Palliative.
When that word entered the vocabulary of social discourse, and of news writing and reporting in Nigeria, I was not a little disquieted.
For one thing, it is not easy on the tongue. For another, it is not a headline word. Old-school editors back in the days before offset printing would have blue-pencilled it out of news copy reflexively and upbraided whoever cleared it for publication.
Even in this digital age, editors concerned more with serving the public than taking advantage of the ease of formatting would hesitate to use it in a headline. They would look for a shorter, simpler, word.
But Nigerians, right down to those inhabiting the remotest village, have come to acquire so much familiarity with the word that only the most pedantic of editors would now regard it as a red signal.
You hear it rendered in local and regional tonal variations in boardrooms and in the market square, the motor park, at festivals, at naming and burial ceremonies, and indeed wherever two or three Nigerians are gathered. You hear it come off the lips of the old and the young and the very young, the well-schooled, the not-so-schooled, and the totally unschooled.
I cannot with confidence dat e its precise entry into our lexicon, but am almost prepared to assert that it graduated into a staple of social and political commentary in the time of former President Goodluck Jonathan.
These days, no discourse on the Nigerian condition passes muster unless it is perfused with details of palliatives currently on offer, the ones that preceded them, how they had been hijacked or misappropriated, and how they have on the whole failed to meet the ends for which they were designed.
In whatever context, the Federal Government is the primary actor, with state governments playing a secondary role. A visitor to this clime might well report to the audience back home that, in Nigeria, they are running a government by palliatives.
“Social media” outlets, pardon the oxymoron, are awash in portrayals of the palliatives in theory and practice. In one, masquerades, regarded in folk culture as creatures from the other world, are asking for their share of the palliatives being distributed or announced every passing day.
They didn’t look famished and didn’t sound angry. Perhaps that is the conduct their abode enjoins. Still, it must be asked: What is going on there? Is it also riven by politics, propaganda, inflation, hoarding, profiteering, shortages, empty silos, epileptic exchange rates, and Boko Haram’s depredations?
In another depiction, the national mood is set to the stirring tune and resonant cadences of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” from Messiah. Here are the opening lines in Pidgin English, riffed appropriately:
I deh hungry/Me dey hungry/I dey hungry/I deeh hungry . . .
Then, these lines, addressed directly to the president, the vice president, senators, ministers, governors, and the government:
Belle dey worry me/Make you give me chop. . .
And then, the explosive clincher:
We–dey/Hun–gry
The performance was the work of a professional or practiced amateur choir, their trained, voices ringing out loud and clear and touching the soul, as in the great Chorus, of which the rendition is a parody.
No assemblage of hungry persons could have sung with such gusto, such vitality, and such vibrancy. Nor was there the merest whiff of anger in their voices. On the contrary, their voices radiated joy, ecstasy even, and contentment. The voices did not reflect what is conveyed in daily discourse as anger.
But the hunger out there is real enough, even if anecdotal. The anger seems sporadic and, in part, engineered. Still. It will not do to say that it is all a matter of perception. They need to be addressed with concrete, targeted, and well-delivered measures. For, as sociologists tell us, if a situation is perceived as real, it is real in its consequences.
The authorities must start by asking the right questions. What exactly is the problem, or combination of problems convulsing the polity?
To a good many of our compatriots, these questions have a simple, one-word answer: Tinubu. If only President Bola Tinubu had installed the right people in his cabinet and executive agencies and pursued the right policies, the country would not have found itself in this parlous state, they insist.
Their solution? Tinubu should resign and make way for a more competent chief executive. They are silent as to who should replace him, and how that person should be chosen.
Others are calling for a military coup to sweep Tinubu off the political platform and supplant the entire governing apparatus. It is as if a cabinet shuffle with tanks will turn things around.
Many of his appointees would not have passed the merit test, it is true. They owe their jobs to political, regional, ethnic, and religious balancing. But even if he had picked the ablest persons in the land, they would still not have made much difference in the nine months they have been in office.
The problems have deep roots.
Just a few years after independence, the Balewa Government launched an Austerity Programme. It was his answer to some of the very problems confronting the nation today. The temper of the times was memorialized in a hit tune by the late high-life maestro, Victor Olaiya, and by other musicians.
The times are hard, they crooned. There is no money in town, no jobs, prices are high, and everyone is yearning for money.
At his first coming as Head of State, General Muhammadu Buhari inherited an economy driven to the brink of collapse by the depredations of the Shagari Administration. Money and basic commodities were rationed; imports were controlled by a regime of licensing,
Military President Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was advertised as the perfect answer to Nigeria’s political and economic problems. On paper, it seemed to fit that bill. In practice, however, it cemented the foundation of our present woes by turning the country into a laboratory for crackbrained experiments in economics and politics.
It was he who introduced the two-tier exchange rate mechanism that enriched him and his cronies, bled the treasury and pauperized the general public. That mechanism is at work today in a more vicious form. It was under his regime that banking became a racket, a proving ground for syndicated swindlers.
President Olusegun Obasanjo came into office full of ideas and goodwill at home and abroad. He believed, and many shared the belief, that he could move mountains. He spoke the language of reform and, to his credit, transformed the broken telephony system, and gave public servants a living pension.
He got rid of public enterprises that were a drain on the nation’s finances. But they ended up, heavily discounted, in the pockets of the well-connected. The purposes they served, however patchily, were lost to the public.
More out of loyalty to his departed former deputy, General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua than from a sound assessment of his record and potential, he foisted the terminally ill Umar Musa Yar’Adua on the nation as president. A cabal seized the space, and the nation drifted.
Goodluck Jonathan, whom Obasanjo again foisted on the nation, was no improvement. He was called “clueless” so often that a visitor to these parts might have thought it was his middle name. It was in his time, I think, that Nigeria slid down so precipitously on the International Misery Index that it came to be regarded as the world’s “poverty capital.” Oil smuggling and oil importation intensified; national refining capacity collapsed.
Buhari 2.0 made no pretence about managing the economy. He simply got his obliging, or rather, conniving Central Bank governor, Godwin Emefiele, to print billions upon billions of Naira to keep the government running. Potemkin rice plantations littered the countryside, of which the rice pyramids that sprang up overnight in Abuja and vanished just as suddenly were a product.
The value of the Naira dropped steadily and forecasts of an exchange rate of N1000 to one U. S dollar that many dismissed as apocalyptic became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Buhari’s so-called reform measures knocked the bottom out of the economy.
To compound matters, as Boko Haram and murderous herders and freelance bandits made farming a dangerous occupation, harvests dwindled steadily, over the years, resulting in food shortages.
The foregoing is the baleful bequest President Tinubu was handed nine months ago.
After a slow start, he has launched policies and programs designed to turn adversity into advantage. It is not going to happen overnight, and things may even get worse before they get better. Policies and programmes are not self-executing. They need to be implemented and monitored by competent, conscientious, and committed officials.
To effect a lasting change in the nation’s fortunes, Tinubu needs cadres of such officials. He must not tolerate the fecklessness and lassitude that now parade some important corridors of power.
