Presidential monologue – Part 31

Mr President, Good morning. The #EndBadGovernance protests has come and ended. You were forewarned. That your policies has thrown the economy into anarchy is too obvious for all who live here to see. The population asked for policy reversals and gave an ultimatum. Your administration response was to summon primitive mechanism to hush the voice of the citizens.

Some segments of the civil society were compromised through filthy lucre to the extent that respected culture of a section of this country, Oro, for social ordering, was desecrated for profane political ends.

Alade John-Rotimi, Deputy-Secretary of Afenifere, captured eloquently this profanity in his article entitled, “Oro in the Cheap Service of Political Expediency” in The Guardian of August 6, 2024. According to him, “The Oro cult today is losing its character as a metaphysical entity denominated by a transcendental spirit. It is today viewed as a visceral agent of temporary wielders of power which could be summoned at will.

A defence mechanism for furthering the cause of society and for promoting her cherished values has been cavalierly surrendered to the whims and caprices of those who want to assume the place of the gods in our affairs to be propitiated, persuaded and promoted as personalised spirits to achieve personal political goals.”

Indeed, August 1 -10, 2024 would be remembered in the annals of your administration in Nigeria, as a time of betrayal of the popular sovereignty. At the end of the protest, over forty people were reported dead by the strong arm tactics of the security forces. Professor Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, has rightly captured the discontent of your administration response to the civic responsibility of Nigerians.

As he put it, “My primary concern, quite predictably, is the continuing deterioration of the state’s seizure of protest management, an area in which the presidential address fell conspicuously short… Such short-changing of civic deserving, regrettably, goes to arm the security forces in the exercise of impunity and condemns the nation to a seemingly unbreakable cycle of resentment and reprisals…Live bullets as state response to civic protest—that becomes the core issue.

Even tear gas remains questionable in most circumstances, certainly an abuse in situations of clearly peaceful protest. Hunger marches constitute a universal SOS, not peculiar to the Nigerian nation”.

Mr. President, One year after, your administration has soiled its hands with the blood of Nigerians. It has consequence. The cold-blooded killings of protesting Nigerians would endure in the polity for a long while. It would, for sure, affect how your administration is viewed.

The cry of hunger in Nigeria is universal. It is not confined to one ethnic group only. It is raining over the head of every Nigerian. Your kneejerk policies are the precipitator. Everyone knew that Muhammadu Buhari administration ran Nigeria aground but your ‘shock doctrine’ by the twin policy of so-called removal of oil subsidy and devaluation of the naira, benignly qualified as merger of the forex market, sent the socio-economic and political fabrics of the country on downward slope.

Mr President, it is an act of self-delusion to believe that subsidy exists. Subsidy as a shadow economic category is fraud. You did not tackle the root but merely imposed tax on petroleum products in the name of appropriate pricing and sustenance of an import regime that continues to suck the country dry.

Anyone who cannot make the refineries work, should build new ones. Those sabotaging the refineries and ensuring the import of refined products are known to Nigerians (see the 2012 probe of the National Assembly.) We as country must not continue to live a lie. Even, I as write, The Petroleum Institute, Warri have long mastered the fabrication of mobile refineries that ought to boost domestic refining.

The Nigerian security forces who have been unable to defeat terror in the land revel in how many illegal refineries they are able to destroy on a daily basis, and they are applauded in some quarters. The Guardian Editorial on this phenomenon in September 12, 2023, called for co-operativisation of the so-called illegal refiners and with quality assurance guide and then feed into the downstream sector.

No one has heeded the advice. The destruction of the ‘illegal refineries’ is continuing while the same security forces are unable stop the big thieves of crude operating in the high sea.

Devaluation of currency, a deliberate act, Joseph Stiglitz, the renowned economist, has argued is necessary only when you have something to export and also where you have an economy of scale (see his Globalisation and its Discontents, 2002.) Productive economies could play with their currency to stimulate demands for their products.

A policy that China has employed severally and with a corresponding response from the United States. I have argued Nigeria’s main export, crude oil, is denominated in dollar, there is no basis for the devaluation of the naira. The global economy is currently inclining towards managed exchanged rate.

Blind pursuit of Bretton Woods Institutions policies for takeover of weaker economies by transnational capital will take no country in the global south anywhere. The crisis of late capitalism dominated by derivatives and without production has sent crisis across the global economy. There is no way out for us without production. Nigeria’s weather is clement enough for production.

Mr President, if your administration must survive, you must commit class suicide for the benefit of Nigerians and write your name in gold. Continuing with the current policy aberration is recipe for damnation. On judgement day, do not say you were not told. Enjoy the rest of the week.
Akhaine is a professor of Political Science at the Lagos State University.