Nigeria: Is There A Reason To Be Hopeful?

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

Is Nigeria making progress? Is there any reason to be optimistic about the future? These are the questions that continue to concentrate my mind as the country and its leadership continue to fumble. Ordinarily, I am a very optimistic person with a positive outlook on life. I would rather look at a half of a glass of water and see it as half-full than half-empty. But wishing Nigeria the best or being hopeful that things will get better does not necessarily translate to reality. The vehicle that transports hope to the destination of reality is positive action.

*Tinubu 

Esther Boyd, the Editorial Director for State of Formation, an offshoot of the Journal of Interreligious Studies, JIRS, in a 2016 article, “Hope is an Action,” wrote: “Hope as an action means pushing boundaries, dismantling barriers, and taking steps – however small they may be – one by one, towards the better that we’re hoping for. To hope for something means to strive towards it, to build it if it doesn’t already exist, and to keep moving forward.” But hope, as Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and cultural critic, once noted could be “the worst of all evils, for it prolongs the torments of man”.

In today’s Nigeria, there is no basis for optimism because Kurt Vonnegut, American writer and humorist, may well have had the country in mind when he wrote: “They gave Pandora a box. Prometheus begged her not to open it. She opened it. Every evil to which human flesh is heir came out of it. The last thing to come out of the box was hope. It flew away.” We have opened the Pandora Box through the seemingly boundless capacity of the leadership for evil and hope has flown away. The capacity of our leaders for evil is breathtaking. Their mendacity is mindboggling and their absolute lack of interest in the common good is the reason why the country continues to plumb the depths of ignominy.

Listening to President Bola Tinubu’s speech on Monday, what struck me most is the fact that the more our leaders claim that things are changing for the better, the more they remain the same or even get worse. In trying to assuage the anxiety of Nigerians thrown into hunger by ill-timed policies of his administration, President Tinubu said: “For several years, I have consistently maintained the position that the fuel subsidy had to go.”

Of course, that is not true. In 2012, he rallied Nigerians against the Goodluck Jonathan administration’s quest to remove subsidy. The president claimed that his administration has saved humongous sums from the removal of subsidy, money, he said, will now be used more directly and more beneficially for Nigerian families. “In a little over two months, we have saved over a trillion Naira that would have been squandered on the unproductive fuel subsidy which only benefitted smugglers and fraudsters,” he crowed.

But doesn’t that sound familiar? Of course, it does. Sometime in August 2016, in Kano, then Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, urged Nigerians not to lose faith in Buhari’s administration. “With the deregulation of the downstream petroleum sector, there has been a significant increase in the availability of petrol throughout the country with savings of N1.4 trillion on subsidy payments alone,” Osinbajo said. But what happened thereafter? As at the time the administration left office on May 29, 2023, Nigeria had borrowed trillions of Naira to pay for the same subsidy that had been removed.

Anyone claiming that whatever happened under Buhari’s watch should be swept into the dustbin of history as some people are doing today is being unfair to Nigerians. Truth be told, the Tinubu administration is an offshoot of the Buhari administration. They are two sides of the same APC coin. This week, the National Security Adviser, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, admitted the obvious – Nigeria is in a bad shape but he tried, albeit unsuccessfully to distance Tinubu from the mess APC created.

“We inherited a very bad situation. Most of the problems people are talking about are not a creation of this government,” he said. Granted Tinubu has created his own problems in the last two months, and nobody is saying he created all the problems but the truth which Ribadu and his ilk are shying away from is that most of the problems staring the Tinubu administration in the face were created by the APC-led government of Buhari.

That was the point the Catholic Bishop of the Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah, made eloquently on July 10, when he asserted, without equivocation, in Ado Ekiti, the Ekiti State capital, during a lecture at the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the call to bar of the founder of Afe Babalola University, Aare Afe Babalola, that Nigeria witnessed the ugliest phase of corruption under Buhari. Buhari superintended over what is arguably the worst looting of the Nigerian treasury. Under his watch, trillions of Naira, most of them borrowed funds, was wasted under a nebulous conditional cash transfer scheme. The goal, we were told, was to provide targeted cash transfers to the most vulnerable households with the long-term goal of lifting millions out of poverty.

Regrettably, it is hard to come by any Nigerian who has an idea of any beneficiary. And that is not surprising because to successfully execute such a programme, there must be an authentic register of the would-be beneficiaries. Now that Buhari is out of office, those who lost their voices have suddenly found it. Recently, the National Economic Council, NEC, resolved to do away with the national social register used by Buhari’s administration to implement the conditional cash transfer. The NEC meeting presided over by Vice President Kashim Shettima, said the register had integrity issues.

Governor Chukwuma Soludo who spoke after the NEC meeting said it was not possible to digitally transfer money to the hoi-polloi, majority of who are unbanked. “We need to face the fact that we don’t have a credible register. There is a big question mark about the integrity of the so-called National Social Register,” he said. But Soludo was even charitable. Kaduna State governor, Uba Sani, didn’t pull any punches when he went back to the issue a few days later, doubling down on the claim he and his colleagues made at the NEC meeting.

Speaking during a live interview on television, Governor Sani said: “My position has always been that, at this critical time, cash transfer is not something that we should bring up. Cash transfer, in my opinion, is a scam. Completely a scam. I am very certain about that. Who are you transferring the money to? Let me give an example. As the Chairman, Senate Committee on Banking for four years, I oversighted the Central Bank and all the commercial sector of our economy. About 70 to 75 per cent of the rural population in North-West is financially excluded completely, so who are you transferring the money to?”

Yet, that was a scheme that was lauded by sycophants as the flagship of the Buhari administration. Those who are squawking today lost their voices when Buhari was the lord of the manor. They are the same people who are shouting themselves hoarse once again that Tinubu is the best thing that has happened to Nigeria even when he has succeeded in putting the wrong foot forward almost on every issue. How hopeful can and should any Nigerian be about the future of the country under Tinubu’s watch given the caliber of people he has tapped to be his ministers? Some people are. Maybe they are seeing what many of us are not seeing. But I am not because nothing has changed. The old order still reigns supreme.

*Amaechi is the publisher of TheNiche