The Tinubu government is having to dig deep for a strategy to reflate the Nigerian economy which now is in free fall. And a great deal of what the government has come up with isn’t popular with most Nigerians. For instance, fuel subsidy was removed and suddenly the costs of goods and services are spiraling beyond reach. Relief isn’t near and people are hurting badly from insecurity and starvation. The fireplace is cold in many homes. There is no stale food for goats and dogs; they have turned to eating plastic food wrappings. How do we handle this mess? Maybe it’s high time we saw in this Presidency the equanimity of governance.
Equanimity is the response to a desire and an outcome that doesn’t go the way you expect. Your response shouldn’t be resignation, giving up, but a motivation to go above the immediate seeming failure to doing something else that brings about a better, more satisfying result. This is what inspiration expert Thanissaro Bhikkhu says about equanimity: it is a realization that “certain things simply will not go in line with your wishes. You want things to go well … but you run up against a brick wall. This does not mean that you give up. It means that you look instead for the areas you can make a difference. So the basic motivation for this kind of equanimity is the desire for happiness coupled with the realization that it’s not going to happen all the time, or as quickly as you like, or in the areas you might want.”
Bhikkhu identifies three kinds of equanimity: that of a doctor, farmer and warrior. Let’s take the doctor. “A person with an illness comes to the doctor,” the writer supposes. “The doctor wants to help. He does his best. But then he’ll run into areas where he can’t make any difference for the patient. So instead of getting upset about the areas where he can’t make a difference, he focuses on the areas where he can.” He advises against “forcing things unskillfully.” This is important and requires our returning to it later in this piece.
Let’s picture the government as a doctor with a good intention of helping Nigeria recover from a distressing economic illness. It believes the problem is structural. So it begins with saying petrol subsidy must go but it also knows that if subsidy goes, all the demons sealed up in the basement will break free. Inflation is first to show its face. At 29 plus percent, it has eroded the purchasing power of the majority of Nigerians. It is said a hungry man is an angry man. Hungry and angry Nigerians today are voting with their feet on the streets, with placards proclaiming “We are starving.” Sadly, the government thinks it’s enemies are the ones instigating the protests.
Yes, the government is right to say subsidy was getting too costly and, worse, it wasn’t reaching the very poor it was meant for. But then what to do is to make it reach them, not remove it. Talk of not “forcing things unskillfully,” the skillful thing to do was to fix the nation’s crude refineries and then stop fuel importation because that’s where the corruption was. Once the refineries are back on, full stream, we’ll have no business importing petrol.
There is another demon. The subsidy that has been saved up, which the government says runs into billions of dollars, isn’t in the budget. It is being shared as federally collected revenue. Since last May, state governments have seen their shares from the federation account rise steadily. The problem is that governors are using the money to buy dollars from banks which they resell to currency speculators. This causes a demand push which results in high flying inflation. This racket is the result of President Tinubu’s “unskillful” removal of restrictions on dollar supply imposed by his predecessor to prevent dollarization of the economy. As it is, we are heading in a direction where and when the market woman will price salt in dollars. Another demon out of the basement.
Let’s return to Bhikkhu. He refers to “equanimity in the context of determination.” He supposes that “You’ve made up your mind you’ve got a goal, and you do everything you can to go for that goal, which involves developing all the other perfections. This will entail doing certain things you don’t like doing…ln addition, there will be long fallow periods when things are not going well, and you have to maintain your good spirits and not get upset by your setbacks. You have to be able to maintain a strong sense of the direction you want go in without giving up. This is the equanimity of a warrior, who realizes there are going to be home battles you’re going to lose, but you can’t get upset about those. You take them in your stride and learn whatever lessons you can from your defeats so that you can win the war.” Long fallow periods. We are in those periods in which we’re being told things will get worse before they get better. But we know that the Nigerian experience defies this notion of things eventually turning out better. We know that things will only get worse as the “long fallow periods” last. And where is the “warrior”? I haven’t seen one yet.
End
