By: Tatalo Alamuon:
•President Muhammadu Buhari
Great
events often steal upon a people virtually unnoticed.It is when they
gather speed and momentum that we begin to wonder what has hit us. This
past fortnight has been quite dramatic in its possibilities for the
nation. Once againwe are on the cusp of unusual developments.
Last week began innocuously enough. But by midweek, all illusions of
peace and calm have been shattered. Upon all the crippling economic
burdens the average Nigerian is forced to bear, a totally unforeseen and
unprecedented hike in petroleum pricing was slammed on the nation with
the deadly ferocity of a military ambush.
It all seems so unreal and bizarre in the extreme. All of a sudden, a
governmentwhich has bonded so intimately with the poor and injured of
the land, a government which has advertised its compassion for the
injury inflicted on Nigerians by their ruling class, bared its knuckles
in a manner reminiscent of harsh, authoritarian military rule.
Yet in a strange reversal of role, it was the government that began
playing the injured, pretending to be hurt that explanations not offered
have not been heard. Glum and uncommunicative at best, jumping from one
absurdexcuse to the other, with IbeKachikwu levitating on highfalutin
techno-speak and the latest
petrolese, this is not the finest hour of the administration.
Is it any wonder, then, that up till this moment and in the face of
looming mass alienation, the president has not found the courage to
address the nation? At least, the retired general from Daura cannot be
accused of great immoral courage. Like all formidable military
commanders, the president has retreated behind a wall of silence,
secrecy and stealth. But one suspects that the general is personally
hurting from this breach of trust and his inability to guarantee the
integrity of his own earlier promise.
But General Buhari needs not obsess about this failure of policy or
be fixated on the dent on his honour as an officer and gentleman. There
is plenty of opportunity to make up. Government is not about a single
capitulation. There is still much hope invested in the Buhari
administration as the very last opportunity for this country to get it
right after forty years in the wilderness of aborted promise.
Yet amidst of all this, the divided and polarized Labour Union has
ordered a national strike which has turned out a damp squib, shunned and
ignored by majority of the workers on whose behalf they claim to be
stirring. This is the first time in the history of the country that
Labour has been so comprehensively cuckolded by labourers. In effect,
the Nigerian Labour Union stands disgraced and demystified.
It is a disgrace and demystification that has been long in coming.
For over thirty years, many of us have been warning our labour
aristocrats that the day is coming when the falcon will no longer
hearken to the falconer. That day, it seems, is now upon us. For the
post-colonial society battered by the rampaging forces of global
capitalism, old labour, with its rustic and rusticated conceptual
armature, no longer works.
When labour is not in collusion and conspiracy with the state to
break the back of rampart civil society as it was evident in the
watershed January 2012 protests, it has turned itself into an enemy of
the very workers whose interests it is supposed to protect. For a long
time, some of us have argued that what labour needs is not retroactive
and reactive protests whose outcome do not make a dent on the plight of
workers but an alternative political platform and ideological paradigm
which will challenge the ravages of global capitalism in its current
stage and particularly in Nigeria.
But this has fallen on deaf ear. You cannot give what you don’t have.
Rotten mango cannot fall very far from the parent tree. The conceptual
and intellectual rigour demanded is beyond the ken of the dinosaurs of
“up and at ém” struggle.
The irony t is that with its reformist consciousness and salary
increment per protest mind-set, labour exists in a state of antagonistic
but paradoxical collusion and complicity with global capitalism and its
transnational oligarchs. The masters of the forces of production are
even toying with dispensing with human labour altogether.
With labour added to the casualty list, Nigeria is a post-colonial
morgue of dead and dying institutions. All the vital institutions of the
state and civil society are either dead or on life-support machine.
This is why there is this eerie disorientation in the nation, as if one
is walking in a land of living ghosts.
Unless Nigeria is remade and rebuilt from scratch, we can forget it.
The greatest affliction which can befall a people is not the affliction
itself but the inability to correctly identify the affliction. The
current crisis about petroleum pricing is not caused by the precipitate
removal of the so called subsidy but something more fundamental. It is a
classic case of confusing the symptom with the disease.
In the hallucinatory haze of the terminally diseased, we often reach
for whatever we confuse with the nearest pain killer. When Nigeria was
fairly well-governed, particularly before the advent of military
despotism, we did not hear of subsidy. When there was no run on the
naira by a kleptomaniac ruling class and massive corruption compounded
by impunity, we did not hear of subsidy.
Simply put, what is erroneously referred to as subsidy is State levy
or government tax on rogue westernization. It is a case of double
jeopardy and a lose-lose situation for the teeming Nigerian underclass.
But pray what is rogue westernization?
Nigeria was never conceived as an organic country but as a trading
and retailing outlet of the western imperium. Till date, the nation has
retained a proud fidelity to the founding charter. Deliberately peopled
by a political elite organically divorced from the aspirations and
yearnings of a true nation, a political elite unable to come together to
found a new authentic nation, aping the worst aspects of western
capitalism without being able to draw on the inner strengths and
resources of the new nation, Nigeria is a disaster always waiting to
happen.
In the event, Nigeria has come up with national institutions which
are genetic hybrids combining the worst aspects of western societies
with the most pernicious carry-over from traditional institutions. They
can hardly pass muster.
Worse, and a result of the programmed inferiority complex of our
elite, we hanker after western goods that we do not produce: from the
latest cars, household gadgets and even petroleum products that we ought
to be able to produce were this not to be a truly dysfunctional
society.
Yet apart from crude oil, we can hardly sell anything to the west.
How can we preserve our foreign reserve and strengthen the value of the
naira when we are wedded to frivolities and meretricious fripperies from
the west?
On any typical journey by train from London on a weekend, you are
likely to run into one of Her Majesty’s ministers on his way to his
constituency clutching his red briefcase and his sandwich. Nigeria does
not have a viable rail system or even decent road transportation.
Meanwhile, our own national and state assemblies as well as other
functionaries of the state award themselves humongous salaries and
emoluments which have no bearing with the dismal economic realities of
the nation. All the mass transportation schemes which they claim to be
derivative ameliorations from subsidy removals of the past have ended up
as gigantic frauds fuelling inflation and the run on the naira. When
will Nigeria produce Nigerians?
To survive, the government must tax this rogue westernization and
petroleum products are the softest targets because of the sheer volume
of the racket. Everybody, particularly the poor, must bear the brunt of
elite malfeasance.We have now been told with commendable if brutal
candour that petroleum prices went up simply because the nation was flat
broke.
At a similar point in his nation’s history, Pandit Nehru decreed that
if India cannot produce its own fabric or develop its own indigenous
car, then the people can trek and walk naked. After mongering platitudes
about self-reliance and the need to stimulate indigenous production,
Nigerian leaders usually relapse into the despotic opulence of village
tyrants. The people take their cue from the rulers.
The argument for the removal of petroleum subsidy is solely conducted
at the level of synchronic manifestation of reality without any
conceptual linkage to its diachronic and futuristic dimensions. It is
all about where we are at the moment rather than where we are coming
from and where we are headed. The faulty answer is embedded in the
faulty question.
This inability to totalize facts is a conceptual subterfuge which
allows the mind to avoid uncomfortable political truths and it is the
bane of western empiricist epistemology and all the disciplines derived
from it, particularly modern Economics which often accounts for their
lack of dialectical rigour and delinquent simplification of complex
reality. This is perhaps the worst intellectual legacy our colonial
masters bequeathed to us.
It is this endemic crisis of nationhood and rogue westernization
which often manifest in the periodic removal of so called subsidy to
much national anguish. As long as there is unregulated consumption of
western goods and as long as corruption is backed by impunity, there
will always be a run on the naira and the subsidy trap will open once
again. Once the naira hits 500 to one single dollar, the subsidy experts
will be back again to collect their scalp until we reach Weimar
Republic and its worthless currency.
This crisis which has been long in coming has now developed its local
pathologies and may no longer be amenable to a national cure-all
prescription but a creative and visionary restructuring of the entire
political architecture of the nation. We have now reached a point where
what is tonic for a particular nationality and its local economy may be
toxic to another.
In retrospect, it is doubtful whetherPandit Nehru, with all his
heroism and considerable political clout, could have achieved the grand
Hindu consensus about the destiny of the new nation if Mohammad Ali
Jinnah and the Pakistani militants were still to be part of an amorphous
India nation. Colonial India had to be created anew, but in a situation
of regrettable mayhem and bloodshed.
National consensus and cohesion will always elude colonial creations
where constituting nationalities retain strong individual identities and
a vibrant sense of private destiny within or outside of the
superimposed behemoth. Nigeria remains a classic example of this
explosive colonial cocktail.
But it can be made to work, particularly if Nigerian nationalities
are willing to surrender this unstated but turbulent sovereignty in
exchange for a more creative and cooperative union of fiercely
independent nationalities. At no other point in its history has Nigerian
been in a greater need of a visionary political genius. The next twelve
months will show whether General Buhari is truly the man we have been
waiting for, or whether we have to tarry awhile
