Pandemic, Pantami, EndSARS and my other 2020 persons of the year

Happy New Year dear reader

In Nigeria, the year 2020 began with the coronavirus pandemic and ended with Dr Isa Pantami. Every other thing in-between are the same old regular issues in an everyday Nigerian’s life. Thus, for Nigerians, there is a pandemic and there is a Pantami. COVID-19, now a common refrain around the world, came into Nigeria early in the year from far away China and snatched the crown from our usual, routine general inadequacies as a nation. For some time, coronavirus took the prime place in the Nigerians’ beleaguered life and diverted immediate attention from festering insecurity, bad economy, decrepit infrastructure, glaring lack and a palpably confused government.

Then, as the year was winding down, and a new wave of the deadly COVID-19 was gaining ascendancy, there came the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr Isa Ali Pantami. Through revered, knowledgeable Dr Pantami, Nigerians were told to do in two weeks what they couldn’t do in 13 years. He directed that all mobile phone lines in the country should be integrated with national identity numbers, within two weeks! The Honourable Minister gave the unrealistic directive and, as Nigerians say, “commot face”. Pantami looked the other way for the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to make the announcement and abandoned the puzzled, bewildered telecoms operators and millions of their subscribers to their fate. The minister even shook off the unpleasant development like a fowl rising from the dust, and has been acting blind and deaf as if his directive was practicable or achievable within the timeframe he had given.

Dr Isa Pantami knows that the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) saddled with this task of doing the impossible has mountainous inadequacies. This commission, reports say, has been able to capture only about 47 million Nigerians since 2012 when this round of national identification process started. Since the NIMC took over the assets and liabilities of the defunct Department of National Civic Registration (DNCR) via the NIMC Act of 2007 many Nigerians know that it had been one of the most obscure government agencies in the country. Considering the commission’s performance and delivery, it seems the NIMC got hold of only the liabilities of its progenitor. This contention is accentuated by the NIMC being one of the most afflicted agencies of government in terms of funding, infrastructure and manpower. And as things stand, by the time 2021 begins to mature, the NIMC would have ascended to the peak as one of the greatest afflictions of Nigerians.

The national identity registration process is so smooth and easy… on paper. It’s just like the Central Bank of Nigeria’s extant policy on money transfers to the country from overseas. Nigerians based abroad would think and say something like “it’s for you to just walk into the bank and get your money (in dollars or pounds or euros) and you change it at the black market. It’s even a better deal for you.” But a visit to the banks will show a grossly warped system of financial dealings that leave the clients or customers of the banks bewildered. That’s exactly what it is like getting captured by the NIMC. Before the latest round of klieg lights fell on NIMC, Nigerians have series of testimonies of its helplessness. A colleague told of how he got his national identity card card years after he was captured, and that the card arrived on the very day it expired. Another colleague has been battling so hard to correct a mistake on his biometric data, which was committed by the registration officials. He has spent thousands of Naira and loads of his time, yet the NIMC hasn’t been able to help him.

This same NIMC has been mandated, through ill-advised Federal Government policy midwifed by Dr Ali Pantami, to capture at least twice the number it had covered in its 13 years of existence in weeks. I hope the Director-General of NIMC, Aliyu Aziz has heard and reported to Sheikh Pantami that Nigerians are sometimes asked to fund the fuelling of dormant electricity generating sets at the their offices.

With the policy, we might throw away the gains we have made in the telecommunications sector, which is about the best managed in our country. We have attained 150 million subscribers since 2001 when GSM came to Nigeria and with a policy and ultimatum which includes the stoppage of the registration of new lines, we might end up like akogba tú ‘gba ká (he who makes 200 mounds and still scatters same) Figures from the NCC show that there are 149 active lines in the country and 147 million of these are run by GSM operators. With “server is down” refrain at NIMC outlets, can’t Pantami, a computer savvy man devise a means other than what he has set Nigerians up against in early 2021? Why would there not be a word from the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 considering the clustering at NIMC offices?

The year 2020 gave us a lot to ponder about. We had the COVID-19 pandemic. We still have the coronavirus, a new wave of it which experts say is mutant. In the midst of the pandemic last year, we had the earth-shaking EndSARS protests. The originally peaceful protests were later followed by the massive looting of warehouses where food and other items were stored by government and some individuals. The looting of the food that were meant to serve as palliatives for Nigerians was one of the ugly highlights of a really very eventful year. Someone cheekily said 2020 was only five months, “January, February, COVID-19, EndSARS, December.”

A younger friend heard me talk about “essential commodities” and heightened his interest. It sounded strange to him, and I told him it was one of the strange things we experienced as children in 1983-1984, during the military regime of Muhammadu Buhari. People lined up to buy “essential commodities” such as sugar and milk, I narrated. I also told him that as a secondary school student in Umuahia, then in Imo State, we paid N15 “Survival Levy”  at school.

He was not amused, but in his surprise and curiousity, he said “we have a semblance of the essential commodities of the 1983/84 in palliatives. I think we are in the same scenario, essential commodities is palliative.”

May 2021 be a better year for us and our dear country.

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