Tinubonomic And 8000 Litres Of Poverty

 By Gbenro Olajuyigbe

In intervention during emergencies, there is what is called Appropriate Response. Impact of inappropriate response is worse than no response. Responding to the ‘needs’ of 12 million households’ out of 43 million households in a severely polarized country is bad enough. 

*Bola Tinubu 

Aside from the existing inequality between the poor and the rich, it further bifurcates the tribe of the poor, potentially with implications for uneven patriotism and implosive crisis.  Giving the selected beneficiary (270 Naira/ 35 Cents per day) in situation where those who earn 1.9 dollar per day are regarded as living in extreme poverty amounts to glorification of poverty. 5000 Naira per poor household under Buhari, which had more intrinsic value than the touted Tinubu’s 8000 Naira, threw 133 million people into nadir of poverty.

Tinubu should do better. There’s no dignity in using borrowed money to dignify poverty in a way that diminishes the poor and stripes them of human dignity. The move is incurably counterproductive. It is worse than the fate of ‘afada pa’kun’ – the poor will not be fed and the loan will still encumber the nation. Using 800 million USD loan from the World Bank as food for boys is sad. Can we think of equally accessible poverty reducing denominating projects the loan can fund? Can we focus interventions on say 2017- 2020 unemployed graduates for productive schemes?

It seems that Nigeria is the only country where the virtues of suffering are celebrated with gleeful tiding. The party is always organized and orchestrated by elites who beat drums for the poor to dance to rhythms of tribulations and sounds of sorrow. Conspiracy of elite has in a way chosen the poor, by default, as the burden bearers of Nigeria’s irritating mis-governance.

Astonishingly, the often scammed poor accept the compass of elite as the tool for charting direction of their fate. Accountability dies in the pit of widespread ignorance while elite arrogance continues to dictates policy direction, which is often obnoxious, repulsive to common sense and cruel to care for welfare.

Paradoxically, Nigeria is the only country in the world that imports what it produces and exports; a manifestation of economic insanity. This is the insanity that has not only destroyed the economic fabrics of the country but has also particularly diminished capacity for development reasoning and logics. 

We should not be talking about borrowing for palliative today if we have not been importing fuel. 

Where is the interest of the poor in removal of subsidy that has become a cliché for irresponsible importation of fuel by patently incompetent governing party in the last eight years? A government that is too weak to fight manifest corruption in the oil sector but see the shift of burden of the irresponsibility-powered- oil- importation to the people is a government smiling at its own ineptitude.

There seems to be dearth of thought, aridity of common sense and incurable fatal attraction to ultra-mediocrity in Nigeria. How else could one describe those who believe that only the rich with many cars benefit from subsidy? The effect of oil subsidy is spiral. The poor will meet it in every grain of rice they buy. Its gravel will be in every Bean they purchase. Its bitter gall awaits them in commuting from one place to another. It will close the shops of Barbers without sparing the windows of welders.

Small scale businesses that depend on petrol will die without desire. It’s foolish to think that subsidy has been removed. What changed is who pays the subsidy? Government is merely shifting the burden of its stupid policy of fuel importation to the hapless people, particularly the poor who are being gaslighted to believe, it’s war against the rich. Government was paying. The people will now pay.

The end result, if government succeeds in this race of deceit is that you have rich government but poor people. That is anti-development. There is no courage in a government saying I removed fuel subsidy. The real audacity of hope is that I built refineries and stopped importation of fuel. It is simplistic and pedestrian to look at fuel from the angle of economic cost without looking at its potentially volatile social costs that could erase what looks like economic gains in the long run.

Something tells me that the inability of government to put all the cards of analyses of energy costs on the table is a deliberate attempt to prevent people from seeing the ugliness of governmental thoughtlessness and modern internal colonization in their proper socio-economic cum political contexts. They fear the dismantling of their bogus claims, false analogies and impudent pedestrian position and policy with which they sanctify their war on people with phony removal of subsidy.

Renewed Hope is a bird that does not fly with wings of affliction, brewed in brewery of brutal cruelty driven by half knowledge and sheer ignorance!

A lot of things buried in hypocrisy include; laziness, indolence, incompetence-bred-Spartan lifestyle. These were the unseen and hardly known features hidden in Buhari characterization which gave him leeway to corridor of power in 2015. He eventually ran a government that started with scam and ended with scam. He promised a robust economy but threw Nigeria into nadir of poverty.

He promised security but he presided over a government that could not prevent callous killings of over 63,000 Nigerians in environment of mindless lawlessness that became the dominant definition of governance under his negligent watch. We allowed Buhari marked his own scripts and he generously awarded himself excellent marks. On one funny stretch, Buhari and his aides claimed that under Buhari, non-oil sector earned more revenue than the oil sector. We all indolently allowed these bogus claims to pass unchallenged. How could oil sector whose seventy percent of its production, barrels crude oil was crudely stolen had performed?

Under Buhari, death, debt and disaster became everyday words in the dairy of a nation sold to aggravated incompetent leadership and outlandish passivity of citizens, who traded off the duty to hold government to account.

These happened because he did not lead thought-driven government and under him, the worst of us governed the best of us with historic propaganda and jaundiced logics.

President Bola Tinubu needed not be told that it was the high cost of energy, particularly the price of diesel that killed multinational and allied companies in Nigeria because the environment became noncompetitive for them. This unbearable high costs drove them to countries like Ghana, South Africa and other more competitive countries with low cost of production. The same way high price of disel killed big companies is the same way high cost of petrol or PMS is bound to kill small scale businesses that largely depend on it in place of epileptic electricity power.

The government of Tinubu should take holistic look at the whole spectrum of fuel subsidy and determine whether or not it is only the rich with many cars that benefit from the subsidy, occasioned by inconceivable importation of fuel by an oil producing and exporting state.

It is an indubitable fact that fuel price increase will increase the price of basic items particularly food items and non-food but basic items that needed to be transported from one place to another/market places. It will further shrink disposable income of already impoverished workers, affects access to education and compounds poverty and inequality.

Indeed, if we quit the single conspiratorial narrative that fuel subsidy only benefits the rich and embrace open minded thoughtful analysis, we will discover that fuel subsidy as foolish as it is, inevitably, indirectly subsidizes basic items like food, transportation cost for the poor and in a way stabilizes income. 

The pressure on our currency, Naira and its shrinking intrinsic value is due to importation of fuel rather than the country refining fuel for export and domestic consumption.

Any attempt at fuel price increase without refining fuel domestically will only build a pyramid of rich government, poor people. This anarchical pyramid will warehoused avengers of avoidable afflictions!

*Gbenro Olajuyigbe is the Executive Director of Emergency & Risk Alert Initiative.