Thirty-nine years later

Life has a funny way of playing back the tape and confronting us with our past. Here is a case in point. 

In 1981 the blight of poor crude oil sales hit the global economy. The late Chief Obafemi Awolowo was the only Nigerian who saw it coming our way and warned the Shagari administration that the good times were about to stop rolling. He could see that Nigeria, with its near total dependence on crude oil, was very vulnerable to the ill wind about to blow the global economy. Time to put away the Akinloye champagnes. The government believed he was playing politics and spreading the bad news about a healthy economy to rubbish its competent management of it – and chided him. 

On the dualisation Akwanga-Jos-Bauchi and Gombe Road

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The chief was right. The ill wind came, and the good times soon began to have some problems with rolling. The blight was upon us. Shagari found himself facing the critical challenge of managing poverty. Not always a pleasant task for anyone, let alone a president who believed that after the long winter of military rule, democracy brought with it the dividends of democracy and thus, the good times. Sadly, Nigeria had descended from the Olympian height of oil wealth to the valley where the national treasury looked like what the rats ate. We were paying the price of depending on a product whose price is dictated by the buyer rather than by the seller.

Shagari’s powerful minister and man Friday, Alhaji Umaru Dikko, was about the only man among the president’s men who believed that the deteriorating economic situation was exaggerated for political purposes. His test of good health of the econom was, you better believe it, that no one in the country was feeding from the dust bin or the refuse dump. If the situation was as bad as it was being portrayed by the sworn enemies of the government, poor Nigerians would need no one to tell them to forage for food in the rubbish dumps.

His principal must have disagreed with him. He knew what the minister did not know. By 1982, Shagari was forced to face realities and accept that we were in trouble. He needed to put a brake on the good times with measures to curb the taste for champagnes, caviar, Thailand rice and Venezuelan rump steaks. He imposed what was known as austerity measures on the country. It was a courageous response to a problem imposed on him by poor crude oil sales in the global oil market, but his austerity measures did not win him accolades as a good economic manager. 

They gave the 1983 coup announcer, Brigadier (as he was then, later General) Sani Abacha, deceased, the audacity to say that the ambitious generals who wanted the president’s job returned to the political turf because the economy under him “had been hopelessly mismanaged.” They came to save the economy from collapse and relieve Nigerians from the excruciating pains of the austerity measures. 

They are still at it, with the economy proving stubbornly that it is no respecter of khaki and agbada. Buhari has worn both khaki and agbada to manage the economy. If the economy was “hopelessly mismanaged” under Shagari’s watch, it is currently hopelessly and poorly managed under Buhari’s current watch. I wonder what Abacha would say of Buhari’s capacity for managing the economy if he were still alive. He would have generously described it as hopelessly and ineptly managed.

If we had well-off people in Dikko’s time who casually threw what they no longer wanted to eat on the refuse dump for rats and the poor to battle it out among themselves, we no longer have them in Buhari’s time. The refuse dump is no longer an option as a feeding trough for millions of our fellow citizens in the daily struggle to calm the rumbling in their stomach caused by hunger. Only the well-heeled in the corridors of power and politics have enough to eat but not much left over for the refuse dump.

Buhari, in the twilight zone of his eight years as president, probably now knows that it is glib to be contemptuous of other people’s management of the national economy. Despite his own belief that he is the best thing to happen to our country, the facts prove that he will be handing over a rickety economic, social, educational, security and political foundation on which no successor president would be foolish enough to dare to build on. A sound economic management has eluded him. His easy resort to borrowing is a strange strategy for economic management. I hope none of those struggling to succeed him will adopt it as an economic policy.

A few weeks ago, the first lady, Mrs Aisha Buhari, apologised to Nigerians for the hard times they are going through her husband’s watch. I wondered if it was what ace television interviewer, David Frost, once described as a cascade of candour. President Buhari himself was quoted as saying that he shared the people’s pains and the hard times they are going through. I thought that was some empathy from a man allergic to empathy. But only last week, the president rolled that back. He was quoted as saying that Nigerians had no reasons to be hungry because there is enough land for them to grow food and feed themselves. I thought that was both arrogant and insensitive.

It has never been about the people not finding land on which to grow food and feed themselves. It is ever about what ails the economy that has never been cured; it is ever about a government being unable to do its part by making the farmlands secure and safe so the people can do their part by continuing to till the land to grow food and cash crops. Our peasant farmers are brave but desperate men. The current odds against them overwhelm them. Bandits and kidnappers have driven them off the land. 

There is hunger in the land. Our food production is at the very bottom. The shame is not on the peasant farmers; the shame is on the government that cannot guarantee them the security they need. The shame is on the government that has left the people at the mercy of soulless and crushing market forces.