By Tatalo Aremu
The Baleful Stench of Crude Oil
After some bizarre back and forth, and some tedious toing and froing , what many people feared most has finally become reality. The pump price of premium motor spirit, otherwise known as petrol, has been officially jerked up very close to the a thousand naira per litre benchmark. With NNPC already dropping some ominous hints, most people believe that crossing the one thousand naira per litre benchmark is a question of time. From all available indices and statistics, this latest increase will add considerably to the misery and burden of the average Nigerian. But for the demonstrated capacity of Nigerian people for heroic endurance, one would have said that the latest increase may well be the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back.
Hope springs eternally from the Nigerian heart. But with the naira floating helplessly and heedlessly in a vortex of global instability and with no commensurate local production to back it up, it is obvious that the situation is even more precarious than had been hitherto been imagined. The auguries are dire. And the authorities are understandably quiet and reticent about the latest development. With the substantial and substantive issues surrounding the last nation-wide upheaval not quite resolved, with workers in most states still being paid the old wages, government credibility has suffered a crushing blow. In the coming weeks, it will have to fight hard to avoid its legitimacy from being added to the casualty list.
We urge caution on all sides. This is a very dicey moment for the nation. Nigerians are experiencing a unique type of humiliation which makes people susceptible to sullen dark furies. With the civil populace battered by unrelenting social adversity into a state of helpless perplexity, this is not the time to goad or bait them into confrontation as this might open the door to anarchy and chaos. What is needed now are cogent, well-reasoned and clearly explicated reasons as to why the country’s current economic flight path can only come up against terminal turbulence.
Nigeria seems to have run into a perfect economic storm: overreliance on oil and a mono-cultural economy which kills off initiatives in other sectors, exponential population growth without commensurate economic development, a restive youth population unemployable in the main, enemy nationals with ancestral grouses bent on bringing the country to heel through unrelenting economic sabotage, a multi-ethnic populace with contradictory and countervailing modes of production, religious charlatans who discourage honest work and active toil in the name of some misbegotten paradise either here or somewhere else, and an irresponsible political elite that feed fat on the toil and misery of the people.
No amount of economic acrobatics can make a dent on the problems or prise Nigeria away from the chokehold of their strangulating malignancy as long as the foundational contradictions persist. In the light of the ethnic cross wiring no national mobilization for a worthy cause such as available to the Chinese, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Russians and the Singaporeans in their moment of existential impasse is possible. Not only this, at every turn, we find the political membrane shielding the unborn so unusually tough and unyielding making delivery without significant rupturing impossible. Nigeria’s political elite have so postponed or shied away from this rupturing out of fear or concern for their own suzerainty that it is now almost impossible to give birth to a new nation without tear and tears.
We can now begin to disaggregate some of the problems loosely and randomly. When a Minister of Education tries to impose the avoidable dictates of his own cultural habitat as a national policy on minimum age requirement for university entry, it is obvious that he is viewing national manpower development from the narrow prism of his sociocultural habitus. When the selfsame person floods what is supposed to be a national list with nominees from his catchment area, it is obvious that he is laboring under the feudal logic of patronage and preferment.
Second, had both the pastoralists and the farmers been of one ethnic bloc rather than mutually antagonistic ethnicities with countervailing worldviews on agriculture and husbandry, they would have been persuaded of the complementary and mutually beneficial nature of their calling. Had there been an infringement, the authorities would have adjudicated promptly. More than a decade after the problem reared its head the authorities have been unable to come up with an acceptable solution out of the fear of being adjudged partisan. In the process valuable life, farm produce and diary have been lost, impacting considerably on the capacity of the nation to feed itself.
Third, a predominantly illiterate population spawned by religious and social contradictions in a politically dominant section of the country, socially maladjusted youth that are ready recruits for political conflagration, disaffected nationals pursuing a single minded project of economic destabilization of the nation and a parasitic caste that feeds off the national grid without contributing anything have all combined to hoist the nation with its own economic petard. Short of splintering the country into several nations, which is an impossibility for now, the problem requires extreme political will and extraordinary wisdom if we are not to end up like Yugoslavia or Somalia. Elections without elite consensus or general goodwill produce winners without overwhelming acceptance who do not feel they owe the old hegemonic coteries or the general populace anything.
This is where we are at the moment and how we got there. Covering everything in its slick malevolence is an oil sleaze of historic and monumental proportions which stinks to the high heavens and makes it impossible for the average individual to breathe normally. The reliance on crude oil and the mono-cultural economy it breeds has led Nigeria to virtual economic ruination, unable to balance its book and unable to pay its workforce. Pilfering on an outlandish scale abounds with both the government and the populace too weak to do anything about it. All the attempts to diversify the economy have collapsed at the altar of profligacy and mismanagement. Nigeria is a classic study in how not to manage humongous resources and leave something for prosperity. The phenomenon is worthy of being studied in advanced classes of economics.
From all indications, Nigeria is trapped by a modern equivalent of the Spanish Curse, a situation of sudden outlandish wealth followed by ruinous inflation, stunted institutions, declining productivity particularly in the manufacturing industry, loss of elite vigour and vision and the rise of a parasitic elite class feeding fat on the proceeds of misery and international banditry. This was how it happened. The Spanish conquest of the ancient civilizations of Latin America brought gold and associated resources to metropolitan Spain on a scale which had not been seen anywhere in the world since the advent of Mansa Musa, the footloose and profligate Mali emperor who took off with the entire gold in his empire on pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither him nor his gold returned.
Of particular relevance to this tale of untrammelled greed was the infamous Potosi mines which was a site of unspeakable human horror and degradation on a scale that was never seen since humans emerged from their primitive caves. The Spanish Conquistadors literally worked the native Indian populace to death and then disposed of them in shallow graves. Virtually the entire populace was wiped out by this callous treatment and associated diseases brought from Europe. When they proved not equal to the task, the natives were replaced by Africans brought from the old continent as slaves who were given the same treatment.
The native Dominican missionary, Bartolome de Las Casas, although an initial beneficiary of the heist, became so appalled and taken aback by the dehumanization that he took to endless railing and inveigling against what he considered to be a monumental crime against humanity. So trenchant and eloquent was the Spanish friar in his critique of colonialism and slavery that his life was constantly in danger.
But Spain did not have the last laugh. Inflation arising from the sudden influx of gold brought economic ruination. Its path to political and economic modernity was stalled and its road to colonial superstardom was blocked by loss of initiative to more competitive and enterprising northern European rivals. Its political institutions became atrophied. Its burdensome prosperity which was not due to any real productivity declined rapidly. A protracted period of national stasis and institutional disorientation followed. America, the new power, goaded it mercilessly and baited it relentlessly until it drove it out of Cuba and the Philippines after pitched confrontations. It is instructive to note that forty years after declaring its independence from Spain, Holland was already sending its merchant ships all over the world. With its political institutions stymied, Spain succumbed to a civil war almost four decades into the twentieth century and had to endure almost half a century of military dictatorship by General Frank Franco thereafter.
This is not some metaphysical retribution at play but the logic of history and the choices people and nations make. History does not forget. Future generations will continue to be haunted by the choices we make. This is why it is not a wise thing to gamble or play games with the destiny of an important conglomeration of Black people like Nigeria. The government must rise above its historic handicaps, handicaps arising mainly from the structural and electoral configuration of the nation. After that we need some interactive consultations on the way forward.
Culled from The Nation
