Preaching to the converted
With the wind of people power still blowing across the globe – from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement; the ruling class is boxed to a corner. And they are using desperate measures. A ban on the supply of Media Trust titles to ministries is one of them. Readers may not know how much […]
With the wind of people power still blowing across the globe – from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement; the ruling class is boxed to a corner. And they are using desperate measures. A ban on the supply of Media Trust titles to ministries is one of them. Readers may not know how much this government has lobbied to get the Trust stable to tow the line or how, having failed, it has continuously denied us of advert revenue. Now it seeks to deny us of subscription and sales revenue. We are watching. One thing is certain, this management I know will never take the side of the oppressor – it is not in its character to do so.
For once, ministers and agents of government are going round public fora begging. Who could miss the emotion-laden appeal of IMF/World Bank ‘reformer’ Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala at the NPAN forum in Lagos. She is asking Nigerians to commit harakiri so that a new world can be created – a world where no logic is superior to what government proposes. With apocalyptic figures she explains that Nigeria would have spent $1.4 trillion on the phantom subsidy. Lamido Sanusi, not known to play to the gallery is afraid of his depleting vaults. He croans that foreign reserves has been depleted to the tune of $16 billion this year alone. Take a look at the traffic congestion from Maraba to AYA and ask where the money went? Look at the polluted streets of Sabon Gari in Kano, Ojuelegba in Lagos or Fege in Onitsha for where $100 was spent in 2011 and you won’t find it.
Look at the glowing skin of Nigerian ministers, and compare that to those languishing in hospitals – dying of ailments that are preventable but neglected by the government that should cater for them. Government officials look dainty with the subsidy and the foreign reserves. The earn fat salaries and receive ridiculous allowances. The entertainment or travelling allowance of most of them is enough to take ten hungry people off the labour market. In our extended family system where ten is employed, the benefits go to three times the number. Is there anything in the budget cutting ministerial allowances or fat salaries? Nothing.
Come to think of it, there must have been subsidy. It must have been swallowed in long convoys making frivolous road trips, taking wives to markets, kids to entertainment. The subsidy must have been swallowed by the latest bullet-proof cars they want to buy for protection against explosions – the rest of us can go to blazes and we do. We were shouting about security budget until we knew how much it takes to feed the president or his deputy’s tea allowance. Truth is, for all the security votes not even army barracks or the police headquarters is safe.
So, what depletes Nigeria’s foreign reserves? Factories? Hell no. From Oshodi through Kaduna, Sharada to Aba, factories are rodent yards. Industrial estates are converted into worship houses, but they don’t employ and they don’t generate funds, they collect. Whither goes our foreign reserves? It fuels presidential jets and parking fees for frivolous trips such as the recent jamboree in Perth, Australia where President Jonathan diverted the presidential jet to Seychelles. Could Obama have done that? No. The British Prime Minister and his ministers travel by British Airways with only essential staff. I know because I was a staff for three years. The Nigerian president’s valet has a plane to himself used to ship in loads of shopping. Subsidy goes into hosting wedding ceremonies; attending burials and anything that catches their fancy. It does not percolate to the common man. They use public funds to host birthdays and parties to celebrate religious festivals.
Subsidy goes into sunventing haram. Haram is disobedience of the Prophet’s laws. He says that pilgrimage is compulsory for those ‘who can afford it’. To hoodwink us, government subsidises (really?) pilgrimage and appoints an Amirul Hajj who gets 40 free slots complete with allowances. To balance the equation, government subsidises so-called Christian pilgrimage with no religious significance or reward.
Subsidy does not manifest Okeagi or other villages where the community still tax themselves to build schools and pay teacher’s salaries. It does not manifest in Mpape, Nyanya, Mafoluku, Brigade or 9th Mile. It is not spent on pupils who, like President Jonathan eons ago still go to school today, barefooted, fighting childhood killer diseases and in tattered clothes. It is not felt by women die at childbirth. It does not percolate to farmers, who toil using the crudest implements but yet must pay taxes for getting nothing from its rulers.
The apostles of subsidy removal have not shown us one one aspect of the 2012 budget that practically seeks to change all these issues. They have not done so because the budget is not about the people – it is about government and how to make those who run it rosier, daintier and more secured. It is not about preventing ASUU strikes by improving the conditions of learning in our universities; it is not about improving roads or building hospitals; it is not about tackling unemployment.
For all I care, Okonjo-Iweala may weep and roll in the mud; Sanusi Lamido may produce and release a Kanywood film depicting the effects of a depleted foreign reserves – the lives of Nigerians are being depleted everday. It shows in hospitals with no drugs, in homes where children go hungry; in schools with roof blown off; on potholed roads and in the ever-swelling labour market.
To hell with foreign reserves and fat-cat subsidy. To hell with the picture of hell they try to scare us with – we live in hell and all this government has done is to stoke the fire. The budget being defended has nothing in it that the average man can identify with and this sermon tries to convert the choir -it should be directed at curbing wastage in government. But would they?