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Chidi Amuta

  • An epidemic of downward mobility – By Chidi Amuta

    An epidemic of downward mobility – By Chidi Amuta

    It is a sort of sinking feeling. Something like an uncontrolled slide into a dungeon down a slippery slope. You seem trapped as you descend into a hellish pit out of which you are powerless to climb out. The descent is often propelled by a force beyond your control. Government. The IMF. The World Bank. Policy makers in Abuja and other bastions of power.

    Suddenly, your living standards plummet.  The things that you have long taken for granted slip out of your control and become privileged luxuries instead of casual entitlements.  You begin to learn a life style of subtractions, eliminations and substitutions. Subtract bread and replace with slices of yam; cut out butter for breakfast and do palm oil stew. Demobilize one car out of a fleet of two. Cut back on electricity consumption. Switch to fans instead of air conditioners etc.

    It is time to quit cooking with gas and switch to firewood and charcoal. But someone from the government is paid to scream about climate change and deforestation. There is no need to go to the hospital for every little headache. Forget essential drugs. Just pray and hope for the best. It is time for every man to become a doctor in the house: ‘physician, heal thyself!’  Ours is after all a land of miracles. There is no need for man made medicines. Just call in the neighborhood pastor to say a little prayer and ‘ye shall become whole!’ Do not worry about what thou shall eat. Man shall not live by bread alone! Adults do not need three meals a day. That luxury should be reserved for children.

    The elimination and substitutions goes on in nearly every aspect of your daily life. Beyond individual life changes, you see whole segments of the society sliding downwards. Government has changed and has introduced new economic policies. A new deity is in town. It is called “the economy”; it feeds on the things that make people happy and lives livable. The things that enabled a better life yesterday have suddenly been pulled off.  Downward mobility suddenly replaces upward mobility as the standard mode of social aspiration.

    In nearly all cultures, the desire of citizens to move upwards in their circumstances is universal. We strive to move up in our circumstances. We toil so that our children will live a better life than us. In a sense, the dream of all humanity is that the next generation will, through education and skill acquisition, enjoy a better quality and standard of life than the present. In this sense, all national dreams have a meeting point: upward mobility. Details and cultural paraphernalia may differ but we all meet at the place of a better life for our offspring. The future is always a better place.

    Some societies have a constant dream, an ideal that fires the aspirations and hopes of their citizens. The American dream is easily the most famous. It is best captured by ‘the pursuit of happiness’ through positive aspiration and grueling hard work. It is most graphically captured by the 2006 film ‘The Pursuit of Happyness” directed by Gabriel Muccinno starring Will Smith as a homeless salesman in search of a good and meaningful life.

    In real life, the American dream remains alive as the powering impetus of the United States as the land of possibility and opportunity for those who seek it through hard work and perseverance. The son or daughter of a pauper can struggle through a life of obstacles and booby traps to emerge on the sunny side of life as a millionaire or something nearly as good. Not too many people, native born or immigrants, achieve the American dream. But they all embrace the spirit and struggle on. Hope eternal drives life’s struggles towards a national dream that fires every life.

    This is why people of diverse nationalities keep trooping to America in the hope of realizing the American dream in one lifetime if possible. The material indicators of the attainment of the American dream in the lives of individuals include a good credit card, a house on a viable mortgage, a decent automobile , access to weekend grocery shopping, sausage and egg on the breakfast table and the occasional annual vacation for self and family etc. These appearances decorate a pretension to partaking in the American dream.

    No one has yet defined the Nigerian dream in any clear terms. No one knows exactly what the average Nigerian kid struggling through school should look forward to on graduation. It is a blind voyage into the treacherous darkness of chances and uncertainty. To the politically minded elite, the Nigerian dream is the realization of a truly united nation that is home to all Nigerians irrespective of creed, region or tongue. To the common folk, the Nigerian dream is a place to call home, to pursue one’s quest for 3 meals and a future that is better than the present. The Nigerian dream is never an entitlement to material contentment.

    The Nigerian dream in terms of social and economic life used to be the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment through education, a career path and an ‘arrival’ at a destination where every child that goes to school and succeeds ends up better than his/her parents in terms of material and socio economic accomplishments. The sun total of the aspiration of every struggling Nigerian is to bring up their children through education so that they can join the elite who possess cars, decent living accommodation, a career etc. In sum, up to the time of the civil war and soon after, it could be said that the Nigerian dream remained a certain upward mobility in which future generations were expected to far better than those before them in material socio economic terms.

    The clearest manifestation of the thriving of the Nigerian dream was perhaps the rise of a Nigerian middle class. All over the country in the span between 1972 and 2007, there arose in the urban areas a demographic mass of Nigerians who could afford cars, apartments, weekend shopping, occasional holidays, bank accounts, investment in stocks and indulgence in the trappings of middle class existence. The middle class was an enrollment into a productive role in national development.

    Earlier in our history, investment in higher education was the best guarantee of enrollment into the Nigerian middle class. People pursued education as a means of guaranteeing their children a slot in the emergent middle class. Of course there were other not so legitimate routes to this dream. Short cuts emerged: fraud, corruption, robbery, ritual and cybercrimes. They could earn financialand material reward but not a place among the middle class.

    The success of the economic policies of successive administrations could mostly be measured by whether the youth were moving upwards or were static or were regressing socio economically. Times changed and different periods redefined upward mobility and the good life.

    Easily the most noticeable upward mobility in terms of an increase in the size of the middle class was under the Obasanjo elected government between 1999 and 2007. The banking sector ballooned, access to consumer credit grew phenomenally, employment in new growth sectors- telecom, banking and financial services, oil and gas, public works, the stock market etc. Most importantly, the sudden and phenomenal growth in cell phone ownership and use unlocked hitherto hidden economic powers in the hands of multitudes in both rural and urban Nigeria (and Africa). This coincided with the period when the international slogan about Africa changed from unrelieved doomsday predictions about “the dark continent” to  an upbeat optimistic note about ‘Africa rising’ especially up to the 2010s.

    In sharp contrast to the rev of upward mobility initiated under Mr. Obasanjo as elected president, the economic downturn under Buhari inaugurated a massive downward mobility that has only accelerated in the more recent months. National debt ballooned, inflation jumped, consumer credits dried up, retail and consumption shrank, unemployment grew as businesses struggled etc. From 2015 to 2023, we witnessed a phenomenal rise of downward mobility. The middle class shrank as living costs shot up. Inflation shot up. Retail and construction nose dived as the exchange rate of the Naira to major currencies worsened more than ever before.

    In the fifteen months under Mr. Bola Tinubu as president, Nigeria’s downward mobility has entered a jet speed momentum. It is now an epidemic. On a daily basis , throngs of Nigerians are sliding out of the middle class. Multitudes are drifting into poverty. Even those that used to exist at the fringes are now at the peripheries of bare existence. In some states, schools cannot reopen for the new school year as a result of high fuel prices making busing of children to school impossible. Some former middle class parents have changed the schools of their children and wards to lower class schools because of higher school fees. Even the federal government has increased school fees in the Unity Schools from N30,000 per term to N100,000 a term. In Lagos state, boarding fees have escalated from N30,000 a term to N100,000 per term. No one has said how these higher fees will be paid by parents whose monthly wag is about N70,000!

    Nigerian youth who cannot stand the gravity of spreading downward mobility have opted to flee, swearing that this was not the homeland that they dreamt of growing up in. The more elderly are fleeing also in the hope of finding places where their old age medical costs can be covered by the welfare schemes of better climes. The only jobs they can find range from morgue attendants, care  home attendants to grueling manual labour as factory hands. The favourite destinations of the japa crowd range from Canada to the United States, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirate, South Africa and even some unlikely African destinations.

    Some of the youth have set out with nowhere in particular as destination. Some have found themselves stranded in fatal crossings through the Sahara desert only hoping that their voyage would lead to southern Europe. Many have died of heat and exhaustion. Others have boarded boats on a journey of no return. Many have perished in the Mediterranean, leaving no trace, trail or message. For those who have stubbornly stayed at home, a different life has been defined by minus signs. Exclude one meal. Exclude another half. Exclude hospitals and make do with across- the- counter cheap drugs from Pakistani and India.

    In the last one year, the rate at which Nigerians are being forced out of the middle class is unequalled in our history. Astronomical gasoline prices have chased many off the roads as car owners. Families that owned and operated two or more cars now make do with one. Inflation has reached 43% while unemployment figures among the young highly qualified has exceeded 4.5%. Food inflation has driven many Nigerians into an unplanned hunger republic.

    In recent times, parents who manage to send their children to schools and universities are doing so in order to keep the children engaged and out of trouble. There is hardly any expectation that the children would end up better educated or socio economically better off. We are now in a precarious position in our socio economic evolution.

    We used to lament that we the middle class of today are a ‘sandwich’ generation; we served and took care of our parents in old age. We ferried our children to privileged schools now only to have little time and resources for ourselves in retirement. Now, we are paying through our noses to educate children who are condemned to end up worse off than us and our fathers! Those we were expecting to take care of us in old age are themselves likely to remain dependent on us for the foreseeable future.

    This is the crux of our present curse of raging downward mobility. Undoubtedly, our epidemic of downward mass migration has unmistakable  political origins. It is inbuilt in a growing endemic culture of bad governance whose origins we know too well and whose duration remains unknown. Those who have descended from the middle class are not likely to return there any time soon. Those driven into poverty may be stuck there for the rest of their lives. The children now being thrust into poverty may be stuck there forever as more children are born into the poverty republic of the world. Everyone knows we are descending downhill but no one knows when the slide will end and whether an economic recovery is possible in our life time.

    Yet, our only hope of recovery lies in the political realm. Democracy holds the key in the hope that the periodic changes of administrations will bring forth leadership that will redefine national progress and reverse our descent into oblivion. No one knows if Nigerian democracy will eve produce leaders of vision and courage that can reverse the curse of this generation.

    When in one life time, we see the lives of the majority take a nose dive downwards, something uncanny has happened. Worse still, when in spite of our most strenuous efforts the life expectations of our children is condemned to end up worse than ours, we are in a bad place. No quantum of prayers and supplications is likely to rescue a nation mired in bad governance and misrule.

  • How country? (2024) – By Chidi Amuta

    How country? (2024) – By Chidi Amuta

    It is that time of the year again for our ritual roadside assessment of the state of the nation from the perspective of the common folk . It is the last quarter of the year, that time of the year when nearly every Nigerian household takes stock of their fortunes in the year that is about to elapse. Above all, it is the first year and half of a new government. After one year of honeymoon, the new Tinubu government will soon run out of excuses on the promises it made to the electorate during the election campaigns early last year. It is time to ask again: “How Country?”

    The “How country?” test is my ancient method of measuring the mood and state of the nation hardly ever fails. It is at once a casual greeting as well as reaching out to neighbours in normal Nigerian street parlance. It is just a simple greeting cast in the mould of a universal non- committal question: “How Country?” You throw it casually at people you encounter at the roadside, in barbers’ shops, in the drive way of the super market  as you walk in. You don’t expect any in- depth answers.

    All you usually get is a reflex response. The respondents hardly have time to reflect on their answers. But it quite often gives you a quick snapshot of the way things are in the country on the go. It is a sort of everyman’s instant state of the union address on the go. No partisanship. No colourful choreographed answers. Just straight from the hips knee jerk instant response. The answers you get  reflect everything from the misery index, the state of security, the ease of finding work , paying your bills or just getting by on a daily basis. Most importantly, the answers are a measure of how ordinary people are faring and how they generally view the prospects of our commonwealth.

    ‘How country?’ hovers between bad English and pidgin, dangling between serious enquiry and a casual perfunctory greeting.  You therefore mostly get answers in mostly hybrid lingo as well. In normal times, you get: “We dey!”. In times of political turmoil, you are likely to get: “Country bend small!”. In times of economic hardship, you are likely to get: ”We dey manage!” When economic hardship joins political confusion and uncertainty, you get: “God dey our side”.

    It has always worked for me in journalism as an illicit public opinion sampling technique. It is at once a way of expressing cordiality and fellow feeling, a reaffirmation of shared feelings as members of a national community of feelings. What irks me probably pains you. What pains me gnaws at your innermost feelings. Thrown at a troubled soul, the question suggests that perhaps there is someone out there who shares your pains or feels your hurt even without your telling them.

    But in the end, “How country?” becomes a way of restating that we are partakers in a community of feelings, caring about each other in a common patrimony whose state of health resonates in our individual circumstances and can be measured in our spontaneous responses to casual greetings. Our private states come shinning through our spontaneous responses to simple greetings.

    As compatriots, we share something intangible, a common concern for the state of the nation and the state of the state that presides over us all.  The state of things comes to us in the simple things of life that make life worth living. How easy is it to get to work? How adequate is the minimum wage to get us to and from work? How affordable is junior’s  school fees? Do we have enough to sare a cup of garri or rice for the neighbor next door?

    Deploying the ‘how country?’ informality, I usually use a crude sampling method to get a rough idea of the state of the nation or the feelings of ordinary citizens. This is something that neither my training in the humane letters, social sciences or media studies specifically taught me.

    On a given day, I would throw the friendly greeting/question at a cross section of ordinary strangers irrespective of class, ethnicity, circumstance or countenance. By the end of the day, I am likely to have greeted a cross section of fellow countrymen and women ranging from my gate man, cook, steward, secretary, driver, managers, policemen at the checkpoint, labourers at a building site or my customer, the woman who roasts corn or unripe plantain (year in, year out) at the roadside on my way from work.

    When I come home in the evening and in the quiet of my privacy, I would recall and rewind from the barometer of memory the findings of the day.  I get a rough idea of the way things are at least from the eyes and gut responses of ordinary people, uncoloured by partisanship, self interest and the arrogance of position.

    On the guiding question of “how country?”, the answer you get at any given times has kept changing with successive regimes. Most times, however, it is a function of what policies touch the people where it matters most. Let us take the contrast between a past administration and the present one for illustration.

    Under an elected Obasanjo presidency, the introduction of the GSM cellphone revolution gripped the public imagination. The new technology suddenly put a lot of power in the hands of the masses. Ordinary people in the villages, in the farms, in the markets, simple artisans and the army of youth on campuses and street corners suddenly found themselves armed with this powerful tool of communication and infinite possibility. Nothing like it had happened previously. Added to it was a policy of financial inclusion through the  banking consolidation and the popularization of the stock market. Market women and simple traders in the markets were encouraged to measure their net worth not just in the quantum of cash under their mattresses or in their bank accounts.

    More common people began to operate bank accounts and to invest in shares and the bond market. Telecommunications and banking expansion provided the two growth sectors under Mr. Obasanjo with infinite multiplier effects that sucked up a sizeable percentage of the unemployed. Apart from sporadic and isolated disturbances such as Odi, Shagamu and Zaki Biam which were decisively put down with a level of ferocity that offended the human rights community.

    These incidents did not however graduate into nationwide insecurity. Nor did they douse the momentum of economic upliftment that swept the nation and put smiles on the faces of ordinary people. If you asked most of the people in the bus stop crowd then: ‘How Country?’, the resounding answer was most likely : ”We dey kampe!” or they simply showed you their new cell phone with pride ans a smile. This was a reaffirmation of confidence in national stability and the abilities of the national leadership of the time and the possibility of hope in the horizon.

    Fast forward to the period between 2015 and the end of the Buhari administration. The prospect of a Buhari return to power as an elected president brought mixed reactions. There was the resurrection of all sorts of populist myths in the popular imagination. The man was a disciplinarian, would punish corrupt people and erect honest people as role models. Buhari’s appeal was essentially retrospective.

    When the hour came for the famed man of steel to unleash his magic, the nation met with a solid silence of an eerie silence. He was either perennially away on sick leave or touring the world.  In the face of grinding national headaches, he was aloof and indifferent. His officials literally too orders from themselves as minimal accountability took flight. The rich were free to multiply their wealth while the poor multiplied in numbers. The man divided the country. He embraced his kith and kin and left the rest of us to find our way. In the end, a nation that had looked forward to Buhari for some salvation could no longer wait for him to retire to Daura.

    Barely five years into the return to the Buhari myth, Nigerians knew better. In a video clip that was then doing the viral rounds in the social media, the newly elected Buhari was heard bragging, fortuitously, that Nigerians would sooner than later know the difference his return to power would make. By the time Buhari was handing over power to Mr. Tinubu, most Nigerian had become speechless in consternation as hardship and mis-governance joined forces to create a nationa that looked forward to change in whatever guise. By the end of the Buhari administration, the most popular response to “How country?” was solid indifference or stony silence.

    Now a year and half into the Tinubu administration,  only very few can find the courage to ask anyone: “How country?” Practically all the indices of daily living have jumped through the roof. Gasoline, electricity, food prices, rents, school fees, cost of medicines , air fares, transport fares etc. The cost of everything has jumped through the roof. Taxes have piled upon levies; tariffs have been heaped on hidden charges all for services that are hardly ever rendered.

    To worsen the matter, an overwhelming majority of ordinary Nigerians have delivered the unanimous verdict that the Tinubu government is not good hence a nationwide protest a month ago against bad government. An indifferent executive has joined forces with a most cavaliar legislature to run riot with state resources with multiple budgets dedicated to spending on sundry items of luxury and waste ranging from mansions to luxury SUVs, jets and ,some say. even yachts and lavish unnecessary junkets with overloaded delegations.

    In the present circumstances, it has become hard to even pose the casual question: “How country?” The answers are benumbing. They range from ‘which country?’ to a studied long sigh and silence of the cemetery.  When you throw “How country?” at common folk these days, you would be lucky to get a response. They just look at you, shake their heads and move on. At other times, you could get a loud sigh followed by a look that suggests that you are probably an alien or a retort question: “Which country?”

    It all takes us back to Chinua Achebe’s last moment memoir: There Was Once a Country. The question meets yet a bigger question: When again shall we have a country?

  • Pharaoh in Trouble – By Chidi Amuta

    Pharaoh in Trouble – By Chidi Amuta

    Order in every credible democracy is a balance of compassion and hard policy choices. The hard choices, often of a reform nature, which confront new leaders only make sense if they are for the common good. Otherwise, a  barrage  of crushing reforms with no tinge of compassion can suffocate the afflicted citizenry and cast the reformer in a bad hue. In that situation, even the best intentioned reformer could become a mindless autocrat. Democracy then breeds, not a charismatic leader but a mindless authoritarian. The equation is somewhat like this: the pain of reform must be balanced by the appearance of compassion. The tough committed purposeful leader who is both feared and capable of being loved.

    President Bola Tinubu inisists that he has unleashed reforms to make Nigerian better. Not everyone of his compatriots agree. Contrary to the chorus of his Abuja choir, most citizens now contend that today ‘s Nigeria is beginning to look more like a training ground for cruelty and a practice field for apprentice authoritarians. Many are swearing that Mr. Tinubu may have turned his back on the ways of democracy and popular governance and now faces a frightening direction. I am among those who are very frightened to live in this place. An assumed democracy has replaced sweetness with bitterness, citizens are now afraid of the very government they went out to elect only a few months ago.

    The far sighted and perceptive never  expected Tinubu’s tenure to be any different from what is unfolding before our eyes . When he chose his inauguration podium ‪on May 29th to mouth ‘fuel subsidy is gone!’, sensible people expected a balancing reassuring statement. None came immediately or any time afterwards. Instead,  more draconian acts of serial wickedness have been heaped on citizens like burning coal. For all these, the government insists that it is on a reform path.

    The Naira was floated with no scientific benchmark. An astronomical tax was heaped on electricity. Pump prices of gasoline headed to the sky and have been shooting upwards ever since. Taxes on practically everything followed: basic food, basic medications, transportation costs, house rents, cooking gas, basic banking transactions etc have since last May shot up beyond the rational.

    When gasoline prices shot up and the Naira was shredded in value,  organized labout raised the urgent matter of a commensurate national minimum wage. The public supported labour’s pressure for an increase of the national minimum wage. A series of negotiations and arm twisting manipulations led to an agreement on a contentious N70,000. While workers at federal and state levels are still waiting for the promised minimum wage, a new vortex of new gasoline prices have been allowed to kick in. The public is confused and has been thrown into a further life support mode. Predictably, the  latest Increase in fuel pump price has taken its toll in the wrong places. Schools can hardly resume because of high transportation costs. Edo , Kano and Borno states have postponed the resumption of schools for the new school year. Other states may follow suit.

    Since May, 2023, hardly any pleasant news has come our way except for announcements about bags of rice scattered in a few states. The government that took away our little sweetness has responded with rice and noodles. A myriad taxes have followed. The rice of offer has turned out a mirage. By its nature, rice is a tax-laden palliative. If you give people rise, they need money to buy meat and fish, oil, onions and other ingredients. In short, a gift of free rice reminds people of their immense poverty. So, people desperately access the free rice as an article of trade, something to be re-sold to raise money to douse the ravaging poverty. That has led to fierce warfare in locations where rice is being shared. People who went out to fight for rice returned in body bags as the fierce battles were  do –or- die duels.

    The pursuit of cruel reforms and draconian levies and taxes has created a country of numerous precedents.  Nigerians living today may have seen far too many precedents in our national life already. In one life time, we have seen more new milestones than any other generation. We have seen the  highest inflation rate- 43%  ever. Since its introcution in the early 1970s, Nigerians have seen the most abysmall exchange rate for the Naira in national history. We have seen the highest poverty rate in our national history, leading to the creation of Nigeria as the world’s poverty capital. For the first time in our life time, hunger has become a widespread national affliction, graduating into an object of nationwide protest and massive street brawls between hungry mobs and armed security personnel.

    Today ‘s Nigerians have seen the highest price per liter of gasoline ever. In some parts of the country, there are reports of prices of up to N1,500 per liter. Similarly, Nigerians are seeing the highest cost per unit of electricity even as darkness envelopes  the land. Nigerians are seeing the most expensive cup of garri, beans, corn or millet  in their life time. It is the worst of times and the most trying of times.

    It is also the most dangerous of times and the most precarious of times. Never before in peace- time have Nigerians seen such a high  casualty rate as this. People are being killed needlessly on an industrial scale everyday. In no other nation’s peace time do so many people die needless deaths. Peace time Nigeria is ranking shoulder to shoulder with Sudan, Syria, Somalia and other dangerous places in the world on a scale of insecurity. The English language has run out of terminologies for describing the variants of Nigeria’s bad state and its architects: terrorism, banditry, abduction, kidnapping and other unnamable crimes.  At no time in our national history have we lived in a more dangerous country, not even in the civil war years.

    Youth is ordinarily the time to hope, to look forward to a long life stretched ahead of you. The youth dream dreams and cherish longings. As youth, death and mortality was far and remote from us. But in today’s Nigeria, death has become the constant refrain in the language of youth. Our university campuses have become common grounds for suicide among our youth. Our children are being killed or are killing each other because the landscape beyond is bleak and hopeless. We are living in a place where suicide has become an easy escape route for frustrated youth.

    Other silly and laughable precedents have also been created in Nigeria under the Tinubu presidency. For instance, we have never seen such extensive motorcades trailing men of power as are being displayed by Akpabio and Tinubu. Nor have such humongous sums been spent on luxury items at the apex of power anywhere as in today’s Nigeria. Nor have we seen single civil construction projects of such magnitude as the Calabar-Lagos highway (N18 trillion!). No previous president so prioritized his personal comfort as to purchase a different presidential jet in under two years in power without parliamentary appropriation or any known budget provision. These are clearly precedents in national profligacy!

    Democracy devoid of compassion or prudent consideration for the welfare of the lowly runs a clear risk. When a democracy proceeds with reckless impunity, it runs the risk of drifting into authoritarianism, a routine insensitivity to the common feeling. The feelings of the people begin to matter less. The state carries on as though it is a self- empowering entity.

    At the moment, Mr. Tinubu’s bumbling embrace with power is by far a greater threat to Nigeria’s democracy and survival than anything else. When a democracy fumbles, its readiest temptation is to be attracted towards dictatorship. The Tinubu government is beginning to arrest journalist for no stated reason. Labour leaders are not immune either. Innocent people who went out to protest their own hunger and poverty have been arrested and are being prosecuted for disturbing the peace of the rulers. Of course, it is easier to arrest people than to manage them in freedom. It is also easier to clamp down on dissenting voices than to loosen a million free voices. People who cannot afford expensive  lawyers to defend them or speak English to state their rights

    are easy to put away until the jail houses are filled with those who should be voting at the next election.

    Compassion is an issue when the common good is of concern. But the  common good is an issue when power is wielded on behalf of the people. But when power becomes an end itself, the common good recedes into the background and becomes a concessionary  afterthought. The pursuit of power, its consolidation, warehousing and monopoly becomes the end of state power. It does seem that barely one and half years after Tinubu’s ascendancy, we are down to that level where the values of democracy are being goaded towards the route of authoritarianism.

    A Nigerian authoritarianism under a rule like Tinubu’s will be untidy. Our power hegemony is never evenly spread. It usually wears a sectional ethnocentric color. Already, Tinubu has erected what is easily the most blatant and unabashed Yoruba ethnic hegemony in Nigerian history. Name any strategic segment of national life and it stares you in the face. Open. Shameless. Even disgraceful to the dignity of the otherwise decent and sophisticated Yoruba nation. We are faced with an impending calamity. Nigeria’s democracy is about to give birth to an ethnic authoritarianism. It will be a sad day when we descend from today’s increasing repression to the hounding of political opponents into political exile out of fear for their own safety. Over and above today’s japa droves, we may soon witness swarms of political asylum seekers heading in many directions. The freedom which our people trooped out to welcome in February is slipping away under our very eyes.

  • Good Morning, Mr. Gates – By Chidi Amuta

    Good Morning, Mr. Gates – By Chidi Amuta

    Perhaps unknown to most Nigerians, the Nigerian government hosted its political opposition in the hallowed chambers of the Federal Executive Council last Wednesday. It was a unique opportunity to hear an opposition perspective on the current state of the nation right in the executive chambers of Aso Villla. This was in a week when Mr. Tinubu was out touring in China after sneakily authorizing a cruel increase of petrol pump prices over and above the wildest imagination. The opposition flag and message were carried by an unusual mascot: American tech billionaire and philanthropist, Mr. Bill Gates.

    Escorted by Nigeria’s leading money mascot, Aliko Dangote,  Bill Gates got an opportunity to literally gate crash into the Executive Council Chambers at Aso Villa where he had the rare opportunity of lecturing the entire Federal Government including Vice President Kassim Shettima and ministers. A lecture on basic development challenges ended up as an unscheduled talk on the inconvenient truths of the present times in Nigeria.

    What was auspicious is not so much the presence of the two money merchants. It was rather the message that Mr. Gates had to deliver at the Aso Rock Council chambers that should interest us. Forget the fact that America’s own money men do not get to casually walk into council meetings at the White House to lecture anybody about anything. It is not usual for Gates, Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffet to hike a ride and gate crash into a White House Council meeting to talk about anything. If indeed they have to make a Congressional appearance on any subject, they have to be invited by the relevant committee leadership and answer specific questions. But this is Nigeria. All anyone needs to qualify to lecture an entire Nigerian government is a trove of cash and influence either as a refinery owner or a rich technology billionaire turned philanthropist.

    In any event, both Dangote and Bill Gates are familiar sights in Nigeria’s power precincts. Dangote is constantly on hand in all meetings that have to do with running a successful economy especially on matters that concern cement and petrol. Bill Gates similarly shows up ever so often in Abuja and Lagos to talk about Guinea worms or his over $2.8 billion spend on charity, especially primary healthcare, in and around Nigeria.

    What is important is the message that Mr. Gates had for his unlikely audience in Abuja. I am sure that most of those there gathered must have been uneasy in their padded seats as the man delved deeper into the substance of his subject. Mr. Gates told them unkind and uncomfortable truths. His contentions were in two major areas of Nigeria’s contemporary economic and social situation: government spending priorities and tax performance.

    Mr. Gates told our government people what they probably already know but dare not openly admit in the corridors of power. All is not well in the economy. Nigeria’s economy has stagnated in the last 15 years. The revenue to GDP ratio has worsened over the same period. For the first time, our debt exceeded 50% of GDP. Our government is now the third most indebted in the world with debts still climbing.

    That is not all. Nigeria now has the second highest rate of food insecurity in the world with hunger ravaging more than half of the populace. Access to primary healthcare remains a mirage while out of school population has just approached 20 million. Given his preoccupation with primary healthcare in his Africa wide philanthropy projects under the Bill and Mellinda Gates Foundation, he is shocked about the average annual spend of N3,000 per citizen in Nigeria. It is of course his contention that what Nigeria needs now is attention to the basic components of development like primary healthcare, basic education and poverty alleviation.

    Implicit in his elaborate presentation is an excoriating critique of the current trend and direction of priority of the Tinubu government. Implicit in Bill Gates’ well timed lecture is an outright condemnation of Mr. Tinubu’s emphasis on wasteful and luxurious government spending. Mr. Gates says it without naming it.

    Nigeria ought to be sending more kids to school away from the streets, buying more medicines and medicaments for health centres and hospitals in remote places, assisting basic enterprises so that common people can find resources to meet their basic needs. Nigeria ought to be sending more hands to the farms to produce the food now urgently needed to feed millions of the hungry.

    Our priority ought not to be presidential yatchs, fleets of luxury SUVs, new presidential jets, mansions and expensive junkets to literally all corners of the globe to attend inconsequential gatherings that have nothing to do with the welfare of the common Nigerian. In the latter respect, the intrinsic value of Mr. Bill Gates’s lecture to our Council of Ministers is actually in the eloquent silences of the message. He told us what we ought to prioritize and left our ministers to conclude on the wrong priorities of the government they are serving.

    Within the present Nigerian political space, there exists a dialect that belongs alongside Mr. Gates’ preoccupations. In fact, Mr. Gates’s rhetoric corresponds to the outlines of the contention of the mainstream political opposition. Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratoc Party are more less saying the same things as Mr. Gates but not in aid of a philanthropic end. Indeed, the basic developmental logic of Mr. Peter Obi since after the 2023 presidential election corresponds to the kernel of Mr. Bill Gates major argument. Of course, Mr. Gates was not out on a political campaign. He was merely marketing his philanthropy. But his philanthropy is essentially a humanistic development agenda. It takes its departure from a human development perspective. Its broad contention is that Africa’s future  depends on its ability to harness its resources to actualize its present human resources in the things that matter and will uplift the majority of Africans.

    It has been the consistent position of Mr. Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the last presidential election, that what Nigeria needs is a basic developmental strategy, not a grandiose pretensious display.  Mr. Obi has consistently harped on the need to prioritize basic development issues of primary healthcare, poverty alleviation and education. In accordance, he has taken the Tinubu government to task on its wasteful priorities of luxury, white elephant projects and highways that lead nowhere in particular.

    As a way of addressing the paucity of revenue in relation to GDP, Mr. Gates used his speaking opportunity to critique Nigeria’s tax performance. In his view, Nigeria is collecting less tax than it should. Literally, Nigerians are not being taxed enough.  Or, better still, the Nigerian tax administration system is not sufficiently effective to collect all that is due to the government. The latter is more true than the former. Predictably, ordinary Nigerians who have been at the receiving end of all manner of multiple and incidental taxes have jumped on Mr. Gates on the social media to question his temerity to talk about taxation in Nigeria.

    Perhaps Mr. Bill Gates does not understand the massive implicit taxation regime under which Nigerians have lived for decades. In Nigeria, the same people who pay monthly income tax, annual business tax and several other incidental taxes are also subject to several implicit taxes. People are taxed by government for the provision of water, elelctricity, security, etc. Yet, nearly every Nigerian provides his own water borehole, private electricity generator, private security guard, etc. These are all services that the government taxes and levies people but does not provide any services.

    On the surface, ordinary Nigerians contend that Mr. Gates cannot talk about personal income tax in Nigeria where the government taxes people without discharging the reciprocal obligation of providing social and other services. In Nigeria, we have governments at both federal, state and local government levels that levy a multitude of taxes, charges, levies and tariffs without delivering the corresponding services and infrastructure.

    Nigerians are unhappy that Mr. Gates would come from the United States, a country where governments account for every dollar of tax payers’ money by way of services to the people.  Yet, it would seem that Mr. Gates is more concerned about corporate and institutional taxes than personal income taxes which has little loopholes for tax avoidance since these taxes are direct charges on monthly incomes at source.

    Mr. Gates of course admits the ineffectiveness of government services in Nigeria but still insists that the Nigerian government needs to find the resources to fill the gap between its current obligations and what it needs to maintain the semblance of a functioning nation state.

    So far, there have been no signs from government circles that the oppositional essence of Mr. Bill Gates’s visit and address to the Federal Executive Council struck any chords within government circles. Instead, what has lingered is the war of nerves between Mr. Dangote and the NNPCL over what killer pump prices to charge Nigerians for gasoline. Implicit in that price war is yet another unstated petroleum tax whose incidence falls almost uniformly on every Nigerian who has cause to stop by the gas station in order to keep moving.

    Mr. Bill Gates has delivered his message and returned to America. It was a message about a more viable alternative development strategy. I doubt that the political import has yet dawned on the Nigerian ruling class who were the immediate audience. The Nigerian opposition will keep up the Bill Gates message but they are not likely to receive the claps and ovation that Bill Gates got in Aso Rock last Wednesday. What a pity!

  • The Brewing Distraction – By Chidi Amuta

    The Brewing Distraction – By Chidi Amuta

    The Nigerian politician is a most futuristic animal. He is above all else a most distractive creature, forever creating political outlets and ventilations. While our civil society remains reactive , our political class is eternally ahead in terms of setting an agenda for distracting the attention of the polity for purposes of keeping itself busy in terms of the direction of what happens next politically. Check: 2027 is literally four years away. Check: the Tinubu presidency is a little over a year old. Check: all the calamities that  hell holds in stock for bad places on earth has converged on Nigeria. The possibility that Mr. Tinubu and his rabble assembly of a government is likely to solve any of our serious crises remains an illusion. Yet, politicians must remain active and relevant.

    Four years to the end of the Tinubu tenure, some politicians are gearing up for what happens in the next election, in 2027. Overwhelmed by the present realties of a state that is literally at a halt, some politicians would rather overlook the present so that public attention can skip present difficulties and focus on 2027.

    Creative and futuristic as always, our politicians have found a way to keep busy and get the people politically engaged. The specter of 2027 has been fast -forwarded. It is as though the next election is next year. No need to worry about bandits and the endless flow of blood all over the land. No need to worry about the elongating unemployment queues. No need to worry about how many baskets of useless Naira notes you need to buy a miserable US dollar.  Forget what the market women are telling you about high prices of food items. They are all killjoys who are hell bent on spoiling the party of the Tinubu renewed hope mandate party. Just listen to the new song from the politicians or better chant the new old national anthem.

    Mr. Bode George, a constant gadly and overgrown child of South West political rabble rowsing, has been busing engaging Atiku Abubakar in recent times.  He has advised Mr. Abubakar who aspired to be the next president to prepare instead for the 2031 presidential elections instead of even the 2027.

    Worse still, several groups of serious politicians from the northern hemisphere of the nation have lately been meeting. There is no secret about their agenda. They are prepping for the 2027 presidential election. Their agenda is simple and straightforward. They are united by two things. They got left behind by the Tinubu gravy train and now  all crave for the centre stage next time around. They cannot wait. More importantly, they have nothing tangible to keep them busy between now and 2027.  For now, they are united by a curious consensus to recruit ex- President Goodluck Jonathan to contest the 2027 presidential election to ensure that Mr. Tinubu does not have the chance of a second term in the Villa. By this rough script, the political North wants to snatch the presidency from Mr. Tinubu who has not shown good faith or sufficient gratitude to the region in spite of his Muslim-Muslim ticket and inheritance of the former Buhari throng of voters.

    The strong argument is that the Northern hemisphere of our political space in the APC  supported his emergence of Mr. Tinubu in the Presidential Villa  in compensation for the clueless Buhari whose most important object was poltical recompense to Mr. Tinubu. The aftermath of the Tinubu victory is looking more skewed to the northern political mind.  It is not just the sharing of pork that is at issue. The region is in a poor shape, perhaps worse than since the creation of Nigeria.

    Security in the north is nasty,  brutish and almost non existent. The distribution of the gravy content of ‘renewed hope’ in the region is not quite as generous as was expected. The handouts to interest groups in the region do not seem as generous as it was even under the xenophobic Mr. Buhari. Bandits are helping themselves to the spois of war instead of waiting to be served by willing political actors. So, what to do? Support the apparently harmless Mr. Jonathan to complete his entitled one term  so that presidential power can return effortlessly to the north.

    The quest for the return of Jonathan is strictly not about better governance for Nigeria or indeed the beleaguered northern hemisphere. The power arithmetic is not about the quality of governance or what could make Nigeria a more manageable federation away from its present dilapidated state. The gathering political distraction is not about how to understand the dynamics of power and the current social and economic forces that have made the  north such a dangerous place or even made the whole of Nigeria a bad place. It is a rehash of the same old North-South nonsense that has left Nigeria damaged and destroyed. The impending distraction is just another chapter in the bad chapter of Nigeria’s unending tragic tale of disastrous governance. We are stiull waiting for the political class that sees beyond region, religion and axis on the national compass.

    In the renewed distraction, there is hardly any thought about imparting skills that will work for Nigeria as a whole. There is no discussion about functional education, economic empowerment, population control, urgent modernization and investment in education, agriculture and a different work ethics that prioritizes entrepreneurship, grueling hard work and productivity for better self actualization and overall national development. It is all about North-South, Muslim-Christian balancing. It is all about feeding the same old insatiable and unproductive political elite that has left the majority of the people stranded and abandoned. It is the feathering of the nest of the same runaway elite that has abandoned the people and relocated to villas in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Abuja, Lagos and Cairo.

    Meanwhile, the hapless Mr. Jonathan is busy attending every available social event around the country in an unstated gathering campaign for what he does not quite fully understand. Himself a prime beneficiary of Nigeria’s politics of entitlement and allocation, Mr. Jonathan may have garnered quite some experience and exposure after office in his countless international democratic engagements. It is also quite possible that he has had time to reflect on his work experience as President  to be better equipped for a retrial run. But the Jonathan proposition is a politically convenient distraction from the crushing  urgency of the tasks that cal us all fiercely.

    On his part, Mr. Tinubu who understands mostly the language of political survival has responded to the hints of his eventual ouster. In response to the imminent distraction, the Tinubu incumbency has found both a convenient political distraction and  veritable challenge. It is urgent. Mr. Tinubu has just settled into a cosy world of luxury jets, lush villas, endless motorcades, sweetheart contracts and endless junkets to all ends of the universe.

    Tinubu is first and foremost a power monger and political entrepreneur.  His is an ultimate political entrepreneur, a merchant of power in the mot Machiavellian sense. Every power has a price tag and nearly every political outcome is a transactional.  Political survival is his foremost  prerogative. He clutches to no ideal, rules by no principles or set of ideas. His prime objective is to be president of Nigeria by all means, which he has achieved. The other two entitlements are to hold the oil and gas cheque books and the key to the Central Bank. He has all these imperial booties in his clutch plus endless air miles on a fleet of luxury presidential jets.

    All these would mean little if indeed Nigerians could see a clear purposive governance in place or in progress. Not quite sure. A gravy train is on the rail, coasting down  a sloppery slope almost unstoppable gradient. Now comes a bunch of killjoys who have declared their intent to stop Tinubu midstream. And he is not likely to turn a blind eye to this distraction.

    Yet for whatever it is worth, the protection of his incumbency and its possible  tenure elongation into a second term is an urgent political  challenge which no incumbent president can leave unattended. In response to the PDP- based maneuvres on the Jonathan proposition, the Tinubu political machinery has reportedly swung into action to counter what may be its most consequential political threat. Counter groups have been mobilized. Internal APC  work groups have set up with a mandate to thwart the moves of the derailers. What lies ahead is therefore a battle royale. The political back and forth between the two sets of political forces is likely to  be the grand distraction of the season.

    The grand historic question is whether the Tinubu presidency will consign the urgent task of national salvation to the counter force of the battle for supremacy in 2027. The possibilities are ominous and frightening. The forces poised against national survival as themselves gruesome and determined. The forces of anarchy fuelling banditry, serial kidnapping, senseless murders in high places and sheer lawlessness are mindless and unhinged. No one is certain that the Nigerian state in its present state of disrepair will prevail over its traducers.

    Yet we are at the moment of decision and prioritization. National survival must precede and supersede the survival of any individual power regime or calculus. The guarantee of a second presidential term sounds like a political expediency. In the nature of nations. Existence precedes essence. No matter how fancicul its format may be, a nation must exist before it manifests its goodness. The very survival of the Nigerian nation is the more pressing urgency. Without a nation to call home, there will be neither a presidency nor a tenure to elongate or argue about. It is only by reinforcing the pillars of national existence and ensuring good governance and a fair society that tenure elongation can be placed on the table. The basic ingredients of national prevalence are the same basic existential issues that today haunt the entire Nigeria: food, shelter, poverty, costs of living in the open market and some hope that basic safety of lives and property can be guaranteed by the state.

  • A protest and its aftermath – By Chidi Amuta

    A protest and its aftermath – By Chidi Amuta

    The long orchestrated nationwide hunger and hardship protests have come and gone. The protesters have since gone home, mostly bruised , battered and even more depressed than ever before . Some are nursing broken skulls or irritated eyes from tear gas smoke. Quite a bit of public and private property has been damaged or stolen.  Miscreants and plain thieves have helped themselves. A handful of citizens and some security personnel were not so lucky to make it back home alive from the theatres of confrontation. The official dogs of war –policemen and soldiers- amassed to hound the protesters have returned to base to rehearse for another day.

    Some uneasy calm would seem to have returned to the streets where some of the pitched battled raged a few days back. But the roots of the protests remain with us. People remain hungry, very hungry and even more angry. The impression that this government is not good for the people whose mandate it claims has remained and has even gone more viral and entrenched. Life remains hard and unbearable across the country. Those who went out to scream and shout have swallowed the bile of their anger a bit, having given vent to a cannibal rage that prompted their protest in the first place. Anger directed at something called government is wasted anger. Government in these parts is nobody in particular! When people troop out in anger against a bad government, their anger may be wasted as it is directed at nobody in particular.

    In the recent skirmish of hunger protests around the country, a bad government came face to face with an angry citizenry massed as a mob. A bad government confronted with ugly citizens is a bad spectacle. Citizens transformed into irate mobs have tested the nerves of a rather jittery state. The mobs massed out in the streets and wherever else they felt their anger would be felt by government. They were united by the simple things that make us all human: hunger, want for basic things of life and frustration with the quality of our lives.

    Pre-protest rehearsals on the part of government ranged from  foolish speculation to laughable political naïvety and  predictable security knee jerks. Aso Rock political minions sketched a political geography of the protests and who could be sponsoring them. The wild guesses ranged from Mr. Peter Obi to IPOB and sundry political opposition jobbers. A different lazy gaze beamed the searchlight on the remnants of the last EndSARS organizers. But this was not like that previous encounter. This was something more nebulous with a silly name.

    But contrary to the wild berth of official protest trackers, like protesters and mobs elsewhere, the crowds that massed out to protest carried placards and private banners with public messages drawing attention to the roots of their grievance

    : “We are Hungry”, “Give us Food”, “Stop Stealing Our Money”. Despite feverish government effort to divide the protesters with politics, the people re-drew the national misery map according to the laws of the necessity of daily living. Hunger, poverty and hardship generate a map of the nation all of their own. That much was evident in the recent protests.

    In line with the immutable law of democratic expression, the right of the people to protest their discomfort  found overriding expression.  Politics could not drown that reality. In return, the obligation of government to manage protest as a feature of democratic expression was observed to a reasonable extent. The hope, going forward,  is that government will have learnt the lessons in the very pattern and mode of the protests.

    Contrary to official conceptions of the projected map of the protests, the urban centres of the north saw more anger than similar centres elsewhere in the country. The message is the same as has been continuously conveyed by international development agencies and even the National Bureau of Statistics. The 19 northern states contain  the poorest concentration of Nigerians with the least GDP per capita, the least access to food, shelter, heathcare and disposable cash. The pains and pangs of poverty are therefore most excruciating in these states, hence the vicious anger of the protests in those places.

    If indeed the political elite of the north was attentive to the rhythm and message of the protests, they will have heard the precise message of  their long missing mandate and engagement with the common people of the region. The message was loud and clear.

    Abuja and Lagos presented  a somewhat different picture. They are home to the most politically sophisticated Nigerians populace. They were more likely to play by the rules of democratic political protest than  most other places. More importantly, a sense of political ownership of the Tinubu presidency may have doused the temper and tempo of the protests in the urban centers of the South West.

    The unprecedented calm in the South East has been variously interpreted. In the first place, it makes nonsense of the pre-protest speculations in Aso Rock that the protests were the handiwork of the political and separatist elite of the zone. Secondly, the calm gave the few noisy South Eastern elements in the Tinubu administration some substance to take to Abuja and brandish the support of the zone for Tinubu. These elements are perfectly entitled to the self ingratiation and overblown self importance. At a more fundamental, geo-political level, it is left for the Nigerian political establishment to figure out why the whole South East would shun a national protest predicated on pains that are so obviously widespread.  Any serious political establishment should spend some time trying to understand what exactly is going on in the political unconscious of the Igbos of the South East.

    Contrary to the convenient tendency to divide the Nigerian populace and electorate in terms of geo politics, ethnicity, religion and partisanship, the anthems of the protesters were more unifying. Nigerians who trooped out to protest indicated a solid unity of purpose forged by their exposure to common adversities of hunger, hardship, unemployment and inflation, mass poverty, homelessness and hopelessness.

    There is of course many things inherently wrong about the mode and framing of the recent protests. The national coordination of the organizers was defective. The framing of the governing message was too large and omnibus. Unlike the protesters in Kenya and Bangladesh, the protests were not powered by any specific demands and deadlines. There were no specific tasks for the NASS, the Executive, INEC, etc. Ending bad governance is such a large chest whose components could be expanded indefinitely. ENDSARS was more pointed hence its targeted objective and specific achievements. This one was rather diffuse. That is probably why the protests ended up as an amorphous  futility.

    After the protests, the challenges for the government should ordinarily be self -defined. Government should be more people oriented. Public policy should be more tailored towards bringing more immediate succor to the masses. Attention should now be paid to areas of wastage of public resources. Government should buy less luxury goods, build fewer needless mansions, embark on fewer questionable foreign trips and do so with more purposeful and sensibly sized contingents. More importantly, this is an opportunity to look at the matter of corruption beyond the routine invitation and questioning of suspects by the EFCC.

    So far, very little timid action has been taken in this regard. A reduction in tariff on imported food has been announced. A curious directive has gone out from the Presidency to the EFCC to donate N50 billion from recovered corruption money to boost the funding of the newly inaugurated Students Loans Fund. All well and good.

    On the contrary, government has embarked on some predictable behaviors. Indiscriminate arrests have been made of alleged suspected ring –

    leaders of the protests without any specific charges as yet.  The office of the National Security Adviser has gone to town to announce the seizure or freezing of over N80bn in suspected protest sponsorship funds. No details. No names, No indictments or specific charges or specific court proceedings.  There are loud rehearsals of moves to institute draconian and authoritarian measures probably in order to projectthe image of a stronger government. For instance, a foolish draft bill to jail or heavily fine people who refuse to recite the national anthem by the House of Representative Speaker has been dropped like hot potato under threat of stiff citizen resistance. No one knows what else lies in store for a citizenry that is now seen as cowed and defeated.

    The abiding question is now this : when citizens in exercise of their rights under a democracy cow under the jackboots of authority, could they be inviting a democracy to transform into an elected dictatorship? The next couple of weeks will perhaps be more exciting for Nigerians than the anxious moments before the futile protests.

  • Dangote in battle fatigue – By Chidi Amuta

    Dangote in battle fatigue – By Chidi Amuta

    Africa’s prime money man, Mr. Aliko Dangote of Nigeria, has recently changed from business suit and kaftan to battle fatigue. For a man whose visibility is defined by money and huge investments, this sudden change of costume is important. Ordinarily, Dangote as a person and a brand has become synonymous with  huge factories and countless trucks traversing different African countries bearing the products of his factories. A big business man can make make rowdy media appearances to project his presence and market his enterprises in urbane gatherings of politicians and business elite.

    As a rule, Mr. Dangote steers clear of contentious utterances and controversial gatherings. But he gets occasionally dragged into dog fights over turfs and market shares for his products. His instincts may not be overtly political nor is he the controversial  type. Of course he cannot but contend with the toxic terrain of Nigerian politics especially the seasonal uproar of partisan fray and name calling. There is always the silent question: “who does Dangote support”, a question that no one can answer esily.

    The man sees his main business as minding his business. His political footprints remain hazy just as his political footsteps are often muted. A few years back when the Obasanjo presidency were scouting for a successor to the bullish general, some PDP political big wigs sent emissaries to Dangote to see if he would want to play Berlusconi. The man turned them down.

    In recent days however, the troubling Nigerian situation is revealing a different Dangote. As it turns out, the man can fight to defend his space and interests: “I have been a fighter all my life. So, I am not afraid of fights nor am I afraid of anyone…” On the matters thrown up by Nigeria’s recent economic trends and travails, Dangote is beginning to make his views known and his interests clearly defined. This is not his first turf fight. He dueled with his fellow Kano man, Abdul Samad Rabiu of BUA cement over cement market share and retail prices. Similarly, he fought the Kogi state government on taxation and land rights issues over his massive Obajana cement factory.

    In the last few days, Mr. Dangote could be seen as having jettisoned  a business suit and kaftan to literally don a battle fatigue. He is in a fighting mood. Not only that, he has jumped into the murky trench of Nigeria’s public discourse. He now wants to be heard on the happenings in his country. And why not? Dangote is first and foremost a citizen of the federal republic of Nigeria. He is entitled to his views and to a perspective on the state of the nation especially the economy in which he, more than anyone else, is deeply invested. As a major investor and strategic economic driver, Mr. Dangote should know where the Nigerian economic shoe is pinching most painfully. If the Nigerian economic cookie crumbles, Dangote and his bankers are more likely to be burnt beyond recognition. The rest of us are not likely to go walk off with slight bruises because of our dependency on one Dangote product or the other. If an economic  tsunami hits the Dangote brand and its expansive network of enterprises, the Nigerian economy is likely to take a major hit. Such a consequential citizen cannot remain silent if he sees his interests threatened by government’s rough manners.

    So, it is understandable that Dangote is presently in the trench of public discourse. He is firing  in feverish defense of not only his business interests but also the fate, fortunes and future of his fellow oligarchs who are all embroiled in the mess in the Nigerian economy.  When politicians roughen the economic landscape, it is often the oligarchs with huge stakes in the economy who bear the brunt.

    Initially, Dangote chose to take on the Central Bank of Nigeria’s policy somersaults and endless tinkering with major indices in the troubled economy. In particular, the astronomical interest rates that keep going higher every week has troubled major players in the economy. Dangote had cause to openly criticize the rising interest rates. He was unequivocal,  insisting that the  high rate is antithetical to economic recovery and growth: “ Nobody can create jobs with an interest rate of 30 percent.” He went further to argue that the national economy cannot recover let alone grow in such a high interest  rate environment. Criticisms of the incumbent government’s economic policies  can be expected to come from regular boardroom spokespersons and textbook professional economists. But coming from a pivotal oligarch and consequential economic factor like Dangote, some are likely to sniff politics in what is ordinarily an honest business advisory. Moreso, Dangote has featured in every economy-related committee that President has hurriedly put together to help make sense of the economic mess he is confronted with. The junction where politics and economics meet and mix is a very dark place. Honest commentators can be lost there if they are not careful.

    By far the most consequential battles in Dangote’s new costume is the series of exchanges between him and the Nigerian oil industry mafia. In the run up to the roll out of the products of the new Dangote mega refinery, all manner of Mickey Mouse debates have erupted. First is the controversy over the appropriate pricing of the anticipated products and their comparative quality. The regulatory agency, the Nigeria Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) has implicitly said that the quality of diesel from the Dangote refinery may be substandard. No complaint has come from consumers of the product so far. There has also not been a laboratory verification of the products from the Dangote refinery. Interestingly, the association of fuel importers has joined the regulator in questioning the quality of the products from the new refinery, including even the gasoline that is yet to become available at the pumps. Clearly, some vested interests are threatened by the imminent reduction or eventual elimination of fuel imports once the Dangote refinery goes into full steam production.

    In even nastier segments of the verbal brawl , Mr. Dangote has alleged that officials of the NNPCL may have established blending plants for petroleum products in off shore locations like Malta to sustain their unrestricted importation of petroleum products into Nigeria. In rapid response, the leadership of the NNPCL  has denied the charge of off- shore blending plants owned by their staff. The NNPCL chief executive has not however denied the existence of such plants in Malta or anywhere near the route to Nigeria. He is more concerned with exonerating his staff from Dangote’s charge.

    However, latest figures from international energy trading platforms indicate that there has been a 43-fold increase in the volume of petroleum pruducts imported into Nigeria from Malta. In fact, there has been a 342% increase in in such imports in 2023 with a value of $2.08 billion. Therefore in spite of feverish denials by the NNPCL leadership that their staff do not own blending plants in Malta, the volume of imports of petroleum products from Malta to Nigeria raise questions that support the kernel of Mr. Dangote’s allegations.

    The back and forth on the relationship  between the NNPCL and Dangote over the new refinery has gone into previously unknown areas like equity holding in the ownership of the refinery. While the public was previously made to believe that the federal government through the NNPCL held an equity of 20% in the Dangote refinery, it has come from Dangote that the refinery has paid up substantially on the government’s equity down to around 7% now and no more.

    Worried by what he considers an outright intent of the management of the NNPCL to undermine the new refinery, Dangote has offered to sell off the huge refinery to the NNPCL if they can pay him off. The implied nuance of that challenge is that the refinery will go down the way of government owned refineries which have crippled domestic fuel supply for over 40years. “Let them(NNPCL) buy me out and run the refinery the best way they can. They have labeled me a monopolist…That is an incorrect and unfair allegation, but it’s okay. if they buy me out, at least their so-called monopolist would be out of the way”

    Curiously, the attacks on the Dangote refinery were not raised while the factory was under construction. They were not raised all the time that the NNPCL was touted as a 20% equity holder in the refinery project. Now that the refinery is about to threaten the continued importation of petroleum products, the regulators have joined forces with the fuel import and fuel subsidy cartel that have joined forces to sack the Nigerian treasury.

    The ongoing nasty brawl between Mr. Dangote and the Nigerian  oil industry mafia anchored in the NNPCL is more than casual. It raises far reaching fundamental issues on our national economy and the forces that have kept us mired in stasis. The prospect that the Dangote refinery would end the four decades long regime of fuel imports has unsettled vested interests.

    The cartels that have feasted on massive fuel imports over the years are indeed powerful. In collaboration with their cohorts in the NNPCL, this mafia has grounded all government owned refineries and enthroned the regime of fuel  imports and subsidy whose removal has ground the economy to a halt.  All available statistics indicate that with the Dangote refinery coming into full steam operation, Nigeria will virtually cease to be an importer of finished petroleum products, a feat that only Algeria and Libya have achieved.

    In addition to becoming self -sufficient in petroleum products, the Dangote refinery is billed to become an exporter of petroleum products to other African countries, savinging us much needed foreign exchange. Because of its size and sophistication the Dangote refinery is projected to compete favourably against refineries in Europe some of which currently export products to Nigeria.

    In a sense then, the nasty exchanges between Dangote and the high priests of the Nigerian oil and gas establishment is also a battle over economic nationalism versus a long- standing dependency on external sources for petroleum products. This is a confrontation in which self -sufficiency and nationalism hold a clear advantage at this point in time. Dangote’s corporate interest now happens to coincide with an overriding national interest and we have no choice than to side with our nation’s best enlightened interest.

    The contention by the regulators that the coming on stream of the Dangote refinery implies the empowerment of a monopoly in the making is neither here nor there. What ought to concern the regulators is the quality and pricing of the products of the refinery. The monopoly-like situation has been created by the ineptitude of the NNPCL which has grounded all our refineries for decades. It is better to have a monopoly that saves us foreign exchange, employs many Nigerians, guarantees steady supply of petroleum products and dampens prices over time.

    It is only proper that government empowers and emboldens domestic capital to assume the commanding heights of the economy as has happened in other free market economies that have grown to lead the world. The United States was built by a few bold leading capitalist pioneers of industry like the Rockefellers, The Fords, Duponts, Vanderbilt, J.P Morgan, Carnegie etc. In South Korea, it was the deliberate empowerment of the Cherbols- Samsung, Goldster (LG) and Hyundai that launched the country into the age of modern prosperity.

    In the Nigerian context, Dangote has been in the forefront of patriotic capitalism.

    Over the decades, Dangote has become the most consequential domestic investor and brand in Nigeria. With some of the biggest and productive industries in major daily needs like cement, tomato puree, salt, fertilizer, flour and now petroleum products, Dangote has become a strategic brand with a domineering presence and footprint all over the Nigerian economic space. Beyond the Nigerian space, Dangote has become a major investor in a number of African countries with cement factories located in these countries. Symbolically, while the NNPCL was busy de-marketing the Dangote refinery in Nigeria, Mr. Dangote was being given a red carpet reception in Gabon where the president was literally inviting Mr. Dangote to come and invest in his country. The subtle message is that Nigeria does not seem to value its own citizens as investors. If a huge investor like Dangote can be harassed by our own officialdom, what happens to smaller investors? What message are we sending out to the external investors that our governments spend a fortune traveling round the world to court and attract?

    In fairness to Mr. Dangote, he does not have to be so massively invested in large industries in Nigeria. He could have spared himself the headache of the “luggage economy of factories, machinery, nuts, bolts , brick and mortar  and huge industrial complexes and vast real estate. He could have simply remained a money changer, using his access to authorities to round -tripping foreign exchange through Nigeria’s porous banking system. But he has chosen to build huge factories, to produce the basic everyday goods that most Nigerians need, to provide employment to many Nigerians directly and indirectly  and carry the risk of running factories that depend on our unreliable power system, treacherous security and decrepit infrastructure. For all this, Mr. Dangote deserves better than the distractions and insults now coming from the NNPCL based  oil and gas mafia and their political enablers.

    By coming out upfront to engage Mr. Dangote in this disgraceful exchange over a refinery that is yet to become fully operational, the oil and gas regulators in Nigeria have exposed a major source of Nigeria’s backwardness.  The regulators are the face of our vampire deep state which uses bureaucratic blackmail and corrupt vested interest to sabotage most patriotic and progressive initiatives.

    The government should bring its gravity to halt this ugly exchange. We need to protect the Dangote refinery and indeed the image of Mr. Dangote as Nigeria’s most consequential local investor. To keep silent and allow this infamy to proceed any further is to lend weight to speculations that Mr. Dangote may be paying for some unstated political sin. In matters of national interest and national economic survival, some considerations are higher than narrow partisanship and dark machinations anchored on the selfish interests of the high and mighty.

  • The sporadic presidency – By Chidi Amuta

    The sporadic presidency – By Chidi Amuta

    No one can fairly accuse President Bola Tinubu of inaction or inactivity. On the job that he was elected to do, the man has been quite busy. On a daily basis, his office keeps rolling out innumerable appointments, setting up committees on nearly every subject and generally acting in response to changing national situations.  If an inventory of executive  actions and initiatives were the sole measure of an effective presidency, Mr. Tinubu would score highly on the scale of  presidential effectiveness. But something seems to be wrong somewhere with the strategy of governance on display.

    So far, there is a worrying disconnect between Mr. Tinubu’s copious exertions and any perceivable improvements  or tangible results in the situation of the country and the living conditions of the citizens. The more appointments and measures that tumble out of  the Aso Rock assembly line, the more desperate the conditions in the country get. Bandits and criminals are killing more people. The cry of anguish over hunger keeps increasing. The unemployment queues keep growing and remain unaddressed as more and more multi national exit Nigeria. In general, there is a sense in which there is now an inverse relation between sporadic presidential actions and the positive outcomes that the people can feel.

    As a consequence, a little over one year after its inception, the Tinubu presidency has struck an unusual consensus among Nigerians. Both the elite and the street people are united in a tentative verdict to the defining character of the administration. This presidency is sporadic and eclectic. It lacks a definite direction. It lacks a defining ideological complexion or character. A government that should be progressive by party identity is neither conservative nor populist social democratic. Given the ultra right wing identity of its key drivers, It is even subverting the interests if its supporting oligarchs. There is no coherent populist agenda either for a president who desperately craves populist accolades. The people cannot see where all this presidential activism is likely to lead the nation. Instead, they behold the lavish style of consumption of key government drivers and wonder what manner of democracy the nation has in place.

    Yet there are certain features that cannot be denied. The president has been busy. On a daily basis, we learn of fresh initiatives. New policies are rolled out, fresh policies are churned out without any follow up executive  templates for effective implementation. A torrent of discordant actions, policies and knee jerk responses to critical national problems have begun to confuse keen observers. While Aso Rock panics, dithers and serially fumbles, the nation’s crises keep multiplying and the citizenry get more desperate and frustrated. Cumulatively, the disconnect has produced more political uncertainty and disquiet. We can see the looming political consequences are beginning to show up in the erosion of unity even among legislators of the ruling APC in the National Assembly.

    In an apparent show of responsiveness to a self-inflicted economic crisis, the President has set up a series of committees. The first was filled with oligarchs of all hues ranging from manufacturers to banking moguls and sundry wheeler dealers. No one knows whether the committee ever met or came up with any concrete suggestions. A committee of state governors has been convened both under the aegis of the National Economic Council and other ad hoc platforms. When the administration discovered that oligarchs like Aliko Dangote were becoming critical of the policies of the Central Bank on interest rates, the Presdient re-energized the dead committee of oligarchs as if they would lend government the secrets of their humongous wealth!

    The Central Bank has in turn been busy churning out any number of circulars on nearly every  money related issue. A foreign exchange intervention regime has oscillated from distributing dollars among bureau de changes to starving the system of forex supplies. A task force has used EFCC, DSS, police and other goons to raid urban foreign exchange open markets to no avail.

    On the matter of increasing and worsening poverty among the many, there have also been a number of knee jerk responses.  Figures of cash transfers and handouts to the most vulnerable have varied in the number of beneficiaries and target amounts. In between, a minister appointed to alleviate poverty through cash transfers has since been suspended for pocketing a chunk of the money meant for the poor and vulnerable. A slew of conflicting propositions on how many households to support and what amount of cash to transfer to these households. No one has demonstrated a credible basis for arriving at the statistics for these poverty alleviation cash transfers.

    This presidency has ordered a distribution of food grains from the national strategic grains reserve  but hardly anyone seems to have seen the grains or located where the silos  are located and what they contain. An earlier initiative had casually doled out N5 billion to each of the states and the FCT for the provision of palliatives to vulnerable citizens. Some of that money went into the procurement of rice for distribution to poor citizens. Some of the rice has been sighted at riotous distribution centres. Scrambles for affordable rice at some of the centres has led to fatalities and injuries among the scrambling citizens.

    The latest initiative on the worsening hunger situation is the proposal to embark on a short term food importation  measure. The estimate is that the importation of food items like rice, beans and wheat at concessionary duty rates over a six month period would lower the prices of these basic food items while increased efforts in agricultural production begin to fill the gap. Yet there are enough conflicting measures in the existing policy environment that may cancel out the benefits of the food importation strategy. High gasoline prices continue to wreak havoc on transportation costs. High costs of energy and other services are likely to impact the market prices of food items either homegrown or imported.  Even the cost of the imported food will be subject to the current fluctuations in the exchange rate regime.

    The expanding epidemic of insecurity around the country has similarly produced a staccato of presidential initiatives. Predictably, each new incident of loss of lives or bandit attacks has been greeted by the usual presidential bluff about “bringing the culprits to book”. Hardly any arrests have been made anywhere in the country let alone prosecution. A hasty assembly of governors and security chiefs has decided to institute a much discussed State Police system. The initiative seems to be embroiled in controversy and political ping pong to a point of death.

    Estimations of matters considered urgent and important by this presidency has varied as well. Even more dismal has been the sense of prioritization on matters deserving immediate attention. At some point it was the reversion to the old 1960s National Anthem which the National Assembly rushed through a legislative microwave oven.

    Multiple emergency supplementary budget proposals have been similarly rushed through a rubber stamp legislature leading to the present situation where the nation is literally operating an unparalleled four budgets in the same financial year. This fiscal cacophony has enabled the administration to pick and choose from a supermarket of unnecessary luxury expenditures ranging from SUVs to yachts, luxury jets and official residential villas.

    Beneath the barrage of often confusing initiatives, one perceives a certain  desperation on the part of the president to court a populist appeal. A few measures are fuelled by a desperation for popularity among key segments of the populace. For instance, a students loan scheme has been put in place more to court the acceptance of students and youth with scant attention to how the loans would be recovered or how the beneficiaries would find employment on graduation.  Little or no thought seems to have gone into the sustainability of the programme.

    Tinubu happens to be the type of politician who wants to be admired and even loved by the masses. With an unmistakable imperial disposition, he probably wants to be worshipped hence his intolerance of opposing voices in the National Assembly. He probably wants to be loved by a mass audience of clapping and hailing appreciative fellow citizens and devotees. But somehow, hardly anyone outside his family and the circle of his political devotees is truly deeply in love with Tinubu. Because his policies and actions have deepened the misery and desperation among the people, the sentiments that attend the president’s name are currently mostly those of dislike,  utter disdain and even open revulsion laced with unprintable side jabs about dodgy certificates, questionable origins and doubtful wealth.

    In all fairness, it is always a tricky walk for a leader to insist on unpopular but necessary policy measures and also crave popular admiration and accolade at the same time. Both hardly go together. But if the unpopular and bitter policy shocks lead to an improvement in the living conditions for the people, the leader could earn healthy recognition and appreciation. Also, if the shock therapy is directed at a clearly defined positive goal, people could be patient for a while. But if the misery deepens and hardship spreads, the victorious leader could turn into a virtual villain, a monster in the public square. From a random sampling of public perceptions of Mr. Tinubu and his presidency both on the streets, in homes and especially on the social media, the honeymoon seems to be over for him. The season of harsh judgment has since begun and could be politically costly for him by the time he approaches mid term.

    President  Tinubu’s present style of episodic and disjointed governance is beset with many liabilities. There could be some bright spots along the way but too many ill -advised measures could send the economy into a tailspin. We could hobble through to four years without knowing exactly where we set out to go.  Some of the hasty, isolated and uncoordinated policies could cancel each other out and create more complex problems than the administration set out to solve. In the end, it is in Tinubu’s best political self-interest to course correct now before it is too late. It is time to rejig his team and introduce method and direction to the present madness.

  • Give us Biden – By Chidi Amuta

    Give us Biden – By Chidi Amuta

    All it has taken to expose the porous underbelly of American democracy is one bad debate night by an 81 year old incumbent president. President Joe Biden fared poorly in his first CNN debate for this election season. A combination of  cold, jet lag and old age troubles made him a bit nervous and uncollected. He was lost in the middle of sentences and seemed to forget his lines on familiar subjects even those where he has excelled as president.

    More destabilizing perhaps was the fact that he  was sharing a debate podium with a known serial liar, habitual bully  and unashamed demagogue. That combination in an electoral opponent is enough to unhinge any honest contestant. But even at that, Trump’s negatives are what should have prepared Biden to come fighting. But he did not. He frequently landed  weak blows and a miserable thud each time he tried to put up a fight. The strategy of treating Trump with kid gloves as, at best, a spoilt child did not work and never works in politics.

    Biden was restrained, meek and a bit uncollected. Trump was his usual blustery, hectoring and serially lying self. He won the debate not by repenting from Trumpism but by repeatedly punching a weakened Biden. In the end, supporters and opponents of the sitting president agreed that he was hardly at his best that Thursday night.

    Concern about Biden’s bad showing at that debate has refused to go away.  Concern among suppporters has grown into anxiety and even division among Democrats. The Democratic Party is riled and divided. Some would like Biden to quit the stage and yield place to a younger candidate with a better chance of defeating Donald Trump in the November elections. A solid core of Democrats led by majority of governors still believe Biden is their best bet in the circumstance.

    Others including of course Biden’s immediate family and his core supporters insist that notwithstanding the bad debate night, Biden is their best bet. He is a tested hand. He has experience, track record and can be trusted by allies and  respected , if not exactly feared, by adversaries. After all , he had out- debated and defeated Trump in 2020. He is best suited to do it again than would a totally new hand so late in the day.

    The Republicans, especially Trump and his diehard devotees , are triumphant. They see Mr. Biden as a man weakened by age, unstated infirmity and incremental incapacity especially in unscripted situations. They are silent on the fact of Trump being nearly of the same age bracket as Biden.

    On the whole, it is bad enough that America is now faced with a presidential choice weighed down by geriatric concerns. It is a binary choice between two ageing men whose competitiveness has been reduced to a comparison between two geriatric health records. It is even worse that both parties have become so limited in their leadership options that they seem stuck with a choice between a convicted blustering old crook and a tired good old man.

    Biden’s debate performance means so much because of the peculiarities of American democracy and society.  America is a nation built on an ideal, on a creed of equality of the people and the rejection of monarchical absolutism. A creedalnation that covers syuch a wide area of terriroty can best be forged through effective communication. At first, it was radio that forged that communication link. But radio was constrained by voice and sound. The advent of television completed the link by additing images to voice, giving nirth to the television nation. People as far flung as from Boston to Alaska , from Washington DC to North Dakota could now hear and see common images of their political leaders and other key influencers.

    America’s is an image and television driven democracy. The political contest in America thrives on big marketing, advertisement and image engineering. Over time, television and the media have come to overwhelm American politics with their influence to the extent that the political persona has become something of a pseudo celebrity. The culture of stardom and celebrity created by Hollywood and the musince industry hasve come to rub off on politics, luring the politician into the limelight of celebrity culture.

    The ability to appear on most major channels and networks, to out- talk your opponent and reduce the urgent needs of the nation to a marketing selling point have become the deciding factors in whom the electorate votes for. The political star that must sell should wear the correct tie colour, be made up by make-up artists, rehash the catch phrases of the moment and appear to be on the side of Joe the plumber and Jane the housewife. In all of it, the ability to convince, to play the salesman at short notice has become a major indicator of preparedness to lead America.

    A candidate who has all the ideas on how to sustain America’s greatness but fares poorly on the television screen  may end up being just “the best president America may never get”. On the contrary, the smooth talker, the guy who has an uncanny ability to combine some substance with celebrity appeal stands a better chance of moving into the White House to lord it over America and, by implication, the entire world for a good four years in the first instance.

    Therefore, Biden’s recent bad debate night meant a  tragedy for America’s television image driven politics. This is why the options have narrowed to whether Biden should stay in the race or take a dignified exit. Either option is no easy route. If he were to quit, the Democratic party will be jolted into finding a substitute bafrely five months to the election. The possibility that the substitute will find his  or her feet so readily and quickly and be in a strong psotion to defeat Donald Trump is slim. That option effectively means that the Democrats would be ready to lose the election just to make the point that they opted for a younger, more vibrant candidate.

    In the alternative, keep Biden in the race and try to fix his lapses and the degradations of old age on his electability.  This requires a closer management of the optics of his campaign events,  better preparations and more indepth homework on Trump’s weakenesseses especially his compulsive lying and liberty with facts. The chances of a Biden win can are better if he stays in the race. But of course, those opposed to his staying on are more concerened about the energy and style of governance that he will lead if he secures a second term. In that regard, his experience and mature knowledge of people should equiop him with good men and women to pull off a credible administration.

    Those who wish Biden well are either genuine supporters or people who live with a mortal fear of the catastrophe of a second Trump presidency. People are genuinely concerned about the fiture of democracy in the hands of a lover of dictators and a self declared autocrat. Worse still, Trump’s looming threat to the international order is likely to tilt the balance in favour of the forces of authoritarianism. A man who openly admires Vladimir Putin, Xi Jiping, Kim Jung Un etc cannot be placed in the White House without overturning the world order.

    Elsewhere in other political cultures, a mere one night of television debate would not mean so much. Take Nigeria for instance. We run a US-type presidential system with a cloned constitution along the same lines. But we hardly subject our presidential candidates to any verbal or intellectual rigour. Our presidential candidates do not have to debate with each other. They do not have to have any mastery of the most urgent national issues. They do not have to reel out statistics of the national economy of other vital statistics. They only need to be the choice of some party, loosely defined.

    In 1999 when the military was handing over to a civil democracy, the two front runners for the presidency were Olusegun Obasanjo for the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP) and Olu Falaye for the Alliance for Democracy (AD). At the height of the campaigns, the idea was floated that there should be a television debate between the two. Somehow, neither party was enthusiastic about the debate. Time was allowed to elapse and the debate never took place.

    In Buhari’s two terms as civilian president, there was no debate between him and any of his opponents. Both Atiku Abubakar and Goodliuck Jonathan may have been willing to debate with Mr. Buari but the latter was not  there for any debate. He lacked the capacity to string sentences together. He lacked any demonstrable knowledge or conviction on whatever were the raging national issues of his time. No one knows what he knew or did not know about anything and everything.

    A reclusive and aloof man of few words and scanty ideas, Mr. Buhari was not the type to talk his way to power. He knew only how to cobble together an alliance of strange bed fellows to forge a winning alliance. Power was his means and end as well. In power, he feasted on the combined ability of his devotees and staffers to do most of the talking in no coordinated manner. What was important was that he was in power and at the helm.

    As late as the 2023 presidential election campaign season, the matter of debates among the candidates was toyed with but dropped like hot potato. While Mr. Peter Obi and Abubakar Atiku were inclined to engage in open debates and media sessions, not so with Bola Tinubu. In fact, the campaign season witnessed Mr. Tinubu at his most controversial and incomprehensible. At campaign events, he was quoted as uttering gibberish, a point that fuelled speculations about his exact health condition. People who heard him uttering “Bulaba; Baba blu… Bulaba…” could not make out what language he was speaking. The obvious conclusion in street corners and bars was that the man was suffering from some mental health conditions that had affected both his comprehension and elocution.

    When he showed up to present his agenda at the Chatham House in London, he could hardly answer any question. Instead, he lined up party faithful and supporting cronies on his entourage as the ones who would answer questions on his behalf  since he preferred ‘team work’.

    Eventually, there was no debate between Mr. Tinubu and any of the other major candidates. There was not even a face –to- face interview between Tinubu and anyone or medium of note. But when the election results were announced, Tinubu, the man who said practically nothing to any one, was declared the winner over and above the other two who spent mental energy dissecting the nation’s problems and urgent challenges.

    Therefore, the favourite Nigerian presidential candidate cannot be a television  hero or media celebrity. Yet Nigerians have shown more than passing interest in the America’s presidential elections than other nationals. It may be a subliminal celebration of what we long for but do not yet have.

  • Protest of democracy’s dark offspring – By Chidi Amuta

    Protest of democracy’s dark offspring – By Chidi Amuta

    Between Nairobi’s glamorous city centre and its surrounding  inner city slums of tin shacks and shanties, democracy and good governance have been shocked into a rude awakening. Central Nairobi is the abode of fancy five star hotels, conference centres, ornate government offices and parliament buildings. If you are a tourist visiting Nairobi for the first time on a fleeting visit, you are likely to leave these precincts with a scented impression of Kenya, the favourite post card tourist destination for Western holiday makers. From city centre to the safari hubs and back can convey a false impression of the African jewel that Kenya is reputed to be. If however you tarry a little longer and get a local cab to give you a tour of the soul of Nairobi, you are more likely to leave Kenya with mixed feelings and deep concerns about the African reality.

    Outside the charmed circle of city centre with its glass towers and marble entrances and facades, patchwork of deliberate greenery and high rise apartment blocks, you are greeted by shanty towns, tin shack dwellings of the poorest of the poor.

    The events of the last fortnight in Kenya are about to re-write the conventional and received wisdom about democracy in Africa. Until recent weeks, Africa’s conception of democracy was limited to the ritual of elections  in relays after tenure durations. Once you were known to hold periodic elections and emplace a successor government, you qualified to be branded a demcratic nation. And on the list of successful African democracies, Kenya has always been ranked highly by Western adjudicators of democratic credibility in spite of its extremes of internal social and economic divisions. It has always had the external trappings of what the West likes to see in African democracies over and above what the majority of Kenyans feel in their daily lives.

    On the contrary, Nairobi city centre has just witnessed the footprints of what we may call democracy’s “midnight children”, the dark forces that have bred underneath the veneer of democratic good manners. These are the generations of youth and forgotten people whose expectations have been fired by the promise of democracy over the years. They have now woken up to ask themselves what democracy really means for them and their future generations,  There is a generational leap between the youth rioting and protesting in Nairobi and their parents. Their parents were content with voting at election time and going home to wait for the fruits of Uhuru which never came. These parents perhaps never saw a reciprocal relationship  between their ballots and the rights of citizenship that democracy is obligated to deliver to them.

    In many ways, President Ruto walked into a familiar trap. Whenever an African elected leader receives accolades from the West for doing the ‘right’ things, the people at home need to take a second look. Since being elected president of Kenya, President Ruto has shown a relentless  desire to be in the good books of the West. He had unilaterally sent a contingent of Kenyan policemen to proceed to Haiti to restore order in the tiny nation overrun by gangsters and criminal gangs that has neutralized and sacked the elected government. He has made a flamboyant state visit to the White House and received accolade as ‘a special ally’and  favourite friendly nation of the West.

    This has been followed by the cultivation of a special relationship with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In return for Kenya’s urgent need for a credit window of $2.8 bn dollars to avoid an embarrassing imminent debt squeeze and default, the IMF recommended a tougher taxation  regime. The president duly and obediently forwarded to parliament a Financial Bill with a slew of taxes on goods and services that directly impact the living standards of an already distressed populace. That bill set off the fuse of social disquiet for a population already in dire straights of hardship and deprivation.  The rest is now history. More than 20 have died. Bloody protests and riots have reduced central Nairobi to ruins and charred remains. Parliament has been sacked by the protesters. A detachment of the same police that was sent to Haiti to rein in criminals and gangsters has been deployed with live bullets to control those the president described as ‘criminals and gangsters’! Nairobi city centre has witnessed the footprints of democracy’s dark offspring.

    Times have changed. The younger generation of Kenyans (Africans) have been to school and back. They are on social media with their opposite numbers in the rest of the world from Washington to Teheran, from Kiev to Johanessburg. They are comparing notes on the things that matter to ordinary people. They have come to demand that democracy must mean what it means. The reciprocity between power and responsibility to the citizenry is now being demanded by the street people. To these people, democracy must reciprocate the obligation to vote with the responsibilities of power to imprve real lives. Those who vote have returned to demand jobs, freedom from poverty, education, healthcare and greater say in the things that matter to them.  Democracy is no longer a one-sided coin that demands that the people vote and look away as their lives degrade. If the people ask for their rights nicely and do not get a polite response, the dark side of the mob ensues.

    The protesters in Nairobi city centre are not likely to be nice in the ways they ask that the rights of citizenship abe reciprocated by the responsibilities of power. Those who are elected to power can no longer write legislations that impose endless taxes on the people and retire to the luxury of state villas. The street people are insisting on their right to say ‘No’ to bad governance. The people who have trooped out to express their anger and disquiet in Nairobi are not ‘criminals’ or miscreants. They are angry citizens. They are the dark offspring of democracy, those who were promised so much  but now find themselves with empty hands, hungry stomachs, without jobs and worse still without hope,

    The anger in the streets has led to ugly sights. Parliament has been razed. Parliamentarians have fled. The president has been forced to retreat untidily from his Finance Bill. Initially he talked tough about forcibly enforcing the ‘sovereign will of the Kenya nation’. Then he compared notes with his security people and they probably advised him to dismount from his high horse of power and arrogance. He has rescinded the Finance Bill and undertaken to enter into dialogue with representatives of the angry youth. But the youth and angry street people insist now that the president must resign from office for breaching the social contract that defines every democracy. He is not likely to do that. Between the government and the people, the bond of reciprocity has been broken, The social contract is in breach and will require unusual political management to restore. Meanwhile the government must find the money to remain  in the good books of the IMF and World Bank who got them into the trouble in the first place.

    The fires of Nairobi have caused some heat in far away Nigeria. Nigerians have for long been caught in the throes of deep social and economic distress. With the active encouragement of the oracles of Western ‘blood’ capitalism (IMF and the World Bank), the new Nigerian government of President Tinubu has been encouraged to take off so- called subsidies on petroleum products, electricity, foreign exchange, telephone calls, and literally every service and social good that keeps the lives of common people going.  People have openly wondered why our own crisis of abysmal governance and the resultant hardship has not quite burst into open lawlessness and near anarchy given the size of the Nigerian wounded population. Many Nigerian commentators have expressed fear that the Nigerian situation could be only a boiling cauldron that could explode into uncontrollable fiasco any time.  The Nigerian government remains optimistic that it can muddle through as usual and manage to escape catastrophe. That optimism remains strong mostly out of the fear that a Nigerian hardship protest would overwhelm the already stretched and wobbly state apparatus.

    In many ways, Nigeria embodies the contradiction of African democracy. We embody and celebrate the form rather than the content of democracy. For instance, Nigeria has recently been celebrating several milestones of ‘democracy’.  In particular, we recently celebrated  a number of ‘democracy’ landmarks. These range from twenty five years of ‘unbroken democratic rule’, a period when our only achievement is the succession of elected governments at all levels through four year relay changes of baton. In a nation that became the hallmark of endemic military despotism for decades, this sounds remarkable.  There was also the anniversary of the June 12, 1993 election. Again the contradiction of that has often been lost on many Nigerians: what is deemed the fairest and freest election yet in the nation’s history was conducted by a military dictatorship which is however  castigated for obstructing a democratic transition! There was of course the celebration of one year of the newly installed President Tinubu democratic government.

    Yet, not until recently has the question been raised in Nigeria as to how democracy translates into the welfare of the ordinary people. While this connection remains unexamined, the size of Nigeria’s poor population has ballooned. The sense of entitlement of the political class has literally sacked the national treasury in funding luxuries and perks. Nigeria’s army of the underprivileged has grown into a multitude mired in violence and self -destructive insecurity.  Nigeria’s dark offspring have grown into a dangerous army that is making the rest of the country dangerous and insecure.

    Therefore, one lesson that the Nigerian political establishment can take away from the fires in Nairobi is to begin seriously and systematically addressing the central question of our time: How can we make democracy translate into a rapid improvement in the living conditions of the majority of our people? That should be the major item on the agenda of the National and State Assemblies going forward.