It was news hour on TV, and an old woman in her eighties or more was the centre of journalists’ enquiries. In agony, she raised her head, stared at a man standing nearby with a pathetic gaze; and then dropped it.
It was news hour on TV, and an old woman in her eighties or more was the centre of journalists’ enquiries. In agony, she raised her head, stared at a man standing nearby with a pathetic gaze; and then dropped it.
A walking stick slanted across the couch, or bed, where she sat. Age has taken a toll on even her ability to shed tears. That must have accounted for my not seeing them roll down her cheeks. Yet age couldn’t envelope the agony that, in itself, enveloped her. She appeared utterly devastated with grief and only let out a line to the pressmen; “if only he had listened to our advice not to go out, he wouldn’t have died.”
That was the guardian of Ademola Aderintobi, 28, shot dead by a blood-thirsty DPO at Ogba, Lagos, on the first day of the massive protests that brought Nigeria to an unprecedented halt.
Ademola was one of about a dozen people shot dead by a police long accustomed to the culture of submitting themselves to an oppressive ruling classas ready tools for suppression. They killed in Edo, Kano, Ilorin and Maiduguri in an attempt to impress their oppressors who they mistake for bosses.
The protesters hit the streets to register their misgivings about the declaration of war on the poor and middle class – branded subsidy removal – by a government renowned world over for its unparalleled record on corruption and profligacy. The government had long lost the debate and mischievously opted for a fiat. When they saw a national resistance, in a manner never witnessed before, to their fiat, they resorted to force. It wasn’t about an economy on the verge of a crash; it was about desperation to provide a cover for corrupt friends, fronts and cronies.
Then came the week after.On TV, the president was delivering a national broadcast. That appearance was more of a public announcement of his transmutation to an emperor. He understood the place, and significance, of the head in a body. For the first time since he came into national consciousness, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan didn’t wear his traditional fedora hat. He posed with a new cap, slim, fitted, firm on his head. His posturing suddenly metamorphosed from that of a jittery uninspiring president to a combative, unremorseful dictator. He didn’t have any need to recognize those who were felled by live bullets from his police. It wasn’t necessary to sound conciliatory. He suddenly came to terms with the enormous powers inherent in his position. Like the days of Abacha when every voice of dissent came from “disgruntled elements”, President Jonathan was quick to see “persons who took advantage of the situation to further their narrow interests by engaging in acts of intimidation, harassment, and the outright subversion of the Nigerian sate”
Those who lost their lives in the protest didn’t matter. How could they? When did “hoodlums” begin to matter?Whoever protested – and they were in their millions – was an enemy of “Mr President’s transformation agenda”. The president will be magnificently mistaken to assume that by using the apparatus of state against a popular will of the people, he had run away with victory. That victory is pyrrhic; it will be ultimately short-lived.
The rage is still on, even more heightened by the probe of the subsidy scheme by the ever responsive Federal House of Representatives. I watched Diezani Allison-Madueke - the first of Jonathan’s supreme triumvirate - admit to a nation in shock her lack of knowledge of how many litres of fuel Nigerians consume per day. Well, the whole world now appreciates what we feared, complained about and protested against; that the entire subsidy regime was enmeshed in corruption. And the much the overseeing minister had to tell us was: I don’t know. She hasn’t resigned yet. She hasn’t been sacked. And expecting any of the two will be raising our sights to an extravagant goal.
Next is the Finance Minister, Dr. NgoziOkonjo-Iweala, who certainly is overrated by those swayed by her daily emotional outbursts. “I came back home to serve my country”, she croons into the ears a gullible nation. In her I-came-to-help-you postures and body language, she refuses to tell us that she only earned and annual salary of $351,740 while in the World Bank. That is nothing in Nigeria where a legislator earns about $2 million annually. Can she, in all honesty, tell us that her total annual pay as Nigeria’s Minister (including obscene allowances) isn’t, at least,twice her World Bank salary? She wants to save money for Nigeria, but she prepared a budget where $7 million was voted for just feeding of the president and his Vice. The best she could offer was to prepare for us a budget that voted 72% of our annual earnings to recurrent expenditure. The president - whose chief consultant on fiscal matters Okonjo-Iweala is - has over 40 Advisers and over 60 other aides. What advice on prudent spending does she give him? Her Finance Ministry ordered the Nigerian Customs Service to clear Vessels of imported fuel without having to see the relevant documents?She has come to serve us?
In the wake of staggering revelations of how Nigeria has been paying subsidy for non-existent 24 million litres of fuel every, and for which Okonjo-Iweala and her co-travelers have called for the blood of the long-suffering Nigerians, I expected her to resign and go back to her World Bank – where she likes to think she left, to her own discomfort, to render a never-seen-before service to us. But that is assuming she wasn’t in the know of the subsidy fraud. Her continuous stay in this government will remove every doubt that she was complicit in this rape of Nigerians. And that would provide a material for research, for students of history; the Nigerian history.
Before they removed the fuel subsidy, when the government still thought they had a winnable case, the triumvirate attended a Town Hall meeting convened by the Association of Newspaper Proprietors of Nigeria, in Lagos. I monitored the whole proceedings and had a reason to pity MalamSanusi Lamido Sanusi, the third of the three, who zoomed off the route of rabble rousing instead of facing the real facts. With a faulty economics and blind loyalty to an alarmingly mischievous government, Sanusi dismissed the call by well-meaning Nigerians for government to shelve their plan of punishing the poor in a bid to protect the criminals who, in any case, are friends and fronts to key government officials. “Which world are you living in?” he queried with the swagger of a College debater impressed with his points and expectant on being declared the winner by the judges.
Suddenly, Sanusi misinterpreted reduction in cost of governance to mean sacking Federal Government workers. The same people who want N18000 minimum wage are complaining of high cost of governance, Sanusi echoed. But this was the same CBN governor who called our attention to the monumental resource-pillaging practiced in the hallowed chambers of our National Assembly. Before his loyalty shifted from country to individual, Sanusi knew it was wrong for the National Assembly to gulp a whopping 25% of our annual budget under whatever guise. Oh, how time flies.
Curiously, Sanusi presented government as weak. He also went further to declare how we all, Nigerians, are for sale. With N80, anybody can be bribed from here to Benin, Cameroun, Niger and the rest of the neighbouring countries. For Sanusi, we have no business manning our borders. We should not discipline the government agencies who we pay to monitor our borders. The solution is simple: increase fuel price!
I also wonder why - on discovering the depth of rot in Nigeria’s banking sector - Sanusi didn’t take the easier option of stopping all banks in Nigeria from operating so as to stop the corruption in the sector, as well as to avoid having to become an enemy to Cecelia Ibru, Erastus Akingbola, SebastineAdigwe, Francis Atuche and the rest who ran their banks aground, eroding shareholders investments and endangering depositors’ funds.Sanusi rather faced them, took tough measures against them and tried to sanitize the sector. Why didn’t Sanusi insist that the president faces the profiteers and rent seekers in the petroleum sector, rather than insisting on inflicting serious pains on powerless citizens?
Now that the decay has been unearthed, and N667billion discovered to have been paid for fuel we neither needed nor consumed, I long to hear Sanusi again. Let him come and tell us he was defending what he didn’t know. I am waiting. I also should expect that he resigns immediately. Again, that’s if he truly is as honorable as some of us assume.
And back to the new emperor in Aso Rock. He must have been impressed with his strategists, and of course, his triumvirate for a job well done.Well, not so fast!
Beyond the swiftness with which he clamped down on peaceful protesters is the urgent need to search his conscience and purge himself of that urge for primitive acquisition of wealth – which was amplified by that expression of avarice, drafted by him and christened budget. The demands of today must force him to rearrange his priorities.
The task of governance is daunting. And in Nigeria of today, it must begin and end with a courageous stab, in the chest, of corruption. This president must wake up to this truth or face another phase of protests. The next wave of eruptions will not be led by labour leaders who are for sale. The next wave of protests will be led by courageous Nigerians who cannot be bought.
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