My travel from Onitsha to Orlu in Imo state last weekend once again strengthened my conviction that the policy of subsidy removal and all the discussions and debates around it merely constitute an unwanted distraction. The Bola Tinubu federal government and other administrations before it as well as all the major candidates in the last presidential election had pushed a too simplistic narrative that tends to purport that subsidy removal will be the bedrock of the economic transformation of our land going forward. I have disagreed with the argument of the inevitability of subsidy removal for reasons I have always stated. We shall return to this shortly.
My journey to Imo state through Onitsha once more brought me face-to-face with the intolerably shameful state of our road infrastructure. At Onitsha-Owerri road, not too far away from Obodoukwu junction, I discovered that what was, a few years ago, mere potholes has turned to a long ditch where vehicles have to dangerously swim through a lake which continuous rainfall has turned that portion of the road to. We all had to alight to lessen the weight of the bus in order to increase its chances of swimming without getting trapped.
At Awo-Idemili in Imo state, the very bad portion of Ihiala-Orlu road at a particular point simply became so unusable that the driver had to divert to explore alternative routes through adjoining villages. It was another perilous journey along narrow, bumpy and snaking untarred way until thankfully we connected a tarred road that smoothly got us to Orlu through Akatta, Okporo and Amaifeke. By then a journey of less than an hour had taken more than two hours!
As we struggled through the tumultuous and painful journey I kept asking myself whether all this infrastructure decay can be attributable to subsidy. Are we unable to set up an efficient and sustainable road maintenance mechanism simply because the government has been subsidising petroleum products? The Onitsha-Owerri road was built in its present dualised form by the federal government beginning from 2002 to around 2013. Various portions of that road have since begun to crack, and in our characteristic laid-back attitude to maintenance, we appear hell-bent on allowing things degenerate so badly as exemplified by the portion where vehicles currently swim. Also, erosion is fast eating into the Oba portion of that road and we appear to be in no hurry to act.
Similarly, the Imo state portion of the Ihiala-Orlu road was first built by Sam Mbakwe with a major rehabilitation done by Governor Achike Udenwa 20 years ago. Again was fuel subsidy the reason we left what was mere potholes grow into ditches and valleys on that once smooth road? Besides road infrastructure, is fuel subsidy the reason for our absolutely inefficient power sector that generates more darkness than light? Is it the cause of the continuous weakening of the naira such that a currency that was once at par with or even higher than the dollar today stands as a mere worthless paper to dollar? Is the fact that successive governments paid subsidies on petroleum products the cause of the ridiculously low quality of our education and health systems? The questions can be endless.
The above posers may sound ridiculous but they indeed reflect the underlying sentiment in the narrative of our ruling class including those of them that contested for the presidency in the 2023 elections. The way subsidy removal loomed large in the campaigns began to give one the impression that in the minds of these candidates, their success as the president would depend on what happens to subsidy. I find this sentiment unconvincing. In the June 4, 2023 edition of this column, I had written as follows:
“… 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… 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…
“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.”
My point has been that governance goes far beyond taking economic decisions. It essentially includes measures related to rule of law, accountability and attitude change. These measures are political, legal and moral in character showing the vastness of the governance sphere. These intangible elements of governance are indeed the fulcrum on which productive leadership is rooted. Good roads, steady power supply and well equipped hospitals will naturally follow when governance becomes grounded in accountability and rule of law.
Stated differently, without first addressing our perennial disease of poor accountability, our quest to reverse its symptoms of poor infrastructure, poverty, high cost of living and general socio-economic woes will all come to naught. Hence, before swallowing the argument of subsidy removal and its accompanying promise of palliatives and eventual economic breakthrough, we need to first ask the question as to what has happened to the humongous wealth this nation has earned over the decades, and what has indeed changed that we now have to trust the government to more judiciously utilise whatever funds to be saved through subsidy removal. But then it’s not just about the greed of the ruling class; we should also be concerned about the greed of the entire public officials including civil servants and those in management positions in various public institutions who cannot absolve themselves of complicity in the ravenous looting that has brought our wealthy nation to its knees. Has anything changed about them and their attitude to public service?
Truth is that we’re unnecessarily confusing the narrative by spending too much time and energy thinking and talking about how subsidy removal will inaugurate our much-dreamt-about economic promised land. This is a big distraction that is preventing us from paying attention to the very nucleus of our woes as a people. Also distractive is the narrative that there is a better way to implement subsidy removal and in regard to which some persons are believing one of the presidential candidates holds the magic wand.
We’re leaving out more profound and more critical aspects of governance to merely focus on a single economic policy. It’s one thing to have an economic policy, while it’s another to have the right value system and institutional efficiency to successfully implement the policy. What we have been lacking as a nation is the right value system and healthy institutions. We have never been in want of sound policies.
My final take therefore is that we could have managed our present predicament better without having to subject the poor to the suffocating hardships they’re currently experiencing. The impression that subsidy must go before we can grow as a nation is, to me, nonsensical. If we manage things well, we shall excel irrespective of petroleum subsidy like the US and other nations that have been implementing such policy. If we do not do this, we will fail even with subsidy gone.
Of course, we’ve since removed subsidy on diesel and kerosene, yet in the past few years we have cried of dwindling resources much more than we have ever cried in the many years when the two products were being subsidised. For God’s sake, we should have seen where our problems really lie and simply take the bull by the horn instead of acting as though everything depends on subsidy. Let the poor breathe!
Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.
