And The Famine Rages On…
By Victor Oluwayemi, PhD
While many Nigerians were greatly swayed by the propaganda machinery of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria of Bola Ahmed- Tinubu, which coalesced with the Congress for Progressive Change of Muhammadu Buhari and the new People’s Democratic Party, led by Bukola Saraki, to form the All Progressives Congress on February 6, 2013, never did Nigerians think the Jonathanian famine, trumpeted loudly at the market square on a daily basis then by the opposition, would be child’s play compared to what they would experience during the years of locust of Muhammadu Buhari’s second coming as a civilian president, whose ascension to the highest seat of power in the land was hitherto unattainable without the political and financial war chest of the landlord of Lagos, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, now the incumbent on the same seat of Nigeria’s president.
The famine, which culminated into two successive recessions in Buhari’s days, has become life-smothering within just a year of BAT presidency.
Dripped by a not-well-thought-out courage, the tamer of Lagos Atlantic, declared impulsively during his inauguration on May 29, 2023, ‘Subsidy is gone’. Although the Buhari government in its twilight had announced to the world, especially Nigerians, towards the end of year 2022 that continuous payment of petroleum subsidy was unsustainable, and the country would stop the subsidy by June 2023.
However, some budgetary provision had been made to cater for the payment of petrol subsidy till then. With the Presidential Transition Committee set in motion, one could argue that Tinubu was already familiar with the lean state of the treasury of Nigeria, worsened by his friend and party’s administration; until he, Tinubu, was sworn in that morning of May 29, 2023, Buhari was still the president, but quite frankly, the former with his team would not have been fully aware of the state of things in the country.
The question, which has remained unanswered, is where is the money budgeted for subsidy in June 2023 since Tinubu’s declaration was one month to the expiration of Buhari’s government subsidy allocation. Hence, the declaration that subsidy was gone was very premature and crisis-inviting. That statement changed everything completely as Nigerians, being who they are, immediately started scampering helter skelter, with filling stations hiking the prices of their fuel and hoarding the same, compounding the woes, anguish and pains of the populace. We later got to hear that that statement was not even in the inaugural speech – it was just a moment of impulsion, which Nigerians are yet to recover from to date.
Perhaps the Tinubu government still thinks it is still in the opposition; its deployment of propaganda and misinformation as state policy has been unsettling. From having the biggest cabinet in the history of Nigeria, specifically since the advent of the Fourth Republic in 1999, to having the highest number of media aides with all sorts of duplicative names and offices, the government seems to be working against its own administration’s success and the country as a whole. Two recent incidents come to mind: one, the presidency touted the state visit of the president to Qatar towards discussing and cementing some bilateral relationship, but this was strongly denied by the Middle East country; two, the amplified $600 million investment with the Danish shipping giant, Maersk, also denied by the company.
The president and his handlers seem to forget that propaganda and deception could win them the presidency, they would not help them in good governance at all. They would only further tarnish the battered reputation and image of the country amongst the comity of nations and breed acute sceptics as citizens.
As if the removal of petrol subsidy was not enough, though there are feelers in the media that the purported subsidy has been brought back, the government still went on to remove their so-called electricity subsidy, discriminatorily classifying different areas on Band A, Band B, Band C, etc., and hiking electricity tariff. Yet, the power situation has remained the same, if not worse, across the country.
Automatically, the cost of living shoots up to the high heavens as food inflation reported yesterday in TheGuardian newspaper was above 40 per cent while the headline inflation has become all-time high in 28 years, according to consumer price index (CPI) reading, released by the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) earlier this week. If not for the massive condemnation that trailed the announced cybersecurity levy of the federal government last week, the citizens would have been further burdened with crazy taxes, the impact of which is never felt positively by the populace.
Despite the raging and severe famine in the country, the government, in its religious benevolence, decides to subsidise 2024 Hajj pilgrimage with a little sum of ninety billion naira. What a magnanimously wonderful government we have! At least, the prayer of the pilgrims, even when we are planless, directionless and purposeless, at the Hajj, will be enough to take Nigeria from the valley of nothingness to the zenith of development!
Fellow Nigerians, fasten your seat belts, but if your own seat has no belt, grip it with the ten fingers in your hands so that you are not flung out of Nigeria’s car with Emilokan on the wheel. And as the famine rages on, remember the journey has just begun…
Views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of The Pendulum Media
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