Nigeria: Bound To Socioeconomic Decay 

By Akin Osuntokun 

The moment it was announced that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was going to enlist the collaboration of the Supreme Court in seeking financial autonomy for the 774 local governments, I knew it was game over. What we know of the relationship between the Nigerian judiciary and President Tinubu is of the dimension that if he requested the court to jump, the response would be how high. 

My experience (of fulfilling all righteousness in seeking judicial redress of the INEC subversion of the last Presidential election) is quite baffling in an important respect. The Judges, all the way to the Supreme Court, were not just overtly biased against the complainants, they were outrightly malicious as evident in such verbal assaults as ‘how dare you bring this unworthy evidence and witness..”.

In a conspiratorial demonstration of guilt conscience, the Chairman of the Appeal Court Tribunal actually acknowledged as such in his closing remarks. He winked at the lawyers caught on the wrong foot of the judgement that there is enough room for compensation in the post election season. The Supreme Court panel fared worse. 

The status of the Nigerian Judiciary today is that the greatest weapon any appellant can get in winning cases at the Supreme Court is the nod of the Nigerian President. Talk of the prevalent phenomenon of ‘state capture’. This typical subversive government behaviour is complemented by the short attention span and instant gratification syndrome of many Nigerians. The inability to reconcile short term, mid term and long term perspectives. This predisposition often renders many Nigerians easy prey to populist political predators. And so, the purveyors of a return to ‘True Federalism” excitedly became the choristers of Local Government autonomy. 

An averagely talented political strategist knows that the Nigerian State Governors are sitting ducks for the deflection of the boiling angst of Nigerians against the elected government. And so when Tinubu, in desperate need of a respite, threw a shrouded poisonous feed into the fish pond, unguarded Nigerians swooped on the poison as if their lives depended on it. 

Totally consumed with venom at the targeted despised state governors, they hollered that a totally disreputable INEC should usurp the role of the state electoral commission in the conduct of elections into the local governments, the constitution be damned. As Saint Bernard is quoted to have said, “the road to hell is often paved with good intentions”. They are the kind of compelling temptations that are brandished by Satan to lure unsuspecting victims to his kingdom. As in a Yoruba repartee, enu okere, ni okere fi npe olode (the squirrel is given to summoning the attention of the hunter with its uncontrolled heckling).

In a recent commentary on Nigeria, the Financial Times of London noted ‘It does not help either that the state is implicated in the wholesale theft of oil, depriving the nation’s coffers of billions of dollars’. Yet as we speak, I do not know of a single Nigerian who has been held accountable for the worst scandal in the history of Nigeria. Not only has anyone been held accountable, the key figure at the centre of it all namely Mele Kyari has been commended for a job well done hence his reappointment as the Group Managing Director of the NNPC for another five years tenure. 

The Nigerian President had no qualms directing two hundred million Nigerians to seek atonement for the sins of people like Kyari and his accomplices have largely perpetrated. Where then is the logic in hounding former Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele if Kyari is held not to have committed any crime?

I have just read that the President has signed the N70000 minimum wage bill into law. The question arises, does this amount include housing and transportation allowance? Does it take into account the potential health bill, electricity bill and school fees?. If it does not, can we in good conscience, blame any of these victims were they to seek recourse to extra legal measures to make ends meet? Should we not worry at the mentality of a Nigerian President, who, in the thick of the existential challenges Nigeria confronts, chooses to prioritise an inexplicable fiddling with the National anthem?. 

General Muhammadu Buhari may be the worst President in the history of Nigeria but he is easily one of the most politically effective politicians to emerge from the Northern region. Have you wondered why a man once reputed as the avenging Angel of corruption turned out to have run the most corrupt government? 

No matter how false his anti-corruption reputation is, he must have come early to the realisation that Nigeria is a lost cause (as it stands today). Hence the need to make hay (for his people) whilst the sun is still shining. Given its free fall, there is hardly anyone in a position of authority today (including otherwise good people) who is not mentally and realistically predisposed towards personal exploitation of office. 

The quick learner that he is, his successor has comprehensively followed in his footsteps. You can rightly guess that the main intra Yoruba political argument today is between those who realistically believe that we should stand behind Tinubu and join the multitude to do the Buhari evil and those who do not. 

To quote the Financial Times once again, ‘Nigeria’s elite learnt a lesson that was toxic to the nation’s prospects: why produce anything when you can make a killing through arbitrage?’ What the London publication is telling us is that for Nigeria to endure and prosper there has to be the acculturation of the ethic of a positive correlation between productivity and reward. The prevailing Nigerian status quo ethos is nearly the exact opposite of this ethic.

In the liability for corruption and the damage it does to the country, many will find it difficult to believe that the civil servants often tower over political office holders. Both of them view any capital expenditure of the government from the standpoint of how they individually stand to benefit, how much capital projects are prone to corruption and personal enrichment. Moreso the former. 

Sundry projects have been sabotaged, stalled and killed the more impervious they are to graft. It was within the cesspool of this culture that the National Independent Power Project, NIPP of the President Olusegun Obasanjo government found its Waterloo. Obasanjo domiciled the execution of the project in an inter-agency task force not solely the Ministry of power. 

Nonetheless, the Ministry was charged with the provision of the blueprint of the logistics of delivery, especially the conveyance of the imported power turbines to the permanent sites. The turbines duly arrived on schedule only for the suppliers to discover that many of the access road bridges to the different destinations could not withstand the weight of the turbines. Hence they were stranded in Lagos for years. In prior full knowledge of this incapacity, the staffers of the Ministry of power simply looked the other way.

The theoretical and practical response to the menace of corruption is the dual instruments of incentives and deterrence measures. The deterrence consists of rigorously applied punitive measures for those apprehended of corrupt practices. But you do not need to look far to see the extraordinary failure of lawfully prescribed deterrence measures in Nigeria today. Just go and take another look at the record and reputation of the man who sits atop the Nigerian parliament as Senate president. 

At the moment of his election to the exalted office no one had a worse and active case of corruption culpability before the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

The dictionary meaning of incentive is “a thing that motivates or encourages someone to do something”. In contemporary Nigeria, is there any better incentive than leading by example and sharing empathy with the toiling masses whose miserable standard of living has been further degraded? Economic recession is not the problem of Nigeria. It is routine stuff for all societies and individuals to go through periodic crisis and challenges. So the prevailing economic crisis of Nigeria is nothing peculiar. 

What matters most at the end of the day is the willingness and ability of the leadership to grapple with the challenge, to mobilise the citizenry behind the effort of the government. When Ghanians saw the publication of a shirtless Jerry Rawlings driving a tractor to cultivate a farm, they were more than happy to line up behind their leader regardless of whether or not they were able to obtain three square meals a day. Whereas in Nigeria, four hundred and sixty parliamentarians were buying two hundred million naira worth of luxury SUVS for each one of them while their country was rated as the poverty capital of the world.

Let Dangote Be

“The Pipeline Infrastructure at the Dangote Petroleum Refinery is the largest anywhere in the world, with 1,100 kilometres to handle 3 Billion Standard Cubic Foot of gas per day. The Refinery alone has a 435MW Power Plant that is able to meet the total power requirement of Ibadan DisCo*.

“The Refinery will meet 100% of the Nigerian requirement of all refined products and also have a surplus of each of these products for export”. 

I do not dismiss nor trivialise the reservations about Dangote but they are inevitably exaggerated. Right now in Nigeria, he personifies, warts and all, the Peter Obi political vision of moving Nigeria from ‘consumption to production’. It is the reason I’m a fan of the Max Weber thesis of ‘the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’, especially the inference of attitudinal dedication to money-making and rational self control as sine qua non to capitalist development. 

Like many others, I was struck by the video clip of a home video practitioner, who, in a burst of prescience, accurately predicted the fate that lies ahead of the Dangote refinery, way back in 2015. The sum of it was that it was fated to become the victim of a devious Nigerian dysfunction. That no matter its conspicuous utility it stands to be sabotaged. We can begin to decode the prediction when we factor the vested interest of the oil import cabal with tentacles at the highest echelon of government. 

The likelihood is that a similar vested interest cabal is at the root of the perennial failure of Nigeria to meet ten percent of its electricity power requirement. Let us hope that the panacea recently proposed by the Nigerian President to solve the contrived obstruction against Dangote would be allowed to work.