Nigeria: The story of a squatter who nurses a pet dog

With US$1 million (N500m) donated to Afghanistan and approval for policewomen in Nigeria to use hijab, is the fog not clearing already? My late mother had a Yoruba ethnographic refrain whenever the unthinkable happened. “O tan, eleyele pari owo” – it is finished, the one who sells pigeons has completed all trades – she would say. And come to think of it; after trading in pigeons, what else is left to be sold? That is where we are at the moment in Nigeria. We have run the full circle of all absurdities. We have entered the final stage of insanity. We now share fuel as souvenirs at parties. Welcome to the 21st century Nigeria of President Muhammadu Buhari where nothing shocks us again!

This last weekend confirmed once again that we are a special people. Nigerians find solutions to whichever problem their leaders throw at them and then move on as if nothing has happened. Our propensity for making the best of any bad situation is what earned us that famous label of the Happiest People on Earth. That was what the socialite cum fashion stylist, Pearl Chidinma Ogbulu, who was “installed” as Erelu Okin by the Olu of Kemta, Oba Adetokunbo Tejuoso, did at her “installation” party.

Style, they say, is the man. Ogbulu, in her ingenuity as a stylist stylistically found a solution to a general problem confronting us as a people at the moment. Realising that the biting fuel scarcity across the nation might have affected the guests to her “installation” party, she decided to do the unthinkable. She shared gallons of petroleum as a souvenir at the party. And you cannot miss the neatly arranged jerry cans of Nigeria’s most treasured commodity. Her portrait sticker was on each gallon of fuel. Oh yes; “ara ki tan nile alara”- a stylist does not run short of styles. My goodness! That was quite inventive!

But Ogbulu’s strange (was that really strange?) souvenir of fuel was not the only psychotic incident of the immediate past week. Something worse than a fuel souvenir happened too; our medical tourist president, General Buhari, in his generous best, donated a huge sum of our patrimony to the Taliban government of Afghanistan. Without consulting us or asking us how we felt, or we were going to feel, Buhari did a Father Christmas of one million US Dollars to the Taliban government. And his “hailing hailers” said Buhari had a good reason for doing that. The donation, according to them, was to ease “the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and to help in catering for the needs of millions of Afghan people, including women and children”. Mogbe! “Eni ti anbo, tun nbo aja” (a squatter who depends on the charity of others now keeps a pet dog!).

Just over the same weekend,  the jocular video of Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State, where he suggested that those living in Lagos should have automatic tickets to heaven because they had already lived their hellish life cycle in Lagos traffic, went viral. Funny? No, I don’t think so. I don’t see anything funny in the fatuous talk. If for anything, El-Rufai and the locust leadership the nation has been unfortunate to grapple with in the last two decades have combined to make Nigeria a hell for all of us.

It is only in hell that one can find a situation, where a country which ranks number six in crude oil production worldwide will be contending with the type of fuel scarcity that we have at the moment. Nothing can be more hellish than what we have now, when, with the quality of our crude oil, we don’t refine a drop of it in the country and yet we pay workers in the nation’s four moribund refineries humongous salaries as oil workers. It is only in hell that an OPEC-member nation like Nigeria will import adulterated fuel into the country in January and by March, nobody has been punished for that infraction. If Nigeria is not a hell already, how do we explain the number of wasted hours we spend at filling stations, trying to buy the finished product of the raw material that is sourced at our backyards?

So when Ogbulu gathered her guests at the Havillah Event Centre, Oniru, Lekki, Lagos, and shared the kegs of fuel to them, without anyone of the “dignitaries” having the discretion to reject such a highly combustible product the picture one gets is that of a people who must have heaved sighs of relief that someone had thought of alleviating their worry regardless of the danger tied to that process. The decision by the Lagos State government to seal up the venue is akin only to the folk saying about a child who throws away a knife after the finger has been severed. That the video went viral shows that the event was done and dusted. While I agree with Gbenga Omotoso, Lagos State Commissioner for Information and Strategy that sharing fuel as souvenirs at parties “is dangerous and can lead to loss of lives and property. It is blatantly against all safety measures in  such places”, I daresay allowing Nigerians to go through the hellish condition of queuing for hours at filling stations is equally as dangerous, if not more dangerous than  Ogbulu’s fuel souvenir. Experiencing fuel scarcity under an administration which rode to power on the promise of repairing the four moribund refineries as a way of nipping scarcities in the bud, to say the least, is despicable. Little wonder that the stylist explained, in her “apology”, that her intention “was just to show appreciation to my guests for turning up at the event at these hard times”. The “hard times” she referred to here is “fuel scarcity”. That itself is shameful and dangerous at the same time!

And just when we thought we had seen it all, Buhari woke up to make our patrimony a souvenir to Afghanistan. What justification have we as a people to donate a whopping $1 million to the Taliban government to help “the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan” when our condition is not in any way better? Pray, what is the difference between the displaced Nigerians in internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps all over the country who have suffered untold governmental neglect and the Afghans that Buhari donated the money to “help”? How do you explain this level of mental ineptitude on the part of the federal government? This level of insensitivity and crass disdain for the pitiable conditions of the suffering Nigerians who are chased away from the homes by felons, who are themselves offshoots of the Taliban, is beyond pardon. How will any donor agency or nation take us seriously whenever we go cap in hand as we often do, cadging aids? For goodness’ sake, is General Buhari saying that Nigeria is rich enough to make that donation or he is simply in the dark about our parlous condition or it is one of the effects of his  I-don’t-care attitude?

It beats one’s imagination that while Nigerians are on the verge of being used as souvenirs to China and other lending nations from which we have borrowed what we don’t have the capacity to refund, we are donating $1 million to a terrorist Taliban government! And this government wants the sane countries of the world to believe that we are actually fighting Boko Haram, bandits and other insurgents? The entire world is fasting for the survival of Nigeria from the hands of insurgents, yet our leaders are here eating three square meals! How on earth do we, as a nation, successfully fight Boko Haram, when we are donating $1 million to Boko Haram’s elder cousins, the Taliban? How can we be sending energy drinks to the enemy’s camp while at the same time sucking out the blood of our fighting Armed Forces? Where did the Buhari government place the psychology of the soldiers at the war fronts when he took that decision to send such a huge sum of money to a government that is a world pariah? Is the PDP not justified when it labelled this government a Janjaweed?

There is no doubt that this present administration doesn’t care about the poor. We have been living with the misfortune of turning out insensitive leaders for decades. But it is crystal clear that the Buhari administration holds for keeps trophy of insensitivity! The generosity of the present administration to our neighbouring nations, especially the ones which share the same religious inclination with Buhari, leaves one with no other option than to interrogate the sense of patriotism in the president. I believe very strongly that beyond the normal international diplomacy of reaching out to other poor nations, Buhari’s propensity to give away our commonwealth is pregnant and at the same time nursing a baby. And it is not that Nigeria itself is buoyant. Every economic theory points to the fact that Nigeria’s economic oxygen has run out. What we have is an empty cylinder. From the north to the south, from the east to the west, poverty walks on our streets in three-piece suits. On a daily basis, lorry loads of poverty-stricken Nigerians are shipped from the north and emptied down south for just only one business- begging.

At every street corner, junction and bus stop, one is daily confronted with the sights of hungry-looking youths, with dilated eyeballs, either looking for menial jobs or waiting for the next victim to rob.  Go to any building under construction at night and count the number of heads sleeping under “open heaven” that the buildings are, and you will appreciate the inflammable keg of gunpowder we are sitting on. But rather than address the litany of woes looming over us, President Buhari chose to donate to the Taliban. At a time the entire world is worried about the helplessness of the Buhari government to tackle the menace of IDPs in Nigeria, he chose to donate to support the humanitarian crisis in faraway Afghanistan. Why? Only President Buhari, like the two legendary basket-carrying men on the entourage of an ancient Benin Oba, knows the reason he made the donation. My people have a name for anyone who leaves his own load and carries another man’s burden. The name? The priest utters no evil!