sarcastic pun in The Interpreters.
In the very first week of the structural adjustment programme (SAP) in 1986, the Naira forever(?) crashed as a viable currency.
That economic debacle, of totally surrendering to imports, while playing yo-yo with the Naira parity, hoping gushing petro-dollars would absorb the shock, had lasted all through military rule (1986-1999), and spanned the 4th Republic Obasanjo presidential establishment (1999-2015).
Of course, there were “reforms” (that highfalutin jazz word of Obasanjo-era high orthodoxy): some of them critical (like the pension reforms); others laughable (like liberalizing petroleum downstream by refined fuel import); and yet others, trip to ego land, as Chukwuma Soludo’s NEEDS (National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy) which, in full golden triumph, beckoned the states to come up with their own SEEDS; and the local governments, with own LEEDS.
It was the golden age of empty sloganeering with raucous applause!
Even when the Buhari Presidency in 2015 changed tack, and instead settled for massive agriculture to power back the local economy, these same “expat experts” pronounced a dire verdict on the new government.
Yet, less than three years down the line, rice importation, by figures from the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS), is down by 90 per cent. By year end 2018, according to the same NBS projection, Nigeria should be self-sufficient in rice and most other grains.
What SAP and Obasanjo era reforms could not even touch in 30 long years, a government delivered in less than three years — and some lobbies still claim that government knows no economics!
Atiku’s link to IBB? Simple. As IBB took Nigeria on an economic wild goose chase 32 years ago, followed by administrations that succeeded him, so would the “new” Atiku take Nigeria to a future economic quicksand, away from the current fast-forming firm grounds.
If those grounds are consolidated and built upon, a robust economy would logically result, other things being equal.
And Baba Iyabo and his CN gang? Just empty drama and vacuous grandstanding — hardly a democratic crime! But it could well turn vicious distraction, with its parasitic tactics of preying on current pains, only to sell a far worse future anguish.
That is Nigeria’s current crossroads, with equal opportunity messiahs stalking the gullible.
But as their past records have shown, over the past 32 years, theirs is the wide and merry way that leads to perdition, not the straight-and-narrow that leads to salvation.
