Nigeria and the Book of Lamentations....

Nigeria and the Book of Lamentations....

By Fortune Nwaiwu

When one takes a retrospective look at happenings within the country, one cannot ignore the endless streams of bitter tales and complaints that have become part of the daily narratives of the average Nigerian. Just like the book of lamentations in the bible which is replete with the sorrows and lamentations of a once great city full of life that had become desolate and a shadow of itself, so is the tragic story of this once great country that held a lot of promise with high aspirations of becoming a beacon of light and bastion of hope to the rest of the black race, I am deeply convinced in my heart that the book of lamentations was probably written with Nigeria in mind.

Nigeria is a paradox; so wealthy, yet so poor; so endowed, yet so deprived. Nigeria makes more money than many countries of the world but unfortunately is ranked as the world’s 20th poorest country apparently because most Nigerians (over 70%) live below the poverty line as they subsist on less than $2 a day. If one takes a look at the statistics on Nigeria’s human development report, one would suffer more heartache, as it is even more depressing. In spite of the abundance of human and natural resources, one thing Nigeria has sourly lacked is visionary and progressive leadership, the leadership gap has proven to be the single most potent factor threatening the corporate existence of Nigeria. The fact that Nigeria is a country of immense ethnic and religious diversity has made efforts to coalesce the country into one cohesive and tightly bonded corporate entity a daunting task, which is only exacerbated by its self serving leadership.

Nigeria, a country plagued by one of the worst kinds of leadership the world has ever seen. Its leaders may not be as physically brutal and repressive as the Taliban were in Afghanistan, or what is obtainable in Myanmar or North Korea, but I am sure the average Afghan would prefer to live with a brutal Taliban regime than the corrupt Nigerian government. For one to fully appreciate the enormity of the Nigerian situation, one has to come to terms with some statistics that exposes the stark realities, hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies off the Nigerian government. Nigeria experiences a near absence of governance at every level (Federal, State or Local government).

This has had the consequence of turning the entire society on its head. Walking into a government office to request a basic service, you are confronted by a member of staff who may not even bother to reply to your greeting and barely has time to listen to you; the policeman that should protect you on the road block, stops you and demands for bribes and has no qualms shooting dead any motorist that refuses to part with a few cents; the customs officer at the border who is supposed to stop smuggling takes a bribe and actually connives with the smugglers to bring in banned products into the Nigerian market, while harassing the traveller entering Nigeria with two new pairs of shoes; the hospital staff member that, contrary to every professional oath, refuses to attend to dying patients because they are on strike; the soldiers who get so bored that they occasionally go on a rampage, using policemen for target practice. These are all to buttress the points made by a Nigerian musician in his song titled “jaga jaga” a few years ago, in which he chorused “Nigeria jagajaga Everything scatter scatter Poor man dey suffer suffer...” and all of these bag of woes has been foisted on the Nigerian people by the bad governance since the inception of the Nigerian state some 51 years ago, the decline has never been worse than it has been in the last 12 years of democratic rule which started in 1999.

Let us take a look at some of the perks of the saintly and good intentioned President Jonathan who desires to save Nigeria from the precipice. 75% of the country’s budget is spent on recurrent expenditure. Of this; over 25% goes as the salaries of its 460 member National Assembly. In 2012, Nigeria’s president allocated for himself a feeding allowance of over $6.2 million for just one year of food in the presidential villa, while also ensuring that his cars and that of his cohorts in the presidency will enjoy another $10 million worth of fuelling. Compare this staggering sum to the paltry $400,000 salary of President Obama who still gets to pay from his own meagre salary for the food him and his family eats in the White house. The Nigerian president’s feeding allowance for one year, which is exclusive of his salary will pay the American president’s salary for 15 years and two months. This is not to talk of the $1.2 million our dear president will spend on watering the gardens of Aso rock; certainly the American president wouldn’t mind being the gardener of the Nigerian president.

Nigerians elect a total of 360 members to the House of Representatives and 109 senators to make laws and enhance good governance by checking and balancing the excesses of the executive arm of government. For this privilege, the 469 members of the federal legislature and their support staff at the National Assembly will spend $940 million in 2011. An even more interesting statistic is the cost of maintaining every legislator annually. Each Nigerian legislator gets about $2 million salary per year as at last year, which works out to about $8 million for the 4 year stay in the national assembly. No wonder machetes, guns and thugs are used at will to "win" primaries and the elections. How many new or even established businesses can achieve a turnover of $8 million within four years with a net tax-free profit in excess of 50 per cent? Is this social justice?[1]

For the National Assembly, even the amount of $940 million above is just what we can see easily but is not broken down for further analysis or accountability. The Nigerian Senate President earns enough money as salary to pay president Obama’s salary for eight years. While President Obama gets to be taxed on 87.5 per cent of his “meagre” pay, Nigerian public officials pay less than 12 per cent on their fat salaries.

Now with the Nigerian economy in dire straits partly due to declining revenue for which the recently dim global economic outlook can be blamed, the Nigerian government now see the urgency to become more prudent with its fiscal policies.

In paragraph six of the Nigerian president’s 2012 budget speech, he reiterated the need for this: “We cannot subject the well-being of Nigerians to such large fluctuations and must therefore protect ourselves by managing our finances prudently including by adopting a conservative benchmark oil price for our budgets.”[2] And part of the strategy for this prudent management of Nigeria’s finances is the removal of the long controversial (which existence is often doubted by major analysts that have confronted the government with factual analysis) oil subsidy. Nigeria’s oil subsidy is the only form of indirect social security that gets to over 70% of Nigerians who subsist on less than $2 a day, and yet the Nigerian government in its wisdom and compassion for its extremely poor citizen decides to remove it so that the Nigerian economy can be saved for the sake of the future of the Nigerian.

The government brings in its apostles of “cuts” Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala et al. backed by the much hated International Monetary Fund (IMF) to do the dirty job of throwing more Nigerians into poverty and deeper hardship. Nigerians must make sacrifices, but not by its leaders. One often wonders if Dr. Okonjo Iweala is not privy to the ridiculous and criminally absurd cost of maintaining the lifestyle of his boss and that of other elected politicians and public office holders. But it is the impoverished Nigerian that must make the urgently needed sacrifice.  Were we to cut the pay of these officials by say 70 per cent, Nigeria would save about $550 million.

Dr. Okonjo Iweala needs to learn some urgent lessons of how subsidies are used to guarantee social justice, it’s not always about the balance sheet, and it’s often more about the peoples’ welfare. Perhaps she is ignorant of the agricultural subsidies implemented by much of the EU and OECD countries just to give their farmers some competitive advantage in global markets, or that Alan Greenspan subsidised the cost of borrowing at very low rates just to ensure that Americans had access to cheap credit for nearly 19years as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank.

The government has since agreed that it is being held down by a cabal in the oil industry but have only fallen short of admitting their lack of will to tackle same, perhaps another explanation for this inability is that the government is the cabal itself, only using a coalition of willing business persons who lack scruples to execute the subsidy scam. The Nigerian government has an age long tradition of serving itself and protecting only its interest at the expense of the Nigerian people, this has always remained the story of governance and most shamefully that of its democratic experiments. Simply put, it is always the same old story of a political-industrial complex which seeks to feed fat off the rest of the system.

Avoiding the diplomatic niceties of civil language, Nigerian politicians are nothing but thieves who see political office as an opportunity to rob the state and its people. The tragic lack of compassion and enlightened self interest on the part of Nigeria’s ruling elites may be the undoing that will eventually see its end. Their failure to understand that it is in their own best interest to ensure that the rising incidence of poverty in the country is urgently tackled and reversed if peace, security and stability must be maintained. They always believe that the Nigerian cannot rise up in rebellion and that he will continue to endure whatever hardship is thrown at him, but eventually they will realise that this line of thought will not endure eternally.

Nigerians are dying more of the indirect consequences of poverty than any other causative factor, poverty forced on them by their leaders. A cowardly government which fails to tackle the thugs which it groomed (Boko haram, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, etc) but has no qualms in using brutal force in dispersing peaceful protesters demanding their legitimate rights. Irrespective of their various political affiliations (PDP, ACN etc) they all remain the same thieving political class determined to punish those who elected them.

One needs to come down to Lagos to see what the once glorified government of Babatunde Raji Fashola of the ACN who cannot seem to be able to shake off the pressure of doing the bidding of his god father and ACN king maker, the glorified kleptocrat Bola Tinubu has reduced governance to. Lagos roads have become nearly impossible to drive on with the numerous pot holes that dot the landscape, just a single day of rainfall and the entire city went under water, not because any major rivers or dams over flooded but because of blocked or non existent drains. Now the new strategy is to use public private partnerships (PPP) the new infrastructure development mantra, to outsource their responsibilities by building a 48km stretch of road at an outlandish cost of $312.5 million, just normal roads, with no rails, no fly-overs, nothing extraordinary to justify the ridiculous contract sum for which the people must pay a minimum $2 toll (for driving to and fro on the road) for the next 30 years[3]. And ofcourse, it’s an open secret who owns the contract for the construction of the road and even the major stake holders in the company that got the concession (Lekki Concession Company).

Nigerian political leaders, in collaboration with its elites both in the public and private sector have now become adept at inventing new forms of economic enslavement for the hopeless and socio-economically disenfranchised citizens. Removal of the fuel subsidy is just a tip of the iceberg of the social injustices Nigerians have had to endure in the hands of their leaders, but it may eventually prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Nigerians need to take advantage of this tiny window of opportunity not just to make demands on this corrupt political class but to eventually do away with them to make a clean, decent start. Nigeria’s entire system of governance, politics and democracy has been rigged from its foundation, there will never be credible elections, and its democracy will never produce accountable leadership or good governance. The entire status quo has to go for meaningful change to come to Nigeria.