As Obasanjo Loses Face

By

Abdulrazaque Bello-Barkindo

razbell73@hotmail.com

 

 

President Olusegun Obasanjo was the first person to clothe General Ibrahim Babanginda’s Structural Adjustment Programme in Halloween glad rags when he asked IBB to give SAP a human face. This happened at a time when Babangida withdrew subsidy on fuel and everybody complained about hardship. Those who wore the shoe knew where it pinched and as a superannuated General of the Army one would say that the hardships of that time did not knock on Obasanjo’s doors at his Ota landholding. What is more, from what people say of Obasanjo, it will be hard to think that people called on him for string-pulling but the situation in every household was deteriorating so fast that only those at the corridors of power missed the point that their economic doctrine were celebrating Halloween.

 

For many, Babangida’s era marked the beginning of the full fading of the middle-class. Those who had connections to power became stinking rich while the rest remained impoverished plebs on whom all the junk was dumped. Civil Servants, who were contented with little, earned even less by comparison and saved nothing. Wages and earnings simply evaporated as soon as collected. Those who could be trusted with responsibility lost their reliability and those who once showed signs of moral uprightness in the fabrics of society, just vanished.

 

Sitting on the upper echelons of society excluded Babangida’s and Maryam’s coterie of friends from this disappearing specie. The rest went fishing. The appalling thing about the IBB period was when the dribbling began. The middle-class family which once rode proudly in a car that was secured through a bank loan became an object of ridicule. The banks stopped loaning out money to paupers and the pauperized. Among students, the rapid transformation of instructional systems and the cultural picture slumped dramatically. Lecturers became vultures feeding on students’ vulnerability by selling handouts. Institutions started begging for donations and incidentally that was when the likes of Abia State’s Orji Kalu emerged with his fraudulent gift of wads of paper in the name of money, at an educational endowment fund raising occasion in Maiduguri.

 

IBB had stormed to power with a promise to release Nigerians from the draconian rule of Buhari and Idiagbon. He came with a promise to return to Nigerians their freedoms which the Buhari-Idiagbon junta had taken away. Because Nigerians cannot ponder a life without talk the first noticeable casualty under Buhari was the freedom of expression and a free press. IBB knew that the Nigerian DNA is embroidered with the words “speech-maniacs,” so he promised to make talk free. When allowed to say whatever they liked, wherever they liked, no matter how foul, Nigerians can stand jackboots kicking on their doors at midnight, so long as they could talk about it in the morning. They could even laugh about it. Babngida capitalised on that attribute but being Nigerian himself, used his own mouth to hang himself. He talked too much, made so many mistakes, institutionalised corruption and deceit and left the good undone.

 

After eight years in power, IBB had said many things that were unforgettable. He had also done many wrongs that were unforgivable, (even un-resolvable). SAP, OIC, MAMSER, Dele Giwa, C130, Option A4, 419, ABN, June 12th, ING, just name it. IBB was all motion, no movement. When the pressure got the better part of Obasanjo’s staff and they began to steal his chicken and eggs he intervened. To stop Babangida, he unmasked the Halloween hangings of SAP by asking IBB to give the programme a “human face,” and with that phrase created a new term in Nigeria’s economic lexicon.

 

The Americans say what goes around comes around. Sultan Muhammadu Maccido has now borrowed the “human face” jargon and returned the favour to Obasanjo. The Sultan of Sokoto is also asking Obasanjo to get himself a face, because the one he used to criticise Babngida cannot now be recognised.

 

In a democracy talk is free that everyone can take pot-shots at government. But when Maccido makes a complaint, wise people know that a face has serious damage. Enough is enough. When Babangida played his “hand of god,” he claimed that the economy had defied all solution even as he praised Nigerians for their resilience. He did not need to explain because he merely dribbled Buhari in the penalty box and did what he liked with the goal-post. But here is a 419 government that is borrowing our mouth to chew onion since 419 of 2003. Nigeria now has experts from everywhere manning its economy and the little subsidies left are still being flushed down the drain. Half of the nation’s wealth is in the pockets of thirty-six unproductive governors and their even less productive wives, thirty-six uncreative ministers and their even less creative cronies. Along with these is a horde of Senators, NASS representatives, SHA members, and councillors with the mindset of Wabara, Mantu and Zwingina.

 

As with the Babangida era, these officials are more ghost-like than any single nation can harbour. And hope to move forward. If they themselves had human faces, any fuel price increase would be an impeachable offence. But they are captives to Ghana-must-go and, in fact, care less about their electorates. Thanks to them, a typical day in Nigeria has become a nightmare of handouts to most of the citizenry. Or even worse. People now go about begging for offerings, in the form of money for fees, for books, for medical assistance, for pesticides, and for roof-repairs. People just beg for every imaginable excuse. As an assurance that we have gone full circle, internet begging, among students with access to the web is in. Stories abound of Nigerians looking for favour from even children.

 

There are more. Able-bodied Nigerians with families are out pleading for everything from fuel money to go to work to rams for naming ceremonies. Yet, these are only a tip of the iceberg. Nigerian governors are junketing the world in search of health instead of building and equipping hospitals. The home public is confronted for instance, by elderly women who say that they have money for their diabetes treatment but have no taxi fare to the hospital. It is not uncommon to come across cases that are hard to ignore like a bright-looking face whose owner has been unemployed since leaving school but now has an interview to attend but is short of transport fare to reach the appointment. These requests are daily occurrences directly linked to the rising cost of fuel.

 

But what is not? A call on any rural inhabitant will leave you gazing at the sky from inside his room once you look up. Prices of zinc have shot through the roofs. If the person is lucky to have a ceiling, the marks left behind by rain remind the visitor of a wild geography class. To begin to tell that person how hard you work to stitch your equilibrium together is a total waste of breadth. In Nigeria rise in fuel price affects everything. It is not like someone is emerging from the street corners to ask for money to take a new wife. This is a luxury only political office holders and the unproductive fraction (that we mentioned earlier) can afford, courtesy of congressional allowances, bogus bank loans, over-invoiced contracts and other phoney schemes. The rest of the population is stuck with an inhuman face that simply refuses to go away.

 

Now this: Someone e-mailed me to say that DSP Alamieyeseigha was never a policeman. The error is hereby regretted.

razaque