This week I had wanted to write about our quest for a healthy electoral culture in the light of the flawed 2023 general elections, but was prompted to change course following the fuel subsidy confusion and controversy currently rocking the nation. President Bola Tinubu is understandably at the centre of the whole drama as it was his declaration that “subsidy is gone” during his inaugural speech that triggered it all. I believe, like many commentators, that the new president had acted with little discretion by his declaration given the expected backlash of such a statement on an administration that is barely coming in, more so one that is contending with a big legitimacy question. Moreover, these are not normal times as Nigerians are groaning under crushing economic hardships and an unprecedented level of insecurity, hence a new government which they should be trusting for reprieve should not allow itself fall into the trap of starting with an action that will subject the people to more suffering, no matter how expedient such action may appear. There must be more prudent ways to work around the situation. The Buhari government craftily delayed the doomsday until it exited and the Tinubu government appears not to have read the ominous handwriting on the wall as it naively walked into that trap which commentators like Prof. Itse Sagay and Prof. Farooq Kperogi timely warned against.
Governance requires much more than expertise in economic principles and models; it also involves some insight into human behaviour with its intricately woven constituents of perceptions, judgments, emotions, cravings and motivations. Such insight enables the leader to more holistically guage and predict impact of policy implementation. As a former boss of mine in the journalism business often says, leaders should always endeavour to “lace economics with sociology.” On this account, the Tinubu government just faltered; they must now summon all the wisdom they can muster to navigate through this gathering storm. If subsidy must be removed, much more wisdom is required in going about it.
However, in the midst of all the narrative that has delegitimised subsidy and projected it as the source of all our woes as a nation, I am persuaded to look at the issues differently. I do not believe that reversing our age-long continuous descent to ultimate socio-economic doom is entirely dependent on removing petrol subsidy as many people are making it appear. Removal of petrol subsidy no doubt will free up resources that can be invested in infrastructure and other sectors, but then experience does not give one sufficient confidence to be optimistic. Ours isn’t a nation that has shown prudence and rectitude in managing resources whether in times of plenty or in times of scarcity. Over the years the greed of the power elite (politicians and other public officials) tended to heighten as the nation’s oil wealth increased such that while pioneer leaders like Zik and Ahmadu Bello died without building mansions anywhere, a common local government chairman in today’s era of petrol-dollars may be able to boast of owning an estate in Dubai. It is only instructive, therefore, that the government headed by Zik and co achieved so much with no oil wealth. A shinning example is the first Niger Bridge with its splendid steelwork which the Balewa government built in nine months. Contrast this with the second Niger Bridge which we struggled for over 30 years to make a reality (note that the second bridge is a much simpler structure that should cost much less in the value of our currency under the Balewa government). There was the Enugu-Port Harcourt expressway built by Michael Okpara in less than two years and which for the past two decades our successive governments have been struggling to simply rehabilitate! Similar examples abound that one will write a full book to exhaustively account for how our successive governments have tended to underperform as resources at their disposal increased.
So, having plundered our wealth in the time of plenty, our political class will be struggling in vain to convince a doubting Thomas like me that bringing back the days of plenty through removal of subsidy will automatically inaugurate our much-dreamt-about economic eldorado. They will have to explain to me why nothing has changed (except worsening of hardship) since the government started partial subsidy removal beginning in 2001 under Obasanjo. These gradual steps have since resulted in the total removal of subsidy on kerosene and diesel. The prices of the two products have since skyrocketed meaning that the citizens have been paying the money the government would have spent on subsidising these products. So what improvement can the government point to as justification for the resources saved from this deregulation? What we have rather is more burden on the citizenry who in addition to paying more on kerosene and diesel still have to endure the familiar woes of darkness, bad roads, insecurity and hunger.
Thus, contrary to the impression being created, our problem in this country is not that the government does not have sufficient money to work with, rather it is that it does not know how to use money when it sees it. So our current economic dilemma, where the government has been crying that the nation is broke, is not the cause of our sickness but a symptom of the sickness. This sickness, indeed a very crippling one, is nothing but the perennial weakness of institutions which has not only rendered them incapable of checking greed, financial recklessness, nepotism, and indolence but has in fact turned them into the very instigators of these ills. Quote me anywhere! In other words, we are like a profligate young man who gets hungry every time because he habitually wastes his money on women, drugs and expensive wines. Hence his problem cannot be said to be lack of money as lack of money is a symptom of an underlying sickness he has, which is inability to manage money.
It is based on the above logic that I was never convinced by the fuel subsidy removal rhetoric of the three leading candidates in the last election. None of them was addressing the ailment; they all focused on the symptoms. Even though they might have been honest in their pledge to apply the resources saved from subsidy removal to critical development projects, they did not dwell on HOW this would be achieved in terms of addressing the many and complex institutional obstacles that have perennially stood on the way. They did not speak to the reasons why their predecessors failed in this regard. Even if they intended to do the right thing, political leadership is so much a complex zone that good intention alone is hardly enough. Bishop Matthew Kukah once spoke my mind when he noted that it would be the height of naivety for Nigerians to believe that their leaders go into office with predetermined motive of failing as leaders. No one loves to fail, and no one is averse to a good name and being acclaimed for heroic leadership. The major psychological force that propels people to seek for leadership is our innate desire for esteem, for honour, for reputation. So people want to be adjudged the best when they handle leadership positions such that not even the worst of leaders the world has seen would be happy to hear their names being associated with failure. What happens with political leadership is that the leader’s will and philosophy so often confront with a stupefyingly complex nexus of factors all pushing and pulling from all directions to have their way, in the process of which some of the pushings and pullings may become damaging to the good intentions of the leader. It is how to deal with these pushes and pullings that was conspicuously missing in the fuel subsidy rhetoric that loomed large during the last electioneering.
So as things stand now, I am still not convinced that we have done what should be done before removing petrol subsidy. People talk about fixing the refineries but my concern is something more fundamental than this – fixing the institutions.
TO BE CONTINUED
Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka.
