PEOPLE & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

And so help us God

Chuks Onwudinjo’s perceptive cartoon strip on NLC’s last strike in the Insider of June 14 perhaps best summed it up. The strip began with the president, a knowing grin on his face, standing next to the NLC president, as the comrade issued his ultimatum over the recent petrol price increase. “Its N38 a liter or nothing! Enough is Enough!!”, thundered the comrade. Next he gave the president a seven-day ultimatum to act or “we’ll bring down this government.” To which the president responded with a wider and even more knowing grin. Finally the comrade leant over to the president’s ears for a conspiratorial whisper. “Aahh! My President!” he said “Please don’t be offended. You know I have to tell them something… I will call it off in the next few days!”

That, it has now turned out, couldn’t have been more dead on target: three days after our dear comrade announced a 21-day strike, he called it off under the pretext that the authorities have complied with the court injunction for a return to the old price of 38 Naira per liter. For effect, the comrade posed for press photos as a petrol attendant. The labour leader may have dispensed petrol at 38 Naira per liter, but elsewhere the stuff was selling at no less than 44 Naira – that is, where the stuff was available at all. As at the time of this writing it was not available in most of the filling stations in Kaduna where I live.

Oshiomhole may think that Onwudinjo’s caricature of him as a master of double-speak is an unfair cut, but it merely reflects popular sentiments about his relationship with the authorities. And if only the labour leader would admit it, he is mainly to blame for this. In case he has forgotten, he should remember that first, he gave a ringing endorsement of Chief Obasanjo as the presidential candidate of PDP and subsequently gave a not-so-cautious endorsement of the highly dubious presidential election itself. Many people saw the labour leader’s endorsement of both Candidate Obasanjo and the presidential election as partial payback for the wholehearted support the authorities had given him when he sought a second term as NLC president. When he apparently sought and got the authorities’ support Oshiomhole should have known that there was hardly any limit to the price he would subsequently pay.

Perhaps the labour leader entertained illusions that he was smart enough to dine with President Obasanjo and still outwit him. If he did, he obviously underestimated the president’s famed guile and intolerance, as can clearly be seen from the fact that in-spite of labour blowing hot and cold – indeed because it has had to blow hot and cold – the pump price of petrol – and other petroleum products – have increased by leaps and bounds since 1999. The fact is that today the public no longer looks up to labour as a bulwark against Presidential Obasanjo’s anti-people policies.

This raises the question of who will fight for the ordinary folk since organized labour has managed to compromise itself out of being the peoples’ champion. Everyone knows that the legislators at the center and in the states are worse than rubber stamps. Ditto the ruling party, the PDP. As for the opposition parties, they seem too divided between and betwixt themselves to offer effective opposition. The courts? Enough of the judges have suborned themselves enough to have turned the courts into an object of public contempt. In any case the authorities obey their injunctions only selectively.

The Church and the Mosque? Who does not know that the clerics have long been doing big and brisk business praying for the authorities to overcome all opposition and survive the justified anger of the masses? The traditional rulers? Have they, by and large, not always been for the government of the day? The media? Have the ethnic and sectarian prejudices of media-men not blinded them into hardly ever taking an objective stand anytime the authorities paint themselves into a corner? Human rights organizations? Is it not apparent that they have since considered their job done once they got the soldiers and the much-maligned so-called Hausa-Fulani feudalists out of the way?

It is apparent then that we are, at least in the short run, faced with a personal dictatorship that not only brooks no opposition at all but actually faces none. The implication of this for the struggle over the price of oil between the free-marketers and the interventionists is therefore obvious; the free-marketers will prevail, or more correctly, have indeed prevailed.

The reason why they have prevailed is equally obvious. The free-marketers are wealthy, organized and are in charge of government. Even more importantly they have the support of the International Establishment as symbolized by the ruling neo-conservatives in America, the IMF and the World Bank.

Herein lies the significance of the struggle over the price of crude oil and its products. In-spite of scientific and technological developments, hydro-carbons – trees, oil, coal, etc – have remained the main sources of energy for the human race, as against alternative sources like solar, wind, fuel cells and nuclear energy. Among hydro-carbons, oil is easily the king. In transportation, especially road transportation, oil has a near monopoly.

According to The World in 2003, an annual publication of The Economist, the world consumes about 76 million barrels of oil daily. Another of its publications, Pocket World in Figures (2002) says America alone consumes about 18.5 million barrels daily as the world’s leading economy and sole super power. This is more than three times the consumption of Japan (5.65 million), the second highest consumer. Of the 18.5 million barrels it consumes, it produces only 7.76 million barrels and thus imports more than half.

At 7.76 million barrel, America is second only to Saudi Arabia which produces 8.59 million barrels. Nigeria, which ranks 13^th among producers, pumps out a comparatively puny 2.03 barrels daily but this is a significant contribution to the nearly 11 million barrels the Americans import daily.

Crude oil is obviously important to America as its highest consumer and to Nigeria as one of its leading producers. Its pricing and those of its products are therefore very important to both. However whereas logically speaking, the Americans should seek to minimize their prices, Nigerians should seek the opposite, i.e. to maximize the price of crude oil, if not its products.

However, in reality things are different. Whereas the Americans do seek to minimize the prices of both crude oil and its products, strangely Nigerians seem to want to minimize the price of crude oil and maximize the prices of its products, petrol especially. Recall that only recently our president told an audience in U.K. that at about $38 a barrel, the price of crude oil was too high! At the same time, however, his government has insisted in increasing the price of petrol under the pretext that prices are best left to market forces.

The pricing of crude oil and its derivatives, however, exposes the blatant hypocrisy of free-marketers. On the one hand they advocate the deregulation of prices and even of the economy as a whole. However, as soon as they see the same so-called market forces acting to their disadvantage, they turn around and become advocates of intervention.

This has been the case with the recent increases in the price of crude oil. OPEC, The Economist (May 22) said, has been under “heavy diplomatic pressure” from the United States and other countries to increase its output to dampen price. This pressure has come in-spite of the fact the price increases have not been due to shortfall in supplies, since OPEC countries have been producing flat-out. The increase in price, said The Economist, was because of (1) surging demand, (2) distribution bottlenecks of products, especially in the U.S. and (3) speculation due to Middle-East uncertainties caused by the war on Iraq, which many, alas not including The Economist itself, had warned was absolutely gratuitous.

Of the three reasons, the magazine acknowledged that the third was far and away the most important, not least because Saudi Arabia plus four of its neighbours, namely Iran, Iraq, United Arab Emirate (UAE) and Kuwait, sit on two-third of the world’s proven oil reserve and their oil is by far the cheapest to pump up – an average of less than $2 barrel against about $10 elsewhere. On the reserves, says The Economist of May 29, “Russia, Nigeria and Alaska put together do not match Saudi’s reserves.”

Not only is shortfall in supply not the cause of the recent increases in prices, because actually there is no shortfall, the increases themselves are more apparent than real. “At $40 a barrel,” said The Economist of May 22, “oil is still far cheaper in real terms than it was during the spikes of the 1970s.”

The simple lesson in all this is that there are no free-market forces anywhere in the world. The essence of society and the raison detre of government is equity and justice among the socio-economic classes. The twain are impossible in any society whose credo is everyone to himself and the devil take the hindmost. And this is the true meaning of unbridled market forces, a.k.a. deregulation.

Today these free marketers are in power at home and abroad and they seem to face little or no challenge in their determination to soak the poor. Last year when President Obasanjo decided to thank Nigerians for meekly submitting to the massive electoral fraud that returned him to power for a second term, with a massive increase in the price of petroleum products in July, I said on these pages that, “The current increase in the price of oil is the beginning of tougher times ahead for most Nigerians. And so help us God.”

I cannot find better words to end today’s piece. As a president who has kept petroleum matters close to his chest by refusing to appoint a minister of petroleum, he had four years and enough money to turn around our refineries and even build new ones in order to put an end to the price shocks and the interminable shortage of petrol and other petroleum products, even as we try to maximize the price of crude oil as producers. He has failed to do so and there seems no one in sight to hold him responsible for the failure and check his determination to make the hapless Nigerians pay for the failure.

It may sound despondent, but at this point one can only resort to the poor man’s prayers: God deh!