Other than the struggle for power in Nigeria which has assumed a judicial dimension now, the politics of fuel subsidy is the next hottest issue in the country’s politics. It is an issue that, like the question of who won the last presidential election, has no consensus around it.
What is the Tinubu imaginaire and how is he going to move on the oil subsidy issue?
Out-going president, Muhammadu Buhari said in 2015 that fuel subsidy is a ruse. Many believed him, partly because he can be said to have seen it all if it involved the oil industry in Nigeria. He was oil minister in the mid 1970s. however, when Buhari got into power, the game changed. Apart from insecurity, energy price rose almost every year under Buhari’s watch. No one has understood what might have happened to the president. While it is true that what people say at any point in time is based on what information they had at that time, Buhari was not only a former oil minister but also a political leader who, even after office, would still be a voice on the energy question. So, what happened to Buhari remains an important question.
Leading elite voices such as Khalifa Muhammadu Sanusi (more popularly known as Sanusi Lamido Sanusi), Governor Nasir el-Rufai and Prof Charles Soludo tend to think that the answer is to remove the subsidy, that it makes more economic sense to do so although, at the book presentation on How Nigeria Can Build a Post-Oil Economic Future, they situated that argument in the leadership question. Nasir el-Rufai sought to illuminate the leadership imperative by using the Obasanjo regime as the model. Obasanjo was, for him, the model in terms of assembling a core of elite whom he rated to be competent while he (Obasanjo) provided the mandarin’s mandarin. el-Rufai also saw the problem at the occasion in terms of Nigeria’s toxic political culture. I
What is the likely response from the radical constituency? A disorganised show of Jacobinism or what?
The Kaduna governor was spot on to raise that argument at that occasion. There might be no better event to raise the question why Nigeria has not made it than an occasion attended by a Soludo, a Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, an el-Rufai, a Fayemi, a Shamusdeen, an Aig-Imoukhuede and so on. It was a critique of that layer of the technocracy in Nigeria even as an el-Rufai might not have left the venue happy if it was a space in which anyone could have deconstructed his (el-Rufai’s own leadership and even the Obasanjo leadership he was waxing strong about.
What no one appears to have said is that the fuel subsidy issue has no right or wrong answer but a power answer. Nigeria has reached a point where any group that has the power to decide the question this or that way is the one with the right answer. And that is where the occasion to which the cover graphic has invited an audience derives significance.
Although an all-conquering Archimedean lever pushing a radical democratic with purchase in popular psychology has eluded Nigeria, the radical impulse manages to seep out here and there, all the time. The oil subsidy contest is one realm where whether the scattered approach to radical democratic politics can still claim the Nigerian political space.
The organisers have lined up their speakers and the rest of the country awaits what will come from the occasion, how it connects with the kind of views circulating in other centres of power and what happens as a new government takes over power in a matter of weeks. Interestingly, many informed elements think it is a government determined to take difficult decisions. In what way would the decision be difficult? Is it when the government is compelled by people’s power to take the decision the way the popular masses want? Or is it going to follow the logic of entrenched parasites? Or, is this a matter of exclusively informed, technocratic view with nothing to do with ideology? Is there anything outside an ideological context? Might Nigeria be heading for a consensus on the oil subsidy question?
Questions! Questions!! Questions!!!
