It wasn’t many weeks after the crown settled over his ears that President Goodluck Jonathan, and perhaps some of his minders, knew that Palladium would be a lifelong opponent. The columnist’s grouse is of course not congenital; it was triggered by the president’s disagreeable worldview that sees him being shifty when firmness is desired and rigid when compromise is required. Even before the election that enthroned him was conducted, this column had concluded that the president, who was then an acting president, would win, but would be incapable of governing with the innovativeness and discipline a harassed and broken nation needed. The columnist, readers will recall, had endorsed Mallam Nuhu Ribadu for the presidency, but also concluded that the young man’s time was not yet, for too many things were loaded against the uppity anti-graft czar, not least his age, judgement, and frequently misplaced candour . I am happy to restate that the president has not made a disciple of me.
I single out for consideration today Jonathan’s fuel subsidy removal policy. Speaking a few days ago while receiving the report of the graduating participants of the Senior Executive Course 34, 2012 of the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, at the Presidential Villa, the president insisted that what was left of subsidy must be removed in order to free the industry and attract investors. It was an inelegant perspective couched allegorically in patient-doctor format. Hear him at his rhetorical best: “Why is it that people are not building refineries in Nigeria, despite that it is a big business? It is because of the policy of subsidy, and that is why we want to get out of it. To change a nation is like surgery. If you have a young daughter of five years who has a boil at a very strategic part of the face, you either, as a parent, leave that boil because the young girl will cry or you take the girl to the surgeon. So, you have the option of just robbing mentholatum on the face, until the boil will burst and disfigure her face, or you take that child to the surgeon. On the sighting of a scalpel of the surgeon alone, the child will start crying. But if she bears the pains, after some days or weeks, the child will grow up to be a beautiful lady.”
Not only has the president determined that the subsidy problem is a boil, he has also concluded that it is located on the face. He also assumes that the boil was left untreated until it became ripe and reached the ugly dimension he talked about. Finally, he assumes that the patient cannot have a second opinion, and that the surgeon is competent enough to make the incision required to prevent scarification. But suppose the so-called boil is only imaginary and indeed psychosomatic? Suppose the patient is a haemophiliac or a diabetic? In Jonathan’s allegorical world, we are after all permitted to cavort among many suppositions. Judging from his antecedents and his responses to Nigeria’s enduring problems and challenges, Jonathan cannot, however, be supposed to be a qualified surgeon, let alone one whose diagnosis is accurate. In January this year, in his attempt to perform surgery on this same boil of his finding, he almost decapitated the national head. In surgically addressing a boil he says is strategically placed on the face – thank God he sees us as a potentially beautiful girl – how can we be sure he will not remove an eye?
Has Jonathan treated the cancer that has made our roads death traps? Has he tackled the security problems in the Northeast and all over the country? Has he responded well to the decay in the education sector, the misery in the health sector, and the confusion in transportation and electricity generation and distribution sectors? He pursues boils but leaves cancers and cardiac problems unattended. He is preoccupied with saving a girl’s pretty face when the patient is suffering from the far more devastating afflictions of leukaemia and haemophilia. The fact staring us in the face is that in his allegorical world, Jonathan seems more appropriately a self-trained nurse who has picked up bits and pieces from eminent surgeons during ward rounds. He depends on the apolitical Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala for his knowledge of economics, though the economic orthodoxy she purveys has doubtful utility for Nigeria’s unique cultural, social and political milieux. In her first coming, she was obsessed with the desire to pay off the country’s debts; in her second coming, she is now obsessed with the countervailing desire to acquire debts. She reminds us of the illustrious and self-satisfied Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who at his first coming was obsessed with nationalising what he described as the commanding heights of the economy, and at his second coming was so fixated with privatising everything we briefly feared he would privatise the presidency or the country itself.
There is not only no convincing proof of the existence of fuel subsidy, as the trial of the so-called subsidy thieves has indicated, it is also clear that neither Jonathan nor his favourite aides and mannequins in the oil sector have given us statistical illustration of what is happening in the industry in terms of production, consumption and refining. Nigeria’s oil industry is so immersed in confusion and inefficiency that it must require extreme arrogance and insouciance for the government to focus only on the financial rewards of removing the subsidy, and ignoring the unsavoury fact that the burden of such removal will be borne mainly, if not only, by the poor. The surgeon-general has spared no time to consider the consequences of the subsidy removal, nor even talked about it, except to refer to it in exasperating tones. Never has a government anywhere, not even in autocracies, sailed near the wind as recklessly as the Jonathan government and his colluding cabals. The poor are overtaxed, over-levied, can’t afford school fees for their children, have no access to decent or qualitative healthcare, and have no access to housing. They are left hungry, isolated and dangerously alienated.
President Jonathan fancies himself a political, developmental and financial surgeon, and is impatient with any talk of second opinion. He wants to railroad his patient into surgery, in the tenuous hope that the patient will not die on his poorly equipped operating table. He knows the threat from the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) is mere noise, and he believes the Save Nigeria Group (SNG) has discredited itself by its indiscriminate accusations and hysteria. He is convinced it would be a mark of courage to defy the patient’s alarm and to proceed urgently to surgery, and in 10 years, as he said at another forum, Nigeria would enjoy a turnaround. He will probably expatiate on this wild and unsubstantiated optimism in today’s presidential media chat. But there is nothing he says that will persuade us he has the discipline and the team to remake Nigeria. Except to the jobholders around him, everyone knows his government lacks the depth and initiative to snatch the country from the jaws of poverty and underdevelopment.
Sadly, now, there is nothing anyone can say to persuade Dr Jonathan that the world is not flat, as his subsidy theory imagines, or that the consequences of subsidy removal, which he and his aides deigned to give only palliative gestures, would not far outweigh the benefits his economists talk about. We hope it is not superfluous to remind him he is a democratically elected president, and that that singular fact makes it obligatory for him to convince us of the existence of a subsidy regime in the downstream sector of the oil industry, and that that subsidy is of such magnitude that except we did away with it, we could not hope to prosper. We may not trust that he would grasp what we readily see, namely that an indifferent and illogical policy issuing from him could mix lethally with an impoverished and alienated public to produce such effects as no revolution is sufficient to mimic. But we have a responsibility to restrain this eager surgeon, lest he make an incision purporting to save a girl’s pretty face only to destroy the patient, and with her, bring an entire republic down.
