My neighbour, the right reverend pastor John, has a daughter who has just turned one. In Igbo, she is called Chiamaka, and Marvellous in English. At one, her bone density isn’t enough for her to take long steps without stumbling and falling. This happens often. Her vocal chords aren’t fully developed yet but she is able to call her elder brother and sisters by their names. And me, she calls “baba”. Every morning, Chiamaka will arrive at my gate, knock a couple of times. She won’t stop hitting the wrought iron bulwark until I answer and take her in. Then she will take hold of my hand and lead me to the kitchen. She wants food. Chiamaka, for now, may lack the facility of speech but the intensity of her appeals is unmistaken.
I have also another one year birthday anniversary in mind. This one comes up May 29, three days from now. I’m referring to President Bola Tinubu’s one full year in office. He took office two long months after he had been declared winner of the February 25 presidential election. Even so, he spent another one month fighting off a legal challenge against his victory. The challenge underscored the nation’s many fault lines. Even after the court battles and one year into Tinubu’s presidency, the two main opposition candidates, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, have refused to recognize him as the Nigerian president.
Still, Tinubu took off with a wham. A whirlwind of political sackings and replacements made heads giddy, as people tried to keep track of who had been sacked and who the replacements were. For example, among the first appointments were the Inspector General of Police, the governor of the Central Bank and Chief of Army Staff, all three Tinubu’s Yoruba kinsmen. Not that he did anything that hadn’t been done before. Loyalty and tenure security are not things to put in the hands of ‘strangers’. But before then, the new president had already turned heads by removing the controversial petrol subsidy which his predecessor was too cagey to touch, not even with the proverbial long spoon. A year on, the vibrations of that risk-wrapped stroke are being felt in homes and individual pockets or purses. Commodity and service prices have soared beyond reach. No wonder, labour is asking for a N600,000+ national minimum wage. Tinubu is unlikely to grant it. Presidency sources speculate something like N34,000, which labour says is way too little in a post-subsidy removal environment. We seem headed towards a stalemate here.
Our president, it should be obvious by now, is more keen to secure the acclaim of an offshore audience, represented by the world’s financial power houses, the IMF and World Bank. The two have praised his toxic economic reform, saying with it, the Nigerian economy should bounce back next year. Impressed, the president is more outside than inside the country where Nigeria’s 200 million poor are hurting. But he will do well to revisit the Arab Spring story of 2011. Arab regimes that accepted the IMF pill were swept away by their angry populations but where was the IMF then? Nowhere. It turned tail and vamoosed.
In the past one year, President Tinubu has been behaving or acting like one of old Israeli kings, Rehoboam. When he replaced his dead father Solomon on the throne, some elders came and asked him whether or not he would remove the yoke King Solomon placed on the people. Rehoboam, as the Bible story goes, replied: “If my father exacted one form of taxation from you, I’ll make it double.” Angry, the elders went back home and instigated a rebellion against King Rehoboam and the country was split in two, Israel to the north and Judah to the south. Tinubu’s government, in the one year of its rule, has introduced more taxes than any administration before it. After subsidy went and petrol prices skyrocketed, the government slapped a levy on electricity that already was chronically epileptic. There is now talk of a cyber security levy. Somebody has said jokingly that Nigerians soon would be taxed if they wanted to talk. The day free speech, which is a constitutionally guaranteed human right, joins the list of taxable items will be the day we cease to be a democracy so-called. The government is taking for granted the citizen’s long suffering nature. Yes, not for us the saying, “suffer not witches to live.” But the anti SARS riots of 2020 showed that patience towards bad politicians is wearing thin.
P/S: Sanusi’s sceptre restored
As I was finishing this piece, news broke about former Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi 11, having been restored to the throne. Sanusi, like his great grandfather, was deposed in 2020 by a government led by Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, who went on to break up the emirate Sanusi presided over into five emirates. However, the new New Nigerian People’s Party [NNPP] government, last Thursday, under a new chieftaincy law, abolished Ganduje’s four new emirates and returned Sanusi as Kano Emir. The import of the unfolding story is how politicization of this old, time tested and highly respected traditional institution has been debased by being turned to a musical chair which politicians now decide just whoever to put on. Expect more on this next Sunday.
