By Sam Omatseye
The clamour will not end. The fierce malice burns. The rage of jealousies, too. But at two, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu does not need to convince the doubters. If his work does not, he does not need to avoid his sleep. Those who are angry for no just cause are entitled to their anger. Those who are deaf to their hard of hearing. Those blind to their unseeing eyes.
It is like what essayist and philosopher Francis Bacon says to those who deny God. “God never wrought miracles to convince atheism,” crooned the thinker, “because his ordinary works convince it. It is true that a little philosophy inclineth men’s minds to atheism.”
But Sunny Ade, in one of his immortal songs, sang, “A sese bere ni o/ eti won aya/ ti won ba ya/ won a fe ran/ ti won ba ran a wa di.”
Translation: “We have just begun/ their eardrums will tear/ once torn, they will sew it back, when they sew it back, it will be blocked.” The minstrel was lamenting compulsive ignorance, the tenacity of hubris masked as a cause.
So, if they are saying the president brought hardship on the people, it is not the work of anyone to teach them that the president inherited an economy gasping for breath. They know. The figures were released. They cannot say they did not know that we were mired in ways and means, that is, printing money for survival. We were printing ourselves not into debt, but into oblivion. If they did not know, it is a pity they did not hear of the about 30 trillion naira hole we had dug. They knew we owed IMF loans. We owed billions to the airlines. We owed subnational debts in the trillions.
If they know and close their lips, we are no gods to restore a voice to them. If they do not know that all those burdens are history, I am not about to begin a history lesson. Journalism of the robust kind has said it over and over with facts and figures. Just like Poet Birago Diop wrote, “if we tell gently, gently, all that we shall one day have to tell…” The critics and uproarious commentators have heard it over the past two years.
If they did not like the Lagos-Calabar Superhighway, what do they say today? They said it was a scam. It was a strategy for larceny. It was not going to happen. The president opened 30 kilometres. They cannot reverse it, but they still would not accept it. Nothing anyone can do about that that. It is fait accompli. At two, he opened 19 road for Nigerians. So much for crybabies.
What about the agriculture, and work of Pate for medicine or the loans for over half a million students and credit for over 80k poor entrepreneurs? What of the investor confidence that has made the stock market swagger or the rise of reserve from $3 billion to over $23 billion? The states are flush like never in the past decade, ask Jigawa that paid off 90 percent of its debt or Delta that paid off half of its debt of over 200 billion naira under the great Sheriff Oborevwori. See Lithium in Kaduna and sprawls of farms in Niger, Kebbi and Kaduna States. If it is not hope, they can hug despair.
They want to deny that progress is afoot on security. They forget Birnin Gwari in Kaduna where a market lay like a corpse for a decade; border onslaughts in Katsina, the persistence of fear and trembling Zamfara, parts of Kogi, Nasarawa, Niger. They forget that an insurgent group threatened from Sokoto called Lukarawa. When last did we hear of them? The commentators and gadflies often glad at faults have said nothing of the long list of bandit kingpins that have been eliminated. This page listed quite a number of them.
It is not my duty to teach critics how to think. But at least I cannot give them eyes, if they cannot see. I cannot give them ears if they cannot hear.
But I will have, like others, to remind them of what they know. To a philosopher like Socrates, he may be frustrated by that ilk of men. The Greek philosopher argues that we know a lot, and that we forget all we know, and we have to nudge the knowledge out with questions. It is called the Socratic Method. Hence the man said, “if I am the wisest man alive it is because I know nothing.” He says this in humility but he says our senses deceive us, and that we have to dig into our forgotten well to know that we know.
Maybe that is the problem with these critics. They are, however, too cocky. Unlike Socrates, they cannot admit that they know nothing. Maybe they know, or their prejudices and hatred for one man have genuinely blinded them to what is before them.
I was with the president recently, and I discussed IMF with him. He said he had no discussions with IMF. I had said earlier on this page that his policies may have received IMF endorsement but it was a coincidence of policy, not obedience of thought. He confirmed that to me. It was then he said “ways and means, $7 billion debts and others gone.”
The stinger is inflation. But the cost of food was soaring when there were ebi npawa cries. Then a bag of rice was over N100k and tomato, onions, garri, etc were hitting the roofs. The prices have not exactly touched the earth, but they are tracking down. Rice now sells for about half the price now. I met a fellow at Asaba a few days ago who said this was the first time in his lifetime that a price would drop down after a jump.
We are seeing it in another core inflation index: fuel. Dangote has announced consistent drops in fuel price. The only time it jerked up again was when the naira-for-crude policy expired. But it was renewed to hope. That idea is genius. Do you think the men the critics brandish can think like that? Atiku? No. Obi? Nada.
The Financial Times of London wrote a sunny editorial on Tinubu’s performance on the economy. But his naysayers are not seeing it. However, when, in the past, the western press slammed him, they advertised it. They became friends of IMF that they had bedeviled. IMF was an angel now, a devil now. Go figure.
The naira is not where we want it but it has survived its topsy-turvy hour when men feared it would outride N2000 to a dollar. “I still think the naira is undervalued,” the president told me. I also spoke about the penchant of corporate Nigeria to raise prices when food was coming down, and he said in reference to bank charges, that “Cardoso will handle it.”
What do the critics say about the student loans to indigent students? They say nothing. Over half a million students are getting it. Is that not intervention? Over 83k Nigerians are taking advantage of credit schemes. It has barely started.
But some are angry. At the bottom are partisan and ethnic caterwauling. They would not accept it even if President Tinubu paved all roads gold in the country. The bitterness of 2023, the fear of the man in Aso Rock, has blinded them to whatever good comes out of his Israel. Last year, when I delivered a lecture at the Trinity University, a number of the students asked if the government could extend the student loans scheme to the private universities. I did not have any answer for them, other than that private universities are for those who have the money to pay. But the public university is for the very poor. My answer may be logical, but it ran foul of their sentiment.
“I think we are blind. Blind people who can see but do not see,” wrote Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago in his novel Blindness. In that book, a whole town turns blind, and they are lost in the paradise of ignorance of the world around them. He shows the true conscience is the eye.
When you have a bad conscience, you see bad things. Civilisations have applauded bad things for ages. Democracies have voted out democracy. They saw slavery and thanked God for it. killed twins and worshipped heaven for it. Forbade women to be circumcised. Women should not go to school. Children who ate eggs would be thieves. Colonialism was good for Africa. Hitler was good for Germans. Today, immigrants are not good for America. Beware of wise men when they are foolish. John Stuart Mill calls it the “foolish majority.”
In his play Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s hero goes to war and comes home triumphant but the masses do not accept their liberation until he shows them his battle scar. Evidence is not always enough. A deranged elite can con a people to believe a lie, like they did to the poor hero Coriolanus. Hence Apostle Paul warned that God would send “strong delusion” to a stubborn people so that they can believe a lie as he did to Pharoah.
Those who do not believe in what is before their eyes and sounding in their ears ought to read Diop’s line, “If we tell gently, gently all that we shall one day have to
*In search of the good cardinal*
Cardinal John Enaiyekan has taken it upon himself to serve as a critic, a reverend without reverence, and he did it again recently. The problem with some clerics of his ilk is that they wear the toga of piety and belch out folly. He is playing to the gallery for the gullible. If he says Nigerians are going through poverty, has he addressed the facts that prices are coming down and he should encourage that pattern rather than holler? Has he noted that his own candidate also agreed that we should remove fuel subsidies and marry exchange rate windows? Does he, in his hoopla, explain that we were in a quagmire before those policies? Does he explain that the same president has paid off IMF loans, given scholarships to poor students and credit to small business folks? Has he diagnosed the agricultural policies? Does he know that the states are flush with money now that even Jigawa has paid off 90 percent of its loans?
Is he a cleric without context in his thoughts? Men like the good cardinal should follow the contents of scripture about learning, especially the one that says, “for a soul to be without knowledge, it is not good.”
