By Adagbo ONOJA
The past two weeks has seen intense plea to the Federal Government of Nigeria to do something about the cost of living in the country. One big time player after another (governors, clergy, traditional rulers, celebrities and sundry pundits) came out to drive home the message to the government of the day to bring down the cost of living. The totality of the outings cannot be understood other than reading the Riot Act or drawing the ‘red line’ for the president. Coming immediately after the rudimentary popular show of force that started from Minna and echoed in Kano, Ibadan and Lagos, the message is the possibility of an impending clash between ‘people’s power’ and the ‘people in power’. That is one direction to watch because it would be interesting to see a situation in which the masses pour out to insist that the National Assembly or Eagle Square will remain OCCUPIED unless and until fuel price is fixed at an AFFORDABLE price. The day the people of Nigeria can unite to discipline governance that way will mark the beginning of independence because that is the only thing that will bury elite rascality. It would be the anti-thesis of the culture of too much faith in unstable variables such as honesty, decency or trustworthiness of anybody who aspires to rule Nigeria.
It is so sad that President Tinubu has so successfully created the probably unintended impression that all he ever cared for is to be called president of Nigeria even if only for a day. Otherwise, what could he have been doing between the time he was declared president-elect and the day he was sworn-in? It was assumed he was surrounded throughout that period by thinkers who were busy reading Festus Iyayi’s 2011 speech in Abuja in particular on where Nigeria ought to be by now (well beyond infrastructure provisioning and such little things taken for granted elsewhere, even in Africa) and how to build the ‘Renewed Hope’ slogan around that. This has nothing to do with whether the Buhari government had collected crude sales upfront or not. Any president of Nigeria has so many ways of getting things done. Nigeria is not a small fry.
Democracy and democratisation
Is it possible the president has found it difficult to transcend the limits imposed on him by the narrativisation of him in the aftermath of the election? That may not be impossible since every one of us is nothing but how we are profiled and understood. But is it not also true that if one has a powerful imaginary, he or she can overcome any discursive condition of his or her emergence? So, what might have happened or be happening to the president? Is it possible President Tinubu has not read Ibrahim Tahir’s two things that ailed Obasanjo presidency? Femi Falana is alluding to one of them. Whatever it is, the lives of over 200 million human beings is at stake.
Without moving in the direction of a clear idea of the ‘Renewed Hope’, the president has left everyone in a pervasive sense of danger. But even more dangerous than dangerous things happening is the lack of uproar regarding the condition(s) of possibility for the dangerous happenings and still more dangerously, the lack of uproar on the way forward. The truth is that the government of the day is not equipped to bring down the cost of living. Unless there is a conversion of Pauline proportion (apologies to those who are not familiar with The Holy Bible), it would be worth asking what magic or miracle (as you like it) will enable the government achieve that.
At a time such as this, a sitting president’s most potent weapon is qualitative interpretation which implies qualitative interpreters. Unfortunately, that is not what the country is getting from the Tinubu Presidency. Instead of such people, what is on parade is elements with capacity for showy loyalty and the ‘cuwa-cuwa’ mentality that serve as the strategy of the wise. Otherwise, someone ought to have told the president that this is not an ordinary crisis that orthodox approaches can help manage but a dislocation. Palliatives and ordering grains cannot respond to the cumulative convulsions from three decades of policy recklessness. This is more so for a government stuck with implementing an even more crude version of SAP as can be seen in the recent PWC disclosure that there was a 98% devaluation in the exchange rate policy at the onset of the Tinubu administration?
Yet, it is SAP in an agrarian economy which exacerbated poverty and to which victims are responding in different ways: with terrorists such as Boko Haram framing their frustration in religious terms; resort to counter-cultural practices (cultism and cultists) by a large chunk of the youth (and non-youth as well); aggravated corruption by those most fearful that the country would soon disappear if they didn’t quickly enough take own cut from the carcass; the phenomenon of turning one’s anger on the closest person as we see in the rising cases of domestic violence involving wife against husband or parents against children and those committing suicide. In each case, the protagonists are responding differently to something which they frame in religious, cultural, secessionist or criminal sense even as some others are forming new coalitions or giving up entirely.
And this combustive combination of responses to SAP explains the dislocation the country is passing through. Dislocation is what a person or an institution or a country experiences when the old order has exhausted its honeymoon and it stands interrogated. In all such moments in the life of an individual or a nation, what used to work simply doesn’t anymore. There are too many deficiencies manifesting at the same time and to which different players are responding differently. Each set of responses provokes its own chain of reactions, deepening alienation and associated political attitudes, from resignation to fate to confrontation or vengeance. Insistence on dislocation as used here is thus important because the way a problem is understood is also the way it is solved. Nigeria is at that point where there can be no putting the genie back without profound responses that go beyond palliatives in dealing with dislocation.
As things are now, the Nigerian State is so completely delegitimised, marked most by citizens voting with their feet in search of greener pastures in other lands and doing so very openly and unapologetically. The political space is totally captured by those least enabled in terms of any formal grooming for exercise of power at that level. Yet, this is a semi-agrarian country where one of the conditions for successful modernisation is a power elite with the capacity to take the masses (peasants and urban poor) from where they are to where they should be. Without even any pretence to have a framework for agro-industrial transformation, any claim about lowering cost of living is a lie. Meanwhile, a topic such as industrialisation has become an anathema. No one is even mentioning it. No one is seriously mentioning the collapse of the universities relative to what they used to be up to the mid-1980s. It is not possible to accomplish the transition without a vibrant university system.
The last time that the country was at something close to this moment was in 1990 when IBB was compelled to why the economy hadn’t collapsed. But IBB had philosophers/thinkers and policy experts around himself, many of them conservative in orientation but always a delight to relate with, especially on policy. They answered him by saying it was simply because the statistics he was reading in the numerous briefings available only to a president were statistics from the formal economy. Those statistics did not include the informal economy which accounted for over 60% of the population. So, collapse of the economy was out of the question even as SAP was also reconfiguring the society in a problematic direction.
Now and in contrast, the informal economy is the target of attack when fuel subsidy or whatever name we call it is removed in a manner that the pump price jumps from around 200 to over 600 Naira. If the removal also came with automatic adjustment of salaries and other compensatory systems, that might have made some sense. Since that was not the case, it became safe to conclude that the government has a problem of nuance in its imaginary.
Still, every dislocatory moment provides its own resolution. In an entangled world, it can be difficult to guess how the dynamics can play out. One possibility – ‘people’s power’ versus ‘people in power’ has been mentioned in the event of the clear ‘red line’ so soon to the president after take-off. This possibility cannot be dismissed in the event of the clarion call last week too for the kind of coalition of the 1980s that set the parameters for democratisation. People will organise to save themselves when living becomes real hell. Is it possible President Tinubu might have decided on making a paradoxical contribution to democracy through radicalising the populace into knowing how to assert themselves politically?
