Juma’a mai kyau

I remember sometime in 2012, at the height of the Occupy Nigeria protest movement against the removal of government subsidies on petroleum products. I also remember the feeling of profound moral imperative for fighting the good fight against the government of Goodluck Jonathan. It was a truly popular and national movement that was so significant to the history of Nigeria it has left cultural imprints on the collective national consciousness. At the end of the day, the movement met government negotiators in the middle and we called it a night.

The immediate president, Muhammadu Buhari, was the opposition leader at that time, and was also Nigeria’s, or northern Nigeria’s patron saint. His declaration that no Nigerian should, under any circumstances, pay more than N40 for PMS otherwise, he or she is being ripped off by the state. That chicken came home to roost after his own ascension to power, and when it did, he came off as a two-bit charlatan who was only after the cookie jar and nothing else.

The average Nigerian knows almost nothing about the complex macroeconomic fundamentals cited by experts and policymakers arguing against sustaining the subsidy regime. All they know and can understand or care to understand are its impacts on their microeconomic fortunes. Furthermore, he or she does not trust our politicians and administrators behind any such agenda – because Nigerian political culture has no provision for honour and virtue, and the imperative of trusting public servants to steer the ship of state with the public good in their minds. This means that the real obstacle is not the subject of understanding, or lack thereof, but that neither side of the equation recognises the binding social contract between them, more or less considering it a useless “boko-ist” idea, a mere formality.

It took only a few hours after a few words in President Tinubu’s inauguration speech on the subject of petroleum subsidy for the entire petroleum value chain to go haywire. That was technically his very first act as president, even though the legislative wherewithal has already been nullified because, for one, the Petroleum Industry Act stipulates the termination of the subsidy regime six months into the law coming into force. It is also noteworthy that there is no provision for subsidy expenditures in the 2023 Appropriation Act passed by the National Assembly.

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So here we are now.

The Nigerian Labour Congress, an umbrella body of industrial unions last week declared a national strike to protest this recent price increment. Reports have it that the NLC was bamboozled during the minimum-wage negotiations a few months back into believing that the pump price of petroleum products will not be reviewed upwards. They demanded N250,000 as the best they could go but accepted N70,000 as the minimum wage under the condition that prices must remain.

The union is going back into the trenches, so I hear. It is going to be long night if this happens. Either way, it is a lose-lose for Nigerians. If the strike goes ahead, it is going to be double trouble given the deleterious consequences any such industrial action would bring to bear on the already sad fortunes of the Nigerian economy at this material time. If they decide to go another way, a new wave of price increments on all essential commodities is to be expected soon too.

Problem is that not a lot of Nigerians have a lot of confidence in the NLC any longer. The union is now a shadow of its past. I remember its sorties during the mid-20-00s; how they were able to stand their ground and get their way during the Obasanjo administration. It has since lost its punch, which included the popular goodwill it commanded.

The NLC has grown into an uninspiring dud which is only good for screaming bloody murder when energy prices soar or when its memberships want bigger monthly paychecks. Its bare-minimum, consumerist obsession and vacuous sense of imagination are indeed saddening. These days, you forget they even exist.

The Congress seems to care or act to checkmate the turbulence in the labour market as Nigerians lose their jobs en-masse, that too while working conditions are abysmal to say the least, while workers go months and even years on end with no pay, while Chinese and Indian employers have given slavery a new name, when economic stagnation is slowly but surely snuffing the life out of an already shrinking middle class, causing the pronounced emergence of a socioeconomic demographic known as the “precariat” – an agglutination of the words “precarious” and “proletariat” coined by a Japanese economic analyst.

The notice issued by the Congress on this subject as well as the lingering controversy over the recent detention of its president have stricken the same chord of our collective consciousness. It’s very remarkable today that almost no one has so much as heard about the notice or is aware of its details – and even more so actually don’t give a hoot about any intervention involving the NLC. That perhaps played the determinant role in convincing the NLC to call off the planned action. That is a good thing too, not least for the fact that that means that we are slowly but surely growing up, and while at it institutionalising accountability in the manner the Sword of Damocles fulfills that role.

The Hausa say that “Juma’a mai kyau, tun daga Laraba ake ganeta” – you can predict a good Friday as far back as Wednesday. Now, things don’t just happen, they are effects of deductive causalities and their reductive consequences. The Hausa thus argue that you can see a good future coming from a thousand miles, and by the same token can also see a bad day from that same vantage.

It has been quite rough on Nigerians – but this was the sobering necessity, the shock therapy almost everyone believes we need to move forward as a country. The patience of most Nigerians has been exhausted and the honeymoon is over. There is hardly anyone who doesn’t have their fingers in the national pie that is willing to give Tinubu government the benefit of the doubt.

For Nigeria, this is yet another sunset, an event that has gotten off to an unfortunate start because the new leadership seemed to have chosen now to start on a firmly objective base by making very tough decisions… it turns out that many of those decisions were terrible decisions at least in the medium to long term sense.

It probably then depends on your political affiliations to determine what to believe now. If you can’t find it in your heart to trust this government any longer… I for one don’t blame you. If you can’t understand or even accept that this will ever translate into a better deal for us all as citizens, you are well within your rights to interpret this as a feel of things to come by Friday.

There is no exciting TGIF (thank God it’s Friday) theme on the horizon… and if it is there, it has been overshadowed by the dark clouds and the rain of double-wahala they threaten next Friday.