A Breath Of Fresh Air Or An Acrid Odour?

By

Babayola M. Toungo

babayolatoungo@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

The latest instalment of the “breath of fresh air” from Goodluck Jonathan in fulfilment of his campaign promises will be unveiled to Nigerians in the new year in the form of the removal of subsidy on petroleum products.  That is for those who still believe there is any subsidy on the products.  These days the only topic of discussion among Nigerians wherever you find them is the government’s plan to hike the price of petroleum products and further pauperise Nigerians no matter the level of cacophony generated by the ordinary citizens who will ultimately bear the brunt of this latest callousness by a government that promised them a “breath of fresh air”.  Though to be fair to Goodluck, he did not mention how fresh the air will be.  To me, this can only be written down as the wages of electing a clueless leader.

 

The planned hike in the prices of petroleum products is an old song inherited from Obasanjo who did so about six times in a spate of eight years.  The first time we heard of “oil subsidy” was during Babangida’s government in 1988.  When the regime wanted to increase the price of petroleum products, Jerry Gana assaulted our ears with the benefits of doing so.  A certain Labaran Maku, then President of the Students Union Government of the University of Jos, was on record as calling the act “criminality and inhumanity” that should be fought by every Nigerian.  Two decades on, the same Maku is playing the role that Jerry Gana did for Babangida.  It was also a song remixed by Okonjo-Iweala, the World Bank employee with a double barrelled portfolio of Co-ordinating Economic Minister and Minster of Finance, a first for any country, civilised or otherwise.  This woman left her office as Managing Director of the World Bank (a middle cadre officewhich the Nigerian media made it sound as if she is the Chief Executive officer of the Bank) to assume office as a minister in Nigeria just as the French Finance minister, Christine Legarde, was fighting tooth and nail to be appointed the Managing Director of the IMF, the junior twin of the Bretton Woods Instittutions.  During her first incarnation as Finance minister under the Obasanjo government, Okonjo-Iweala, caused Nigeria to part with $18billion as repayment to Paris Club of creditors, though it was universally agreed that the loans are dubious.  That was how she was rewarded with a promotion as one of three Managing Directors of the World Bank  after she was frustrated out of office by the same Obasanjo.

 

Though this blackmail of the poor by successive governments have been on since 1998,  General Abacha’s “removal” in 1995 that gave birth to the PTF was supposed to be last one.  Obasanjo thereafter “removed” the subsidy about six times.  Increment in the prices of petroleum  products has always been the easiest means of robbing the poor to pay for the profligacy of the ruling class.  The government have been bandying around figures that makes no sense to anyone apart from its apologists.  The Nigerian ruling class, be it military or civilian, is the same when it comes to the welfare of its ‘subjects’.  For all they care we can all collectively go and jump in the Lagos lagoon so long as we can pay for their lifestyles.  Already Nigerians are living under the most dehumanising and degrading conditions imaginable among all the citizens of oil producing countries the world over, but this is no concern to our ‘rulers’.

 

Petrol prices have the most impact on our lives compared to any other commodity though I believe those that live fat on our blood may not even be aware of this from the Olympian heights they live.  Though they bamboozle us with the macro aspect of petrol prices, I would like to crave their indulgence by begging them to look down for once and see the road their folly may take us to.  Take for instance the achaba operator who may have to buy a litre of petrol at N150.  His passenger may have to pay him N200 for a drop because he will have to also visit the roadside mama put to eat, who in turn have to go to the market to buy the foodstuff for her roadside canteen business from the man who sale grains in the market, who in turn has to go to the village market to buy the grains, which must be transported to his shop in the market by a commercial vehicle driver, who in turn has to go to the fuel station to buy petrol.  Now I know this my sound too complicated to our macro economists like Okonjo-Iweala, so let me put it this way.  Bottomline is – they are all dependent on one petrol powered machine or the other, even the farmer has to hire a tractor which uses diesel to till his farm to be able to sow and reap before taking his harvest to the village market.  Now, if I am not asking too much, I will like their excellences to put in perspective how this vicious circle may end up financially and practically strangulating the end user – the poor, unemployed wretches scattered all over the streets of this blighted nation.  The only logical outcome I can see from this gloomy scenario is the inability of Nigerians to take care of their most basic bills.

 

A cabal of the president’s friends under what they called “organised private sector” have been making noise how the poor won’t feel the pinch when they hike the price of petrol because most of them uses buses and not cars and buses use diesel not petrol.  This is not only patronising but insulting.  So the poor don’t cars – is it their fault?  Anyway, the poor doesn’t even have the luxury of using buses these days – they use achaba – those two-wheeled devils that decimate their population on a daily basis.  Our casualty wards in our hospitals tells their own story, though such places are not places where Goodluck and his friends visit.

 

Already we have seen how the children of majority of Nigerians are loitering our streets because their parents cannot afford to send them to school; how people are turning to alternative medicine because it is cheaper, accessible and affordable to the poor; how businesses are closing down because of lack of patronage from a populace already overburdened by poverty and deprivation.  If the government is to be believed that it expended the sum of N900billion on oil subsidy, why on earth couldn’t they have used the money to reactivate our comatose refineries or even build new ones?  How much will it cost to build new refineries?  And by the way, what happens to the 445,000 barrels per day allocated to NNPC for local refining?

 

It will be good, though I know it should be asking far too much, if the government will tell us why we have to import, who imports, what is the cost of the importation, who benefits from the subsidy and how is this subsidy calculated and based on what indices.  In Ghaddafi’s Libya, electricity, water, education and healthcare are all free.  No Libyan lives in a rented property and a litre of petrol cost about N22.  Yet the Libyans lynched him.  But our government is lynching us economically in a painful, slow death.  A man whose campaign platform consists of only telling Nigerians that he was not born rish as if all others were born rish promised us a “breath of fresh air”.  That he went to school without shoes.  Don’t we all?  Well, we now live in an atmosphere polluted with acrid smell, less than one year into his four.  We ask for it.