IT’S now crystal clear that the governance strategy of the regime of the president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is to unsettle Nigerians, distract them, pauperise them, inflict pain and then punish them. The major crime of the people is that they have obviously and stoutly refused to embrace his declaration as the winner of the very controversial and strongly disputed 2023 election. But he is the defacto president of the republic in spite of misgivings.
To be sure, the president has his own supporters. And they have various reasons and motivations for their stand. Some support him because he is their kinsman; some because he settled for Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket which was unprecedented in the country’s democratic experience; others because he is their party man; and, yet many more because of what they expect to get from association with those in power and in office. Some genuinely believe that he won the last presidential election, fair and square.
The reasons for liking or disliking Tinubu as the president no longer matters except to the extent of how his governance style impacts on both the hailers and wailers.
And that impact has been telling. Majority of our citizens are like people beaten by acid rain- from the very first day of his accession to power. On May 29, on the presidential dais while taking his oath of office and oath of allegiance, the president proclaimed the removal of petrol subsidy. It had been a contentious subject for many decades in the country.
It was the Achilles’ heel of many a democratic president in the past. Tinubu’s predecessor, an affliction called Muhammadu Buhari, who hitherto described the subsidy as a scam concocted to defraud Nigerians by the presidency of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan ended up jerking up petrol prices many times in the course of his two terms of four years each. Courage failed him to do so again before he left office ignominiously last May. The day Tinubu assumed office he claimed that he was seized of courage and so announced that petrol subsidy was gone.
For a man who assumed the presidency under a cloud of an alleged stolen mandate, the certainty of association with drug dealers in the United States in the 1970s working as their bagman or accountant, swirls of issues regarding his school attendance at home and abroad including his claim that he attended and graduated from a secondary school in Lagos four years before the school was founded, his shady National Youth Service discharge certificate, his real names, state of origin, parentage, among other disconcerting matters, Tinubu managed to contrive to deny himself of honeymoon enjoyed by every newly elected president in other countries.
The country went into a tailspin on the announcement by Tinubu of the scrapping of petrol subsidy. The price of petrol spiked by many folds and with it the prices of other products and services. Transportation fares went up. Food prices were immediately jerked up by sellers. Before then farmers had either been killed or driven from their farms by terrorists who the regime of Buhari stridently refused to designate as such ostensibly for primordial reasons. In removing the so-called petrol subsidy, Tinubu did not act out of ignorance. He knew the consequences of his action. In January of 2012, this same Tinubu had written an epistle to the then President Jonathan brilliantly, but now obviously deviously, outlining the grave dangers of petrol subsidy removal and urging the former president to back down from the subsidy removal that was effected that year. Everything Tinubu warned Jonathan that would happen with subsidy removal are playing out today. The only difference is that the effects are harsher today than they probably would have been 12 years ago because 12 years ago Nigeria was not the poverty capital of the world as it has been in the last couple of years. The president boasted that his proclamation on subsidy removal was not in the speech prepared for him for delivery on May 29. He spoke extempore. In any case there was no Cabinet. There were no key and knowledgeable advisers in place to offer an opinion. There was no evidence that he consulted relevant stakeholders in the months he waited in the wings as president-elect or president-select. Tinubu’s was a classical case of ‘physician, heal thyself’.
While citizens were squirming from the widespread and sudden deleterious effects of the removal of petrol subsidy, the president proceeded to conspire with his own appointed governor of the central bank, Yemi Cardoso, to ‘float’ the naira. That action yet triggered another crisis of cataclysmic dimension. The value of the naira dropped precipitously. Again, there was no evidence that plans were made to mitigate the effects of the sudden and rapid devaluation of the Nigerian currency. The North African country, Egypt, had cause to devalue its currency recently. Its action may still have the same or similar effects on Egyptians as Nigeria’s but the people could see the deliberate actions taken by their government to cushion the effects. The Egyptian regime first ensured that it secured commitment from the International Monetary Fund [IMF] to increase its rescue package from $5bn to $8bn. The government also firmed up the arrangement whereby the United Arab Emirates [UAE] will provide Egypt with “$24bn for land development projects”. Additionally, it secured a commitment whereby UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia will provide $11bn in long term deposits with the Egyptian central bank to be invested in real estate and other projects. Egypt is a major exporter of cotton among other products, so a devalued currency could play in its favour. Can we say the same of Nigeria?
Petrol subsidy removal and devaluation of naira in 2023 were not attended by rigour and consultations. So there is actually no plans for methodical and periodic evaluation and mitigation where necessary. Ironically there is evidence that petrol is still being ‘subsidised’. Only the regime knows from where it is getting money for petrol subsidy payments since there was no appropriation for such in the 2024 budget. Being transparent is not one of the strong points of the Tinubu regime so we should not expect full disclosure in this regard. In like manner, the flotation of the naira appears to have a very narrow goal- just the rate of exchange against other currencies. The Central Bank still manually fixes the rates daily.
In its determination to inflict more pains on Nigerians, the government recently hiked the tariff for electricity by over 200%. In its usual style there was no vigour, there were no consultations and the data used in arriving at the decision is hollow. Everybody is lamenting- ordinary folks and businesses. The claim that only consumers in the so-called ‘Band A’ will be affected by this tariff increase has been punctured. ‘Band A’ are supposedly consumers who enjoy between 20-24 hours supply of electricity every day. This is a phantom. It has been established that virtually no part of Nigeria enjoys that not even the Aso Rock Villa, the seat of government. In some other places changes in the rates of public utilities are programmed to take effect at a specified time in future. Not here. Electricity tariff increase was effected the day it was announced. Now confusion reigns. Consumers are being billed arbitrarily. The regulators are threatening sanctions on distribution companies. Many DISCOs, electricity distribution companies, are furiously downgrading Feeder Pillars they had hitherto advertised as belonging to the so-called ‘Band A’. All the published classifications of the Feeder Pillar and premium consumers are at best misleading and at worst outright lies. We are experts at muddling along.
Like our population which various people estimate variously at between 200 million to 230 million, the government does not know how many of our citizens have access to public power supply. Some people estimate that there are 12 million electricity consumers in Nigeria. Others put the figure at 13.5 million. Both figures are miserable for a population of at least 200 million citizens and residents. Twelve million is less than half of the population of Lagos state which is also a guess estimate. How do you provide solution to consumers you do not know their size? How do you satisfy clients with equipment which are more than 60 years old and which have not been maintained and upgraded as appropriate in the intervening years? How?
We are in the 21st century, l am assuming that Nigeria has arrived there too, and we are still treating public power supply as rocket science. Since the return to rule by civilians, which we mistake for democracy, the country has spent an estimated $30bn to resolve its huge energy deficits. The harder we tried the more darkness we generate and distribute. For more than three decades distributable electricity has not risen beyond 4,000 megawatts. Our energy mix is still limited to the traditional hydro, thermal and gas sources. The country has allegedly spent about $30bn in the sector in recent decades but we have not invested in revamping any of our power plants built in the first republic. What our rulers have done is to create a multiplicity of agencies including the moribund National Integrated Power Project [NIPP] and Rural Electrification Agency which is currently enmeshed in multi-billion naira fraud. The NIPP has built up but abandoned power plants in many parts of our country. One of such is in Mgbidi, Oru West LGA of Imo state. It is located in my village, Imeoha. Each time l pass through the site as l did last week l am reminded about how our rulers have turned our country into a wasteland. For their own benefit and at our expense. The fad today is the Siemens power deal which is almost unstuck. Some experts are doubtful that it would be a game changer. But we won’t stop until we sink millions or billions of dollars into it. There’s something dark about this country that is beyond the absence of electricity. And that is concerning.
