Thorns On The Uneven Road – Random Musing -By Jimi Bickersteth

This morning, I was just musing on the nation’s insincerity to itself and its components parts, so to speak, and in the process, shooting itself on its crippled legs and creating, parts in dire need of tesseract. How do I mean? Are we talking of a four dimensions here! Yes, if that is the case, then, which is the fourth.

Here lies the crux of the nation’s problems. Most of the time the political class and all of us often based our presumptuous assumptions on equality and equity in the nation on the Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba consciousness, but, often dilly-dally and profess ignorance of the fourth leg, the place of the minorities in the north and south axis of the federation, simplicita!

I thought of what Boko Haram, the present consistent and persistent assaults in Zamfara and Taraba had wrought on the beauty of the nation, and on its motto of unity in diversity. The killings in cold blood, the daredevilry kidnappings everywhere, the furore about the Lekki tollgate incident, the camera picked up by BRF at the site, and controversies generated by the Lagos judicial probe panel’s leaked report, the debt and energy crisis and other sundry matters and of who will be the Messiah that would save the beautiful country, Nigeria, from its masturbatory fantasies, and from the debts pit and the quagmire she has found herself, all came streaming into my thoughts process.

Fantasies kẹ̀, – Yes, if I tell you there is fire burning on water, you will be right to ask me for the ashes. We shall get there in a while; to the rot in NNPC, the comatose economy, the thinking that more money would solve the national problems – yet year in year out the deficit budgeting rituals increases not only the budget volume, but also, the artifices of the crass inability to sought to propose proven definitive remedies for rapidly diversifying the economy and constructing infrastructure, while preparing for a future of declining oil revenue now that forces of good and evil, are massed and armed and opposed, each bearing the germ of death for society and leaving in its trail rivulets of sweat running down the peoples faces.

There comes a time, this line may struck a chord, when a people get tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression; when, the government cannot fan the flames of the peoples nest, and help to separate them from their cuddling romance with increasing inflation and higher unemployment rates. The people know that, in the normative sense, higher employment even with inflation would have been desirable. The nation’s present “stagflation” recession, inflation and technical insolvency has brought even to the most incurable optimist, a sudden end to any hope or notion of another economic boom in the horizon, anytime soon.

The fantasies climaxed with the nation’s “smokestack industries”, such as steel and textiles in a state of extinction, this for many Nigerians showcased the economic and social trends of the last two decades. The nation’s economic downturn had engendered for the people a mood of disillusionment, and they had all eyes riveted on the APC government and the
“change mantras”.

The APC PMB’s approach to governance since it took over the reins of government from the PDP, have in no small measure, begin to help strengthen a renewed suspicion of the APC/PMB’s government’s ability and capacity to deal effectively and efficiently with the country’s deep-rooted sociopolitical problems, of protection of traditional values against what were the outgone administrations notoriety, profligacy and encroachments of a permissive and often chaotic modern society.

Here the nation needs PMB’s (in spite of his propensity for misstatements) unflagging optimism, doggedness and uncanny ability, to stand for it, as a figure of stability and reassurance for prosperity and relative social tranquillity while eliminating waste, abuse and fraud from the nation’s body politick.

PMB is expected to replace the mood of pessimism in the nation, and this he could do just by:
i. reviving the ailing economy and breathe life to the “smokestack industries”
ii. agree with proponents of
“supply side economics” that a greater supply of goods and services is the swiftest route to economic growth.
This options are more imperative now that less fortunate Nigerians are hurting economically, PMB has to help those people.

While doing all of these, mister president, who goes about this days wearing a cynical smile of a man full of disillusions, but anyway a smile, needs to bring the nation’s debt and defence spending under control as there are too many leakages, and on top of all these bring believe with motivation, that the nation would prosper if the power of the private sector was unleashed. One cannot live in that out of the world opulence on the rock and not carry immense responsibilities, certainly, the job entails more than flying in the air.

The PMB’s administration can make and preserve our democratic institutions to prove that the practical operation of democratic government is equal to the task of protecting the economic security of the people, and in the conflict of rights and obligations and agitations that seems to have Nigeria’s heaven’s almost overcast, palliatives and ideas for conflict resolution must be promptly administered, to leave it too late, leaves a hollow in the polity, and physical science admits that anything with a hollow will float.

Today, the nation is floating in a sea of corruption, injustices and remains a building site at 61, but one thing was certain, and that is, permissive and passive as Nigerians are, they can always make government think about them if and when they really want them to. Going down memory lane, May 29th, 2015 was a date that came after a war between experience and trust, judgment and character, and in some ways a battle of generations “57-72”. It was a date that Nigerians had a great history volume closed and another had opened. Yet, were less sanguine – and faced some deep and familiar problems once the euphoria of battle and victory dance of the “APC change” ended. PMB was expected to tap into a deep wellspring of frustration over the inability of PDP to deal effectively with economic and social issues, having successfully hammered home the theme of change, in a nation where the extent and pace of change – economical, technological, cultural, demographical and social should be unceasing.

For the ruling party, a raging storm has gathered since the ‘ide of March’, when the peoples spoke with a voice that made mincemeat of power and advantages of incumbency, and ousted the entrenched power and tendencies of the outgone PDP and the out gone president’s growing megalomania. But, with the state of affairs some six years after, it appeared that one must remind the APC government that the mandate given PMB was for him to take Nigerians from where they are to where they should be.

To date, Nigerians have been rattled, by masturbatory fantasies of billions of dollars captured from the thieving administrators and coterie of advisers of the PDP, yours sincerely would have thought that by now, the EFCC should have reined in the guilty parties, with such thieving mentality, but all Nigerians have as a buffet treat, were, self righteousness, and an administration that has only succeeded in producing a stuttering dictation of pace and rhythm without sequence or rhyme, in a nation of hungry, angry, lonely and tired people.

This disposition consequently was rubbishing the carte blanche in the Buhari’s mandate, which were, to go every way – whenever he choses, wherever he choses and however he choses, mark my words, the nation’s president is not one of the most powerful man on earth for the fun of it.

Now, the chuckles, sighs and trepidation that greeted PMB’s 2022 budget presentation as he laid the documents on the floor of the joint House, as stipulated by the constitution, had hardly gone down, the nation was agog and thrown into another frenzy of a budget with a doubtful stability and coherence between monetary, fiscal and trade. Which in a way, belied the sincerity in the cheers, ovation and purely partisan clappings mister president received, as he leaned the broom on the wall, while laying the budget proposal out for the nation like a pretty dream.

In the circumstance, the president must note that loans which he has proposed are going to be new debt on fleek. But loans are not the only tools to jumpstart an ailing economy in the face of disaster and recovery, but, investment, divestment, and putting into good uses the tons of recovered loots.

The reaction is fueled by the perception and assertion of the people, rightly or wrongly, about the impact IMF and, other loans and aid giving institutions have had on nations in economic distress, loans that promises so much but always delivered very little. Loans that aimed to reconstruct economies, but the scars the ‘loans deal’ leave behind don’t heal. Such is the strength of the myths of marching forward looking backwards.

The nation’s excessive loans requests to float its economy has dampen morale, and PMB hopes of revamping the nation’s economy on loans, is a toast of contradiction. A transparent, purposeful and efficient governance would make for an infectious collective aspirations and ambition.

The IMF templates for economic recovery are basically designed from a eyrie, knitted and suited for the developed economies of Europe. Flashback to the Greece experience. Thus, the nation needs a homespun solutions to the economic malaises confronting it, but, by first tackling and winning the war against corruption.

The IMF and or whatever source(s) PMB intends to ‘beg’ for his loans are, certainly, not the solution(s) to the nation’s economic predicament; while the loans are not an elixir, and proposing it as the final word, in the peculiar economic downturn and a global economic meltdown, suggest that the nation’s growth and plans thereof is not in our hands, that it is in the hands of some external forces, who must exercise some liberal economic control.

The nation does not expect the PMB administration to be used as pawns on the world’s economic chessboard, so much so that he will become so dazed, and succumb to further pressure for loans. It is clear though, that the pervasive inequality and wanton poverty in the land is quite challenging, and he, PMB does not have all the aces, but he must of necessity, look inward for solutions.

Yes, there is a rough balance of political forces between Nigeria and Europe, and even though the nation’s economy was given a boost by crude oil, but have not really prospered from expanded international trade and opportunities to expand enough, to shift the whole emphasis of the economy, further ruined by corruption, with the underlying trend of inflation still upwards.

The PMB’s administration, must embark on ambitious programmes that should have patterns and levels of expenditure that would yield dividends to the economy and aimed at raising living standards. The nation must not be scared of dismantling its trading economy that are been constantly threatened by an oversized and overcentralised political system, and a political apparatus and overhead that is beginning to weigh ever more heavily on the decentralised and consequently weak agricultural base and a dwindling crude oil revenue.

PMB must perfect a delicate juggling act while trying to rescue the nation from the contradictions in its development policies and nudge it towards strategies more compatible with the nation’s material resources, crude oil being one of them, so as to stop the mere surviving on instincts. The nation must be liberated from fiscal restraint and massive increases in public expenditures, including the presidency’s own Year 2022 proposed #26billion for feeding and flying.

The nation’s internal structural problems and the external factor (price of oil) fuelled by too little attention paid to administrative constraints in mobilising and managing resources for development; the public service widespread weakness of planning, decision making all contributed in no small measure to the distortion and slow growth of the nation’s economy. This grim picture should compel the nation to design programmes to:
a. Restructure and diversify the productive base of the economy in order to reduce dependence on crude oil.
b. Try to reduce the dominance of unproductive investment in the public sector.
c. Address the perennial failure to provide adequate incentives for agricultural production and for exports which really make economic adjustment inevitable. Ironically, trade-exchange rate may make a mess of the adjustment; because the tendency to let real official exchange rates become overvalued because of higher inflation at home and abroad on one hand. The adjustment will not fair well under an arrangement of increasing use of trade and payment restrictions, (the large profit opportunities offered by smuggling, the wide gap between official and black market exchange rates) – all indicate the widespreadness of overvalued exchange rates, which seems to suggest that most official foreign exchange rates do not reflect its scarcity on the other hand, while the country could not generate the much needed investment capital.
d. Economic adjustment under the prevailing economic and market conditions and coming on the heels of the dreaded covid-19 and its attendant influence on global economic conditions is a compulsive cinema of the mind, a 4D at that, especially if the future of the crude oil market, as it were, remains largely volatile, and, except if the price of oil increases appreciably and steadily in real terms, then with the increased weight of oil in total imports, even relatively small price increase will have a large impact.

It is sad that the sordid pictures that confronted the nation is that the poor may not cross the poverty line for another forty years, regardless of PMB’s wishful thinking. A thinking of planning to take a certain percentage across the poverty line with the prevailing market conditions is at best wishful. Therefore, he has to improvise, this may lead to new innovations and development which may include rebuilding, renovating, revitalising and reviving the nation’s comatose economy. Seeking for further loans without planning to put it in any productive use would be skating on thin ice

I I

The state of terrorism, banditry and the Boko Haram connection: Its debatable, and dependent on where one stand on the issue of how long it takes to hit the ground running in combating banditry, in a bastardised and dazed nation. However, if, PMB the nation’s great white hope could not contain the incursions of hopelessness, and guarantee the nation hope for a better life, then disaster is imminent.

Here, PMB & APC need to apply a comma sense, so as not to be mesmerised or overwhelmed with power obsession, and forget that the Boko Haram scourge, the Niger Delta uprising, the kidnappings and bloodbaths in and around the federation and corruption in high places, which started like startled little waves, had leapt in fiery ringlets, and has presently gained the cove with pushing prow.
The insurgencies one would like to point out were mere angst, frustrating and seething rage that have enveloped Nigerians because of the unanswered national question -and has found outlet in those major uprising, championing ethnic, minority, economic and religious causes.

The killings in Zamfara and the the seemingly endless Boko Haram scourge, the most popular items on the new stand today, one would like to submit (without prejudice or casting good sense aside, to the current efforts at stamping them out), the ongoing attempts should be a fortuitous ocassion for the government to work with an uncommon common sense, analyse and rationalise the present the past gave Nigerians so as to be able to establish and project a path for the future.

In my humble opinion, to begin with combating the insurgents bombs for bombs, and the might of a multinational force, albeit, prissy, impetuous and audacious is preposterous. It would amount to surfing the surface for the dancers agility, meanwhile, the drummers are underneath. It may end up giving the insurgents new impetus and spread its dragnet. The nation’s leaders should note that what Boko Haram lack in finesse, infantry training, intellect, recce and sophistication, it made up for in prescient, timing, precision, sheer organisation, cohesion and coupled with a supreme will, sacrifices, the natural and inate capacity and resilience of a camel in the desert.

The Boko and the like appeared to have a mentality, gusto, and ingenuity needed in a state of distress and confusion and trials and to confront them in their present form and shape would not be a stroll in the park. The nation cannot pretend that it is winning the battle and losing the war. PMB should tarry a while, suspend further decimation of the nation’s civilian population and members of its armed forces.

The nation’s leaders could still explore the peace options, even if it amount to an ego tinted and a negotiated peace. To confront the Boko Haram scourge with a combined and superior military force, in view of the unanswered national question would be a tiny way to look at the germane issues involved in the resulting insurgencies, and tiny ways lead to suffocation while the wide ways open vistas and great doors of opportunity and possibilities for the nation.

Nigeria should not trooped out trying to kill a fly with a sledge hammer, especially now that the feelings of charged air, the impression of molecules dancing through the atmosphere ready to come together and explode. There are ominous signs in the air that things are not going well, and we must collectively scream, enough of the icy silence and perfidious pretences. The strident shrill in our voices is that the government has to as a matter of priority increase the welfare of the people.

The time to throw open the door for all this little irritants making the nation look uncomfortable and vulnerable is now, but first, PMB must back a new set of economic and social measures, prominent among which are measures to fight poverty, to counter unemployment with work and to provide a social safety net.

Nigerians by now, know that the Boko Haram insurgents were really not because of PDP, but was simply a national question waiting and wailing for an answer. Therefore, the doors of solutions should be thrown open wider to accommodate all comers; divergent in mathematics makes a series increase without limit as more of its terms are added. In the door of divergence, the Nation would discover there are a couple of little irritants waiting in the wings.

III

PMB must in an interface between his person, his office and the nation, take a holistic view, winning the battle against Boko Haram is not the same thing as conquering the wars posed by the national question. i. The inconveniences in the ‘marriage of convenience’,

ii. The inherent incompatibility and chauvinistic tendencies of the metaphor of unity and diversity.

iii. The people will keep asking for answers as long as politics and religion would be with us.

Be it noted that the two basic facts responsible for why Boko Haram and other identified iridescent insurgencies were turning to breaking ice in a stream are:

i.failure of leadership, and, ii.the state of affairs in the nation further compounded by the widespread inequality, poverty, illiteracy, political apathy, all of which has eroded the moral authority of the ruling elite, and the negative intrusion of multi nationalism.

Today, very little has changed in the structure, phenomenal scope, intensity and character of political relations in the nation since the 1900s. The people have always been alienated from the decision – making process in a federation with unitary format, in its fiscal relationship, and self-interest of a ruling oligarchy and other psychological factors – rather than the rational calculations of the complex interests of the larger population. In this context, interest is defined as no more than the self interest of the ruling elite at any given time, in an immensely pluralistic and complex country.

Since the 1900s up to when the first experiment in democratic rule was truncated in January, 1966, all the evidence has always pointed to the fact that Nigeria was drifting in the direction of anarchy, but was able to paper the cracks with the reprisal coup, civil war, the long interregnum, though, at a greater cost in human resources and materially.

The Boko Haram or any insurgencies for that matter demands that PMB better judgement might have suggested that the effective solution lay in persuasion and dialogue for a negotiated peace and truce. PMB’s vacillating and dithering can be understood within the context of the conflicting and neutralising pulls of the demands of a national leader and statesman on one hand, out to prove a point, and on the other, that of a partisan politician, whose position within his party imposed on him obligations which were not always consistent with the larger interest of the state or helpful to the promotion of such interest. At the expense of repeating oneself, PMB must try harder in his handling of the national malaise, whose only panacea is a huge political will and panache or wipe his feet.

In politics you cannot do away with sentiments, however, one hopes PMB would not be encumbered and immobilised by forces which he was either unwilling or unable to control, even with his cult-following. These include but not limited to ethnicity, bitter political partisanship, intolerance, bigotry. These forces in various combinations, have at every turn undermined any potential for evolution of a common will and the kind of society – which the nation’s abundant resources could have afforded.

PMB, you can ride out the storm, that Nigerians have not found reason and strength in the anger of Boko Haram, the Herdsmen assaults, the dissolution of the nation meant they have solid faith in the Nigerian system and family.
PMB arrival at the helm in 2015 was like 1983, at a time when the nation was on the verge of economic bankruptcy and social collapse. The most important of his objective would be the rehabilitation of an economy which had been assaulted by corruption and irrational borrowing.

PMB ought to find a permanent solution to problems which lay at the core of the fractousness of the Nigeria state, and especially the genocidal violence in parts of its North East and now the North west axis. It would be the greatest of all mistakes, and second only to that of 1914, to do nothing about the national question -the logic of the philosophy of equality, of ethnic and religious domination or deprivation, inequitable and unfair distribution of economic and political power and government patronage by individuals and groups arising from their historical location in the political system.

IV

My take on the Lekki tollgate ‘leaked’ judicial probe panel’s report is that the very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. The leader does not just look at what is, if he does, he may never attain what could be. PMB even in between its snail pace, should be armoured with the primordial instincts that deploying force in any form or shape on marginalised young people growing up in deprived neighbourhoods, lacking a future and under the tutelage of depraved leaders and casting such decision in stone, would not be only follish, ultra vires, but also criminal in all intents and purposes.

To all discerning minds and protagonists of a clampdown on the people, young or old, the laws of the land does not give the president such wide power. The confusion here is that the government is confused over strategies and tactics for dealing with the anarchy in the north and the agitations in the south. It is also portraying PMB as ambivalent, by calling soldiers out to strengthen the ineffectual efforts of the police force is a unilateral declaration of war, but can we pacify the nation’s youths and teeming mass of humanity through coercion and the use of legitimate apparatus of state violence against the populace; buffet of deceit, bombings, threat of islamisation of the core north, looming sectarian warfare, and life’s frayed beyond splicing, that it is becoming impossible to pick up the strings.The only plausible thing to do is to, let them dangle, but meanwhile, follow the due process and wait for the end.

But for how long should the strings dangle, Nigerians must stop the pretences of “all is well”, because it is not. PMB must aim at finding common ground and recreating confidence in the ability of the Nigeria state to guarantee a safe environment for all to achieve their goals. It will be a great betrayal to the cause of liberation and good governance, if we assume that we can restore dignity by icy silence and force, while we continue to divide ranks and subjugate our kith and kin in servitude and degradation.

#Jimi Bickersteth
Jimi Bickersteth is a super blogger and a writer. He can be reached on twitter @alabaemanuel

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