“It is the wise we send on errands, not the long-legged”
African proverb
It is understandable that President Tinubu is determined to achieve results in a number of key aspects of our national life. His is a presidency that took a long time in incubation, and its realization was one of the most challenging for any president since 1999.
As he said himself, it was time to be on the driver’s seat, after successfully delivering the ambitions of many others. No Nigerian president has assumed leadership in the context of the size and complexities of challenges as Tinubu just did. His touted managerial capacities, finely-honed instincts for talents and skills and steely political will, will be severely tested against deeply-entrenched cynicism over the capacity of political leadership to positively alter the state of the massive collection of challenges that is Nigeria. He will be aware of a tough challenge that seeks to bring an end to his presidency by the judiciary, as well as potential sabotage from those elements with bulging skeletons in cupboards he may be persuaded to look into.
Above all, he will want to put an early distance between him and our sad previous eight years he will be expected to both clean up and build a future over.
Still, you have to wonder if Tinubu’s understanding of the links between energy, distance and strategy are sound enough to win him a race he must not lose. As things stand, he has four years to make a case for another four from Nigerians. These will be four years that could make the difference between continued decline or defining reversal, so the stakes cannot be higher.
History has now recorded Tinubu with the courage to put a final nail on the coffin of fuel subsidy. Courage, however, is not always a vindicating virtue in politics . In many instances, courageous decisions have left wrecks behind them, although it has also recorded other courageous decisions that have gone down in history as great departure points.
Tinubu’s courage to bury the corpse of the fuel subsidy gave us a new world, warts and all. The warts speak first, and do so in a most emphatic manner. They remind Nigerians groaning under unspeakable levels of poverty that they will have to be poorer before their lives become better. They do not have a choice, only hope that they see evidence of compassion for their plight, as well as assurances that leaders who tell them that they know the way do not lose it, or lose their heads when it is needed most.
This is where leadership is called upon to show its quality, the point where doubts are assuaged, despair is replaced with hope, and cynicism with confidence. The courage to abandon the sinking ship of subsidy ought to have contingencies that should reduce the damage from sinking. It must have registered by now that there are serious misgivings over the response of the administration to the compelling demands for some form of relief from the effects of the subsidy removal.
It is not in the size of the relief package, although it could be bigger if current constraints had not made it difficult to expand. N500b is a huge amount of money, but it is unlikely to be appreciated in a context where people have become accustomed to hearing how trillions have been wasted or mis-applied.
Perhaps those who do the administration’s thinking are not aware that ‘palliative’ is a four-letter word for Nigerians. Not its meaning as relief, but its abuse and association with some of the worst sins of the previous administration. The idea that trillions have gone to the bank accounts of Nigerians classified as poor for years, or other battery of anti-poverty schemes administered with the most minimum of scrutiny and accountability has been condemned in the minds of Nigerians. The bottom of the barrel was the tragic, nation-wide scramble for locked-up food items and other relief materials meant to be shared to poor Nigerians who had suffered during COVID-19 lockdowns.
Any association or similarity with the mode or system of using public funds to cushion effects of hardships and poverty by the previous administration is bound to be roundly questioned, at the very least.
Perhaps it is the lack of time to design alternatives to a discredited past, or, it is the case that the administration feels the anguish of the poor so much that it was stampeded into action. Stampede is the only polite word that fits a decision to use a pre-determined 12m households and pencil them down to receive N8000 each over a six-month period, from money borrowed by a previous administration that approached foreign loans with the assurance that the world would end next week.
The mere thought that someone somewhere will chalk up this assault on a beleaguered people as relief in six months’ time is insulting. If there are words worse than insulting, they will fit a major, defining first few steps of a new administration. If we sustain our simile about races, this decision will fit the runner who goes in the opposite direction of other runners, believing that he will run a shorter route. It will also fit the runner who beats the starter’s gun, runs out of the track and seeks shorter routes to the finish.
A friendly advice to an administration trying to put its feet firmly on the ground in preparation for a tough race against time, tough competition and limited resources will be to re-assess this worn-out and deceptively simple idea that handing out N8000 to 12 million Nigerian families for six months will cushion the hardship being experienced by over 180 million Nigerians. N8000 will not feed a family of five for more than three days. It will not cover transportation cost of the working head of the family for a week.It will not pay the doctor and buy prescribed drugs for malaria for one child.It will not provide capital for the smallest rural enterprise. It will not pay school fees in a primary school for one child.
The entire six months package (N64,000) will not pay the rent of a two-bedroom apartment in a slum. It will not buy the administration goodwill even among recipients.It will create hostile citizens in millions who have been left out to bear the brunt of the subsidy removal without even the pretensions of a cushion. It is the wrong way to go, when you apply medication on an ailment that leaves the patient worse-off.
Part of N500b will make a dent on the serious dangers which many parts of the North face by under-producing food because of the combined effects of insecurity and lack of the finance to buy fertilizer and other inputs.It will begin to sniff the huge threat of food insecurity which the nation definitely faces, and this administration says it is prioritizing. Part of N5000b will substantially provide roofs over heads of rising numbers of IDPs in many parts of the North Central, as well as support security and public safety officials to resolve horrible inter-communal conflicts in the region. Part of N5000b will reinforce the vital imperative to bring an end to the paralyzing sit-at-home in the South East which makes citizens feel as if they live in another country other than Nigeria. It will improve an atmosphere that will allow resumption of an exchange economy, manufacturing and enterprise in a region that has been badly damaged by armed, organized criminality hiding behing pedestrian politics.
Part of N5000b will reduce crude theft which bleeds our economy and the criminalizing of hundreds of thousands of young people. Part of N5000b will improve infrastructure in the South West and strengthen an expanding digital economy which promises to provide another backbone to the nation’s economy.
Putting a little bit of money in the pockets of the poor and sending him off to multiply it may have worked in countries where there are conditions for sustaining small businesses and investments. In our current circumstances, you need to create those conditions first. Without them, you are planting seeds in dried soil with no prospects of nourishment. It does not help that the planned relief package coincides with information of huge allocations to the legislature for services. This is the legislature Tinubu fought tooth and nail to install. It gets worse when the dollar looks like it will sell for N1000 in the next few months. Hearts of the poor will sink deeper with reports that the price of PMS has officially been raised.
Perhaps a cabinet and a few more hands and minds around governance and economic policy around him may succeed in anchoring President Tinubu’s presidency down around a few fundamentals. One of these, hopefully, will be that renewed hope is about people, and it has to be carefully crafted with vision, wisdom and a sense of mission. He can win this race, but not if he ignores its rules and what he is running for.
Baba-Ahned is a former Federal Permanent Secretary
