Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
Campaigns for the 2027 general elections are off to a predictably shameful start. Those who expected novelty are in shock. Others who expected depth of insight may yet embrace disappointment. The lead contestants for the office of president are already sounding like cracked vinyl records in an annoying echo chamber.
Insights on major national challenges. No originality and no new perspectives on how to dig the nation out of the bottomless pit into which the incumbent government and its immediate predecessor have dumped us all. More tragically and curiously, the entire political brigade of talkaholics has allowed Mr. Tinubu to set the campaign agenda for the season. Everyone is dancing naked around the petrol station, singing about subsidy removal and its gruesome consequences for the nation as if that is the only malady in our epidemic.
For the major power contestants, it all comes down to the petrol station. All the serious presidential contenders have donned their gas attendant overalls. Between Tinubu and his challengers, it is still a matter of who will sell gasoline at a lower price and what will they do with the proceed. In a more elegantly dressed-up political language, it is all about petroleum subsidy and its attendant social and economic consequences. This petrol price war is being variously called a ‘policy’option, ‘reform’ programme, ‘renewed hope agenda’, etc.
Right from his inauguration parade at Eagle Square on 29th May. 2023, Mr. Tinubu thoughtlessly blurted out: “Fuel subsidy is gone”! The rest is tragic history.
The President and his gang of officials, party devotees and supporting mob have since then dug in on Tinubu’s signature policy of massive removal of subsidy on petroleum products. The policy, which has been in force for the past three and a half years, has thrown Nigeria into economic and social turmoil. The prices of everything have skyrocketed. Transportation fares in urban areas have become impossible. Hunger has invaded the land. The population of poor people has overwhelmed the general population, making Nigeria the world’s most poverty -stricken nation on earth. All the indices of daily living have degenerated. Begging has become a national epidemic as shame and self-esteem have vanished from the psyche of most Nigerians. As a consequence, there is a new consensus that perhaps the Tinubu government is easily the most useless and hopeless in recent Nigerian history.
A rickety economic methodology of poverty management has been developed to legitimize the cruel policy. The language of “palliatives” has been introduced to name the government’s distribution of rice, Indonesian noodles and sparse cash among the poorest. Many have died in scrambles for ‘palliatives’, making it unsafe to go near wherever these tokens are being distributed. Those who went to fight for palliatives and got injured were taken to hospitals where there were no basic drugs. Some returned home to die a miserable death. Death by palliatives!
The Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance have been tinkering with figures to justify the extortion of over N16 trillion from our impoverished populace in the name of fuel subsidy windfall.
Of course, they have come up with new narratives and fairy tales. Nigeria is on the path of recovery. Vote for Tinubu and you will find paradise waiting. There are all kinds of PowerPoint presentations and sponsored statistics to confirm the phantom recovery. The World Bank, the IMF, and major Western merchants of debt are in agreement. They see Nigeria turning around the corner. They cite an increase in foreign reserves, some stability in the exchange rate regime even at its present extortionist rates. More and more Nigerians are getting used to hardship and deprivation, just as gasoline prices continue to fluctuate in response to Donald Trump’s yoyo war rhetoric over Iran, which continues to dictate international oil prices and therefore the pump prices people pay from Lagos to Houston and from London to Los Angeles.
In spite of desperate efforts to show that the subsidy removal gambit is restoring Nigeria’s economic health, the popular consensus is that the 2027 general election is all about how to rescue Nigeria from the consequences of Tinubu’s subsidy removal policy. It is therefore politically expedient that political opposition to the Tinubu incumbency should unite around a possible reversal of the petroleum subsidy removal. Another lazy narrative is that once you reverse Tinubu’s subsidy removal on petrol and other essentials, all will be well.
As a direct counterpunch to Tinubu’s religious adherence to petroleum subsidy removal, therefore, Mr. Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the opposition ADC (African Democratic Coalition) has kicked off on an opposing easy targeting. If you take out the removal of subsidy on petroleum products or reverse the Tinubu policy, all shall be well with Nigeria once again. He has promised to reverse President Tinubu’s signature withdrawal of the subsidy on petroleum products. For Mr. Atiku, the subsidy removal was wrong-headed in the first place and he has vowed to restore subsidy if elected the next president.
Atiku’s grouse is not just with the removal of subsidy. He contends that the entire oil industry has been grossly mismanaged over time, leading to the crisis of supply that preceded subsidy removal. He insists that the subsidy removal windfall has fueled a new wave of corruption in the form of phantom government agencies and mega contracts for highways and projects that no one needed in the first place. From his previous records, Atiku’s grouse is more that the Ponzi contracts are going mostly to Tinubu’s Paris-based friends rather than his own Dubai -based commission agents.
On his part, Mr. Peter Obi of the National Democratic Congress does not agree that subsidy should be reinstated. Instead, his middle-of-the-road stance is that subsidy should go, better governance and greater accountability and populist economic policies should reduce the hardship among Nigerians so that the benefits of subsidy removal accrue to the people in the three areas of poverty reduction, education and healthcare, with a draconian reduction in the cost of governance.
There is no fundamental difference in this regard between Tinubu and his major opponents in the 2027 race. They are all stuck at the gas station. An obsession with oil, gas and the petroleum industry in general is what has united Nigerian political campaigns in the last few decades. Every presidential aspirant readily heads for the gas station to increase the pump price of gasoline in order to find the revenue to fund their fancies and fantasies or recover their campaign expenses. Politicians borrow money even from the devil to fund their elections and only hope to pay back their loans with the proceeds of gasoline price hikes in the form of Ponzi contracts and all manner of Ali Baba deals.
Perhaps the ready recourse to petrol economics is excusable given the near total dependence of the Nigerian economy on oil revenue since the late 1960s. Whether they are military or civil politicians, the obsession has remained the same. What has been entrenched over the years is a lazy tradition of politics, the politics of the beaten track. With a population of over 230 million and vast land replete with mineral and other resources, the prolonged obsession with oil revenue has confined Nigeria’s politics, economics and social expectations to the gas station.
But there are all kinds of other resources on which Nigeria could thrive and prosper and still be a competitive and leading world economy. The exploration of these other economic options is the challenge that ought to engage the new politics.
As a political campaign pillar, the sole preoccupation with petroleum subsidy is wrong-headed. Tinubu is wrong to have removed the subsidy without thinking of its ramified consequences. Atiku is wrong to zero in solely on subsidy removal and its dreadful consequences. Similarly, it is damaging for Obi to shortchange his populist followership with accepting the subsidy gambit in the hope that good governance can right the wrongs of a devious policy. Taken together, all three positions take us back to the old petrol station politics of the last three decades.
It is all lazy politics and idle economics. The proceeds of gasoline price increases are lazy taxation returns whose incidence falls indiscriminately on all and sundry, requiring little effort from the tax collector. It funds a tax-and-spend governance. All governors and LG chiefs need to do is wait for the oil royalty cheque from Abuja and simply cannibalize it among an unproductive workforce and wait for another month. If international oil prices rise or fall, the prices of gari and cooking gas follow suit. But we need to go beyond petrol and this economics of the national feeding bottle.
Our politicians must now face the world as it is. The old energy economy is seriously threatened. Renewable energy is here. Electric vehicles are replacing gasoline vehicles. Gas turbines are yielding place to nuclear and solar power systems.
Human capital is being transformed into exportable merchandise. The power of technology in its rarest – AI- form is beginning to replace humans as the motive force of global economics. The question then is whether our politicians even understand the new world and Nigeria’s place in it.
The assets to exchange for the income to reduce dependence on petrol are abundant here. We have vast land to cultivate to feed our exploding population and export to other nations. We have a vast reserve of human capital to train as doctors, nurses, caregivers, engineers, technicians, etc to export and boost our remittances in foreign exchange.
We have a vast and beautiful country rich in nature and culture that could build a tourist heaven to earn huge revenue but have allowed the country to be overrun and taken over by criminal cartels.
In order to inaugurate a new politics and really rescue this sinking nation and its desperately distraught masses, our politicians must get away from the gas station and put on their thinking caps. Talk is cheap. Hard thinking is where the real work is.
