Nigeria: Using Torchlight In Broad Daylight

 By Owei Lakemfa

There is a country called Nigeria. For three decades, its coffers were daily looted in the guise of fuel subsidy. The looters are known by name and some are known faces. The companies they use in looting are registered and have addresses. Rather than bring the criminals to book, government decided to remove the subsidy.

Thus, the people are forced to pay astronomical prices for fuel, while the subsidy looters keep their loot and are free to forage for other things to loot. This is the truth. There is also the lie; that fuel subsidy has now been removed. The truth is that it is impossible to remove fuel subsidy no matter how much the people are visited with high fuel prices.

Nigeria And The Politics Of Hunger

 By Sunny Awhefeada 

My generation's first experience of hunger and its attendant crises was in the mid-1980s. My genera­tion here refers to Nigerians born after the civil war and attained teenagehood from 1983 onwards. We have read in history books of how starvation was one of the major tools that was deployed to fight the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970.

Pictures abound of chil­dren, youths and older people who suffered from the affliction of hunger. Not even the efforts of humanitarian agencies that tried to alleviate the hunger in the refugee camps that littered the secessionist enclave of Biafra alleviated the crisis. Hunger engendered dis­eases which in turn yielded deaths. Many still believe that starvation more than bullets and bombs was what made Biafra to capitulate when it did.

Is Nigeria Still Redeemable?

By DAN AMOR

Every real nation state is an historical product. It is, in Marx's celebrated phrase, "the official resume of the antagonism in civil society", but under historically determinate circumstances. As such, it is the product of the historically specific constellation of class relations and social conflicts in which it is implicated.

*President Buhari 

It may, therefore, indeed, it must, if it is not to rest on its monopoly of the means of coercion alone, incorporate within its own structure, the interests not only of the dominant but of the subordinate classes. In this quite specific sense, then, every real nation state has an inherently relative independence, including, as well, the independence to understand the dynamics of its self-made domestic crises. In consequence, therefore, the general characteristics of the Nigerian nation state today may be seen in terms of the enormity of its domestic crises and social contradictions.

Is Nigeria Working?

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

If Nigeria is working, we will know! Those were the exact words of late Prof Chinua Achebe, Africa’s foremost novelist and distinguished intellectual. In other words, the citizens do not need any bogus claims by government’s megaphones to realise that there is an improvement in their country’s economy because it will automatically translate to an enhancement in their lives.

*President receiving a get-well card 

And as they enter the markets to procure their basic needs or engage service providers for some of those services they just cannot do without, they would certainly have direct encounters with the “improvements” their country is alleged to have witnessed.

But sadly, what they are still seeing everywhere are benumbing evidences of further deterioration and the attendant pains – a direct result of very poor management of their country.

Is Nigeria Still Redeemable?

By DAN AMOR

Every real nation state is an historical product. It is, in Marx's celebrated phrase, "the official resume of the antagonism in civil society", but under historically determinate circumstances. As such, it is the product of the historically specific constellation of class relations and social conflicts in which it is implicated. 

*Buhari 

It may, therefore, indeed, it must, if it is not to rest on its monopoly of the means of coercion alone, incorporate within its own structure, the interests not only of the dominant but of the subordinate classes. In this quite specific sense, then, every real nation state has an inherently relative independence, including, as well, the independence to understand the dynamics of its made-made domestic crises. In consequence, therefore, the general characteristics of the Nigerian nation state today may be seen in terms of the enormity of its domestic crises and social contradictions.

Subsidy Removal, Fuel Scarcity And Buhari's Grand Failure

By Dan Amor

Over the years, Nigeria's four decrepit refineries which were built to refine crude oil into petroleum products for local consumption and possibly for exports were left to rot just to make room for the importation of petroleum products by the governing elite and their contractors. This makes it pretty difficult for the importers or oil marketers to bring the products to the reach of the final consumers without incurring additional costs. The effect of this excess tax on the consumers in the name of landing and other costs of carriage from the ports to depots across the country is what government tries to cushion so that the products would be affordable for the common man. This extra payment government makes to the oil marketers in order to maintain an affordable price regime for the products is what is generally referred to as oil subsidy.

*Buhari 

Subsidy is therefore a government policy that would act as a palliative due to fluctuations in the international market. But what makes this policy so controversial in Nigeria is that everything about the oil & gas sector is shrouded in secrecy. Ever since the military administration of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida introduced the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in 1988, whose major intention was to vend juicy national assets to willing buyers, those companies not sold to government officials or their cronies, were allowed to rot in other to attract the sympathy of Nigerians for their privatization. The refineries, two in Port Harcourt, one in Onne near Warri and one in Kaduna, are part of those assets. Since the Babangida era, Nigerians have been living with this menace. It triggered a lot of civil unrests during which several Nigerians including university students were killed.

Sylvester Akhaine’s Logic Of Struggle And Humanism

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

The world is a theatre of struggle. Every stage one finds oneself at, one should know that it is a struggle; it is one of the principles of social Darwinism – Sylvester Akhaine

With Donald Trump clinching the United States’ presidency on the back of the promise to privilege the welfare of Americans and deport immigrants he considers as parasites, such foreigners have only the option of making their own countries great to cater for them and obviate the need of seeking succour overseas. To make their countries to attain a level where they do not need to be economic refugees in foreign countries like that of Trump imposes on such citizens the necessity of a struggle to remove impediments to the development of their societies.

*Sylvester Akhaine

For African states and other formerly colonised countries of the world, the need for a struggle to attain their national destinies is very familiar. It was such a struggle that paved the way for political independence in the 1950s and 1960s in African countries. Thus for these African states to overcome their new masters, whether internal or external, there is the need for them to resume the path of struggle. This validates the intervention of Sylvester Odion Akhaine, through The Case of a Nursing Father, in the contemporary discourse of resistance by the citizens of post-colonial states against their economic and political oppressors to create prosperous societies.

Beneath the veneer of a preoccupation with existential affairs such as those at the home front as signified by the title of the book are weightier issues of a people’s struggle to be free from oppression in its multi-faceted forms. But then, even at the home turf, a struggle is required for the solidification of humanism. This is demonstrated by the author’s refusal to align with the members of his elite class who objectify their fellow human beings by making children from poor homes as housemaids.

While such housemaids spend their days in drudgery in the service of oga, madam and the children, no one spares a thought for their education. The author resolves the conflict that could ensue from his resistance by becoming a nanny in order to accommodate the professional demands of his medical doctor wife. By both husband and wife accepting to take turns to care for their first child, they avert a feminist war of equality.

Thus, in the African context, there is the robust possibility of mutual help between a husband and a wife as counterpointed by a brand of Western feminism that breeds an unnecessary gender hostility.

Why Nigerians Are Leaving The Country

By Dan Amor

It sounds very much like an apocryphal tale. But it is true that the joke is once again on the Nigerian society. What I am saying is that Nigeria is constantly losing batches of experts to the larger world. Thousands of highly trained medical doctors and other professionals are daily departing these shores for greener pastures abroad. Even those who summoned the courage to return back home during the immediate past administration of Goodluck Jonathan are heading back abroad.

They are going to join millions of talented Nigerian intellectuals, academics and professionals, who had been driven out of our land by the harsh realities of our current existence. It is not a matter of profound argument or intellectual debate to say that the death of the Nigerian middle class due to equivocation and compromise has long been awaited. Yet, implicit in the very meaning of compromise as a means of harmonizing the best features of opposing values is an element of tension. And it is this unwearied straining after the ideal within the actual rather than any lame begging of issues that imparts so devastating a tone on the social life of our dying middle class. Check our various passport offices, consular offices of other countries in Nigeria and international airports to confirm this. The exodus of Nigerians to other lands in the past six months is frightening. It sends shivers down the spines of most of us who don't have money to move our families to our villages not to talk of traveling abroad.

In fact, it takes a thorough grounding and deep reflection on our belligerent and turbulent social system to appreciate the interplay of the social forces that impinge on the growth of the Nigerian educated elite. But the situation now exerts a critical immediacy and honest evaluation. "We cannot pretend that the profound implication of the exodus of members of the Nigerian middle class to foreign lands have been intellectually confronted except in pious lamentations and official platitudes. For instance, the Ibrahim Babangida task force on brain-drain was another comic relief constituted in 1988 only to signal the official recognition of the menace." Professor Ibidapo Obe who headed the committee even attempted to bamboozle Nigerians into believing that brain drain was a good thing. Whereas, according to Professor Adebayo Williams, the inimitable critic and essayist, "nothing can be more excruciating than the pain of having to abandon one’s patriotic post at a time when national events demand scrutiny and vigilance, yet to remain in Nigeria is to surrender your life to grinding poverty and penal servitude or even death. Hence the compelling need to choose between dying in abject poverty and negating your patriotic obligation by checking out”. Consequently, in 1986, the first batch of Nigerian experts, having felt the suffocation occasioned by a wanton reduction of their wages to mere pittance as a result of the senseless devaluation of the naira, fled to the United States, Saudi Arabia and other Asian Tigers for survival.

OIL SUBSIDY: To Be Or Not To Be?

By Dan Amor, Sebastine Eko & Omini Oden

Over the years, Nigeria's four decrepit refineries which were built to refine crude oil into petroleum products for local consumption and possibly for exports were left to rot just to make room for the importation of petroleum products by the governing elite and their contractors. This makes it pretty difficult for the importers or oil marketers to bring the products to the reach of the final consumers without incurring additional costs. The effect of this excess tax on the consumers in the name of landing and other costs of carriage from the ports to depots across the country is what government tries to cushion so that the products would be affordable for the common man. This extra payment government makes to the oil marketers in order to maintain an affordable price regime for the products is what is generally referred to as oil subsidy.

*Buhari

Subsidy is therefore a government policy that would act as a palliative due to fluctuations in the international market. But what makes this policy so controversial in Nigeria is that everything about the oil & gas sector is shrouded in secrecy. Ever since the military administration of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida introduced the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in 1988, whose major intention was to vend juicy national assets to willing buyers, those companies not sold to government officials or their cronies, were allowed to rot in other to attract the sympathy of Nigerians for their privatization. The refineries, two in Port Harcourt, one in Onne near Warri and one in Kaduna, are part of those assets. Since the Babangida era, Nigerians have been living with this menace. It triggered a lot of civil unrest during which several Nigerians including university students were killed.

The Military junta under the late General Sani Abacha which inherited the crisis set up the Petroleum (Special) Trust Fund (PTF) headed by the current President, Muhamadu Buhari to manage the excess charges from the pump prices of petroleum products. The fund was meant for the provision of infrastructure across the country. In 1999, when Chief Olusegun Obasanjo assumed leadership of the country as a democratically elected president, he disbanded the PTF and insisted on the deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry. But the move was resisted by Nigerians who thought that they had long been shortchanged by government in the oil and gas industry.