Papa ‘alota oyoyo’

Except in rural Nigeria it would be difficult today to hear children serenade their father with the ‘’lullaby’’ in the above headline whenever he came back home as used to be the case many years ago. The song is usually in anticipation of the goodies that fathers typically brought home in those days. Expectations of fathers from their children were often sky-high. As the children sang they jostled for prime positions to be the first to see the snacks or whatever other edibles that had been bought or brought home for them. In the event that there were none, the returnee-father would have explanations to make to assuage the expectant children.

This type of scenes in the homes of yore are fast receding into the distant past of our collective memory. In rural areas children have long started to moderate their expectations from fathers most of whom are now likely to come back home stressed, flustered, frustrated, angry, and disappointed. For the farmers among them, they may have seen the crops in their farms eaten and/or destroyed by cows; herdsmen uprooting and feeding their produce to cows as feedstock; they may have fled back home on encountering automatic rifles-wielding herders who shoot to kill; or fathers who could have been compelled to witness their wives and/or daughters raped at gunpoint by invading herdsmen.

Those are not the fathers that children expect anything from these days. Our country has been turned upside-down and the earlier we accepted that depressing reality, the better for our mental health. Our parents have been traumatised.  We also have been traumatised. Everybody, almost everybody, bears significant injuries and wounds deep in their bodies. For many it has been hell on earth. The greater tragedy is that the prognosis for the future wellbeing of our citizens does not look good. No, not good at all. Many Nigerians are despondent and that, on its own, would only aggravate the already bad situation.

From time past ‘papa alota oyoyo’ may not be a thing for the urban children of our country. To an extent urban children did not, and still do not, generally speaking, experience the undiluted, unpolluted, and untainted joy of the rural child. In varying degrees they live a gilded life garnished by artificial tools and toys. Lives framed by televisions, telephones, earbuds, movies and netflix, beaches and junk foods from eateries dotting the city centres. When urban children are indoors they are consumed by movies and enslaved by playstations. The addiction is so bad that the children no longer noticed when the father of the house returned. Of course, there’s a GM [gateman] to open the gate when the man returned.

Gone are the days when fathers were bogey men and the sound of the horn of their cars from a distance would send everybody in the house, including their wives, scampering from the family’s living room. Wives and adult children would jointly and hastily dress the parlour and make it over to avoid the wrath of the man of the house. Some children are no longer scared by such household ‘terrorism’. In some cases, urban children merely temporarily remove their eyes from their preoccupations to throw perfunctory greetings to a returning father. 

In a classical sense, the contrast between Nigeria’s rural and urban children was captured by a Jamaican reggae artist Max Romeo [along with his backing band, The Upsetters] when they released a classic song in 1976 which they aptly called ‘’Uptown Babies Don’t Cry’’. The refrain goes thus: ‘’Uptown babies don’t cry [because] They don’t know what suffering is like…’’ It was a socially conscious track which highlighted the stark contrast between the lives of impoverished children living in the ghetto and wealthy children raised in upscale neighbourhoods. The chorus was intentionally repetitive, ostensibly deliberately written that way to emphasize the disparity of the stations of the children. This Romeo’s track was part of his critically acclaimed album, War Ina Babylon.

Some say that Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is the father of the nation, though Nigeria hardly qualified as a nation. The assumption, therefore, is that when you become the president of this country, you automatically become its father. Comrade Omoyele Sowore is a candidate in the 2027 presidential election. So if he wins he would automatically assume the title of the father of Nigeria in spite of his being a middle-aged man. This father label for the president is one of curiosities of this country. Nobody gets to read or hear about this inanity and insanity even on the African continent except in backward and gerontocratic countries.

About one week ago America’s former president, Barack Obama, took a dig at Donald Trump, without calling him by name, when he said that part of the problems confronting the US was that an old man who is almost totally bereft of ideas and modern trends was clinging on to the presidency of a superpower. It has to be noted that the dislike between Obama and Trump is deep and mutual. In Germany, France, the United Kingdom, US, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and elsewhere, you don’t hear such inanity as father of the country being mouthed. King Charles is not routinely addressed as the father of the UK. Not even Russia’s Vladmir Putin, the current ‘owner’ of that country is so addressed. The company we keep in this regard is that of North Korea.

Tinubu, the ‘father of Nigeria’ returned from his extended vacation [extended twice] in Europe last week. He returned on the eve of the ‘celebration’ of the country’s 66th Independence anniversary. But instead of goodies, he returned with gaslighting and propaganda, the queer USP [unique selling points] of successive All Progressives Congress [APC] regimes since 2015. When Muhammadu Buhari, the affliction of Nigeria, who’s now late, acceded to the presidency in 2015, he claimed to have come with the mandate of ‘Change’. When he sought reelection four years later in 2019, he revised it to the ‘Nextlevel’. As it turned out his ‘Change’ was empty and his ‘Nextlevel’ was emptier.

For Tinubu it has been deja vu. He lies and by so doing he creates the impression that lying may soon go out of fashion. Between when he returned and his broadcast on October 1, only one truth came out from his mouth. And that truth was blurted as he stepped out of the presidential jet: ‘’l have enjoyed myself. Fantastic’’. Those were the words from the mouth of a ruler who went on a vacation abroad while his country was in ruins.

One year into his ruinous regime driven by wrong-headed economic policies and scorched earth politics, he gaslighted Nigerians by claiming that he was seeing light at the end of the tunnel. No other persons saw that light even if it was dim except perhaps his supporters among the elites, and sundry Mandate Choristers who in reality are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Like the rest of us he saw nothing. They saw nothing. Not even a mirage.

The next time that Tinubu spoke to the hapless and suffering Nigerians, he told them that the country’s economy was turning the bend. It was another blatant lie. He looked us in the eyes and gaslighted us yet again. Tinubu speaks to Nigerians the way that dictators and propagandists do elsewhere.  And from history. Say the same thing or similar things repeatedly, and your hearers would begin to doubt themselves. They would begin to doubt their own sanity. It is straight from the books of Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler and his propagandist Josef Gobbels, and their apprentice student, America’s Trump. In the face of America’s rapid decline, their president tells them that they are in a golden age. He’s attempting to force Americans to deny the evidence before their eyes and their lived experience.

Tinubu again pulled another ‘the more you look the less you see’’ on us from his bag of poor tricks last week. In an Independence Day anniversary broadcast which, by the way was a torture to watch, he told Nigerians that they were going into the era of prosperity. Prosperity? In this dire state of Nigeria? Leaders and rulers are free to talk up the state of their countries, but it would amount to insensitivity and evil to raise the hopes of the people in the face of an overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Where are the prospects of prosperity in Nigeria of today or even of the forseable future? Two years ago, the Bretton Woods institutions [IMF and World Bank] said it would take a minimum of 15 years for their structural adjustment programme [SAP] which Tinubu adopted and has been implementing, to begin to bear fruits. And they gave stringent and explicit conditions for their programme to work. But as we have written previously, Tinubu’s SAP 2.0 will fail miserably just as Gen.Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida’s SAP 1.0 failed spectacularly in the mid-1980s. The scars of Babangida’s misadventure are still all over Nigeria.

Where did Tinubu see the imminent shared prosperity for Nigerians if he is a truthful man? In the tenous and tentative growth in the country’s nominal gross domestic product [GDP]? That’s a mirage or at best beneficial only to the minority economic elites who are actually parasites and not producers. Take the federal government’s largesse away from their so-called ventures and businesses, and they would fold like a pack of cards. Where’s the productive base of the economy? Has the foundation been consciously laid by this regime that is mouthing the dawn of prosperity? No. Is Tinubu being deceived by the apparition of the seeming overflow of inflows of monies from foreign portfolio investors? He’s said to be an accountant, and so he must know a thing about ‘Hot Money’. Hot money is the achilles heels of a fragile economy like Nigeria’s. The case of Nigeria and hot money is potentially worse because the investors in her debt instruments are attracted by the outrageous interest returns on offer. Foreign Direct Investments [FDIs] which are the essential tonics for economic recovery are either unavailable or so meagre in the country. Such investors still treat Nigeria as a leper. Even a motorpark economist knows that that’s what the country needs at this time.

The duplicity of the promise by Tinubu that we have entered the era of prosperity should be obvious to everybody except those who belong to, and are trapped in, his cult. This country’s youth population is bulging. Young Nigerians make up between 60-70% of the population. Many of them are idle, poorly educated, and almost unemployable. That partly explains why unemployment among the youth hovers around 60%.The youth population is a time bomb. And our rulers are behaving like Emperor Nero who fiddled while Rome burned. Disincentives abound for anybody and everybody venturing into production at a scale that could significantly impact the economy and the job market. Interest rates on bank loans are still high in spite of the recent reduction by the central bank. How many businesses would survive, breakeven, and make a return on investment with funds borrowed at about 30%. Not many, if any. Even then the prospective private investor borrower is being crowded out and choked by governments at all levels which regularly invade the domestic financial markets. Our governments have voracious appetites for loans. In addition, the private sector borrower would also struggle with the short tenor of loans.

Even if a typical investor overcomes the aforementioned challenges, he would still have to grapple with the acute energy deficits afflicting Nigeria. And the prohibitive cost of energy where available. Other public utilities which are usually in the province of governments in other climes in terms of their provision are in short supply or totally unavailable here. An example shamefully will be public water supply. Do we need to speak to the issue of agriculture which was once the mainstay of the economy? And how the country has progressively declined? Or how farmers can no longer go to their farms because of insecurity? Or the fact that when they manage to farm, they would be compelled to pay tax to non-state agents and to terrorists? If farmers succeed in farming and harvesting their crops, where are the roads or rails to take their produce to the market? And where are the disposable incomes for the potential buyers? What is the state of the middle class in this country? Does it still exist? Ordinarily, we would have said that Tinubu and the ruling APC are being delusional, but they are not. They are deliberate and intentional in gaslighting Nigerians. The question is: for how long?