By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Let the whole wide world join me in
universal celebration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who has just repeated the
immortal feat of discovering ice.
The first time ice was ever
discovered in human history was in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
According to the opening sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Now that many ill-assorted young
Nigerians are making noises about cooking food endlessly in the mad bid to
enter the Guinness Book of World Records, I think what really needs to be
celebrated is President Tinubu who has not only now discovered the ice of fuel
subsidy but has gone ahead to break it!
To break the ice after just
discovering it is not a mean feat at all. A bolus of ice cream for President
Tinubu!
When one clueless fellow then known
as President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan dared to break the ice of fuel subsidy on
January 1, 2012, by putting the subsidy-less fuel price at 141 Naira, all hell
broke loose, to use an old cliché.
Jonathan’s very unpopular New Year
“gift” sparked off spontaneous anti-government demonstrations the very next
day, that is, on January 2, 2012.
The heart of the matter today is that
all the erstwhile activists, fire-eating journalists and unrepentant progressives
who rioted back then are now hailing this latter-day discovery and breaking of
the ice of fuel subsidy by Tinubu.
Yes, Tinubu has done what Jonathan
attempted to do, but there are no protests in the streets which makes me
believe that we are no longer in Nigeria but in Macondo!
The hapless Jonathan was gifted with
the “Occupy Nigeria” riots as many
protesters marched on the streets with placards and bonfires.
A melting pot of the struggle against
Jonathan was the Gani Fawehinmi Square in Ojota, Lagos, when for a week, from
sunup to sundown, Nigeria’s self-advertised revolutionaries converged there in
the solidarity of telling truth to power.
In the new dispensation of President
Tinubu, the progressive revolutionaries have tattooed their tribal marks in the
shape and size of that of Macondo where the discovery of ice always meets with
tumultuous applause.
Jonathan was slated because the cost
of everything such as transport, housing, school fees, food etc. stood to
increase unlike in Macondo where things change and remain the same.
The common man would not have been
able to survive Jonathan’s onslaught but in our new Macondo, the people can
always understand and survive by being fed on the high cost of the ice of
Washington Consensus Democracy.
The first objective of the “Occupy
Nigeria” protests against the Jonathan regime was to force the government to
return to the status quo and cause petrol to be sold at the previous rate of 65
Naira per litre.
Since we are no longer dealing with
Nigeria but Macondo, the fuel price can go as high as 700 Naira per litre and
people can trek from Ndiorumbe to Katakata land without anybody complaining.
What happened to Nigerians as per the
organized fight against fuel subsidy removal in 2012 to its arranged acceptance
in 2023 is the magical realism of transition from Nigeria to Macondo.
Nigerians are like the eponymous Rip
Van Winkle character of Washington Irving’s short story who drank a strong brew
and slept for all of 20 years only to awaken to a totally changed world in
which 700 Naira fuel is preferable to 141 Naira fuel.
Nobody now wants to remember that
after poor Jonathan was forced to reduce the fuel price to 97 Naira he in the
course of time eventually reduced the price to 87 Naira.
Having successfully transited from
Nigeria to Macondo like Colonel Aureliano Buedia who followed his father to
discover ice, Nigerians of the new Macondo era earnestly ask for higher hikes
in fuel price and electricity tariff!
As distinguished members of the idle
rich class, these transfigured Nigerians operating out of Macondo cannot have
enough of anti-masses policies!
In keeping with the brave new world of the discovery of
ice by the great leader of the country now renamed Macondo, let’s give the last
word to the conclusion of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude “because
races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second
opportunity on earth.”
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