It is miscellany time again, Matters Miscellaneous being the rubric I patented more than three decades ago to take editorial notice, in broad strokes and short takes and in no particular order, of some events that might otherwise get lost in the glut of occurrences, and of some personages that might otherwise feel ignored.
First, the Budget.
To everyone’s relief, President Muhammadu Buhari drew the curtains on the 2016 Budget Drama last week as he signed the Appropriations into law.
While it lasted, it was the most riveting drama in town, outpacing even the Bukola Saraki corruption trial in interest and incident. Whereas the latter involves one individual seeking desperately but vainly to cast himself as an innocent person being persecuted vicariously for the Senate over which he presides, the other has as its subject nothing less than the long-awaited financial blueprint of the Change Agenda on which Buhari was elected, with expectations of deliverance from the ruinous era of Dr Goodluck Jonathan.
If they take their self-assigned brief half as seriously as their audience takes them, the compilers will by now have entered Nigeria’s 2016 Federal Budget into the Guinness Book of Records.
It may not count as the budget with the highest expenditure outlay, or the one with the biggest deficit, or even the one with the longest gestation period, though it scores high on all three. It will qualify as one of the most contentious – think, as an example, of whether or not it provided for the Lagos-Calabar rail line — and definitely as one of the least innovative, what with sections of it being no more than photocopies of budget items and expenditures from previous years, being themselves photocopies of items and expenditures from the years before.
But it will be the first to go missing, and then to resurface, only for the best authorities to declare that it was never missing in the first instance. It will also be the first to be disowned wholly or in part by ministers and department heads, on the grounds that what they had submitted had little in common with what the lawmakers were debating.
They finally found a portion of the provision for the Lagos-Calabar project hidden between the lines, and recovered the remaining portion from appropriations the lawmakers had made for all manner of projects for their constituencies, among them town halls and public toilets.
So, more than a century after the amalgamation – regarded as the Mistake of 1914 and not just by Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto and his adoring followers — the two most storied cities in colonial Nigeria are to be linked by rail.
Expectations run high that the project will create thousands of primary and secondary jobs, boost inter-state commerce, ease travel and boost tourism. Its execution will bring change the public can see.
It must not be just another declaration of intent.
Switching gears, it must not be like the electricity that Dr Goodluck Jonathan (remember him?) promised to make available yanfu yanfu well before he was due for re-election, to the point that generators would become sentimental archaisms, like oil-wick lamps.
I took Dr Jonathan for his word and was looking forward to snagging for the house upcountry one of the better sets that Aso Rock would ferry to the dump site, only to come to grief like everyone else who took him seriously, except those political conjurers who could get him to sanction the withdrawal of hundreds of millions of Naira from the Central Bank by waving across his face any document purporting to contain the key to his re-election.
Today, the power situation is as dire as it ever was, despite the increased tariffs.
Dr Jonathan earnestly believed that he could engineer a technological and industrial revolution and transform Nigeria without a dependable electricity supply.
Time is running out for the Buhari administration to convince Nigerians that it does not share that belief. The official targets for power generation are ridiculously low. Meeting them is not going to bridge the yawning gap between supply and demand.
Better to think big, really big.
It would be an unpardonable oversight if this miscellany did not include Ekiti Governor Ayodele Fayose, far and away Nigeria’s most frequently reported and most frequently cited public figure.
There is nothing so bizarre, so sophomoric, so egregious, so indecent and so repellent that you will not find Fayose doing it. There is no thought so coarse, so vulgar and so prurient that you will not find him giving it robust utterance.
His strictures on President Buhari have been unceasing and unsparing, but not entirely unwarranted. The trouble is that his everyday conduct manifests all too disgustingly what he so stridently condemns in Buhari in and out of season.
Some commentators who would like to say the things Fayose says but cannot for all kinds of reasons bring themselves to say have conferred on him the status of “voice of democracy” and “conscience of the nation.”
Fayose as “voice of democracy,” this man who is a living refutation of virtually everything that democracy connotes – this fellow who converted seven of the 27 members of the House of Assembly into a majority, who prevents the judiciary from sitting, leads his thugs to beat up court officials, supplants the Assembly to announce passage of budget proposals it never had a chance to discuss and runs Ekiti as if it were his private estate?
Fayose as “conscience of the nation?” Our modern-day Tai Solarin and Gani Fawehinmi?
Is this what Nigeria has been reduced to?
Phew.
A country that has Fayose as its “conscience” and an exemplar of “democracy,” howsoever defined, is well and truly finished.
You’ll never guess who turned 80 the other day.
Chief Ernest (ha!) Shonekan, head of General Ibrahim Babangida’s so-called National Interim Government, the fìdìhè contraption that was mercifully interim but was not a government and was not national. He doddered on for 83 days before the loathsome dictator Sani Abacha put him out of his delusion and supplanted him.
Probably more from duty than conviction, Ogun State Governor Ibikunle Amosun took a full page in this newspaper yesterday to mark the milestone and to praise Shonekan for heeding “the call to higher national service” at a critical moment in Nigeria’s history.
What Shonekan heeded was a treacherous call to subvert the sovereign will of the Nigerian people as expressed clearly and eloquently in the June 12, 1993 presidential election which no sane person now disputes that it was won by Shonekan’s Egba kinsman, Bashorun Moshood Abiola.
The advertorial goes on to hail Shonekan as a “national treasure.”
Some treasure.
NATION
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