Protest, Dangote and other stories
By Lasisi Olagunju
Nigeria is a drama, an entertainment. Listen to the ‘Wahala’ singer, Portable, as he wonders why anyone would want him to join this week’s proposed protests. Yes, he admits that he joined protests in the past. But he says that was when he was poor. “Now I am rich…You want a rich man to protest?” He asks cynically. He does not want an answer. Portable’s video looks like it would be the end of all protests if we all became wealthy. The government should love it. I do.
The government and Portable join forces to beg you not to protest on August 1. I don’t care if you protest or you protect your turf. All I crave is no violence. I urge you to look deeply at other areas of our governance. Look at the laws being made and the laws being interpreted. They can make your protests useless, your bad worse and the worse disastrous. Can you remember what Judge Gideon John Tucker said about lawmakers and the laws they make? The American, in 1866, wrote in a court record: “No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” Fortunately, at this moment, our own legislators are on break. Or how would we have combined their presence with threats of protests from the north to the south?
However, whether the lawmakers are in session or not, they are still working very hard and harder like obedient Boxer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Boxer is that Orwellian horse who believes strongly that “if Comrade Napoleon says it, (then) it must be right.” His motto is: “I will work harder.” With them, Tinubu is the Big Brother; always right. A democracy can have a bumbling executive but it must not have a stupid, servile legislature and a deliberately ‘illiterate’ judiciary. The country is in the throes of a to-be-or-not-to-be protest over these very bad times. In desperate moments as we are, the legislature and the judiciary should be stabilizing forces. Sadly, they are not. They’ve willingly donated their freedom to the Villa. I heard an elder say no one begs to be sold into slavery. It is not in all cases. I remember a character, Kent, in Shakespeare’s King Lear whose ambition is to be servile to power:
King Lear: Who are you?
Kent: A very honest-hearted fellow, and as poor as the king.
King Lear: If you’re as poor a subject as the king, then you’re certainly poor enough. What do you want?
Kent: To serve.
Lear: Whom do you want to serve?
Kent: You.
King Lear: Do you know me, fellow?
Kent: No, sir. But there’s something in your face that makes me want to call you master.
King Lear: What’s that in my face?
Kent: Authority.
What Kent sees in King Lear’s face is exactly what Senate president, Godswill Akpabio, and his men see in President Bola Tinubu. The ‘authority’ in the cap of the president makes our lawmakers desperately seek to serve Tinubu and call him master.
This president is lucky to have Akpabio as Senate president. If President Olusegun Obasanjo had had him as the head of the National Assembly, he would have got his third term. Today, there is a bill before the Senate seeking a single-term of six years for the president and the governors. Thirty-five senators sponsored the bill. If the president wants this Senate to pass the bill today and the implementation to start this moment with him as the first beneficiary, his will shall be done. The lawmakers will do it “in national interest.” The Supreme Court will approve it.
There are other matters that should concern you. A justice of the Supreme Court addressed tenure extension in the court’s recent judgment on Local Government funds. He wrote: “Under Section 135 (3) of the Constitution, the tenure of 4 (four) years for the president provided for by Section 135(2) thereof, shall be extended for periods not exceeding ‘a period of six months at any time’ by a resolution of the National Assembly, if it ‘is not practicable to hold elections’. By the same token, by a law of a State House of Assembly, the tenure of local government councils can be legally extended, for any reason, such as insecurity or war, if it becomes impracticable or impossible for elections into the local government councils to be conducted. The mandate given to an elected local government council is the mandate of the electorate of that local government area and if the tenure is extended, it is the people’s mandate that is extended…” I found that reasoning quite ingenious! Was that point one of the issues canvassed before the court? Read it again.
Someone said Nigeria is a Netflix series. Two deputy governors in Edo; two speakers in Rivers, two emirs in Kano. All courtesy of the judiciary. We wait to see the next set of twins in our mad political ward. But while we wait, I salute the spell makers who started the blockbuster protest drama going on. They have corralled this government into working for their scheme. They couldn’t have given better oxygen to their protest agenda than the government spin doctors have done so far. August 1 may be an anti-climax; the audience is satisfied already.
Meanwhile, the Bola Tinubu government has been dancing to Da Grin’s music lately:
“T’an ba s’eyin bi aya,
Won a s’are kabakaba.”
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The song is too onomatopoeic to accept the corruption of translation. I should just say it warns that you will run helter-skelter if you cross the line of decency. Is the government truly in panic mode because of threats of protests? Or is it acting its own scene in the tragedy that mocks the people’s pains? The Villa has become a house of feasts. It hosts kings and priests; princes and principals. And when they come out, they tell the hungry: “Peace!” I also join them to chant peace be upon Nigeria. If the protest organizers want to protest despite the state’s pleas and threats, they should please tell looters of stores and warehouses not to come out. They should also tell those who killed and ate human beings in the name of protests in 2022 that they are not welcome. All these happened during the EndSARS crisis and they were not funny. They gave activism a very bad name. I don’t think anyone wants such mayhem added to the headache of hunger in every home.
The protest drama has got an interlude. The Dangote/NNPC series. In size, strength and beauty, the Dangote horse in Lekki fits the race and the battle. But Aliko Dangote’s observers demand to know why the super-rich man started looking for feedstock after building a refinery. No Muslim prays first before doing ablution. “May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?” That is Shakespeare again in King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4. No one does that without injuring the horse and stalling the cart. Why did he do that? We are talking of a master sculptor here, not a woodpecker. Cricket (Lántètè in Yoruba) was asked why he fixed his wedding date and on that very day commenced cooking the expected baby’s teething medicine. He answered that whatever should be fast should never be delayed.
I want to believe that Dangote did not become this super rich by doing things in the wrong order. No. It just happened that: “Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph…” – Exodus, chapter 1, verse 8. Whether in Egypt or Israel, the one who trusts in their chariots and takes things for granted always have their journey extended well into the night. Even those who claimed affinity with God roamed the wilderness for 40 years. But the refinery is a national asset that should be made to work. This is where a pro-business government should come in to still the boiling waters. And I think it has. NNPC’s Alsatian appears on a leash. The investment is huge. Nigerians say they need that refinery.
There will be hunger, anger and protests where 20 bean cakes serve two hundred masquerades. The next scene flows directly from the Dangote/NNPC Act. The scene is where 200 million Nigerians scramble for proceeds of 200,000 barrels of crude oil. Nigeria’s daily crude production is about 1.4 million barrels. But the country is left with 200,000 barrels per day to finance its budget. You wonder why and ask where the remaining 1.2 million barrels go? The government we have, and the ones we have had, helped us to eat tomorrow’s food yesterday. In simple prose, today’s crude production pays for money already collected and spent. That is why the government is broke and has gone for the broke; that is why the government squeezes honey out of us. It is a revelation that shows that things are worse for Nigeria than is ever imagined.
I once quoted a report in the Washington Post of May 4, 2016 which spoke of an oil-rich nation that should be rich but “instead, it’s becoming a failed state”; that had been run down so much that it “can’t afford to brew its own beer, stay in its own time zone, or even have its own people show up to work more than two times a week.” How did that country get here? The report describes the tragedy as an entirely man-made catastrophe. “Economic mismanagement at a world-historical scale had barely left it with enough money to even, well, pay for printing money anymore.” That country got here by “spending more than it had and not having as much as it should.” That is a country that thought of spending money, and did spend money that it did not earn. “You can’t redistribute oil profits if there aren’t oil profits to redistribute,” the report says the country did just that and followed it up with policies like the president replacing “people who knew what they were doing with people he knew would be loyal to him at the state-owned oil company.” That action, among others, it says, scared oil companies out. That country is not Nigeria. It is Venezuela, Nigeria’s twin brother.
The August protest will come and go; the problem of Nigeria will remain. Protests have failed to melt the hardened heart of the rulers of Venezuela. Suffering-and-smiling has failed them too. The country has continued to dwell in a maelstrom of violence and grinding poverty. The United Nations keeps a tab on what goes on in that country. Its report says, today, Venezuela suffers from one of the highest rates of undernourishment in South America, and 68% of the people struggle to afford food. The country faces a humanitarian crisis with nearly 8 million people (out of 29.4 million) taking refuge in other countries. Some 2,000 people flee Venezuela every day, displaced because of rising crime and violence and shortages of food, medicine and essential services. It held a presidential election yesterday.
August is this week. The country is on edge. People with the right oracle say the actual protesters are the entity called the north. They say the aggrieved harbor the anger of the conned. And they cannot be named. You would think that those who offended them would know how to appease them. Both sides should know what they ate that is giving them constipation. They should also tell us the broth they cooked that is setting the house ablaze.
Nigeria’s drama, like Venezuela’s, is unending. Every Scene is linked to an Act. The link could be through the characters, or the theme, or the sub-themes. The plot is predictable. So much is happening right now. So much may still happen. May Thursday, August 1 meet us in peace.
