Not This Year’s Offence

Mahmud Jega

In the middle of the dry season, the monkey was sitting peacefully on a tree branch when the farmer threw a huge stick at it. The monkey looked around at the farmer’s field. It was parched and devoid of any crops; there was nothing at all in it for the monkey to steal. So, it muttered to itself, “Whatever offence I committed could not be this year.”

The New Year 2024 began last week and, as has been my tradition over the years, I am calling on all segments of Nigerian society with the reason, intention, inclination, capacity, history, tradition, grudge and effrontery to mar the national mood to join in declaring a moratorium on actions that could cause anxiety, grief, horror, anguish and bloodshed in this New Year. Any attack launched on Nigerian people, polity and society since last week cannot be due to any offence committed this year. Neither the government nor its security agencies nor other powerful people have yet committed offences this year, so I urge all combatants with axes to grind not to throw sticks at monkeys in the middle of the dry season.

My first message goes to commodity traders. You bought food products from rural markets last year and ferried them into our towns and cities on trucks and lorries. The lorry owners charged you expensively because they said petrol, diesel, engine oil, grease and battery acid are costly. But that was last year’s fault. How can you charge us expensively this year because of the fuel and diesel prices of last year? Is that fair? Isn’t there in your vocabulary something like beginning on a clean slate?

Even those traders who brought spark plugs, bolts, nuts, bushings, lower arms, shafts, carburetors, injectors, water pumps, discs, radiators, pistons, rings, crankshafts, roofing sheets, plumbing materials, electrical fittings and medicines from China and Europe and ferried them here in containers aboard ships, why should they charge us with the prices of last year? Some of them are even adding to the prices and saying the ships that brought the goods had to turn away from the Red Sea because the Houthis are firing rockets at them. So, if a Houthi rocket narrowly missed a Maersk container ship last year and it had to go round the Cape of Good Hope, must I be the one to pay for the extra fuel and insurance cost?

I am surprised that currency speculators carried last year’s value of the naira against foreign currencies into this year. In your own business of speculation, is there nothing like closing the books at the end of the business year? Just because naira traded at 1230 to the dollar on December 31, must you sell it higher than that on New Year’s Day? How is that different from hurling a stick at the monkey in the middle of the dry season? You know that two days of work were chopped off because of Christmas and another day of work was chopped off because of New Year. Some years ago when this happened, an economist calculated that the national economy lost N1.7 trillion due to the holidays. So where do these traders expect us to get the money to pay last year’s prices for this year’s commodities?

The same thing with Boko Haram. You guys have been fighting for 12 years. You have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people, sent millions to IDP camps, destroyed homes and facilities worth billions and billions and yet, most of your most ruthless ideologues and fighters have been killed, your once fearsome media propaganda machine which used to churn out press releases, pictures and videos is now silent, your “Caliphate” has shrunk from an impressive 40 LGAs in three states to a few islets in Lake Chad and a few caves in the Mandara Mountains, your army has split into two bitterly feuding factions. Yet you are still fighting. For what? Can’t you let bygones be bygones? If it is fanaticism, are you more fanatical than the Imperial Japanese Army, with its world-famous kamikaze tactics and the seppuku traditions of its commanders? In any case, we just entered a New Year; what is the idea behind importing the grouse of ten years ago into this year? That your leader Mohammed Yusuf was summarily executed? That was long ago!  The policemen who did it, most of them are out of the force by now. Half of Nigerians today are under 25 years of age and do not even know why you guys took up arms in the first place.

I also have a message for bandits and kidnappers. You bandits, you have no notion of a sustainable business practice? You have driven farmers from their fields, stopped millions of people from travelling and drove untold numbers of people from their homes into refugee camps or outright destitution. How do you expect to continue to reap from their labour and become rich overnight? You kidnappers, I suppose you do not know about the laws of action and reaction. Due to your nefarious activities on the roads, you drove the elite into air travel, where you cannot reach them, so you grab very poor farmers and petty traders from commercial vehicles and ask them to pay ransom in millions of naira. Can you squeeze water out of stone? People who are already pummeled by high fuel prices and reduced farming and trading activities, partly caused by you, and you still expect them to make huge ransom payments?

Almost the same message for IPOB. I have never heard a more dumb idea than Monday Sit At Home, especially when traders are the most dynamic economic group in South East Nigeria, where you hope to reestablish the State of Biafra. Even worse is killing people in order to enforce Sit At Home. “All the blood we are shearing…” A million people died in May 1967 to January 1970 and if that was not enough river of blood to ensure Biafra’s survival, how much more blood must we shed in order to revive it? Can’t we leave last year’s problems at the steps of December 31 and not hurl sticks at the monkey in the middle of the dry season? 

Trade unionists are another boiling cauldron with no notion of leaving last year’s issues to last year. Between NLC, TUC and their affiliates, they have already collected a long list of items for a future “total, indefinite” strike. They include fuel price, cost of living, new minimum wage, hike in electricity tariffs, unfulfilled government promises and beating of NLC President. So, you mean anytime someone smacks Joe Ajaero’s balding head, even if it is over a community land dispute or a Local Government councillorship election, all the workers in Nigeria must go on strike? Even when it costs the country nearly two trillion naira for every few days of no work? You Mr. Ajaero, I hear that your personal ambition is to surpass Mr. Arthur Scargill, who led British coal miners on a 12 months’ strike action in 1984-85. Some say you also want to surpass George Meaney, who was President of the American Federation of Labour/Congress of Industrial Organisations [AFL/CIO] for 57 years.

I also have a word for Yahoo boys, who sit in front of desk and laptop computers and fiddle with smartphones, day in day out, looking for ways to beat banks’ billion-naira IT security systems, hack into other people’s accounts and make away with their life savings. Look, you guys are really smart, smarter that pinstripe suited bank MDs and EDs. Pray, why must you steal a few trifling millions from bank customers’ accounts? Why not instead apply your IT skills and invent applications such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Uber or Interswitch that could fetch you billions? You saw Mike Zuckerberg when he recently came here. All he had on was jeans trousers, a rumpled t-shirt, a large head and tousled hair, yet he thought up something that fetched him billions. Sure you guys can also do it. Stop importing last year’s failed solutions into the New Year and throwing Yahoo sticks at people’s accounts in the middle of our economic dry season.

Another word for young and no-so-young Nigerians who want to “Japa,” this country’s 21st Century craze.  Back in my primary school days, I read in an Economic Geography textbook about the Mexican “wetbacks,” men who swam across the Rio Grande into Texas and other southern American states. After more than 50 years, their number has only increased. Donald Trump’s wall has not deterred them. Americans, who are themselves descendants of illegal immigrants from Europe who hit the shores without obtaining visas from Native American chiefs who owned the land, have now erected all kinds of barricades to stop Latino migrants. In our own case, Nigerian youths try to enter Europe not across a small river but across the formidable Sahara Desert and the equally daunting Mediterranean Sea, in dinghies operated by descendants of Barbary pirates, dodging NATO naval vessels, many of them drowning in the waves, there to lie near sunken Roman artifacts, sunken Mesopotamian trading vessels and downed World War Two Axis and Allied warships.

My last word today is for jilted lovers and those who kill because of envy. Last year, we had many cases in Nigeria of young wives killing husbands or otherwise severing critical parts of their bodies, allegedly because of forced marriage; wives bathing the children of co-wives in hot vegetable oil; and of jilted men murdering their former fiancées. Look here, young Nigerian men and women. If our generation had used similar tactics whenever we were jilted or forced into marriage, would there have been anyone around by now to give birth to you? If you were jilted last year, begin the New Year on a clean slate. Don’t hide in a dark alley and attempt to strangle a former fiancée. It is worse than hurling a stick at the monkey in the middle of the dry season.