When tomorrow comes (2)
Economic management is not by mere theory on how to generate income for government while sustaining penury in the land as a strategy for ruling the people by whim perpetually.
- By Femi Abbas
Economic management is not by mere theory on how to generate income for government while sustaining penury in the land as a strategy for ruling the people by whim perpetually. The defunct Soviet Union toyed with all sorts of economic theories jumping from socialism to communism only to finally collapse into irredeemable pieces after 74 years of catastrophic experiments. Today, the major bane of Nigerian economy is not just the elimination of the Middle Class but also the extremely high cost of running the government at the expense of the masses. Even the West which purportedly serves as Nigeria’s economic model does not show one per cent of our government’s prodigality. For instance we know that American President earns $400,000 as salary per annum. That amounts to N60 million at the rate of N150 to one American Dollar. How much is the salary of Nigerian President? We also know that the United States has only about ten federal Ministers. What is Nigeria doing with about 49 Ministers? In the American President’s official convoy, there are usually about five cars at most and three in that of the Prime Minister of Britain. What is Nigerian President doing with about 27 cars in his convoy? And by the way, which section of our constitution authorises the office of the ‘FIRST LAYDY’ that has virtually become the second office in the country today? If an unconstitutional public office is not a bastion of corruption what else is corruption in Nigeria? How much are the allowances of the President, the Vice President, the Senate President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Legislators, the Ministers, the myriad of special, senior and junior advisers to the President? How much of tax payers’ money is spent weekly or monthly to feed each of these if the President and his Deputy alone can spent about N1 billion to eat cassava bread and Ofada rice in one year?
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One question that kept resurfacing while the protests were on last week was about the masquerade called cabal. The President and his so-called economic team blamed the massive corruption in the oil sector on that cabal but had no courage to unmask it. Rather, it was the already terribly impoverished masses that must pay the cost of the cabal’s corruption. If a government can identify a cabal as an economic pest but cannot unmask it then, who is the cabal? And now, with the reduction of the oil price and the already skyrocketing prices of consumable commodities that have further diminished the standard of living of an average Nigerian who loses, who gains?
To further take us through the track of deception with which we are well familiar, the Executive arm of government claimed to have accepted to reduce their salaries by 25% as a way of showing a good example of leadership in deliberately created austere times. This was long after the same Executives had forcefully reduced the allowances of the Legislators by about 40% while refusing to reduce theirs even by one per cent. If for the benefit of doubt, we concede any sincerity of reducing such salaries as claimed are we given the benefit of the monetary value of that reduction?
One person that deserved pity in the melee of the so-called subsidy removal palaver was Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, the Minister of Finance who kept hammering the issue of trust. Perhaps she would not have raised such issue if she had asked herself these relevant questions: Why did the Executive arm of -government (including herself) wait until the street protests began before rushing to reduce salaries? Why did it not unveil the corrupt cabal that it claimed to know before removing the non-existing subsidy? Why must the wretched ordinary Nigerians pay for the ineptitude of the federal government? Why was that removal action taken by the government before the commencement of the 2012 budget implementation when such removal was meant to be in the 2012 and not 2011 budget? Are Nigerians not short changed by that illegal action? And if a government is regularly known for telling blatant lies and for short-changing the citizens, does such a government deserve any public trust?
Nigerians have become wise enough not to continue to play fools in the hands of an inept, insincere government. This was a reality which the likes of Dr. Okonjo Iweala faced. The magic of using sentiment to play Nigerians against Nigerians with a view to subduing them has become impotent. Poverty knows no religion or ethnicity. It knows no gender or age. Thus, those who rely on those factors to keep Nigerians divided for their own selfish benefit should start a rethink. Revolution is quite possible here as it was possible in the Arab world. The only means of preventing it is good governance. These facts will form some chapters of history for the future generations to read that they may not find themselves in a similar quagmire as ours ‘When tomorrow comes’.
