By Funke Egbemode
Occasionally, when I see men wreaking havoc all over the place with their third legs, I chuckle and shake my head. Why? Because I remember the pains, the agony male infants go through when they are circumcised in those days before the advent of the less bloody ‘ring’ method. Each time the little boy had to pee, he screamed. His pee would be in little bursts. His mother had to carry him gently, delicately in a certain way. Each movement was accompanied with pain for days. I still remember vividly the circumcision of one of my boys. Two days after the ‘event’, he was still in so much pain he refused to be breastfed. None of my songs could calm him. He cried so hard, his lips quivered, his little eyes were red and filled with distress. I bet in his infant mind he was wondering what he’d done to deserve all the discomfort. I sang. I danced but everything I did to make him comfortable made him cry harder. I eventually joined him. We both cried as I paced up and down the corridor, praying to God to help me. I was a young mother, confused but above all, afraid for my boy. Then, out of desperation, I sought the counsel of an elderly church member whose boys were born in the days when local healers and traditional surgeons were in charge of the delicate matter of peeling off infant boys’ foreskins, in the days when the only soothing solution was snail water. Lord rest Mama’s soul, she took the boy, calmed him and within minutes, he drifted into a long sleep. These days when I look at my boy and I remember his red eyes, quivering lips as he writhed in the agony of circumcision, I smile because he doesn’t look like what he has been through, that pain of circumcision.
That is the way I see this fuel subsidy removal. The pain is palpable and there is most likely still more, further down this road. Our lips will quiver. Our eyes are getting red already. Maybe they will get redder. And just like I went to seek a grandmother’s help out of my pain, we are going to have to do things differently from here on, seek counsel from those who have handled this kind of pain successfully. Did I tell you Mama had twin boys? Yes, just imagine two boys screaming all day, all night from the pain of traditional circumcision without any form of anesthesia. Then imagine if my boy was uncircumcised because I was afraid of pain, because I didn’t want him to cry. Picture him in the male hostel when he went to boarding house in secondary school. Imagine if he was the only boy in his hostel with his foreskin still dangling over his dangling modifier. Imagine the horror bath-time would have been, how the senior boys would have turned his uncircumcised tool into a tourist attraction. Don’t laugh. That is how the rest of the economic community see us, a laughing stock, a nation of strange comedies and comedians. A people so blessed they don’t know what to do with their prosperity.
What did we think would happen to us when God blessed us with crude oil and we refused to do everything to maximize the blessing? Oil-rich and piss-poor should not collocate in the same sentence in Nigeria but they do because by some strange logic, we, our leaders, over the years believe that you can install a refinery and expect it to work forever. We convinced ourselves that spending both capital and profit from our oil sector will keep us afloat. That re-investment in the sector was unnecessary. The big men we put in charge of our affairs who have since moved on from Peugeot 504 to Peugeot 505 Evolution and now to Toyota Landcruiser and Lexus (Armour) as official vehicles left our refineries in the Volvo 244DL age and kept lying through their teeth that the refineries would soon work. They gave us different dates, shifted the goal post in the middle of the match every year. They told us they were doing Turnaround Maintenance every quarter, every year. They have turned us around along with the refineries so much we are now dizzy. Our heads are spinning. Nothing good has come from their efforts. Nigerians have been forced to worship at the shrine of their Turnaround gods for so long their refinery gods have moved from sucking crude oil to sucking human blood.
So, why are those people protesting the removal of fuel subsidy protesting? Things are hard, harder than before? Yes, I agree. The days ahead don’t look promising. It is the way of circumcision. There is no easy way to do peel off the foreskin of the infant boy. There is always pain involved somehow. There is always blood shedding involved. There is no easy way to do what we are finally doing. The pain is worse now because the boy being circumcised is grown, all grown up. In fact, when he saw the circumcision surgeon and his blade, he took off, running about a full kilometer before he was caught. His blood warm from all the exercise is now flowing free and plenty. Also, because he was not circumcised as an infant when he could be strapped to his mother’s back or kept in bed so he does not bruise his brand new third leg, his pain is worse. That is our story, circumcising a grown man.
I hear a lot of argument on whether President Bola Tinubu ought to have removed fuel subsidy in June or waited till July, whether he should have done a forceful tooth removal or applied anesthesia. And I ask those who have had a tooth removed if the anesthesia eventually wears off or not. I fail to see how the new President was supposed to continue to borrow to fund the subsidy regime without storing up more pain for all of us in the years ahead, which was what had been done through the years and that is how we got here. Every administration bowed at the grove of temporary relief until Tinubu decided what had to be done must be done on May 29, 2023. The easy choice would have been for the new president to go and pour libation on Esu of fuel subsidy so we can all go to bed smiling while our punishment for being cowards for decades waited downstream for us. And while we would be waiting for the anesthesia to wear off, the mean guys who got subsidy from Nigeria and took our fuel to Sudan, Cameroon and Niger would have continued to smile to the bank. They know how to get richer while we steadily got poorer. They are the ones who drive the fuel-guzzling automobiles. We buy fuel-efficient Toyota and Hyundai.
There was also the alternative of pretending that the Buhari-administration had not already ended fuel subsidy when it did not include it in the current budget, right. According to Mele Kyari, the GCEO of NNPC Ltd, there was no money to continue to import fuel and the only option left was to start importing less quantity of PMS. Will less quantity of imported fuel not mean fewer fuel stations will have fuel and those that will have will sell at whatever price they deem fit? Won’t that mean there will be queues and black markets everywhere? How exactly is perhaps seven months of importing less quantity of fuel going to help the price of gaari, noodles or rice?
If your wife borrows from a Microfinance Bank and then takes a loan from Union Bank or First Bank to repay the MFB, will you pat her on the back or call in the shrink? If your friend borrows from a bank to marry a new wife, won’t you ask him if he intends to sell the wife or the babies she’ll make to repay the loan? Yet, all these years, we borrowed to pay subsidy and thought we were smart. I listened to one ‘television expert’ advising the Tinubu administration to source funds to pay subsidy and I covered my face in shame on his behalf. What kind of expert can’t see that piling up debts only store up sorrow?
We did not fix the refineries. We kept the workers in the refineries. We budget for the workers’ salaries and pension annually. Those refineries probably have big boy Executive Directors travelling Business Class for trainings in Europe and workshops in America. Isn’t that how we ended up with N4.8 trillion on cost of operations in the refineries? Yet, the refineries never turned around. There are a dozen things wrong with the years of misapplied prosperity that we called the fuel subsidy regime and it will take more than a dozen years to recover our sanity and dignity.
Well, President Bola Tinubu must have realized that we cannot continue in sin and expect grace to abound. He knew we cannot continue to do the same old cowardly things and expect our debts to just vanish. He has decided to peel off our ugly limp foreskin. The pain and discomfort will eventually wane if we don’t self-sabotage. Only then will we be able to use our beautiful dangling modifiers to make the girls preen and swoon.
• Egbemode is former Commissioner for Information, Osun State