As Nigeria negotiates and navigates its structural challenges…
2027. That’s not a number, it’s meant to be a threat. The only way to escape that threat is to return fuel subsidy as it was. Drag the naira to its dollar-augmented cosmetic value and force the cost of living down. If President Tinubu has direct or some other form of access to social media, he’d have seen some of these positions. Nothing is impossible, with God that is. At least according to Luke 1:37.
Adidas, thinking that we wouldn’t notice, inverted it Impossible is nothing. Motivational speakers reworded it, “if you can conceive it, you can achieve it”. Physics addresses the cost of such lofty thoughts, “to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. This applies in nature, matter and energy. The sun influences rainfall, when you kick a ball, its movement depends on how hard you kick, how you kick it and the prevailing conditions in which it was kicked. In social systems, reaction can sometimes be a lot more than or less than action. That is before you even consider unintended reactions and their multiple chains.
During the elections, everyone knows the solution to Nigeria’s problems. The popular ones, at least from the consensus position by all the major candidates is, the removal of subsidy. The other such position that had most of the candidates thinking in the same direction was the removal of multiple foreign exchange regimes. Both positions are easy ones in theory; you don’t want to keep burning, literally in this case, billions of dollars via petrol subsidies whilst your basic infrastructure remain inadequate, you are short of schools, they are barely good enough where available and you cannot even consider a test for the teachers because you are not able to deal with the consequences of knowing what they don’t know.
Moving resources from subsidizing petrol to advancing other pressing needs sounded like the most obvious policy direction. One of the candidates in the last election described the fuel subsidy regime as an organized crime. I once met with a presidential aspirant who called it a scam. As with the divide between rhetoric and reality, that aspirant later became president and soon got swept by billions of dollars in subsidy payments.
As a politician, your best chances of not going back on your words is to lose elections. That way, you can continue to revel in saying what you would have done better, knowing that no matter how much you say you’d do, there is no budget for your promises. Barack Obama’s Promised Land is a long tale in the different worlds an organizer or activist dwells in and the one that an elected politician must navigate.
Back to what is not impossible. Nigeria can sell petrol at N100/litre again. To do that though, it’d have to borrow several billions of dollars to meet the gap in each litre of petrol it subsidizes. To find a lender for such an amount, it’d have to show that by borrowing the money for such an endeavour, it will be helping to build an economy capable of paying its bills and its debts. Unfortunately, it cannot use its previous records of doing same to back its argument. Its argument wouldn’t have a reference in any sound economic ideology, so chances are that no one is going to loan it money to subsidize fuel consumption.
If theoretically it finds a creditor with no care for what it wants to do with the money, it must do so knowing that its local currency will be under even more intense pressure. To reduce that, it could borrow some more dollars to defend the naira. If done, both scenarios will lead to a stronger naira — on the surface — and cheaper fuel — at the pump. We could do that for a few more years again, until we return to this exact point. In essence, Newton’s Third Law will ultimately apply, in this case, with reaction being bigger than action.
What is the way out? Sincerely speaking, easier said than done. Anyone who tells you that the way out is easy is either a sincerely ignorant person or a wicked liar. Our choices through the years have compounded and if we don’t pay now, we or some other people at a later time in the future will pay anyway. In truth, the choice of paying now was not entirely in our hands. The entire system was going to crash anyway. When the newly inaugurated President Tinubu said, “subsidy is gone”, it was more an announcement than a decision. That was the state of Nigeria at that point in time. He was reading the news.
The role of government is not just to make policies, it has a responsibility to create the environment in which such policies are understood by the people. It also must lead by example. “Nigeria is broke” appears to be apparent enough to most Nigerians, but the privileges that public office holders continue to enjoy does not reflect any signs of poverty or its impending visit. The big cars are still being bought, office furniture and equipment continue to enjoy quick devaluations, salaries and allowances are growing like a baby constantly fed on milk and honey.
In a discussion with my friend, Brian Kagoro, he helped to nuance the much touted, “stomach infrastructure”. We talk about, “stomach infrastructure” in a way that seeks to make it look like only the poor care for basic survival. What are estacodes? Mental infrastructure? What is housing allowance? All those privileges enjoyed by the elected and appointed are elite forms of stomach infrastructure. Advanced stomach infrastructure at best. That we choose to call them by different names does not isolate them from what they really are; benefits that address physical needs of people.
When we see these things for what they are, we will have a better appreciation for even policies that we are left without a choice but to pursue. That appreciation will reflect in the choices that political office holders make on their own forms of stomach infrastructure.
This piece appears in THISDAY Newspaper 11 October 2024
