Government Of The Deaf And Dumb!

 By Kenneth Okonkwo

I attended one high profile birthday celebration in Abuja sometime ago. In that celebration, some physically challenged persons were invited too. I picked interest in one pretty lady among them. My attention was drawn to her when one young guy wanted to chat her up but she wasn’t replying. 

*Tinubu and Shettima 

When the guy noticed that she was using sign language, the guy apologised to her and their leader and confessed to the leader that he didn’t know that she was deaf and dumb. The young girl was mad when she perceived what the young guy told their leader. She quipped, the mere fact that I am deaf, doesn’t imply that I am dumb. It dawned on me that if you call a person dumb, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the person is temporarily unable or unwilling to speak, it means the person is showing a lack of intelligence.

President Bola Tinubu on Wednesday, 23rd October, 2024, discharged five ministers from his cabinet and appointed seven new ones, pending Senate confirmation, as part of a cabinet reshuffle. Also, he reassigned ten ministers to new portfolios. The ministers who were removed from his cabinet include Uju Ken-Ohanenye (Women Affairs), Lola Ade-John (Tourism), Tahir Mamman (Education), Abdullahi Gwarzo (Minister of State for Housing and Urban Development), and Jamila Ibrahim (Youth Development).

 

The seven new nominees Tinubu selected include Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Nentawe Yilwatda, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, marking the official end of suspended Betta Edu’s tenure. Other nominees include Maigari Dingyadi for Minister of Labour and Employment, Jumoke Oduwole for Minister of Industry, Idi Maiha for the newly established Ministry of Livestock Development, Yusuf Ata for Minister of State for Housing and Urban Development, and Suwaiba Ahmad for Minister of State for Education.

 

A cursory glance at the above reshufflement reveals that most of the citizens expecting changes that will address the problems of Nigeria were highly disappointed. Adebayo Shittu, an All Progressives Congress (APC) stalwart, and former Minister of Communication under the Buhari government, speaking on Politics Today, Channels TV, on Thursday, 24th October, 2024 by 7 pm, emphatically declared that there’s nothing exciting about the reshufflement.

 

For the avoidance of doubt, World Bank came out with a report recently to show that more than 129 million Nigerians are living in poverty. We have experienced more than three national grid collapses in a week. Jigawa tanker explosion death toll has risen to 181, and displaced 210 families. This government met the fuel price at about N195 per litre, today, it’s about N1,200 per litre, and it’s still not available. Naira has continued its slide compared to the dollar, thereby inducing greater macro-economic instability. 

This government met naira at the official rate of about N500, but today, it’s about N1,700, just within 15 months period. These teething problems reveal that our major problems rotate around the management of our economy, monetary and financial system, petroleum economy, electricity operations and disaster management affairs. Listening to the announcement made by the President, none of the ministers in charge of these areas was removed. The ones removed, however incompetent they may be, outperformed those who are in charge of the problematic sectors mentioned.

 

The first pronouncement I thought the President would have made was to sack himself as the substantive Minister of Petroleum. This is the worst performing ministry in Nigeria and arguably the most corrupt in the world. This ministry has promised that the Portharcourt refinery will start operations more than four times since the birth of Tinubu’s regime, but till date it has not, yet billions of dollars has been pumped in for the repairs. Crude oil is our natural resource, yet we are expected to pay the same thing as other countries who do not have oil. Even with the local refineries coming up, the price is rising higher. 

There’s absolute lack of transparency and accountability in the sector. No Nigerian seems to know what is going on. The President, who travels abroad for vacation during very trying period, ought to appoint a substantive Minister of Petroleum to take charge of the ailing ministry. The mere fact that the price of petroleum has unreasonably gone up to about N1,200 per a litre and still unavailable exhibits the utter incompetence and corruption going on in that sector.

 

After the pronouncement of Tinubu on the reshufflement, and nothing happened at the ministry of power, Nigerians wondered why the government even said it will alter its cabinet. There’s no ministry of power existing presently. A minister that divided Nigerians along class lines, along the haves and havenots, for the purpose of supplying light, is a misnormer. Band A, band B became the norm in the supply of electricity. 

The band A group are given preference of a promise of about 20 hours of availability of light per day, while band B are relegated to about 4 hours of light a day on the arrangement that the band A people will pay higher electricity tariff. Apart from this policy being discriminatory and illegal, it’s also deceitful. The band A has long discovered that they do not get up to 20 hours of electricity per day. Everyone is celebrating darkness with incessant national grid collapses.

 

On the issue of the economy and naira devaluation, this government has displayed the greatest ignorance in the management of the economy. There’s no magic in a strong currency because strong currency is predicated on a strong economy, and strong economy presupposes an industrial productive base and a steady export market. Is it not disturbing that a government that is importing every single thing it’s using, including all the cars, planes, and yachts, even where there are local alternatives, will be depreciating its currency and thus making the imports to be more expensive? 

When this government came in, it removed oil subsidy completely, the fuel price shot up from about N195 to about N500 naira. The government was the sole importer of all the refined oil used in Nigeria. At the same time, it ill-advisedly depreciated naira from about N500 to about N1,700 thereby tripling the cost of imported refined oil and every other imported thing into Nigeria. The government found that it could no longer afford the imported refined oil at the initial deregulated price and had to continually increase fuel price to suit the deregulated naira. This is an unfortunate transfer of the consequences of the incompetence of this government to the people who are now bearing the unbearable burden of excruciating fuel price increase.

 

Nations who have governments that take advice understand that it’s when you are a productive country with a steady export that you can depreciate your currency so you can make your products cheaper than the foreign products and make the citizens of other countries buy more of your products. Recall that when this incompetent government removed fuel subsidy initially, smuggling of imported fuel stopped, as neighbouring countries could no longer afford our fuel at cheaper prices. 

But immediately it depreciated the naira, smuggling started again because our neighbours can now buy our fuel cheaper than us and the smugglers can make more money, because of our depreciated naira. It would have been a great source of wealth to us if the oil was locally refined, but because the refined oil was imported, it now became a burden to us because our government will be subsidising the smuggled products to other countries.

 

Nigeria has become the burial ground for small and medium scale industries because of frequent policy flipflops, high interest rates, hyperinflation, astronomical energy costs, toxic operating environment, multiple charges and so on, yet the Central Bank of Nigeria, rather than reducing the interest rate to businesses to make them have access to more capital to stimulate the growth of the economy, is increasing the interest rate to about 35% for the businessmen, making it almost impossible for non corrupt business enterprises to make profit. Most of the expatriate businesses have left Nigeria and more businesses are dying everyday. If this government were serious in rejigging the cabinet, whoever is involved in the management of the economy should be in the job market now looking for another job.

 

On the issue of Humanitarian ministry, one would have thought that this ill-conceived ministry, created to make money for the rich, while pretentiously portraying it as a ministry for the alleviation of the sufferings of the poor, will be permanently rested. If Betta Edu, trained to be a medical practitioner, with all the trappings of humanness, couldn’t resist the temptation of allocating money to the staff to fly from Abuja to a non existent Kogi airport, and disbursed N3.2b to some ministers in the name of consultancy, while only N545m was allocated to all the vulnerable poor people living in four states, including Lagos, which wouldn’t have reached to them because it was already paid into a private account, then even if you put a Nigerian angel in that ministry, he/she will steal. 

Buhari’s Ministers of Humanitarian Affairs are alleged to have stolen billions of naira and are facing trial. Tinubu rightly suspended the ministry and wrongfully is reinstating it now, obviously succumbing to the manipulation of very corrupt officials around him who are the very beneficiaries of the systemic corrupt scheme of the ignoble Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs. Of course, it’s a government of the deaf and the dumb.

 

It’s only a government that doesn’t care about what its people are going through that will promise the people to cut down the cost of governance but turns to actually increase the cost. After the reshufflement, we now have more ministers than less. In a capitalist economy like ours, most ministers are more or less regulators, not participators in the actual implementation of policies. We now have three ministers in the ministry of agriculture when only one minister would have sufficed. Nigeria was thriving better when we had one minister of agriculture than now when we have three. This shows that the multiplication of ministries is geared towards providing money for the boys for political reasons not for economic reasons. This reshufflement is nothing other than the continuation of the incompetence and corruption of this regime.

*Okonkwo is a lawyer and actor