Mad men and specialists An Igbo saying notes that no matter how much you treat a sick mind, you can never cure it of murmuring. In other words, you can never tell with a psychiatric case because the fear of relapse remains an ever-present reality. After about two and a half decades of active study of the Nigerian condition, one has come to the conclusion that just when you think things have changed, or are about to change, they remain the same.
One is beginning to fear whether this is not a mad house after all with ‘madmen’ and ‘specialists’, the one feeling superior and contemptuous of the other. And what are you dear reader, I dare ask, are you a madman or a specialist? One asks because the Nigerian situation is once again so surreal and subhuman that it can easily bend even a sane mind.
A few weeks ago, just before the announcement of the cabinet, this column had made strident calls against the unhidden intention of President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB) to assume that most crucial seat of Petroleum Ministry in addition to holding the number one job. But reactions had been most vitriolic with mellower ones admonishing that PMB needed to take the oil seat to harness the nation’s primary source of revenue. Even an aide had concluded that only oil thieves were afraid of the presidential wisdom to take on the petroleum portfolio.
The magnitude of the presidency Today, sooner than we expected, there is crisis already. Fuel shortage has lingered for nearly one month and nobody is speaking coherently about the situation. The Senate cannot summon the Oil Minister before it because he is also the President. Today, we see in simulcasts, pictures of our president in nifty, foreign lands basking in the limelight and relishing bon mot, while at home, the citizenry are living in utter frustration and despair.
Acute and prolonged fuel scarcity across the land has brought so much hardship on Nigerians that many are already asking whether this was the CHANGE they voted for just last May. Now if there was an Oil Minister, he would have been the one answering our questions and carrying the can. Some will point to the Minister of State; but a junior minister is a mere errand person. He still will have to look up to his boss for initiative and direction. It’s double jeopardy if his boss is also the president, for he would probably be in a permanent frozen condition through his tenure.
And one dares ask, is there anything the president wants to get done in the oil ministry he cannot do sitting in Aso Rock? Is there any file he cannot access from the Ministry of Petroleum in 10 minutes sitting in the comfort of his Aso Rock office? He could even get the minister to live in the presidential quarters if that would help. It is simply about appreciating the magnitude of presidential powers. The president wearing the tag of minister would therefore, only diminish the effectiveness of and benefits derivable from a substantive, sound, visionary minister. Recall that former President Olusegun Obasanjo held the position of Oil Minister for eight years.
We cannot recall any value he added to the oil sector apart from irrational increases in products’ prices. He never built any refinery or petrochemical complex; instead, he engendered mind-boggling corruption in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Yet we do not have a proper account for that era. We can go on and on about the futility of PMB micro-managing the oil industry, but we must move on.
Quest for prudent, creative governors
The other day, governors in the land gathered in Abuja for their now too frequent Governors’ Forum meeting. Rising therefrom, they unabashedly told Nigerians that the states they manage are too poor to continue to pay even the minimum wage pegged at N18,000. By the way, this wage, which was agreed over four years ago, ought to be due for a review now.
What now, you ask? If the 36 states have failed, what then is left of the country? Huge bailout loan was recently doled out to these governors by the Federal Government; now they ask for more. Very few of them can account for that loan and one wagers that fewer still applied it judiciously and for the purposes it was meant.
This is our tragedy. Most of our governors have proven to be fiscally immature and lacking in prudence. Their budgets are still mere formalities; they can neither plan nor apply states’ funds with thrift. Many are building monstrous white elephants, such as airports and fountains. They largely misuse funds when they cannot divert them. This is perhaps our gravest misfortune.
This crude oil price crisis is about one year on now. We would expect the Governors’ Forum to be proffering smart alternatives they have devised to earn revenues to run their various states. It must be said again that it is a fallacy to say that a state made up of millions of people is not viable. It must be the manager who is not viable because he is not creative. Our agric and forest resources are still largely untapped, to give one example. The whole country lived on these before we struck oil.
Of handout, fake rice and exhumed chickens In the throes of dwindling revenues and inability to pay salaries, the Federal Government throws in an ill-digested welfare package that seeks to handout N5000 each to 25 million poorest Nigerians, monthly. Whoever conceived this economic hara-kiri should be put in solitary confinement. This is recipe for chaos and calamity.
One, it is not sustainable; two, it will gulp about one-quarter of federal budget; three, it will imbue more social and economic crises on recipients; four, it would be fraught with fraud; five, most of it would go to the North, which already has more than its fair share of the national wealth, etc. It’s a no-brainer, to put it starkly and it is being pursued because someone had said it during electioneering. Another vacuous campaign promise being bandied now is school meals. Goodness gracious! What is the Federal Government doing in this age with primary schools, not to mention federally-funded meals?
Over one trillion naira to be thrown into this populist fantasy should be applied to agric, which will expand the economy and create quality jobs. We must make agric the new crude.
And one last word, did you read that Nigerians now exhume and resell contaminated poultry products impounded and buried by men of the Nigerian Customs Service? The truth is that smugglers are still having a field day, colluding with the Customs, damaging what is left of our economy and invoking health havoc upon the land.
If these and more don’t affect the mind, then one is probably out of one’s mind in the first place.
NATION
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