WHO CHOSE CHEAPER PETROL OVER BETTER SCHOOLS?

We pay for the choices we make, argues JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA

I was scrolling through X, when I saw two tweets. The first read, “Just a soft reminder. Fuel was N197 per litre on the morning of May 29, 2023”. The response read, “And Nigeria FG was paying over 20 trillion naira yearly to subsidize the fuel and defend the Naira. I guess you’ll like to remind us of our years of wastage”. Like most things over the decades, the Nigerian government has not done a great job of making Nigerians see the cost of cheap dollars and even cheaper petrol. Both subjects aren’t just economic questions, they have socio-political ramifications. However, many citizens don’t care for the reaction. Why should they?

The government could make petrol sell at N100/litre. The same could be done for the dollars. They could buy dollars at the prevailing market price and then decide to sell it to Nigerians lucky enough to buy it from the banks at any cheap price set by the government. Nothing is impossible, it just comes at a cost.

The price of petrol and all the actions leading up to it is more a political issue than it is an economic one. An active Dangote refinery does not mean a straightforward path to the cost of fuel and its accessibility. There are other interests to consider. Without these considerations, things could happen accidentally. Who likes accidents?

At times over the years, it has felt like there are saboteurs who are more powerful than the government. Maybe they are not, maybe it just appears so. Take banks declaring stupendous profits for instance, amidst the inability of poor Nigerians to understand the many charges the banks arbitrarily impose on them. If you open the same type of account in say the United Kingdom, the United States and then Nigeria and then leave your money for a year, you will meet a little more than your money in the U.S. and the UK — or at worst, your exact money — but your money would have evaporated a little bit in the Nigerian bank. It’d have suffered some charges or the other.

It is not unusual to see American banks that are over 100 times bigger than Nigerian banks yet are only able to make profits that are only about 15 times bigger. There is something there if you look harder, may be it is the economic genius of Nigerian bankers over their American counterparts. Or the Central Bank and its policies. I should not digress for far too long though.

It is probably deemed a national security issue. If not, I often wonder why the government has not shown Nigerians the true state of their economy. That way we get to understand that contrary to what we think we know, we are barely getting by as a country. This is where the activists and grants-fueled advocates will remind you of the fact the VP’s residence was renovated at a certain cost and that the president spent this and that amount on whatever and that the First Lady also had some amount of money spent on her cause. And they’d be right about those arguments. Because government has not exactly moved like it is broke. National Assembly members are enjoying more privileges today than they did when the government was not said to be broke.

The other truth though is, even if the National Assembly earned less — and they ought to earn a lot less in a way that reflects not just the current state of the economy but by default — we still wouldn’t have enough to fund our fuel and dollar indulgences. Even if the VP’s residence was not renovated — and they could have decided not to renovate the residence and may be just have him stay wherever he was staying before he got elected VP — the money wouldn’t have made any marginal difference to the state of our government’s ability to balance the budget. I ought to say the same argument applies to other such expenses that are deemed unnecessary. Sadly, you need to force many into understanding that more than one truth can co-exist; the presidential villa should have its budget reduced to reflect the state of Nigeria’s financial position, that action will not create a supply of enough money to fundamentally change the state of the economy. They should still stop moving like they govern a rich country.

Many people, especially politicians themselves think of sums of money in terms of their absolute size. That is also why we think we are a rich country. We hardly ever see our numbers against the reality of our population. If we did, we’d better understand the true state of our collective wealth — or poverty — and we probably will be inclined to push for decisions that better reflect the need to direct our limited resources into economic structures and infrastructure with a more telling impact on most citizens and on our collective future.

That said, I understand the allure of cheap dollars and even cheaper petrol. I even understand these more against arguments that, “that is the only thing poor Nigerians enjoy” because of course, there are no free and cheap schools, to university level.

You’d have to understand why it is hard for the average person to understand the advantage of cheaper and better schools. Because the reward for cheap petrol and cheap dollars are here and now, schools don’t deliver nearly as fast rewards.

In the end, we all pay for these choices. That’s fair enough. And we wonder why we have been so poor all these years. Why is it easier to understand the effects of poor decisions at the individual level yet it is treated like a quadratic equation once its time to apply the same logic to the country? That said, Nigerians deserve cheap petrol and cheap dollars. We do, like they have it in most other countries with great productivity as ours. To not think this way is to be evil. I kid you not. We chose cheaper petrol over better schools. That’s wise too.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing