Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
By Suyi Ayodele, a columnist for the Nigerian Tribune, is a contributor to USAfrica.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a Muslim. His wife is not just a Christian, but a pastor of one of the biggest Pentecostal churches in Nigeria. I encourage Pastor Mrs. Remi Tinubu to impress on the president the implications of King Saul’s consultation of the witch of Endor as contained in 1 Samuel 28:7.
Whoever sold the idea of the N8,000 palliative to the president is a “familiar spirit”. Saul lost the kingship after taking counsel from a familiar spirit at Endor. If Tinubu implemented that scam called palliative, he would have lost more than his ‘goodwill’, he would have confirmed the ‘cynicism’ of many Nigerians who never trusted him to make a break from our shoddy past. There should indeed be a difference between the mother dog and its puppies!
Tinubu wants to give N8,000 per month to twelve million households for the next six months. How many poor people are in Nigeria? How many are we as Nigerians? Nobody knows. Nobody cares to know. And nobody will likely ever know as long as the locusts oversee our green vegetation. For almost over 60 years after the disputed 1962 census, we have not been able to conduct any credible census to know our actual figures. The population of Nigeria has always been based on speculations and projections. No nation plans its development using speculated population figures. Yeah, accurate population census can allow a people to project and plan. Speculated figures do not give such liberty. That has been our mystery as a nation, and a people. They say we are over 200 million people. True or false? However, there is no demographic statistics to show our real social stratifications. We don’t know how many of us are rich, how many are middle class, and how many Nigerians are below the poverty level. We see poverty walking our streets in three-piece suits, but we cannot differentiate between the poor-of-the-poor, and the poorest-of-the-poor. We only know the rich and the over rich, who over the years have been feeding fat on our collective patrimony. Only an accurate population figure can give us the data of the poor and vulnerable in our midst.
One of the indices of how badly we have been governed came to life in the 2023 general elections. The incumbent President Tinubu, according to INEC, was elected by 8,794,726 million Nigerians. A total of 14,583,724, other Nigerians, the umpire announced, said no to the Tinubu presidency. Add the figures together; just 23,378,450 Nigerians participated in the last election. What percentage of 200 million people is that? Can we conveniently boast that that figure represents our universal adult suffrage population? That was one of the reasons the last administration under the watch of the very lethargic General Muhammadu Buhari refused to count us before he shepherded us to vote. We love to always do our national arithmetic the ‘wuruwuru-to-the-answer’ way, instead of the systematic mathematical approach to solving sums. Little wonder that virtually all the ailments we carried from the day of our amalgamation to independence on October 1, 1960, are still very much with us. Some of them have become cancerous. A good example here is the issue of corruption.
Corruption in Nigeria is as old as the nation itself, if not older. The first sign of that malignant cancer is the January 1, 1914, misadventure known in history as the Amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates to a single nation. Even the noun, ‘Protectorate’, as used by the colonial overlords to describe the southern and northern parts of Nigeria, was, and remains a huge fraud itself. The British Government which had the fortune of grabbing Nigeria from other European countries after the November 15, 1884, Berlin Conference of Scrambling for Africa, which resolutions were sealed on February 26, 1885, knew, and knows till date, that Nigeria was never a protectorate but an exploitation field of the colonial Britain. The 1914 agglutination of the two eternally incompatible Northern and Southern Protectorates was a continuation of the corrupt tendencies of the British Government. The theory of using the wealth of the beautiful south, which the ‘Enthusiastic practicing paedophile’, Lord Lewis Harcourt, after whom the Garden City of Port Harcourt was named, coined as “Lady of means”, to nurture the parlours North, which he christened “The well-conducted youth”, is nothing but corruption. Events, over the years, have since shown how “well-conducted” the youths of the North have been.
One hard reality of that 1914 British deliberate and wicked colonial policy is that whether we like it or not, as long as Nigeria remains, like they say, “one indivisible entity”, the poverty of the North will continue to deprive the South the enjoyment of its wealth. Pa Solomon Asemota (SAN), speaking at the 4th Colloquium of Lagos at 50 celebrations held at the Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos, on September 15, 2016, said, among other things: “The British knew that sooner than later, the British Treasury would stop augmenting the finances of Northern Nigeria. The negro South or Southern Lady of means, on the other hand, had surplus as a result of import duties collected at Lagos Port especially import duty on liquor which grew from 3s to 3/6p per gallon in 1901 to 5/6p in 1912 and by 1913, the revenue from Gin was #138,000. The grant of British taxpayers to the well-conducted Youth averaged N314,500 for 11 years ending March 1912. Southern Nigeria on the other hand, helped to complete Northern railways from Baro to Kano, thus the need to have one treasury for the two countries Southern and Northern Nigerias became apparent. A common railway policy was preferred to two. These were the main factors responsible for amalgamation.” That seed of corruption, discrimination, nepotism, and marginalisation was planted by the British. This present generation of leaders, especially those who have been in the saddle since December 31, 1983, till date, have nurtured that seed of corruption to the monster that we have now bestriding our terrace with crass impunity.
One would have expected that having ‘won’ the 2019 general elections, Buhari would have taken the opportunity to etch his name in gold by carrying out a census exercise that will give us our accurate figure. No, he didn’t do that. And that was deliberate. Truth is that any accurate census figure will be to the disadvantage of the North. Buhari, in and out of government, is a candidate of the North, for the North and by the North. Colonial Britain, which gave a humongous population to the desert North did it for a purpose. As long as the amenable North holds the levellers of power, the West can continue to exploit Nigeria. The North itself, especially its elite, need the poverty of the people over there to hold them down so that they cannot breathe. The greatest means of subjugating a people is to ensure that they don’t rise above the poverty level. The Western world is doing that to us as a nation, in specific terms, and as a continent in more general terms. They ensure that the African continent keeps going a-borrowing so that the Black Race will be perpetually a-sorrowing. The very edge Southern Nigeria prides itself on having over the North will soon go. Very soon, the number of out of school children, and those of not-in-school children down South will balloon, when parents cannot afford to pay school fees. That time, we will all be done for.
Our leaders are serial rapists. There is no exception. The citizenry has been raped mercilessly. And we are tired. Unfortunately, our libidinous husbands remain turgid. Who do we cry to? We suffer Vesisco Vaginal Fistula (VVF) in all aspects of our humanity as Nigerians. Physically, we are wasted by felons who come as herders, bandits, kidnappers and armed robbers, all creation of absentee leadership of the second half of this political dispensation. Psychologically, we are daily tortured by the affluence of our leaders, which they flaunt without remorse, while the rest of us live in abject poverty. We are like the proverbial people who live by the banks of the oceans but wash their faces with spittle. Morally we are downcast. The very ones we hope will bring about the desired changes appear to be worse than our former conscienceless husbands. On Thursday last week, the new locusts in the National Assembly passed the N819.5 billion 2022 supplementary budget sent to it by President Tinubu. The lawmakers amended the budget and approved N70 billion to support the “working conditions” of members. Like a rubber stamp entity, the Assembly has become in recent times, the Senator Godswill Akpabio-led National Assembly passed the amended bill in less than 24 hours after it received it from the president. No consideration was given to the masses. No consultation whatsoever was attempted. It was just a case of garbage-in-garbage-out legislation. In that amended Fiscal Bill, N500 billion will be spent as palliatives to cushion the effects of the removal of fuel subsidy. That amount, President Tinubu said, would be shared at N8,000 a month to 12 million “vulnerable households”. It will run for a span of six consecutive months, ceteris paribus.
Tinubu removed fuel subsidy, extempore, on May 29, at his inauguration. Hell was let loose. Everything money can buy has skyrocketed since that hare-brained announcement was made. Nigerians now live in agony. But our new husband assured us that relief would soon come our way. A month after removing fuel subsidy, the government’s vuvuzelas went to town to announce that N400 billion had been saved from the scam called subsidy. Nigerians thought that the era of wastages and corruption had gone. But before they could clap, the government approached the always pliable National Assembly to ask for an approval of the $800 million World Bank loan, which the Buhari government started. Pronto, the lawmakers approved the request. The approval was a horse-trading venture. While ‘vulnerable’ Nigerians, in their millions, would have N500 billion to ‘share’, the 540 lawmakers in Abuja have N110 billion to buy bulletproof SUVs for themselves. That is including the N70 billion to support their “working conditions.” Minimum wage in Nigeria stands at N30,000. That is our fate in the hands of those we elected to govern us.
The Tinubu presidency came with some elements of hope for those over eight million Nigerians who cast their votes for him in the February 2023 elections. Little wonder they adopted the slogan, “Renewed Hope” as an indication of their expectations. That slogan could not have been more accurate given the failure of the immediate past administration. In less than two months at the saddle of leadership, the “Renewed Hope” is looking ‘hopeless’, even to the most fanatical of the Emi Lokan clan. Nothing seems to have changed. In a country where the average people don’t have an omolanke (cart) to convey themselves, a few over-pampered legislators are tinkering with N40 billion bulletproof SUVs. The proponents of the “Renewed Hope” slogans are struggling to come to terms with the fact that any moment from now, the Tinubu presidency will be spending N576 billion to take care of the “vulnerable” families in Nigeria. I read many of them on social media. They could not believe that a Tinubu presidency would in its early days be toeing the perfidious path of its predecessor. I am least bothered by such lamentation. I have said it here before, whatever is the outcome of this government, good or bad, we will all be partakers, irrespective of our political inclinations.
We should make it clear here. I am not against the government taking care of the poor in our midst. One of the fundamental principles of governance is the welfare of the people. I have no problem with the government rolling out palliative measures to ameliorate the pains of the spur-of-the-moment removal of subsidy, by the president. Ordinarily, a government that is perspicacious would have known that before announcing such a major policy drive, everything that would have ameliorated the pains associated with such a policy, would have been put in place. But we are Nigerians, a people at the mercy of their leaders. We swallow any pill our leaders force down our throats. My issue with the N8,000 per month for “12 million vulnerable households” and for six months, by the Tinubu government is the parameters used in arriving at the measure. Who are the “12 million vulnerable households”? Where is the data, where is the statistics? How do you share the money? Have we not travelled on this path before? What is the difference between what Tinubu had proposed to do and what his predecessor, Buhari did with Trader Moni? How much of our patrimony did the Buhari government spend in ‘feeding’ school children during the COVID-19 lockdown? How much will this government spend on the “vulnerable households”?
When the elders in my place cannot distinguish between two situations, they tell you that “omi eko, eko ni” (the water used in preserving akamu, is akamu itself). What Tinubu and his handlers intend to do with over half a trillion naira in the name of palliatives for fuel subsidy removal, reminds me of our “ete ohun eyi, abiyamo yankan fun omo re” (between leprosy or scabies, let a nursing mother purchase one for her baby) folk song during Egungun festival. The two afflictions damage the skin. If Buhari’s Trader Moni is leprosy, Tinubu’s proposed N8,000 per “vulnerable household” palliative is scabies. Both are scams, nothing more! It is too early in the day for the Tinubu presidency for this type of shenanigan. He should give us a break from our immediate nauseating past. Our leaders should also give us the benefit of the ability to think!
By the way, did Buhari not tell us in June 2021 that his government had between 2020 and 2021, lifted 10.5 million Nigerians out of poverty? That announcement was made on June 12, 2021, while celebrating June 12 Democracy Day. What happened to those ones? Tinubu was a huge part of the Buhari administration. Granted that he promised during the electioneering that he would continue the legacies of his predecessor, Tinubu should however, know that there are some old farms one does not inherit. Sharing our common purse to the imaginary poor families is one such legacy. Our new husband should not inherit the phallus of our past husband, Buhari. Half a trillion naira is no small amount of money. That can be very impactful if properly channeled. But definitely not as ‘handouts’ to a group, which data we don’t have. President Tinubu told us many times that he is a strategist. His orchestra amplified that to no end. Nigerians deserve to see the beautiful masquerade they were called to behold dance well at the arena.
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