The Nation Newspaper

Tag: year

  • A defining year?

    A defining year?

    For most Nigerians, the salutation – Happy New Year – has come to mean more than usual wishes about the potential good that the new year could deliver. In fact, it has become something of a desperate, high-intensity prayer that the dark palls enveloping the country will yield to the promise of a new dawn. In other words, for the once-upon-a-time happiest people on planet earth, the phrase goes beyond mere routine, temporal transition. It is rather a supplication of sorts for Divine intervention to enable them make a clean break from those dark elemental forces that seek to devalue their humanity – forces beyond their control. Something of a forlorn hope that something, no matter how minute, could still be salvaged from the mass debris that their national landscape had become. 

    Yes, country hard, or as the Americans are wont to say –It is the economy stupid. I understand that these are moments when the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS)’dreary data will hardly suffice to capture the reality that defines the daily grind of the ordinary Nigerian. And it is not as if the fellows at the NBS are not doing their best; it is merely stating that the arc of Nigeria’s moving averages on all of life’s indices are far too complicated no matter whether the measure(s) is/are single or multiplex! 

    New year or not; surely one needn’t a gaze into the crystal ball to appreciate the difficulties that lie ahead in the coming months. Inflation is currently at an all-time high at 30 percent; food inflation is much worse at nearly 50 percent; the few manufacturing entities remaining in the country are practically on life support – no thanks to the combined forces of the crushing foreign exchange regime, infrastructure deficit, and smuggling of cheaper and sometimes fake or substandard products.

    As for agriculture, the sector limps on with farmers either unable to access their farms due to the ravaging insecurity in parts where bandits and other outlaws have taken over or such other structural constraints that Nigerians are only too familiar. In the circumstance, Nigerians can only but wonder if there is anything of promise in the new year.

    Simply put: Nigerians’ anxieties about what the future portends are certainly not without basis. After all, in the energy sector, they have heard such countless deliverables in megawatts of electricity that ended up like the smoke. A nation that in 1964 started and delivered the Kainji Dam in just four years (1968) has since been unable to make a headway on the Mambilla Hydro power project several decades after. Obasanjo came with grandiose promises on thermal plants but delivered nothing after spending a record $16 billion. Nearly two decades after what is supposed to be the revolutionary Power Sector Reform Act, the country is still headed nowhere with our supposed saviour-operators acting more like Ogbanjes as against entities truly out to do business.

    Same with the petroleum sector; surely, few Nigerians remember that Shell D’Arcy actually built Nigeria’s first, 38,000 barrels per day capacity oil refinery at Alesa Eleme near Port Harcourt in late 1965. Possibly, fewer still remember that the military took it over; expanded it, and subsequently, three additional refineries were built to raise the nation’s stake in petroleum refining to 425,000 barrels of crude daily. That was before the locusts took over and ran everything aground. Ever since, the entire country has been locked in a no-motion mode – hung on the debate on subsidy and appropriate pricing of the products, with the country only now looking up to an individual to salvage the situation!

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    Just as tragic is the mess that we have made of our agriculture hence our inability to feed ourselves. As a secondary school student in the late 70s, when the study of agricultural science still made sense, such concepts as agricultural extension services were not textbook stuff; we saw them in live demonstration with farmers interacting with extension workers.

    I recall that in my school – Titcombe College, Egbe, Kogi State, practical agriculture was something that students took delight in; in fact, we actually had a massive orchard that supplied students with citrus in season! Today, most of our so-called policy makers only remember the farmer either when there are intervention freebies to share, or the subject is farmers-herders clashes – something they find handy to rationalise the pervading poverty of ideas at the highest levels of government! 

    Yet we wonder why the country is not only ranked among those on the bottom on the Human Development Index but why poverty stalks around our neighbourhoods.

     Nothing, I dare say, suggests that year 2024 is not going to be different however. At the cross-over service on the eve of the new year, I recall my pastor saying something about the darkest hour of the night being the closet to the morn. That may well be. Only that I cannot now recall if he added that if wishes were horses, that beggars would ride. In other words, if truly Nigerians have gone through such terrible times that it hard to imagine anything worse, that in itself is no guarantee the miracles that they are ever so eager to pray about (and which they have long outsourced to God) will drop without human exertion. Clearly, we can’t be doing things the same way while expecting a different outcome.

    As I see it, only hard work, more hard work and honestly of purpose particularly by actors in and out of government, will make all the difference in year 2024.

    Yes, with or without the crystal ball, I still see hope.  True, the Holy writ speaks of hope deferred as making the heart sick; I believe that we have now reached the point where all things being equal, things should begin to look up. 

    Let me anchor my hope on three things.

    First, I see the coming of the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote Refinery and Petrochemical Complex as something that would revive the wearied Nigerian spirit. Talk of the many benefits – from easing the demand for forex and with it the potential for shoring up the naira’s value, to the multiple jobs along the value chain – Nigerians surely shall, going forward, have many reasons to rejoice.

    Second, I see the power situation improving. Clearly, one needed not to be an incurable optimist to appreciate that the current situation cannot be allowed to continue. It is – and that is putting it mildly – embarrassing. It is hard to imagine President Bola Tinubu – a president sworn to renew the hopes of Nigerians – leaving the initiatives to the current club of clueless operators. I see drastic change in the air. While this might come incrementally, I see it enduring!

    Thirdly – on the security sector – we may have been on the same fruitless spot for so long that many have begun to lose faith. Whereas the Tudun Biri fiasco by the military and the Yuletide massacre by bandits on the Plateau are as unfortunate and regrettable, both incidents have merely brought what I consider a fierce urgency to the quest for a comprehensive solution. I see things beginning to cool down in virtually all the hot spots in the country – under the firm, able direction of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

    I close. I hear Nigerians daily say that things must change. I agree; only that change must begin with you and me. We must start by doing those little things that our common humanity, if not citizenship, demands of us.  Once again, Happy New Year.

  • Another year is ending and a new year begins

    Another year is ending and a new year begins

    Year 2023 that is ending has been a difficult year all over the world, but to say the least, it has been doubly, problematic in Nigeria. There is a shortage of food because we are not growing enough food, the farming population is aging and the young people are flooding into the towns for the bright lights in the cities. Secondly the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are disrupting the flow of food and cost of available food imports is skyrocketing. The cost of fuel and consequent devaluation of the local currency is making the cost of imports unbearable. 

    We are also witnessing the global inflation ravaging the entire world. We are going through a transition from living beyond our means to living within our means. We transited from one government to another despite the rather contentious and disputed national and state elections, a feature which has sadly come to characterise our elections in Nigeria. Election seems to be a festival of bountiful harvest of monetary rewards for lawyers and some would say, for members of the judiciary in Nigeria.

    I don’t think there is any other country in the world where elections are followed by so much litigation as we have in Nigeria. In our country, when a candidate loses an election, the refrain is that she or he has been rigged out. When he wins an election, it is either he or she has bought his or her victory. It is not that elections are not sometimes challenged in other countries but in Nigeria, it is the routine end of all our elections. This is sometimes accompanied by violence. This makes one to come to the conclusion like Marquis de Montesquieu came to in the 18th century that people in the tropics are predisposed to dictatorship than to democracy which is more suitable to people in the temperate regions of the world. I cannot think of countries in the tropics that run democratic constitutions seamlessly whereas democracy seems to be rather popular in the temperate countries particularly in the temperate region of Europe, the United States and Canada in spite of dictatorships of the Nazi, the Fascist, Communist ideology which were European export to the world.

    In Africa our monarchical legacies like other monarchies in other parts of the world did not tolerate opposition. We mostly do not have positive terms for opposition in our languages. Nowadays we all want to be on the winning side in any elections no matter in which country. Winning an election in Africa may be the difference between having flowing potable water in your pipes or dry pipes or no piped water at all. It could also mean no motorable roads or smooth expressways. It could mean absence of other great things like hospitals, good schools, good communications and transportation and other appurtenances of modern life.

    In other parts of the democratic world, some of these things are regarded as normal expectations from good democratic governance. The thing is that some of these things are also available to citizens in countries run by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. The difference is that if the totalitarian and authoritarian rulers do not provide them, there is nothing the citizens can do because protest or demands for them are not allowed unless the protesters are sure of support for a change of government or the consequences of liberty or death as battle cry.

    What has our experience in Nigeria been since about 1951 since our country exited from British dictatorship based on racial superiority and western educational achievement of knowledge? The British conquest and domination was based on superiority of knowledge translated into superiority of weapons and intelligence and governance wisdom based on knowledge. When the British felt they had to concede to our fathers a share in government based on the fact that our founding ancestors had acquired western education, they brought into being constitutional provisions that made it possible to share with us the burden and opportunities of government with our fathers and sometimes with our mothers schooled in the same intellectual environment with our fathers. This first crop of rulers guided by the British overlords seemed to have imbibed the democratic culture which allowed difference of ideas not leading to blows and undemocratic exchanges in the public glare.

    But when the British left or surrendered to our pressure, the democratic edifice carefully constructed collapsed like a house of cards because the structure itself was built on faulty foundations. From the collapse we needed a civil war to realise our mistake and to build back on the debris and ruins of the previous sandy foundation. We learnt the hard lesson that it is much easier to destroy than to rebuild. Since our civil war, we have been writing constitutions only to find them not quite adequate to the problems that keep emerging and to tackle each new problems cropping up all the time.

    We have not found the magical constitutions that substantial portion of our people like. Once a new constitution is written, people use it to satisfy their greed. Those out of the gravy train would then commence on serious agitation to make the country unstable and if possible ungovernable. We then put together a governing coalition to ram down the throats of those who are out of the loop. This has been our story since independence. The devil is in the detail the skeleton of our problem is clear to any serious thinker. The kernel of our problems is the ethnic divide and the bringing of chicken and pigeon together in a cage. They will soon cohabit uneasily or they will fight against each other using whatever advantages they have against each other until they are separated or they fight till death.

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    Of course we have seen on the African continent in Somalia people of the same ethnicity and religion finding it difficult to stay together and reducing themselves to the level of the most primitive Homo sapiens and an atomistic society only tolerating each other at the level of clans, not even tribes. The option before us is to realise that no country is a paradise. We must make our country work.

    It is people who build countries we have to use who we have. Not all our people are devils.  Quite substantial parts of our people are indeed saints. If you are a religious person, you will know that God can use anybody to achieve His mission in His divine creation. Perhaps our mistake is that we want to be governed by saints rather than by practical men of action and women of action. There is no country on earth where their leaders and politicians will pass the test of righteousness. We just have to make do with what we have and confine them within the structure of established laws and constitution of our country and if they go out of line, we find a way of throwing them out and replacing them with next best offer we have.

    This seems cynical. But from all the recent revelations about those in commanding heights of responsibility, we see that virtually all those we hold very high have individually and collectively betrayed us  and stolen the resources of the country, resources that they cannot use up to the fourth generation. When people do this, it is not just greed but outright madness. This is not just a recent thing; it seems one regime has bettered the other in undoing the country in the nefariousness of undermining the economic health of the country.

    I have heard people say that the present regime is our last chance and that if it fails then we are done for. There is so much hope that judging from his antecedent of being a political brawler and being a street fighter, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the incumbent president should be able to put the country on the path of rectitude. This is a mistake we all make. The solution to our present problems has to be collectively designed, negotiated and executed. It cannot be solved by one Poobah at the head of government but by all of us having a change of heart and determinedly deciding to rebuild our country block by block of hard work and righteous living and serving the country rather than serving ourselves. It is by doing this that the whole world will know that there is a new day in our country and the beginning of moral rearmament in a country where for years people had always waited for our potential greatness to be actualised.  The time for a radical change is now.

    Happy new year my readers.