NOW, THE REAL BOKO BOMB
If there is any season I find most interesting in the electioneering process, it is usually the countdown to general elections. In climes where votes truly count, where the people's voice is strong and vociferous, it is a season when the chickens normally come home to roost. It is a season when elected leaders who, hitherto, had been behaving like some demigods, usually come down from their Olympian heights, and become like mere mortals once again. It is, indeed, a season when voters become and feel truly important as employers of a political class that has been feeding so fat on the public till and behaving like some mythical kings who reign in perpetuity over a thousand thrones. It is a season of reality. And how I love the season.
In their desperation to win votes, most politicians crisscross the land, in-season, and sell dummies, outright lies, to voters. They promise to deliver heaven on earth. They pledge to construct roads which surfaces are as smooth as your skin; light up the country and make sure your electricity supply does not blink a second, 24/7; provide dams where there is no river and look for water later. They promise to engender an ideal or near perfect state where everyone lives in harmony, realises his loftiest dreams and where everything strikes a perfect rhythm.
However, and as we have now started experiencing, a new reality usually dawns the 'morning' after inauguration. First, the voter wakes up and finds no utopia. No Eldorado. Though his power supply 'improved tremendously' during the campaigns and things appeared to be retuning to normal, the morning after brings a new reality, A realization that the more things tend to change in this clime, the more they remain the same. The more our leaders promise a change for the better in our fortunes, they faster they relapse to old ambiguities. Indeed, the more our leaders extol the ideals and gains of democracy, the faster we seem to slip into a parallel universe where down is up, and black is white (Dan Agbese). And the faster the seemingly idyllic existence they promised during the electioneering campaigns becomes a mirage. As their tenure wears, the faster hope, like fat under intense heat, denatures and evaporates. In fact, the faster it comes to a screeching halt.
That is the crux of the matter this morning. Before the 2011 general elections, and throughout the clueless and colourless campaigns, no one told us to brace up for harder times. No one told us we would have to tighten our belt harder on our progressively diminishing waistlines. Nobody hinted us that soon after inauguration, kerosene would dry up from the pumps and become an 'essential commodity'. Nobody told us to prepare for darker nights and noisier days as power supply becomes more erratic in most parts.
None of the parties included it in their manifestoes, if they had any, that we would get higher tariffs for the darkness that the Power Holding Corporation of Nigeria, PHCN, continues to supply. None of them gave any inkling that we would soon begin to pay with an arm and a leg (to borrow the words of that popular advert) for fuel. In fact, nobody told us to brace up for the fast approaching hell.
That hell would soon be delivered via the removal of whatever remains of the subsidy on petroleum products. Going by the surfeit of reports in the media on the matter, it is just a matter of time before a new regime of petroleum prices is slammed on us. We are told that President Goodluck Jonathan has been under tremendous pressure to yank off the remaining subsidy, so that his government would, perhaps, have a fatter purse to execute programmes that would make life more abundant for Nigerians. The same time-worn cliché.
Now, I'm not knowledgeable on oil matters. So, I depend on experts to educate me. For me, Professor Tam David-West, a former Minister of Petroleum, remains a veritable source of information, an encyclopeadia (if you like) as far as oil matters are concerned. I take everything he tells me hook, line and sinker. I believe him because he knows, and he is a patriot. He means well for this country.
On this extant matter, the gospel, according to David-West, is that 'there is no subsidy. The concept of petroleum subsidy is fraudulent. …The concept of subsidy is made to deceive the people. We have four refineries in this country; the contract for the Kaduna Refinery was signed by me in 1984. The refinery was rated as one of the best the world over. Years later, they deliberately damaged it. They have to sabotage the refineries so as to import fuel from abroad. And for every barrel sabotaged, they make millions the year round.'
That's not all. Not only have they paralysed the existing four refineries, they have also refused to provide the enabling environment for private investment in that critical sector. Why? Most of our leaders feed fat on economic dislocations and disorder in the land. Mind-boggling corruption is at the heart of the matter. If not, how do you explain the cruel paradox that they have turned this country?
Fifty-five years after Nigeria discovered oil in commercial quantity at Oloibiri, in present day Bayelsa State, we remain the sixth largest producer of crude in the world. Paradoxically, despite this enviable status, we are the largest importer of refined products in the world. We flare gas every day in this country, yet, we do not have enough for domestic use, nor to power our turbines. We import anything and everything, from PMS (petrol) to kerosene. Kerosene, a major source of energy for low-income earners, is costly and very scarce. Open the papers on any given day and you are confronted with pictures of children and housewives on endless queues for the commodity.
Like David-West submitted, hiking pump price of petroleum products at this time (which is what the whole noise on subsidy is all about) will make the tension generated by the bombs of Boko Haram pale into insignificance.
Despite the lofty promises of democracy, there isn't much to sheer about here. Government, which is supposed to work tirelessly for the best interest of the majority, is doing the exact opposite, making an infinitesimal few fatter by the day at the expense of the majority. Bad governance has become second nature to us. Corruption continues its ravages like a virulent cancer. Unemployment soars even as the government remains clueless on how to reduce the disturbing figures.
Poverty walks our streets on all four. Diseases like polio and cholera that have long become history in most serious countries still kill and maim our populace. Our health facilities remain 'mere consulting' clinic that General Muhammadu Buhari described them in 1984 when he assumed power as a military dictator. Labour is not appropriately rewarded. As we speak, the states have not implemented the N18, 000 national minimum wage policy, an action that has prompted labour to threaten a well-deserved showdown. And insecurity rules the land. What with the Boko Haram bombings, and all of that.
To my mind, the biggest bombs are yet to boom. They would boom with the removal of whatever remains of oil subsidy because the action will turn life to hotter hell for the long-suffering people. And people would react. And in reacting, I'm not talking about anyone deploying any Molotov cocktail or megaton bombs or cruise missiles. No. I'm talking about the fury of a people so cheated, so marginalized, and so oppressed. I'm talking about the common, frustrated people on the streets of Asaba, Warri, Benin, Ibadan, Lagos, Yenagoa, Port Harcourt, Kano, Kaduna, Yobe and Maiduguri. I'm talking about the increasing population of the jobless among us, who trudge the streets, daily, in forlorn hope. They are the real bombs.
And they are everywhere. Everywhere you go, people are hungry and angry. To now add the burden of another price hike in pump prices of petroleum products is to ignite the fuse that would trigger a bomb that would make Boko Haram bombs look like a child's play. To me, the increasing population of the angry, hungry and desperate throng on our streets are the real Boko bomb.
President Jonathan will do himself, and government, a world of good by avoiding this booby trap. Removing whatever remains of fuel subsidy is a landmine his adversaries want to trick him into. He must resist the satanic pressures to take the deadly plunge.