Adieu, Year of the Monkey
Hello, 2017! You were the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. Are you a harbinger of strife or peace; want or plenty? What you carry in the inner recesses of your womb will be revealed by Father Time. As mere mortals, we hold our breath in eager expectation. Meanwhile we look back at the expired year […]
Hello, 2017! You were the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. Are you a harbinger of strife or peace; want or plenty? What you carry in the inner recesses of your womb will be revealed by Father Time. As mere mortals, we hold our breath in eager expectation.
Meanwhile we look back at the expired year in order to inform the new one.
Not exactly a bad idea if you ask Margaret Fairless Barber who famously declared that, “To look back for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it and to render it fit for its prime function of looking forward.”
In Nigeria, the greatest achievement of 2016 was the capture of the Ground Zero base of Boko Haram in Sambisa Forest. That does not mean that the terrorists have vaporised from the surface of the earth. But is does signify their ‘nunc dimitis’ as there may be a few more battles and skirmishes to tackle headlong. The next task is to rebuild the hundreds of villages and communities destroyed by the vagabonds so that the two million people displaced can pick up the pieces of their lives in dignity and peace.
2016 will be remembered as the year of recession when we had to come to terms with the fact that we had been living a lie all along and that we couldn’t continue the looting binge of past years. A social media commentator recently puts the matter in perspective: “We mostly have been living above our real means. We have been staying in houses that ordinarily our incomes can’t afford. Our children going to schools we can’t afford.
Driving cars we ordinarily can’t maintain. We have been living a fake life all along. Now the reality is before us and we don’t want to accept it.
This shows how morally bankrupt we are”.
Life has been tough for the common man, but much more so for the hangers-on of erstwhile treasury looters whose source of wealth was tied to the fact that their principal had access to the treasury. Now they can be found on various social media platforms ‘hagiographing’, ‘disinforming’ and hate-vending.
We scored some pluses in the anti-corruption fight, although there are allegations of selective prosecution. For the first time in the history of Nigeria, some judges are being prosecuted for collecting bribes. The employment scheme of 500,000 additional teachers was rolled out and financial provision was made for the long-awaited Second Niger Bridge.
In my books, the single most salutary achievement domestically was the reinvigoration of interest in agriculture, especially rice production. The unveiling of Lake Rice (a collaboration between Lagos and Kebbi states) signalled the way to the future. The lesson is that there is no limit to what we can achieve when we work together as members of the Nigerian family irrespective of tribal and religious differences. The latest estimate of the Nigerian population is 193 million. To have that kind of captive market is an agricultural entrepreneur’s dream. It is expected that in 2017, many more states will collaborate across geographical divide to make money in their areas of comparative advantage instead of wailing for handouts and freebies.
It is clear that President Buhari has to rejig his team and realign forces within his party. The refusal by the senate to confirm Ibrahim Magu as EFCC boss was a direct slap in the face of the president and his anti-corruption stance. He also has to reinvent himself and improve on his response time to critical issues. He has barely 30 months to another election. What he does or does not do in the next 12 months will largely determine how his government will go down in history. If his government can breathe life into the solid mineral sector, electricity generation, agriculture, ease of doing business, zero tolerance for corruption, investor-friendly tariffs and small and medium scale industries and enterprises, we may yet sing a happier song in 2017.
Further afield, 2016 was remarkable for many reasons. Colombia Struck a peace deal with FARC rebels after 50 years of bloodletting; Britain Votes to Leave the European Union; the 50-year-old isolation of Cuba by the US ended. Russia Interfered in the US Presidential Election; Brazil and South Korea Impeached their Presidents while North Korea conducted Missile and Nuclear tests; Coup failed in Turkey; Russian-backed President Assad gained upper hand in Syrian civil war; Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh conceded defeat and then made a U-turn and vowed to die in office.
America, the erstwhile number one policeman of the world fell to the machinations of both Russia and Israel to enthrone one of the most bigoted specimens of humanity on the world as president-elect. The Chinese say 2016 is the Year of the Monkey. Well, this particular monkey has made a career of cheapening women, fraudulent dealings, insulting everyone and every institution from the Pope to the CIA to the United Nations. A Russian poodle in the White House! And fellow miserable specimens are still rooting for him, even as he described the UN as a mere “club for people to get together and have a good time”.
A response was quickly fired in the way of Trump, just in case he is truly ignorant of the importance of the United Nations: “…While not everything the UN does is a success and or without issue, the good that the UN does in the world is unquantifiable…. Trump, a narcissistic rapist who has never gone a day in his life without clenching a silver spoon in his tiny little hands, should be forced to spend a day in a Mosul refugee camp so he could gain a little perspective on what the UN truly does – and to see the suffering that Trump’s incompetence and ignorance will surely lead to.”
If you thought you saw political fireworks in 2016, wait until you see what happens in 2017. Adieu 2016. Welcome 2017. I can’t wait!