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Allegory of death, love and reputation

By Yakubu Mohammed
28 July 2016   |   4:18 am
Shortly we shall come to the classical allegory of death, love and reputation. Before then, let us look at what leads to it. It is the matter of our troubled economy which, we are told, has gone into recession, technical, perhaps clinical, but certainly not fatal...
Minister of finance, Kemi Adeosun

Minister of finance, Kemi Adeosun

Shortly we shall come to the classical allegory of death, love and reputation. Before then, let us look at what leads to it. It is the matter of our troubled economy which, we are told, has gone into recession, technical, perhaps clinical, but certainly not fatal, because it is not in coma.

Two managers of the national economy, who should know better and whose words must be taken like the words of the oracle, have spoken. And what they said last week was bad news. Kemi Adeosun, the elegant and photogenic minister of finance, broke the depressing news to the inquisitive senators at their plenary session before they took off for vacation last week that the economy was bad; it had drifted into recession. She qualified it, though. What the country has been infected with is technical recession. Meaning it is not life threatening and can be managed technically with the loving and tender care that only the feminine hands can provide. And in not so many months hence, we shall hopefully be out of the woods and the patient will be good to go home.

She was confirming what her budget and national planning counterpart, Udoma Udo Udoma, had told the National Economic Council some days earlier.The planning minister had told the august body, in no flattering terms what the symptoms of recession look like. He said that two negative quarters growth technically result in recession. He admitted there was a negative growth in the first quarter of the year.

And if the second quarter posted the same negative result, certainly the country would have drifted into recession. For we, the uninitiated, recession, according to economists, is a period of general economic decline during which GDP would contract for upwards of six months, with spiralling prices, inability of employers to pay wages with the attendant general decline in living conditions, scarcity of essential commodities and even scarcity of money to spend. In layman’s language, there is abundance of poverty and famine in the land.

But if well managed, it may not last long. The good news is that the two ministers have also assured us that this bad patch in the nation’s economy will not last because the government has put in place measures that are guaranteed, in their estimation, to stave off a certain economic cataclysm. Some of the measures already showing results, we are told, that the non-oil sector is beginning to yield appreciable revenue.

Some of the ministries have announced their road maps towards economic recovery. Works, Housing and Power Minister, Babatunde Raji Fashola, has mobilised contractors back to work on the roads and in tow their work force. Power is still epileptic but Fashola is honest enough to admit that so long as the so-called avengers in the Niger Delta continue to avenge, whatever it is they are avenging by blowing up pipelines supplying gas to the power station and their elders cannot reign in on them, so long will the power situation remain bleak, moreso that whatever alternative there is to gas is not an immediate, even if it is urgent proposition.

But clearly something positive is happening in the other sectors of the ministry, especially works. The roads are receiving attention. Rail transportation under the Ministry of Transportation is being given a new fillip. Kaduna to Abuja has been linked with modern rail line and when others come on stream, they will revolutionise the rail system and minimise the hardship Nigerians go through on the roads.

Last week, Audu Ogbeh, the farmer turned minister of agriculture, who has the daunting task of providing food for the country as well as provide a credible alternative to petroleum, has unveiled his plan for the country as part of the economic diversification programme. The “Green Alternative” which is his blueprint for agricultural transformation, is apt as far as nomenclatures go. It sounds like Shagari’s green revolution programme which Ogbeh is familiar with, but as an alternative to or complimentary to petroleum, the current blueprint, if diligently pursued to a logical conclusion, holds out great promise.

It promises, for instance, to put food on the table and guarantee food security for the country, something which I think is a sophisticated version of Governor Fayose’s crude “stomach infrastructure” considering the fact, yet to be scientifically proved wrong, that a hungry man is an angry man. Truth be told, today there is a lot of hunger in the land with all its concomitants of short fuse, short and volatile temper, easily provoked to anger and a general depression leading, in some instances, to the tragi-comic cases of stolen pots of soup and the trade by barter during the last Ramadan fast when a man was reported to have gone to a market somewhere in the far North, picked a bag of rice and attempted to pay for it with his son.

He did not do so crudely and directly. He told the trader he was going home to bring money which he had forgotten to bring with him. He left his five year old son behind as collateral. As it turned out, he did not come back for his son because he had no money to pay for the rice. The good trader, in the spirit of Ramadan, returned his son to him and when he knew the facts of the matter, he felt pity and decided to forgo the rice. That is part of the humiliation that the Green Alternative is designed to stop. And it promises to do more. It will contribute to the non-oil export to the tune of 75 per cent. The goal, ultimately, is to free the country from a slavish dependence on food importation.

The more road maps and the more blueprints from the ministers the better. If nothing, they will fill the communication gap between the government and the citizens. It is some little comfort to know that something is being done to alleviate the sufferings of the people and make the recession short lived. But there are conditions, almost the equivalent of the IMF’s conditionalities that must be met. They come in form of sacrifices.

For all of us it should no longer be business as usual though, even under the Buhari watch, some governors still behave as if they are in conquered territories. They are playing with money as if it has lost its value. But bail out after bail out, many of the extravagant governors still find it difficult to pay workers’ salaries. And they have not done anything to temper their own greed and avarice with the soberness that the current situation calls for. Whatever little funds they get, they have no qualms servicing their personal comfort which falls in the first line charge.

That former President Goodluck Jonathan and his team were profligate and they mismanaged the economy is no longer in contention, what with the quantum of the anti-corruption cases going on in which his men are the leading actors.

The time to cry over the spilt milk is now over. President Buhari has the unenviable task today of fixing the broken country and he has to bring his legendary reputation for strict adherence to principles of probity and accountability to bear on the way he does it. His coming, no doubt, raised so much hope against the background of the enormous damage that has been done to the economy. Buhari, an ascetic, not given to the ways and whiles of those imbued with inordinate cant and hypocrisy, came highly recommended because of his track record as a man of impeccable integrity, and an embodiment of fairness and firmness, a man who had pledged to enthrone justice no matter whose ox is gored. He needs to call all those noble qualities to action today because Nigeria is going through the equivalent of a war situation. To sacrifice any of these noble attributes for any reason whatsoever is, in my view, to squander the good will of the people and to capitulate in the face of a clear and present danger.

Perhaps that is why he needs to be reminded of the allegory of the three travelling companions in John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: Death, Love and Reputation. When it came time for them to part, one of them posed the question: Where can we find one another? Death said it could be found in places of catastrophe, among crumbling edifices, full of danger and calamities and where there is sorrow and anguish. Love, on the other hand, said it could be found among the innocent poor, the deprived who desperately long for the milk of human kindness. But listen to Reputation: It told its companions to tarry a while and declared: “Once I part with anybody, I cannot be found with him again.”

6 Comments

  • Author’s gravatar

    Where can we find one another?

  • Author’s gravatar

    I find it repulsive for this writer to state … ‘that former President Goodluck Jonathan and his team were profligate and they mismanaged the economy is no longer in contention…’How can one say that a man who grew the nation’s economy to become Africa’s largest economy is worse than the one under whose charge the economy recorded sub zero growth? Under Jonathan, Nigerians did not lack food and workers were not owed 1 year salary arrears. Right now, the cost of a bag of rice equals the value of our minimum wage. It means that an honest low-income worker can only buy a bag of rice with his monthly salary. The thunder of God will strike those who burnish the image of this evil regime.

    • Author’s gravatar

      you no well….call your doctor. If he has a PhD, chances are he will tell you whats wrong with you.

      • Author’s gravatar

        truth is …you are the one that needs a doctor…did the mallam in kano give out his son for a bag of rice in kano during gej’s regime?

        • Author’s gravatar

          you are short temper, short sighted, short memory, impatient and all these attribute might even match your physical ones. Else I am perplexed as to why you cant stop to think how we got to where we are now and if the prob is becos someone was elected over a year ago, then again its not your fault but your short attributes. shortigo

          • Author’s gravatar

            okay…o, mister talligo…