The only reason why petroleum product prices are hiked at will in Nigeria, while the government of day still enjoys a self-delusion of its popularity; without the people rising in revolt; without anything happening either to the government or those in charge of this rape of the people, is that the leaders know quite well that they were never elected into office by the people. They stole the office in a sham of an election and imposed their inglorious selves on the people. And pursuant to that vision and agenda, they quite rightly feel that they owe the citizenry no explanations or favours in relation to their welfare, since they owe their power not to the people, but to their consummate skill in election rigging and intimidation of opponents. And also because the people have been so enfeebled and emasculated into timorous and imbecilic inaction, by years of repeated brutalization of civil structures, that they cannot muster enough consensus and enough outrage to sweep away an ontologically dysfunctional and non-performing government. This holds absolutely true because, in a democracy where the people are really the repository of ultimate power, or in a society where a culture of good followership obtains, a rise in the price of basics like bread, has led to violent uprising by the people and to the eventual and ultimate kicking out of many a government. The omni-dimensionally decadent Tsarist Russia, France under the Bourbon Monarchy and Romania under the inglorious Ceausescu remain footnotes to this. But the obverse of this obtains in Nigeria. More so, the leaders a la Obasanjo have always known that Nigeria is a nation of over 120 million emasculated idiots, who possess an infinite propensity to endure evil, kleptocracy, executive recklessness and a culture of leadership orchestrated impunity, in timorous acquiescence and imbecility. If Obasanjo was not right, how does one explain the fact that a simple act of falsehood that saw Richard Nixon resigning the Presidency in the USA, and a little act of election rigging rousing the people to kick out Eduard Shevadnze in Georgia and lately Jean Bertrand Aristides in Haiti, have repeatedly occurred and crystallized into a tradition in Nigeria, while the people at best, grumbled to their pillows and at worst take out their frustrations on each other, instead of the legitimate cause of their desperation; namely their long monstrous line of incompetent leadership. If we are not a country of emasculated human beings, what is this government still doing in power at all levels, when their raison d’etre, which is the welfare of the people, have been thrown to the dogs? Why is the government not yet kicked out by popular uprising, as was the case in Georgia and Haiti? If we are not idiots, why do we wait a second longer and what are we still waiting for? What are Nigerians still waiting for, when an average Nigerian family cannot place two decent square meals on the table daily, for themselves and their children? What and who are we still waiting for, when garbage and filth has taken over our streets and state capitals, visiting our fragile frames already compromised by hunger, with a cocktail of diseases? Why are we still waiting, when our hospitals have become places where we go to die instead of where to receive health care? Why be patient with a government that has left our roads as stretches of interconnected pot and manholes coated inequitably with tar? Why continue to patronize a government that cannot guarantee our safety in our homes, in our streets, on our roads and in our communities? What are we still doing in our houses when those houses are not even safe from the marauding arm of the men of the underworld, and while the police cannot even guarantee our safety from those who may wish to do us harm?The only reason why this situation obtains in Nigeria is because we have no government at all. What exists as government in Nigeria at all levels is a government of idiots, by the rogues for their pockets. Governance in Nigeria is peopled by the worst conglomeration of grotesquely-incompetent nincompoops, who neither had a plan nor vision for their people; who neither had a destination nor know the way to get there. Nigeria since independence has vacillated among a cabal of brigands who are hell bent on embezzling the country out of existence and bludgeoning the people into a plastercine-like submission and political puerility. They are helped by a superabundant coterie of sycophants who see these personifications of incompetence, through the false prisms of hypocritical heroism. If we are not all idiots, what do we make of the (Y)ouths that (E)arnestly (Y)earned for (A)bacha under the able and perverted leadership of Daniel Kanu in 1998; the politicians that adopted Abacha as their sole candidate; the traditional rulers, Church Leaders, doyens of industries and media tycoons who fell over themselves and outdid each other in endorsing the candidacy of a syphilitically-crazed thief? What do we make of the crazy professors and professionals that have repeatedly served under pillaging military regimes and chameolonically donning democratic pretences at the least excuse like Jerry Mamser Gana and Arthur Nzeribe who as Festus Okotie-Eboh was the byword for corruption and venality in the First Republic, has risen to assume the position of the byword for everything that is vain, base, terrible, rotten and inglorious in the Nigerian socio-political landscape and corridors of power? Do we have leaders in Nigeria?No! All we have are pirates in power. At the Executive arm at all levels, the President is either incompetent, powerless or lacks the political will to lead Nigeria aright. He lacks the basic vision to steer Nigeria in this turbulent and tempestuous socio-economic and political sea. He grossly underestimated the decades of aggregated rot that has sedimented on the tectonic plates of our nationhood. Nigeria as an Aegean stable, through decades of manhandling by the military and the political class, became so dirty that only the river of the people‘s uprising directed through it, could achieve any semblance of socio-economic and political sanitation. Today OBJ is losing his temper because the problems he underestimated has become the albatross of his visionless government. The State Governors are a different ballgame altogether. They are struggling to out-class each other, a la Okonjo-Iweala and Esther Usman Nennadi, in stealing and embezzling their states’ allocations. They are simply bestriding their states as Machiavellic clones would: Bridling opposition, naming every project after themselves, converting apparatus of their states especially the media into one nauseating propaganda machine that launders and attempts to whitewash their monumental incompetence. In the North of Nigeria, the state governors to hide their incompetence, actively fan the embers of primordial forces like religion and sharia; which renders the poor, hungry, harassed and unemployed masses pliable, malleable and manipulable in their hands. In the South and the West they actively crack down on, bribe or buy up voices of genuine opposition like OBJ is doing at the Federal level, making Nigeria effectively a one-party state. Listening or watching the news bulletin from any state radio or television station in Nigeria is like one sitting in on a sterile litany and nauseating mimicry of indecency. These media have effectively stopped informing or educating the people. The have become agents of misinformation and political propaganda.Without law and order, safe investment opportunity will never arise in any community. OBJ’s government has been actively wooing investors to come to Nigeria and do business. It is such a laudable and brilliant idea that the social infrastructure to support that is simply non-existent. Do we have a Police force in Nigeria? Well, It is my humble opinion that we neither have Peace and Security in Nigeria nor a police force to maintain law and order. The time is ripe for Nigerians to start paying armed robbers to protect them from the police. The Police have finally lost their pretence of being a force. It is now an efficient factory of incompetence, ineffectiveness; a nest of incurable corruption and a lame, toothless old dog that deserves to be given some euthanasia and interred for good. The reverse should be the case where there is a government. The only function of the Nigerian Police is to aid the armed robbers by commission or by omission. The majority of the rank and file are deployed on government convoys as security details. The other half is deployed first to bullion vans; a veritable platform from which they announce and dramatize their brutality, incivility and uncouth nature to the whole world. The other half of this half, who have been reclaimed from the once notorious road-blocks, where they hitherto assumed the role of government-approved armed robbers; extorting money at gunpoint from motorists, are now assigned to guard men like IBB, Chris Ubah, Emeka Offor and other thieves whose source of income, though mysterious is known to be the stealing of the Nigerian people’s money. A very insignificant and inconsequential percentage are deployed to public buildings. If any percentage remains, it is retained at the stations, ill-motivated and ill equipped to fight the kind of thieves and unemployed youths armed by the politicians with sophisticated weapons, a lot of anger and a lot of money in the run-up to the last PDP electoral heist in 2003. The trickle that is left to answer to the people’s distress calls respond with the kind of non-challant attitude meant for people whose lives are not worth the price of a peanut. Nigerians are daily gunned down in their homes and streets by gun-wielding ghosts, and none of this puzzling murders have ever been conclusively solved or foiled by the police. Crime has now become so lucrative and profitable that almost every young unemployed Nigerian has once tossed the choice of going into it, or migrating to any country outside Nigeria, as the only options available in his fast diminishing and most times, non-existing horizon of opportunities.Do we have a legislature? At all levels, this has been hijacked to become a rubber stamp of our rudderless executive. That was the reason why Wabara who did not win a senatorial election rose to become the Senate President. This is equally why the senate has become a hotbed of bribery and corruption allegations and counter allegations, while the common folks in the streets are daily been harassed by hunger and the elements, as many of them are tenants residing under bridges, in open air contraptions at motor parks and at road junctions and terminals. The amount of money involved in these scandals insult the poverty of over 70 million Nigerians. The Senators and House of Reps members are the new class of millionaires we have in Nigeria today, residing in choice neighbourhoods and holding choice properties in other choice neighbourhoods across the length and breadth of Nigeria. What is the office of a senate president doing with over 5 luxurious pleasure cars in the 13th poorest nation on earth? This is simply a bird’s eye view of what obtains at all strata of government in Nigeria. The Presidency boasts of more pleasure cars than drivers to drive them. The first lady‘s recently abolished office, is another story altogether. I had at an occasion witnessed a 17 car convoy accompanying the first lady of Nigeria, when she came for the opening ceremony of Bolingo Hotels in Abuja a few years back. Forget about the mistress of the senate president or his House of Rep’s counterpart. Do not count the governors‘ mistresses nor their local government area chairmen. Do not try prying into PDP officials‘ inventories and the number of cars and the amount of money at their disposal for official functions that consists in some unproductive and economically stupid ostentation, that serves no useful economic or social purpose. It is only in the Nigerian legislature that a speaker of the house could spend over 19 million naira on Salah celebrations, while majority of Nigerian Muslims cannot even afford chicken for their own Salah. I will strongly resist the temptation to x-ray our judiciary. It is a great place to find out what the government in Nigeria has metamorphosed into. This supposed last bastion of hope for the common man has been so marooned in the islands of corruption, that some High court justices or judges are been quizzed by the INTERPOL over their alleged roles in a corruption scandal. At the Local government level, councillors have become mini-gods in their localities and together with the chairmen and (Dis)honourable members of the State House of assemblies have become a new class of the “nouveaux riche”. They spend their time discussing contracts and how best to re-allocate the local government allocations to their private accounts. These are the dividends of the Nigerian democracy. Our people are daily been pushed deeper into the poverty trapezium, without apologies from their leaders and without any end in sight. The leaders who are perched on the surrealist corridors of power and its trappings, are not in touch with the grim and stark reality that confronts the people daily as a result of their recklessness. They do not travel on the potholes that the people are condemned to transverse daily to eke out their miserable existences. They are not until recently, harassed by armed robbers that have become a regular furniture of the night life experiences of Nigerians. They are barricaded in high security zones with scores of policemen and bodyguards to render attacks on them a suicidal option. They do not queue in long, interminable lines to buy fuels for their cars. They bask in privilege while the masses scour the trash heaps for their daily Garri.More to my point, there is absolutely no reason for Nigerians to pay high prices for refined petroleum products. The only reason why petroleum prices rise in Nigeria is because we have no government and Nigerians are idiots. I am being presidential. Why should hapless, milked and impoverished Nigerians keep on paying a pocket of government approved gangsters at the NNPC, Shell BP and the Presidency, that skim the excess revenue into some offshore accounts, while the dividends does not even trickle down to the people? Why should Nigerians pay the same price that obtains in a country without a single oil well, while we have an ocean of oil and gas flowing beneath our shores. The government at the last count offered a wooden apology for the rise in the pump price of petrol. The arguments advanced is one of the most ridiculous attempts to hoodwink an already bludgeoned populace into acquiescence while the government of the day continues their rapacious plunder, where their predecessors left off. The government once sold us a dummy, making us believe that the excess proceeds that would be saved from the petroleum subsidy removal, will be channelled into development projects. Fat lie. Since the removal of this subsidy, to what has the so-saved subsidy proceeds been channelled? Was it used in the profligate, wasteful construction of the bribery and corruption-rigged Abuja stadium complex, which Nigeria neither needed at this time nor had any use, save for the ostentatious motive and ephemeral prestige accruing thereto as well as the opportunity of once more defrauding Nigeria and settling political cronies? Was it the hosting of COJA, with billions of naira that could have been channelled into stabilizing the economy or invested in self-sustaining populist projects that would not only fund and regenerate itself, but provide stable employment opportunity for some Nigerians? Was the money saved from the subsidy channelled towards the dead and buried Poverty alleviation programme or the Universal Basic Education, which is still a pipe dream many years after its been gazetted by the government? Was the money channelled into upgrading the Enugu International airport, consequent upon its approval by the government? Was it channelled towards building an efficient rail network in any city or state in Nigeria? If it was channelled towards any of these, the people do not know and we have the right to know or was the proceed saved from this withdrawn subsidy the money given to Tony Anenih’s Works Ministry for the Nigerian roads, which I believe, he did a great job of rehabilitating and constructing in the planet Mars? What percentage of it was ploughed into developing the Niger Delta, stabilizing the educational sector or the Agricultural sectors of the Nigerian economy?The increase in the pump price of petroleum products in Nigeria, when the average income of poor (the middle class does not exist any more in Nigeria) Nigerians remains static like a stagnant pool, is superlatively irresponsible and morally obscene. No responsible government in history, has ever abandoned totally, the fate of millions of its citizenry to the whims and vagaries of capricious markets forces, whose only credo is the absolute, unalloyed belief in the goddess of profit and unregulated capitalistic ethic. This is more dangerous considering the fact that governments in Nigerian history repeatedly failed to diversify the economy, thereby crowning oil the mainstay of an overburdened, terminally ill, and cannibalised economy. To this end, any bowel movement or farting in the oil sector, sends the poor masses deeper into the mires of economic impoverishment and desperation, as it brings a corresponding chain-reactionary increase and ripple effect in the prices of almost all products in the market; both goods and services. The rise in prices occasioned by increase in fuel price stands tyrannically over diminishing purchasing power based on a constant and battered income regime for over 80 million Nigerians living below the world poverty average.Successive Nigerian governments have overreached themselves in bludgeoning the economy to death through massive embezzlement and stealing of public funds, corruption, misappropriation of funds, misplacement of priority areas in favour of white elephant and economically unviable ventures, heavy external and domestic borrowings, which went down the drain, only to resurface in private numbered accounts. Today, Nigeria which is the 6th largest oil exporter in OPEC, and which sits atop over 20 Billion cubic litres of one of the finest crude oil reserves in the world, does not meet up with it domestic requirements, at a price affordable to her citizenry. Many irrational and lame excuses have been floated by those who should be responsible for this. They contend that domestic oil prices in Nigeria is among the cheapest in the world, so it stands to reason that it should raised to meet international standards. Is this not a laughable manifestation of bovine stupidity and consolidated ignorance on the part of our leaders? In Saudi Arabia, I was told by Saudi friend, citizens fill their tanks at no cost at all. They have this resource, and the resource should serve the people and not suffocate or strangulate them. Before any sensible government could elevate the domestic price regime of its basic resource, it must first of all elevate the living standards of her people to international standards. It must first elevate the income per capita, salary regime and earning capacity of its citizens to international standards, then would it be justified in abandoning the price regime of petroleum products to find its feet in the globalizing sea of market forces. When the foregoing have not be emplaced, it is a superlative act of irresponsibility for the government to abandon the fate of its citizens to the unbridled reign of capital. If an American who earns an average of $21,000 per capita buys gasoline at $1.50 cents per litre, it is criminal to subject a Nigerian who earns an average of $250 per capita to the same price regime of $1.50 cents for gasoline. First the latter resides in the neighbourhood of poverty, while the former fetes in affluence. The latter will naturally lack the most basic of his needs, while the former can afford to send a dog to school at $400 dollars per month. To this end, there exists no basis for comparison and for subjecting Nigerians to the price that Americans pay for gas, because it is a standardized, international price. The derelict and dysfunctional state of our refineries is another crippled excuse that has become a favourite refuge of our incompetent authorities. Their contention includes that those which by accident are functional and in operation, are not maximizing their capacity utilization. Whose fault is this? Is it the fault of the poor who never had a hand in the numerous mad decision taken about them? I have always asked who refined petroleum for the Biafrans during the last civil war. These guys refined their own crude in the heat of a war in mobile refineries that were so mobile, that they were impossible to locate and proved impervious to the Federal bombs till the war ended. Today, Nigeria that is not at war cannot even refine her own crude for domestic use nor maintain her refineries. E ji kwa m ogu O!.Another excuse is that privatization and deregulation of the down stream sector is in the spirit of opening up the economy and making it more competitive and more profitable. Profitable for who? Profitable for those Nigerians that would be killed off by poverty? Profitable for the government that would then have more money at its disposal to misappropriate, embezzle and loot? Profitable for the Black marketers that would make a fortune on the hides and skin of the poor masses? Profitable for the poor masses that would be condemned to inescapable poverty? Or profitable for the IMF and the World Bank? Is that the liberalization that Nigeria needs at this time? Liberalization: This old World Bank/IMF mantra that has been stupidly swallowed by African governments have grossly impoverished our people. Why can’t America, Europe and Japan in the spirit of economic liberalization remove their Agricultural subsidies and open their farm and Agricultural markets to downstream sector liberalization? They cannot do that because their governments are wise and have the interests of their people at heart. Any of the governments of these countries that contemplates that, let alone implementing it is kicked out before it can breathe in or breathe out. The Third World and Africa can scream all they want. They can stage a Cancun-like walk-out, sit-in or gang-up all they can: that cannot pressurize these countries into removing the subsidies on the fundamental or basic sectors of their economies. If this holds true in these societies, why are our leaders blind to that in our own case? Is this not a case of Bovine stupidity? Since Nigeria degenerated into a mono-product economy, the domestic price of petroleum became the measure of central tendency for the price of goods and services in our markets, consequent upon its indispensability in an underdeveloped, undiversified and poor Nigerian transportation system. And once the cost of transportation increases on the heel of the increase in pump price of petroleum products, the purchasing power of the people is greatly diminished and hardship and burden on the shoulders of the people greatly increases.It is my humble opinion that this situation will change, the moment Nigeria becomes endowed with a responsible leadership and a followership populated by sensible men ( not idiots as Obj would remind us), who would have the courage to check and throw out irresponsible governments, whenever they arise. It is equally my opinion that we would keep on entertaining these crop of grossly incompetent leaders until Nigerians learn that power belongs to the people, and not the leaders; until they realise that they are the masters while the leaders are the servants; and that a servant cannot be greater than his master, and that a servant owes an account of his stewardship to his master. Nigeria’s problems have not changed since Achebe. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian climate, air, landscape or people. The trouble with Nigeria is, and remains squarely a failure of leadership. The day that fuel price will become affordable to the masses in Nigeria is the day that Obasanjo, the state governors, our honourable and dishonourable senators, Reps, Assembly men, Councillors, Local government Chairmen, Judges, Police Commissioners, 419ers, etc., will start earning a monthly salary of 5,000 naira (Five Thousand naira ),which arrears would be owed them for 3 years like other civil servants are forced to experience. And out of this sum, they will pay NEPA for the long periods of darkness that the rest of Nigerians are mandatorily condemned by this monolithic ogre to enjoy every month. They will out of this sum pay their house rents to their shylock landlords and pay the school fees of their children who sit down at home for 9 months of strike and 3 months of academic work; buy food for their monogamous families, polygamous mistresses and their dependents, and then stand in long interminable queues for at least 16 hours every day for two weeks on end at the gas station; bribe the pump attendant with a 100 naira bill, just to fuel their cars at 49 naira 90kobo per litre of PMS. Then and only then would they know the hardship that harassed Nigerians go through daily. Baba Iyabo does not feel these pains. He neither pays the landlord, hops a Molue nor gets caught in the notorious Lagos traffic jam. It is only when our leaders become like us in our suffering that they will do something to effectively get the fangs of their incompetent regimes and that of corrupt petroleum marketers and bunkerers off our bleeding flesh. The only other option is for the people to rise in anger and throw out these blind guides who claim to be leading us. Fuel prices can only stop this arbitrary and insane upward-appreciation, when a government is enthroned in Nigeria or when Nigerians cease to become idiots.
Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh can be reached at ogbunwezeh@nigeriavillagesquare.com
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Posted by Robot| 29.04.2008 11:03