Another round of torture began for citizens as soon as Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu took office on 29 May 2023. The President did not wait for a proper briefing before announcing two key decisions that caused the nation to groan in anguish. The removal of petrol subsidies skyrocketed prices of everything while closing the official forex window collapsed the strength of the Naira.
•Tinubu
Suddenly, the Naira dramatically weakened against foreign currencies, the most obvious being a fall of over 300 percent against the dollar at its peak. A Naira that sold in the official window for N460 suddenly depreciated almost to an embarrassing 300 percent to sell at N1,500. The quality of life depreciated by the same margin as prices of goods and services shot up astronomically. A bag of rice rose from N38,000 to over N70,000 within weeks. Utility rates raced to the roof as well. Fuel prices rose over 200 percent while electricity tariffs jumped 300 percent for a band of consumers.
Groaning citizens never realized the terrible truth that this punishment was a parting gift from Tinubu’s predecessor, the gap-toothed General, Muhammad Buhari. The truth about our current situation was hiding in plain sight as Buhari prepared handover papers for Tinubu. Buhari’s boobytrap was in plain sight; how could we have missed it?
Buhari’s Works Minister, Raji Fashola, gave us a hint on the eve of Mr. Bola Tinubu’s swearing in. He couched it in bureaucratese so that many will miss its significance. Fashola told a Channels TV interviewer that the Buhari regime “implemented a phased withdrawal of fuel subsidy that should end in June 2023.” This had been an open secret since January 2023 when Buhari signed his final appropriation bill into law. Unfortunately, journalists and public intellectuals failed or refused to pick up and warn citizens about a coming Armageddon.
Fashola wasn’t the only Minister who used bureaucratese to hide this terrible secret in plain sight. Finance Minister Zainab Ahmed said as much when she explained the 2023 Budget to journalists and the nation:
“The projected fiscal outcome in the 2023 Budget is based on the PMS subsidy reform scenario… The budget framework assumes that petrol subsidy will remain up to mid-2023 based on the 18-month extension announced in early 2022. In this regard, only N2.25 trillion has been provided for the PMS subsidy.”
National Assembly legislators equally conspired with the Executive to inflict this punishment through the 2023 budget law. They knew the trouble to come but conveniently forgot to warn Nigerian citizens to brace for it.
Their refusal to expose Buhari’s terrible truth in plain language was an electioneering strategy for the 2023 campaigns. In this respect, opposition politicians share the greater part of the blame. They are never alive to their responsibilities but prefer to hang around, waiting for the next election cycle to begin shopping for votes. It never occurs to them that it is easier to energize a voting base without spending “shishi,” as Mr. Peter Obi inelegantly put it, by consistently playing their role as a shadow government.
Malcolm X is credited with the quote that “the best way to hide something from Black people is to put it in a book.” The 2023 electioneering proves that anyone can couch and announce a terrible secret in bureaucratese to achieve the same objective of hiding it from Nigerians. Buhari, an unlettered president, had the last laugh over those who mocked his poor education in the eight years that he held office. The half-educated president reserved his final punishment against citizens as a boobytrap in public documents and bureaucratese. As the educated Tinubu blindly walked into the trap, we can imagine Buhari’s impish grin at his expensive joke as he jetted off to London to live his best life.
This part of our evolving history will recur as journalists and public intellectuals allow succeeding governments to hide our terrible truths in plain sight. Citizens cannot count on opposition politicians to expose the truth, including those in the camps of Peter Obi and Yele Sowore. We already see this in Labour Party’s National Assembly legislators who are busily scrambling for Senator Godswill Akpabio’s “goodwill messages” delivered in their “mail boxes” for maximum holiday enjoyment. Three years from now, we shall again bite our fingers in regret as Chief Bayo Onanuga, like Malam Garba Shehu before him, tells us how they creatively “hid” Tinubu’s many policy sins in plain sight to enable the APC to win another round of dubious victory.
Nigerian Relationships
Two gentlemen were in conversation the other day in a bar about the trouble with Nigerian collaboration – in business and in life. One, an American returnee, put the problem squarely as the issue of trust.
“No true Nigerian, and I don’t mean an honest Nigerian, is willing to commit to a definite position on anything. They want to disambiguate and dissemble so that whatever they say together cannot be used against them tomorrow. This also makes it easy for them to wriggle out of commitments that the other person thought they have made.”
His companion, a Nigerian brought up, agreed but entered a caveat. Unless one is a long-standing friend, one finds that relationships are increasingly transactional. Most people are in a relationship because they expect something in return for whatever they give, some kind of quid pro quo. It is this attitude that makes them not want to commit to anything that will not be beneficial to them.
“But I’m not talking about the transactional type of relationship,” the oyibo said. “I mean business transactions.
“You want someone to do a job for which they will get paid. But you are not willing to commit the job in writing so that it becomes a binding contract.”
“I see what you mean,” the Nigerian said. It happens but not all the time. Nigeria does not have a contract culture. You will be surprised that more than 80 percent of workers in Nigeria do not have written contracts of employment. In this way, the bosses can wake up one morning and dismiss everyone.
“That’s terrible,” oyibo said.
“Yea, and you can’t take them to court as a consequence because there is no formal contract between the worker and the employer.”
“Your government is really lax about helping vulnerable people survive in your system,” oyibo observed.
“Has government done any good for its workers before looking out for anyone else,” our man shot back.
“Look at the disgraceful package they are giving to workers as minimum wage.”
The oyibo just smiled. Minimum wage is a taboo; he rarely talks about it.
Each time he is told how much a Nigerian worker earns as minimum wage, he wonders why the country is not getting outsourced jobs currently flowing to India and China from the United States.
He suddenly realized that he was getting an education on why this is the situation with US manufacturing jobs and the Nigerian cheap labour.