By Mark Adebayo
“The root cause of poverty is social injustice and the bad government that bets it”
– Colin Powel
THE End Bad Governance and Hunger protests by Nigerians seem to have come and gone, at least for now.
In disaggregating the protests, what are most prominent are the bad and the ugly. The good of it all seems hazy or interred in the sepulchre of inconsequentials. Notwithstanding, the good is embedded in the intrinsic value of the protests because it sent clear signals to the powers that be that they cannot continue taking Nigerians for granted without some consequential recompense. To that extent, the protests were necessary – absolutely so.
Successive governments in this country have grown accustomed to daring Nigerians with their unbearably anti-people policies and rights violations exacerbated by satanic corruption and power abuse. They flaunt their stolen wealth in the faces of the people with institutionalized impunity and expect the people to play along by remaining perpetually docile, casual, and cooperative with power abuse in the midst of mass suffering.
Those in power feed fat at the expense of the people they purport to govern. The rulers’ dustbins are richer than the kitchens of most Nigerians. That’s why the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, could boldly boast that whilst Nigerians were protesting, the ruling cliques would be feasting. He was actually right. The legendary Michael Jackson once sang that “they don’t really care about us”. Nigerian rulers are the worst when it comes to the parade of mindlessly corrupt and unpatriotic elements in government anywhere in the world. They operate like an army of occupation that steals everything and destroys what they can’t. Nigerians have been victims of rapaciously insatiable class of political cliques at irregular intervals who exchange batons of our misery with venomous intensity. Nigerians are ruled by our enemies sent directly from the pit of hell.
Because they are alienated from the people they rule over, they behave exactly like aliens on a mission to steal, kill and destroy. The Nigerian ruling cliques are typical hordes of a destructive army on the march to actuate Armageddon. By their disruptive orientation, they have inflicted indelible damage on the potential of Nigeria to be a big player among the comity of nations. The country crawls when it should be soaring. It stagnates when it should be on motion. It stalls when it should be accelerating. It suffers retrogression when it should be in geometric progression.
In the indelible words of Professor Claude Ake of blessed memory, “Under a military regime, we march in circles. Under civilian government, we walk in circles”. Nigeria is like a yo-yo, punctuating between retrogression and stagnation since flag independence in 1960 till date. The wicked have come to power. The satanic reign supreme.
They have always been here. Not today. But today slays us all asunder. We are choked. These bad rulers, with their barefaced bloodthirst, alternate between skulduggery and babarism. The incumbents often worse than their predecessors in their relay of crude statesmanship. We fare worse in the present than the past. The worst among us always get to rule us. Why? I don’t know!
Tinubu came with a pledge of Renewed Hope. Everything he has done since becoming president has injured our hope and destroyed our expectations. It is now quite clear, from the benefit of regrettable hindsight, the Bola Ahmed Tinubu prepared to win the presidency but never prepared to govern. He lacks the capacity to govern or govern well.
What were the predictable values of the protests? The collateral damage was huge. Predictably, lives were lost. Billions of Naira worth of properties were destroyed. Public and private goods were looted. The innocent suffered for days. For some who lost private businesses that they built through thick and thin without state support, it is a lifetime injury that time lacks the capacity to heal. But, when driven by hunger and justifiable anger, people lose the moral authority to be rational. Therefore, deaths and destructions are inevitable in a state of mass anomie.
They don’t really care about us has never been so relevant to the Nigerian tragedy than the moment. Imagine in a country where the citizens are protesting against mass hunger and while it has hardly died down, the president took possession of a One Hundred and Fifty Billion Naira worth of presidential jet and a one billion Naira worth of Cadillac to ease the President’s movements while citizens wallow in severe pains and poverty. No lessons learnt by him and his administration either from past or recent history of how not to mismanage a nation.
The people in government continue to flaunt their stolen wealth on the people’s faces ignoring the time bomb scenarios they are creating of which conflagration they cannot contain when it blows over into mass riots and anarchy.
Everyone knows that the precipitate removal of fuel subsidy by the Tinubu government without first putting necessary cushioning infrastructures in place is the root cause of the current economic crises. There are no two ways about it except for the deceptive counter reasoning by government which amounts to nothing but futile propaganda.
Subsidy removal was a killer antidote to a treatable disease.
The late American economist and brilliant statistician, Milton Friedman, once wrote that “The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem”. This is the exact monkey wrench in the works scenario that the thoughtless subsidy removal has created.
Despite all the trillions that the government claimed would be saved from subsidy removal, as at today, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL, the sole fuel importer into the country is reported to be owing fuel suppliers a whopping Nine Trillion, six billion Naira ($6bn). This is what has been responsible for the recent upsurge in fuel scarcity and long queues all over the country. The NNPCL is a bad debtor with credit problems. A failed enterprise already. The current handlers of Nigeria are running the country insolvent – broke!
We are clearly in a dispensation of government in absentia. This government’s records of nonperformance are staggeringly unconscionable.
The security situation is so bad that Nigeria can be classified as being in active anarchy and a rapidly failing state.
Attacked by Boko Haram just two days ago was Faudiya School in Geidam Local Government Area about 180 kilometres from Damaturu,the state capital.
The news filtered out just yesterday, Friday August 29th that a school boarding facility owned by the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), a Shiia sect, was attacked by terrorists and forty students were summarily executed by the Boko Haram terrorists. Just like that!
The other day, twenty medical students and their Professor were abducted by terrorists in Benue state along the Otukpo/Otukpa/Enugu federal highway while travelling to Enugu State for the Federation of Catholic Medical and Dental Students’ annual convention.
Fortunately, in a rare professional inter-agency coordination and collaboration, the victims were rescued unhurt by security forces within 48 hours. Such heroic feats are quite rare in Nigeria of today.
It was an embarrassing publicity disaster for the Nigerian Army as a viral video emerged in the last 24 hours showing bandits seizing a Nigerian Army Mine-Resistant Armored Personnel Carrier (MRAP) in Zamfara State. Nigeria must admit its weak state status and Nigerians must ensure that we put in place a revolutionary thinking leadership that can fix this horrific situation that we have found ourselves in short order.
Kidnappers are having a field day smiling to the bank daily in today’s Nigeria as the country’s security architecture has almost totally collapsed. Abuja, the country’s capital where I am based, is among the unsafest cities in the country today as ‘one-chance’ robbers and kidnappers operate unhindered round-the-clock. It’s like the Nigeria Police is nonexistent.
A recent report by SB Morgen (SBM) Intelligence, a geopolitical research firm, in a report titled “Economics of Nigeria’s Kidnap Industry” says kidnappers demanded over N10.9 billion from victims and their families between June 2023 and July 2024. Even though the report suggested that the criminals didn’t get it all, they got a considerable percentage of the ransom.
In all of these, Nigeria’s rulers have learnt no lessons at all. They live larger than life, act recklessly with impunity and live in insane opulence commandeered at gunpoint from Nigeria’s commonwealth. They have mortgaged generations unborn with their disruptive orientation to reality. They still terrorize us with sirens as heavily armed escorts send us off the roads when they’re passing. The citizens have suddenly become unbearable irritants to the politicians in power.
As Nigerians wallow in abject poverty and biting inflation, those who preside over Nigeria’s affairs can’t care less what the people are going through.
They hold the reins of power and are using same to terrorize and oppress the people with retrogressive neo-liberal policies and clampdown on dissent.
We must use the power of our votes to get into power those who can expeditiously fix Nigeria in the next series of election.
The alternative doesn’t look pretty. Should the people rise up in violent anger, the whole abutments of the country may be totalled. But, however we go about it, Nigeria needs salvaging soonest.
