Like play, like play, the year 2022 is not only just here, but January is gone! The month of January is usually a tough and challenging month of the year, unusually long not because it exceeds 30/31 lunar days like other months but for other reasons. January is tested and defined according to one’s resilience and survival strategies. What, with early salary in December, end of year activities that come with celebrations and funs which come at a cost. Then comes the bills; school fees, rents and lifelines to extended family members and sometimes friends, whose budgets may be woven round good old bonds.
Hard times berthed in Nigeria way back and so nobody needs to give an average Nigerian any lesson in hardship or tough time because it has become our second nature. Whether you have a salary paid job, an entrepreneur or self-employed, January comes with fears and anxieties. Even our good old ritual of New Year resolutions which acts as compass is often broken because of January packages and surprises. It takes more than a careful calibration to navigate through and out of January, but thank God we made it.
Without sounding pessimistic let us face the reality, tough times lie ahead indeed. We will have to cope with grinding poverty and the suffocating insecurity that has refused to go away contrary to what the government presents to us as the alternative truth. On the other side, the storm is gathering for the 2023 general elections and the politicians are here again busy, chasing mirage. My teacher once told me that mirage is ‘devil’s water’, but I later came to know it to be illusion, chasing what does not exist. Yes, that is what it is, in Nigeria all is mirage; the promises, the scorecard of the government in infrastructure, just name it.
The federal government has prepared an additional package of misery for us when she hinted through the finance minister that the fuel subsidy would be removed in 2022 and that Nigerians should brace up for it. This means we will pay more for fuel. In any case, nobody needs to threaten us with any subsidy removal, we have passed the road before; you don’t threaten an old woman with fat phallus. The problem with this whole subsidy business is that nobody has a fixed figure attached to it to know how much the government bureaucracy siphons through this phony subsidy payment, and the beneficiaries.
Petrol subsidy in Nigeria has become like Janus and a spirit that does not go away. The fixation on gasoline as a cure-all for economic recovery is robbing the poor to pay for the incompetence and corruption of the rich and powerful in political offices. Now fuel queues have since returned in cities across the country. I had the opportunity of a first-hand experience in Sokoto a few weeks back where I saw long queues at fuel stations while black market thrives in front of the filling stations with street urchins hawking the product in jerry cans.
Here we are in Abuja the federal capital the notorious queue has returned while motorists and commuters agonize. The black market operators have taken over with their kegs in front of filling stations that dispense the products only at night to the street urchins at higher tips. The return of fuel queue is just a he-goat manoeuvre which the federal government needs to drive home the point that the problem is the behemoth called fuel subsidy which the removal will guarantee availability and steady supply.
Ordinarily, gasoline supply and availability should be the least worry to Nigerians as an oil producing country. We have four refineries that have gone kaput. No government or regime has gotten the initiative to engage in simple but common routine maintenance of our refineries to fix them and ensure steady local production to meet our domestic needs. We are not even talking about building new refineries which are since overdue and which would have given us advantage as revenue earner considering the huge market in the sub region.
The petroleum ministers have always been run-of-the-mill political appointees without the right competences to build capacity to turn the industry around. They are simply appointed to serve political ends. The petroleum ministers are just simply accounting officers to funnel earnings from crude sales to oil the wheel and insatiable greed of government officials, their minions and powerful traditional rulers. Removing subsidy assuming it exists and increasing the price of petrol at this time is to administer hemlock on Nigerians.
The APC-led government has not been known to be empathic and tolerant to the feelings of ordinary Nigerians whatever their lot, counting on the fact that we have short memories. Nobody can accurately gauge the mood of the country but hardship and insecurity remain the defining features in our polity today. It is probably going to get worse in coming days and months in the run-up to the general election come 2023.
We daily inundate God with supplications for intervention, sleeping in places of worship praying and fasting for the locusts ravaging our land. We are praying to God to come down and remove the bad people we have put in government. Is that what other people in other countries are doing? The organized labour used to be a rallying point but has now gone comatose and hugely compromised while the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) are just business outfits for bread and butter. The students’ movements have been taken over by youths without knowledge of their historical mission, preferring to mimic and monkey politicians in their debauchery and waste. Ours has become a scotched and famished earth crying for heroes.
There is a foreboding omen for 2023 because of the high stakes. The only thing the politicians are thinking is power sharing and power shift, the same old people that have sold us a bull in Chinese shop. They want power to rotate and change from north to south. Others argue probably with equal sentiment that southeast or an Igbo man should be president, come 2023. Wherever the president comes from and whoever becomes the president may never be the game changer to turn the country around if we remain divided as we are today. Election alone is not going to solve the problem of insecurity, unemployment and poverty. Election alone is not going to make our roads safe and remove weapons from the hands of non-state actors.
In the count down to the elections, more money will be thrown into circulation for politics; there would be more ritual killings for good luck charms to oil the wheel of political power which will heighten the state of insecurity. Nigeria is bleeding and the haemorrhage is going to get worse in coming months towards 2023. The politicians always wear the mask of Esu, the Yoruba deity of evil that wears double face. The politicians recruit cultists and assassins dancing naked in their ghoulish feast of blood. They probably relish the smell and sight of blood to satisfy their gods. This is the period and harvest time for the sorcerers, mediums, fetish priests, native doctors, and star gazers that control the lives of the politicians.
It is true we need the elections if only to see the back of the present government and regime that has done such incalculable damage to the psyche and unity of this country through selective treatment and bigotry. What we need more than ever before is to first take a conscious step to unite the country, and the ethnic nationalities which is going to be an uphill task.
This is probably the best time for us to review the terms for which the ethnic nationalities can continue to live together as one united indivisible entity; not the one decreed and held by force and threat. The argument that the constitution does not present us with any clause to opt out in self-determination if we no longer feel secured in the political entity and space called Nigeria, is balderdash. In any case we need not shed blood to stay or opt out of any union. There is no human law that compels anyone or group to remain in a suffocating relationship where he/she is not guaranteed equity and justice as the experience of great empires and nations have shown whether in African or elsewhere in any other part of the world.
- Kebonkwu Esq is an Abuja-based attorney.