Nigeria: What Goes Around Comes Aground

 By Banji Ojewale

The universal principle is that what goes around must come around. It’s not so in Nigeria. With us, when what goes around goes around, it does more than coming around. As it makes its return trip, it comes aground, grounding us, leveling us, merging us with the miry mud. That’s been our history, extinct and extant. We create institutions and leaders from this back-and-forth process to form an endless cycle of vulnerable links in governance that remind us of the late poet, Christopher Okigbo: AN OLD STAR departs, leaves us here on the shore, Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching; The new star appears, foreshadows its going Before a going and coming that goes on forever… (Path of Thunder).

*Buhari and Tinubu 

 It is a villainous star, a kind of abiku that gives short-lived joy to the home where it surfaces at birth. Our present is nothing but a horrid replay of our unpleasant encounters with the past. We sowed the wind yesterday; but today we’re reaping what’s greater than the wind. What goes around comes aground.

It’s tragic that we always go back into forlorn ages for deliverance from present woes. In 1984, we all stood in awe of Decree 4, and to differ with officialdom was to court doom. We were mortally pummeled by the provisions of that law under military ruler, Muhammadu Buhari. His days recorded some of the worst breaches of human rights in the annals of Nigeria. There was retroactive application of the law that outraged Nigerians and the international community.  Yet, more than three decades later when we wanted a president to free us from the ‘’clueless’’ hold of Goodluck Jonathan, guess who went for?

Buhari, a figure of a discarded dispensation! We dug him from his sepulchral abode, to sit over the affairs of the living; he couldn’t but bring the nation to a level where we entered a grave crisis from which we haven’t emerged. He grounded the country and bequeathed an economy, which experts warn won’t yield to a quick fix. They say a lot of dead debris would require to be washed away in the years ahead to make way for the real business of economic resuscitation, which would take a much longer time. We aren’t reaping the wind we sowed; we are going to be harvesting a killer hurricane.

It’s no surprise that President Bola Tinubu, Buhari’s successor, is inheriting a country left in funereal straits. What else did we expect from a predecessor he exhumed and installed as our leader? As we all can see now, Buhari didn’t remember to take the pall over him back as he receded after his eight-year reign; it is still with us, overshadowing the entire land of the living.

Tinubu is also under the guidance of Okigbo’s cursed star. He is planting seeds certain to grow into labyrinthine forests with the potential to ground us in the years to come. He’s throwing free cash at challenges that emerge, when, according to experts, he could use this money to address long-term needs of the poor, instead of the ones of the moment. His recent predecessors walked this pseudo-welfarist route of easy cash solution and failed. There was/is nothing to show for the billions they have spent.

This approach is set to inject more ‘multidimensional’ penury into the system, as revealed by local and independent international figures. First, what does the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, say? The body issued a report late in 2022 where it said the number of compatriots ‘’living in poverty stands at 133 million.’’ This is 63% of the country’s population. There was no indication of any impact of the various levels of the direct cash interventions initiated by the successive governments. Now the World Bank. Its recent publication says ‘’extremely poor people in Nigeria (has) increased from 95 to 104 million.’’ Again, nothing to reflect the raw money the authorities claim they are giving the poor.

So, why would Tinubu ply the same unprofitable path? It’s because he’s tragically trapped in Nigeria’s halfway capitalist frame that promotes the deployment of capital (raw cash) to tackle the needs of the indigent masses, from which he can’t free himself. Otherwise, why not address these issues by applying  the massive funds under his watch to build critical infrastructure: schools (along with free education for at all levels), health centres, modern roads, employment-generating agro-ventures in the rural regions, aggressive human capacity building projects etc.? 

Ready or ‘uncreated’ money in my pocket or in my bank account won’t bring about these fundamental changes in the polity. Rather, it will lead to individualistic misadventures and illusory perceptions of prosperity. While the government would assume it’s pursuing popular interests, it would wake up at the end of the day to face acute mass misery, hunger, depression, inflation and poverty among those we pretend we want to help. We seem not to be decoding this five-word maxim: what goes around comes aground.

What the leaders are giving out by way of so-termed palliatives to soothe the agony imposed on us by the ill-conceived displacement of the fuel subsidy - N35k monthly remittance to a very small percentage of the population for a short period, offering ‘13^th’ month bonus, halving charges on public transportation for a few days during festive seasons, asking workers to cut the number of office hours to beat high cost of commuting etc.- all amount to a will-o-’the-wisp in the face of the real and overwhelming concerns of the society. It’s like trying to tame a 21^st Century plague with the concoctions of 13^th Century alchemists.

Thus, all Nigerian governments, military, diarchy and civilian, have trodden this predictable trajectory. As our leaders step into office, we hail them and proceed shortly to the next stage of hauling them unto our laps. It’s never a long romance. For, just a few months after the citizens release their leaders into the performance field to fulfil their campaign pledges, the administration and its agencies begin to assail the people with policies that are sheer seeds that only bring forth fatal fruits in the future.

*Ojewale,  a commentator on public issues, writes from Ota, Ogun State