By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Published: December 16, 2008
Am I happy that, at long last, the judiciary has brought a final closure to the 2007 presidential election? Perhaps! But not quite.
I am not quite happy because rather than being an end, the Supreme Court judgment which, last Friday, validated President Umaru Yar’Adua’s mandate will mark the beginning of another round of hullabaloo which will spill over to 2011. The controversy will, once again, colour the next polls and the vicious cycle will go on endlessly. Ours is a country in a permanent state of politicking.
Expectedly, after the verdict, Yar’Adua was animated and vivacious, putting a lie to the school of thought that says he is a reluctant President who would only be too happy for the Supreme Court to annul the election so that he can exit Aso Rock gracefully. Make no mistake about it, the man is enjoying every bit of the glamour and power at the command of the office of the president.
But that is exactly my worry. All there is to occupying public office in Nigeria is the glamour. Nothing is done to bring substance on the table. Now that Yar’Adua’s mandate has been given the legal muscle, what is in it for the suffering masses? Nothing!
After the ruling, the President was upbeat: “What this victory means is that it further helps to humble the three of us (Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, Senate President David Mark and himself). It makes it clear to us, the great burden of leadership that weighs upon us, the burden of this country and it makes us to reflect and become even more determined to serve this nation as best as we can and in the most honest manner…. This nation is facing many great challenges in terms of the need for us to develop and transform our country in such a way that we will be able to provide for the basic needs of its people and all hands need to be on deck. Now that the election is over, I am calling on all to please put politics behind us and put national service in front of us.”
Well said. But do I believe that he will now roll up his sleeve and face the urgent task of governing Nigeria? I wish I could but I don’t.
Why? Because, there will be no change. Yar’Adua has nothing to offer Nigerians. He is not the solution to our problems. If anything, his ascension to power has compounded the problem. If he were to be a drug, he would be My Pikin, the killer drug that caused renal failure in children and sent them to their early graves rather than solving the teething problems which the manufacturers claimed it was manufactured to cure.
Yar’Adua has run a lackluster government not because there was a legal challenge to his Presidency, but because he simply doesn’t get it. Currently he is performing at his optimum. Our hard luck is that his optimal performance is not good enough to leapfrog a nation in dire need of solution to its myriad of problems.
Sadder still is the fact that we have wasted almost two years of the Yar’Adua Presidency. But it would have been less painful if there is any indication that the remaining months would be any different. Truth be told, they won’t. We will only be lucky if things don’t get worse.
And when that happens, we must have succeeded in wasting 12 years in a row. Ironically, for most countries, at least ten out of these 12 years were years of economic boom until the recent economic crisis. We refused to be part of the global economic boom. But we will, no doubt, be part of the economic burst.
Already it has started. When crude oil was selling at almost $150 per barrel and we were earning more than twice the budget benchmark, we frittered away the money. All indices of national development were negative. Our education system collapsed and instead of revamping the public school system, our leaders stole all the money to establish private schools with fees that are out of the reach of ordinary citizens.
The road networks across the country collapsed and instead of fixing them, our leaders would hire private jets to ferry them across the country. We neither had electricity nor pipe borne water.
The same period we earned the most money from the sale of crude oil than at any other time in the history of our country, was the period Nigerians paid most for petroleum products because we have no capacity to add value to the product and therefore exported the raw material and turned back to import the finished petroleum products. Because the products were imported, we were inveigled to pay more.
By so doing the country produced a few money bags who became staggeringly rich and could afford to donate N1 billion to the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to build a secretariat and millions more to their benefactor, Obasanjo, to build his private library.
Because industries could not cope with the high cost of production, worsened particularly by the energy crisis which made their products very uncompetitive in a globalised economy, many, particularly indigenous companies went burst. The multinationals beat a hasty retreat.
Unemployment rate became unprecedented and since, to borrow a cliché, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, our young men and women who could not get jobs after their education or who were thrown into the debilitating unemployment market when the companies where they worked went under took to crime.
Nigeria is a country where those in government, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, don’t care a hoot about the ordinary man.
The implication? Head or tail, the common man loses. How do I mean? When the prices of crude oil hit the roof, Americans were paying nearly $4 to buy a litre of fuel. Now that the prices have crashed to about $45, the pump price of fuel has commensurately dropped to a little over one dollar. But in Nigeria, as prices of crude oil increased, Nigerians were asked to pay more for petroleum products. Now that the prices have dropped dramatically, the government came up with the deregulation argument to stall any possible agitation for a downward review of prices. Who are the beneficiaries? The same fat cows and their benefactors in government. The common man who continually holds the wrong end of the economic stick bears the brunt of their asphyxiating greed.
Meanwhile, the lawmakers are busy acquiring the best of automobiles and electronic gadgets and still defrauding all of us in the process. They live life to the hilt as if there is no tomorrow. But they exhort us to tighten our belts.
Now, despite the Central Bank Governor, Chukwuma Soludo’s assurances, the crude oil prices crash has put our 2009 deficit budget on a tailspin. The value of the Naira is crashing against Dollar. The Stock Market went burst several months ago, wiping out, in most cases the entire life savings of some families.
This is a time that calls for visionary leadership. Yar’Adua cannot deliver on that. In any case, what is there to be happy about? That it took Nigeria, the self-acclaimed giant of Africa almost two years to do what Ghana did in less than 72 hours (deciding who won a presidential election)? Again, my question. Yes, Yar’Adua won. So what?
