PRESIDENT Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a Muslim. His wife is not just a Christian, but a pastor of one of the biggest Pentecostal churches in Nigeria. I encourage Pastor Mrs Remi Tinubu to impress on the president the implications of King Saul’s consultation of the witch of Endor as contained in 1 Samuel 28:7. Whoever sold the idea of the N8,000 palliative to the president is a “familiar spirit”. Saul lost the kingship after taking counsel from a familiar spirit at Endor. If Tinubu goes ahead to implement this scam called palliative, he will lose more than his ‘goodwill’, he will just confirm the ‘cynicism’ of many Nigerians who never trusted him to make a break from our shoddy past. There should indeed be a difference between the mother dog and its puppies!
Tinubu wants to give N8,000 per month to 12 million households for the next six months. How many poor people are in Nigeria? How many are we as Nigerians? Nobody knows. Nobody cares to know. And nobody will likely ever know as long as the locusts oversee our green vegetation. For almost over 60 years after the disputed 1962 census, we have not been able to conduct any credible census to know our actual figures. The population of Nigeria has always been based on speculations and projections. No nation plans its development using speculated population figures. Yeah, accurate population census can allow a people to project and plan. Speculated figures do not give such liberty. That has been our mystery as a nation, and a people. They say we are over 200 million people. True or false? However, there is no demographic statistics to show our real social stratifications. We don’t know how many of us are rich, how many are middle class, and how many Nigerians are below the poverty level. We see poverty walking our streets in three-piece suits, but we cannot differentiate between the poor-of-the-poor, and the poorest-of-the-poor. We only know the rich and the over rich who, over the years, have been feeding fat on our collective patrimony. Only an accurate population figure can give us the data of the poor and vulnerable in our midst.
One of the indices of how badly we have been governed came to life in the 2023 general election. The incumbent President Tinubu, according to INEC, was elected by 8,794,726 Nigerians. A total of 14,583,724 other Nigerians, the umpire announced, said no to the Tinubu presidency. Add the figures together; just 23,378,450 Nigerians participated in the last election. What percentage of 200 million people is that? Can we conveniently boast that that figure represents our universal adult suffrage population? That was one of the reasons the last administration under the watch of the very lethargic General Muhammadu Buhari refused to count us before he shepherded us to vote. We love to always do our national arithmetic the ‘wuruwuru-to-the-answer’ way, instead of the systematic mathematical approach to solving sums. Little wonder that virtually all the ailments we carried from the day of our amalgamation to independence on October 1, 1960, are still very much with us. Some of them have become cancerous. A good example here is the issue of corruption.
Corruption in Nigeria is as old as the nation itself, if not older. The first sign of that malignant cancer is the January 1, 1914 misadventure known in history as the Amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates to a single nation. Even the noun, ‘Protectorate’, as used by the colonial overlords to describe the southern and northern parts of Nigeria, was, and remains a huge fraud itself. The British Government which had the fortune of grabbing Nigeria from other European countries after the November 15, 1884 Berlin Conference of Scrambling for Africa, which resolutions were sealed on February 26, 1885, knew and knows till date that Nigeria was never a protectorate but an exploitation field of the colonial Britain. The 1914 agglutination of the two eternally incompatible Northern and Southern Protectorates was a continuation of the corrupt tendencies of the British Government. The theory of using the wealth of the beautiful south, which the ‘enthusiastic practicing paedophile’, Lord Lewis Harcourt, after whom the Garden City of Port Harcourt was named, coined as “Lady of means”, to nurture the parlous North, which he christened “The well-conducted youth”, is nothing but corruption. Events, over the years, have since shown how “well-conducted” the youth of the North have been.
Our leaders are serial rapists. There is no exception. The citizenry has been raped mercilessly. And we are tired. Unfortunately, our libidinous husbands remain turgid. Who do we cry to? We suffer Vesisco Vaginal Fistula (VVF) in all aspects of our humanity as Nigerians. Physically, we are wasted by felons who come as herders, bandits, kidnappers and armed robbers, all creation of absentee leadership of the second half of this political dispensation. Psychologically, we are daily tortured by the affluence of our leaders, which they flaunt without remorse, while the rest of us live in abject poverty. We are like the proverbial people who live by the banks of the oceans but wash their faces with spittle. Morally we are downcast. The very ones we hope will bring about the desired changes appear to be worse than our former conscienceless husbands. On Thursday last week, the new locusts in the National Assembly passed the N819.5 billion 2022 supplementary budget sent to it by President Tinubu. The lawmakers amended the budget and approved N70 billion to support the “working conditions” of members. Like a rubber stamp entity the Assembly has become in recent times, the Senator Godswill Akpabio-led National Assembly passed the amended bill in less than 24 hours after it received it from the president. No consideration was given to the masses. No consultation whatsoever was attempted. It was just a case of garbage-in-garbage-out legislation. In that amended Fiscal Bill, N500 billion will be spent as palliatives to cushion the effects of the removal of fuel subsidy. That amount, President Tinubu said, would be shared at N8,000 a month to 12 million “vulnerable households”. It will run for a span of six consecutive months, ceteris paribus.
Tinubu removed fuel subsidy, extempore, on May 29, at his inauguration. Hell was let loose. Everything money can buy has skyrocketed since that announcement was made. Nigerians now live in agony. But our new husband assured us that relief would soon come our way. A month after removing fuel subsidy, the government’s vuvuzelas went to town to announce that N400 billion had been saved from the scam called subsidy. Nigerians thought that the era of wastages and corruption had gone. But before they could clap, the government approached the always pliable National Assembly to ask for an approval of the $800 million World Bank loan which the Buhari government started. Pronto, the lawmakers approved the request. The approval was a horse-trading venture. While ‘vulnerable’ Nigerians, in their millions, would have N500 billion to ‘share’, the 540 lawmakers in Abuja have N110 billion to buy bulletproof SUVs for themselves. That is including the N70 billion to support their “working conditions.”
Minimum wage in Nigeria stands at N30,000. That is our fate in the hands of those we elected to govern us.
The Tinubu presidency came with some elements of hope for those over eight million Nigerians who cast their votes for him in the February 2023 elections. Little wonder they adopted the slogan, “Renewed Hope” as an indication of their expectations. That slogan could not have been more accurate given the failure of the immediate past administration. In less than two months at the saddle of leadership, the “Renewed Hope” is looking ‘hopeless’, even to the most fanatical of the Emi Lokan clan. Nothing seems to have changed. In a country where the average people don’t have an omolanke (cart) to convey themselves, a few over-pampered legislators are tinkering with N40 billion bulletproof SUVs. The proponents of the “Renewed Hope” slogans are struggling to come to terms with the fact that any moment from now, the Tinubu presidency will be spending N576 billion to take care of the “vulnerable” families in Nigeria. I read many of them on social media. They could not believe that a Tinubu presidency would in its early days be toeing the perfidious path of its predecessor. I am least bothered by such lamentation. I have said it here before, whatever is the outcome of this government, good or bad, we will all be partakers, irrespective of our political inclinations.
We should make it clear here. I am not against the government taking care of the poor in our midst. One of the fundamental principles of governance is the welfare of the people. I have no problem with the government rolling out palliative measures to ameliorate the pains of the spur-of-the-moment removal of subsidy by the president. Ordinarily, a government that is perspicacious would have known that before announcing such a major policy drive, everything that would have ameliorated the pains associated with such a policy, would have been put in place. But we are Nigerians, a people at the mercy of their leaders. We swallow any pill our leaders force down our throats. My issue with the N8,000 per month for “12 million vulnerable households” and for six months, by the Tinubu government is the parameters used in arriving at the measure. Who are the “12 million vulnerable households”? Where is the data, where is the statistics? How do you share the money? Have we not travelled this path before? What is the difference between what Tinubu had proposed to do and what his predecessor, Buhari did with Trader Moni? How much of our patrimony did the Buhari government spend in ‘feeding’ school children during the COVID-19 lockdown? How much will this government spend on the “vulnerable households”?
READ ALSO FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE
and then