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“Three Bulls Equal One Mecca” By Bala Muhammad
"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think." -Adolf Hitler, quoted on www.free.freespeech.org
I had occasion recently to accompany my wife shopping at Abuja’s Sahad Stores in Wuse Zone 4. The wife continued piling items in the trolley, while I kept reminding her that we had only ten thousand naira to spend.
At the checkout counter, the cashier calculated and announced, with some flourish for a job-well-done, “That will be twenty six thousand naira,” as he made for plastic bags to pack our–or rather my wife’s–shopping.
More than anyone I knew, my wife hated embarrassing situations, and I knew right there and then that she had brought one upon herself. Other customers queuing behind us for their turn looked on restlessly, waiting for us to pay and give way. Give way I did for, sensing the impending faux-pas, I immediately dropped the ten thousand naira into my wife’s hands and rushed out the door to await her in the car.
The look on her face when she came out said everything about her traumatic and embarrassing experience with Nigerian inflation, and she did not talk to me all through the drive home. When she came to, she told me how she had shamefacedly removed almost half the items in the trolley, beginning with all the exotic cosmetics she had selected. But her greatest embarrassment came, she said, when a rather less-well-fed woman (compared to her) on the queue had looked at my wife with genuine sympathy and had said, “Eya! Sorry O!” Would the earth have opened up.
My wife, then freshly returned from a sojourn in Germany, could not understand why things had become so much more expensive in so short a time. In Germany, she had told me, the economic fear on the part of government was that of deflation (prices going down, thus threatening production margins), while there was almost no fear for the purchasing public, as prices had remained more or less the same for decades.
In elementary economics, inflation is explained away as a necessary economic phenomenon. Many people who don’t go out to really “earn” a living (examples include the multitudes of ‘yan maula parasites who throng our offices and homes) never really appreciate the impact of inflation, especially as wages in this country do not rise commensurate to it.
Though essentially a student of communication, my knowledge of economics is good enough for me to know the danger inflation poses to my take-home-pay and, as my family’s major breadwinner, the trouble I go through to bring in the bread.
Back in 1999, while I was working at the BBC World Service in London, we had a crisis we termed the missing zero when the then new Nigerian civilian administration upped the nation’s minimum wage to the equivalent of thirty US dollars a month (an amount that perfectly mirrors UN’s threshold of relative poverty, i.e. earning less than a dollar a day).
On the day that piece of news about Nigeria’s minimum wage broke, it was a major item in the BBC World Service bulletin, not so much because it was revolutionary, but more because of the seeming ridiculousness of the amount. But for us Nigerians at Bush House, the amount was nothing out of the ordinary.
A symbiotic system at the World Service dictated that, if one department (there are more that forty language sections at the BBC World Service) was in any doubt about foreign news details (as in pronunciation of names or correct rendering of titles), it would always ask the language section most closely related to the news item.
And so it was that, while I was busy working, I got a call (the first of many to come throughout the day) from the Indonesian Section asking whether there was a missing nought in the quoted figure of thirty (30) dollars, as they thought the amount to be three hundred (300) dollars, but that the devil had eaten ‘one zero’. I assured the Indonesians that it was really thirty dollars. Next phoned the Croat Section, and then even the neighbouring Somalis (who worked next door on Floor One at Bush House).
But the most tenacious of all in trying to establish the truth about Nigeria’s missing zero was the Vietnamese: apparently unconvinced by the explanations on phone, the Editor, no less, descended from their Fifth Floor office to really clarify this matter face to face. It took more than ten minutes of precious time, during which he learnt the rudiments of Nigeria’s government and economy. I could see distinct pity on his face as he left. (The average salary at the World Service was then in the region of four thousand dollars a month, before tax).
It seemed no one had believed the copy from the newsroom. How could people live on such an amount, everyone was asking incredulously. Many wanted to know what the original salary was before the increase. We didn’t volunteer that, and neither did we volunteer the percentage of Nigerians in paid employment. Neither did I volunteer that I had left a university teaching position which paid about twenty thousand naira (then about twenty five dollars) a month. But we did explain that Nigeria’s cost of living was relatively low, and that the thirty-dollars-a-month pay was for the lowest of the workers.
Nothing illustrates inflation and the fortunes of a nation’s currency than the decades-old Fulani herdsmen method of determining the cost of a bull (bajimi) in relation to the cost of passage to the Pilgrimage (Hajj) in Mecca. When air travel began more than half a century ago, the average Fulani maniyyaci (Hajj ‘intender’) realised that, to pay passage, he had to sell Bajimai Uku (Three Bulls).
From then on, the cost of Hajj was roughly equivalent to the market price of three bulls. The only caveat in this was that the Fulani had (still have) a near monopoly in determining the price of cattle. It then followed that, in every subsequent year when the Hajj fare was marginally increased, the Fulani would also marginally increase the bull-price to be able to maintain the age-old three-bulls-equal-one-Mecca maxim.
So, for example, in the early 1980s the Federal Government asked for one thousand naira as Hajj fare. The Fulani man would calculate a third of one thousand naira to be the year’s going price for a bajimi. As the Hajj season is also the Babbar Sallar (Eid el Kabir) season, when cattle and other animals are coveted for layya (ritual slaughter), it was a given that bulls would sell.
For the 2005/2006 Hajj, the Federal Government asked for about N260,000 for a karamar kujera (literally ‘small chair’, but meaning hajj fare with $500 BTA, as opposed to a babbar kujera or ‘big chair’ with a $1000 BTA). That was why, for those who bought really big bulls for the layya of January 10, 2006 (Zul Hijja 10, 1426), they have had to pay round about eighty seven thousand naira each, to ensure three bulls equal one Mecca.
Fulani herders may live in the bush, and may act and appear worldly unwise, but this single maxim of theirs (ours, if my ancestors had stayed with their herds and eschewed city-living) confirms their (our) ingenuity.
The economic implication of this three-bull maxim is that the price of beef is directly related to the cost of a Hajj passage (perhaps unknown to most economics professors). The danger of inflation in its multiplier effect, as seen in the increase in the price of fuel, can also be studied from the three-bulls perspective.
Now back to our three-bulls (not cock-and-bull) story. It is said that an Ardo (Fulani chief) thought he was more ‘chiefly’ than the Ardo of the neighbouring ruga (temporary habitation). So when Ardo One heard that Ardo Two had sold three bulls to pay for a karamar kujera, Ardo One sold four bulls to pay for a babbar kujera. On board the airplane on the day of departure, Ardo One was coincidentally assigned a seat next to Ardo Two. Ardo One pointedly refused to take his seat, insisting “How can our chairs be of the same size, when I had sold four bulls to get a babbar kujera, while he only sold three bulls?”
It took time to explain to Ardo One that a babbar kujera was not in the size of the plane seat, it was in the amount of BTA.
--The writer is Director General of Kano State’s Societal Reorientation Programme (A DAIDAITA SAHU)
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