Category: Opinion

By Farooq A. Kperogi

OCTOBER 1 is celebrated as Nigeria’s Independence Day. But Nigeria isn’t independent. It is, for all practical purposes, a dependent state, a satellite state, whose political and cultural elites are still tethered to the coattails of colonialism and neocolonialism. Its economy is almost literally run by the World Bank and the IMF, and the older the country gets, the more it seems to tighten the apron strings that tie it to its former colonial overlord.

No one illustrates this contradiction and emotional dissonance more dramatically, not to mention more symbolically, than President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who chose to depart for the United Kingdom, Nigeria’s former colonizer, for a two-week annual leave just a day after celebrating Nigeria’s so-called 64th independence from British colonialism.

To publicize traveling to rest in a country that colonized you, a day after celebrating freedom from that country’s colonialism is the ultimate national self-ridicule. It’s like a woman throwing a party to celebrate her emancipation from an oppressive relationship with a wild brute, only to show up at her ex-partner’s doorstep the next morning to seek validation.

A president choosing to spend personal time in the country that once colonized his own projects an image of lingering dependence on the former colonial power. It’s an implicit endorsement of the cultural and societal norms of the colonizer over those of the home country and raises questions about national pride and the commitment to fostering domestic tourism and economic growth.

Most world leaders opt to spend their annual leave within their own countries or in neutral locations to support local economies. For instance, former U.S. President Barack Obama often vacationed in the state of Hawaii, his birthplace, while French presidents traditionally spend holidays in French territories. These choices reflect a conscious effort to remain connected with their homeland and to promote its attractions.

Like Muhammadu Buhari before him, Tinubu didn’t find any part of Nigeria worthy of his presidential annual leave. London is worthier of presidential annual leave than any part of Nigeria because these leaders actually disdain Nigeria, which provides the political, social, and cultural basis of their power. That’s such an unrelieved national tragedy.

Nigeria boasts diverse landscapes, rich cultural heritage, and numerous tourist attractions—from the savannahs of the north to the coastal regions of the south, from Yankari Game Reserve in Bauchi to Obudu Ranch Resort in Cross River. By vacationing domestically, the president could spotlight these attractions, boost national tourism and inspire citizens to explore their own country.

It would also send a strong message to potential international tourists (whom this and previous governments seem fixated on attracting) about the safety and appeal of Nigeria as a destination.

But choosing to vacation abroad, particularly in the former colonizing country, redirects personal expenditure away from the domestic economy. While the economic impact of a single individual’s spending might be minimal, the symbolic loss is significant. It suggests a lack of confidence in the nation’s infrastructure, leisure facilities, or security— issues that are within the president’s remit to address and that he claims he is deeply concerned about.

The timing of the trip particularly exacerbates its symbolic dissonance. October 1 is not—or should not be— merely a historical marker; it is—or should be— an annual reaffirmation of Nigeria’s autonomy and identity. Departing for Britain immediately after such a celebration diminishes the day’s significance.

It conveys a message that, despite official rhetoric, the ties to the colonial past remain unsevered on a personal level for the president who should symbolize our national identity and pride.

Leadership everywhere but particularly in transitional, post-colonial countries like Nigeria that are still battling national self-image issues carries the added responsibility of shaping and reinforcing national identity.

The personal choices of presidents often serve as a reflection of their commitment to this role. By engaging in actions that align with national interests and cultural pride, leaders can foster a stronger sense of unity and purpose among the populace.

To be fair to Tinubu, he has signaled from the inchoate stage of his presidency that he wants no truck with national self-pride and that he is a fawning, unapologetic crawler of British colonialism. That was why he pushed the restoration of the discredited, self-humiliating colonial national anthem through the National Assembly with unprecedently breakneck speed.

In my June 1, 2024, column titled “‘New’ National Anthem is National Self-Debasement,” I observed that it’s inexcusable national self-humiliation to discard a home-made national anthem, irrespective of its defects, for one that was made by an imperialist whose influence we’re supposed to be independent of.

“A country whose symbolic song of independence is inspired, written, and composed by the appendicular remnants of imperialist oppressors of whom the country has supposedly been independent for more than six decades isn’t worthy of its independence. Such a country has lost the moral and philosophical argument for independence and against recolonization,” I wrote.

The national anthem, as an auditory emblem of sovereignty, should carry the weight of our independence and self-fashioning. “Arise, O Compatriots,” whatever its deficiencies, was a product of Nigerian composers who won a national contest in 1978.

The national anthem should be a rallying cry. It should encapsulate the country’s ideals, aspirations, and identity, as espoused by the citizens of the country. Reverting to an anthem with colonial ties is a step backward in Nigeria’s journey toward solidifying its post-colonial identity.

So, it should come as no surprise that a president who so casually and so thoughtlessly discarded a homemade national anthem for one that was composed by a British woman is so enamored of colonial tutelage that he chooses to depart for the country that colonized his country a day after celebrating independence from the colonizer.

I noticed that the usual patriotic fervor that most Nigerians evince on October 1 was noticeably absent this year. Maybe it’s because they can sense the lack of investment in Nigeria’s pride right from the presidency—in addition, of course, to the raging hunger and listlessness in the land.

What’s the point of patriotism and national pride when the president of your country is so ashamed of the country that he is restoring symbols of colonial domination?

I was especially piqued that the official statement announcing his London trip said the president “will use the two weeks as a working vacation and a retreat to reflect on his administration’s economic reforms.” What? Why does he need to go to London to reflect on the death and destruction that his IMF/World Bank economic policies are inflicting on Nigerians?

Nigeria is the theater of destruction. That’s where he should be to reflect on his IMF/World Bank economic policies whose outcome is already foretold—deepening mass poverty, hopelessness, torment, extermination of the middle class, etc.

Maybe Tinubu doesn’t need a vacation anywhere. He only needs to descend from his Olympian presidential height to the streets of Nigeria to see the cries, tears, and blood of everyday folks being crushed by the impossibly ponderous weight of his sadistic economic policies.

The contest for royal supremacy between Muhammad Sanusi II and Aminu Ado Bayero took an explicitly ethnic turn a few days ago when Hashim Dungurawa, the Kano State chairman of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), said President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was protecting Bayero from deposition and humiliation by Kano’s NNPP government because of Bayero’s “Yoruba lineage”!

“If the President thinks he will use a few of his kinsmen in Kano and the alleged Bayero’s Yoruba lineage to continue to keep the deposed Emir Aminu Ado Bayero in the State, let him wait for 2027, we will show him that those people will not help him,” Dungurawa said.

By Dungurawa’s ethnic supremacist logic, Kano had a Yoruba emir from March 2020 to May 2024 since “lineage” means line of descent, which is traced patrilineally in most Nigerian societies, including Kano.

By the way, it was actually Muhammad Sanusi II who first covertly caused this whispering campaign to be created and amplified in 2020 in Kano in the aftermath of his deposition and the installation of Bayero as his successor. He did it to delegitimize Bayero.

Nor is this sort of atavistic ethnic baiting Sanusi’s first. For example, after former presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu characterized his Fulani supremacist, anti- Hausa (and anti-anyone who isn’t Fulani) article titled “The Fulani Factor in Nigerian Politics” as “Sanusi’s racist rubbish” in July 2000, he was so enraged that he lied in an Arewa House lecture that Garba Shehu’s parents were from Edo, as if Edo people were lesser humans.)

But what’s the basis for the astonishingly counterintuitive claim that Aminu Ado Bayero is a Yoruba man even though he is the spitting image of his later father, Ado Bayero?

Well, it’s because his mother, Hajia Maryam, who died in 2021, was the daughter of Zulkarnain “Sulu” Muhammadu Gambari, the 9th emir of Ilorin who died in 1992. In other words, she was the older sister of the current (11th) emir of Ilorin.

Although no Yoruba person regards the Ilorin ruling family as anything but Yoruba-speaking Fulani people, Sanusi and his ethnic supremacist supporters regard the family’s locational, linguistic, and possibly genetic, association with Yoruba people as a “stain” on the “purity” of their Fulani identity.

Never mind that Sanusi himself—and all emirs in the Northwest—have locational, linguistic, and genetic association with Hausa people, just like the Fulani emirs in Nupeland have locational, linguistic, and genetic association with the Nupe people. Or that ethnic cosmopolitanism is central to the originative imagination of the Dan Fodio caliphate.

The notion that Aminu Bayero is of “Yoruba lineage” because his mother was a Yoruba-speaking Ilorin Fulani princess is utter, misguided, counterproductive identitarian essentialism, that is, the pretense that there is such a thing primordial ethnic purism that is “unblemished” by interconnectedness with other identities.

The claim that Tinubu is protective of Aminu Ado Bayero (which, by the way, I resent because it has no basis in law since only governors can enthrone and dethrone traditional rulers) is particularly ironic because Ado Bayero was one of only a few traditional rulers (the other being the Sultan of Sokoto) who had the courage to tell Tinubu that his economic policies were strangulating the people.

In February this year, he told First Lady Remi Tinubu to let her husband know that ordinary people were in pain. “Although, we have several means of communicating to the government on our needs and requests, you are the surest way to tell the President the happenings in the country,” he said. “We get information daily that essential commodities and cost of living are high, and people are suffering, although it didn’t start with this government.”

How about the self-proclaimed “pure-bred” Fulani Sanusi who has encouraged his minions to play up the Yoruba ethnic “contamination” of Bayero as the reason Tinubu isn’t supporting him? Well, he is delighted with the current state of the economy and patted Tinubu on the back for removing subsidies from petrol.

“It’s injustice for anyone to blame the Tinubu administration for the current economic hardship because there is no other alternative than the removal of the fuel subsidy,” Sanusi said. “After all, Nigeria cannot even afford to pay the subsidy.”

He even went so far as to claim that the economy is in the toilet because Muhammadu Buhari resisted his counsel to “firmly and unequivocally eliminate fuel subsidies.” “The economy was poorly managed, and they [were] not willing to take advice,” he said.

A “Yoruba” emir was empathetic toward the suffering of his people and told a “fellow” Yoruba man, who is the president, the truth about the anguish his policies have caused people without fear of consequences, but an “undiluted” Fulani emir told the Yoruba president that his mass pauperization of people and the obliteration of their means of livelihood was all fine and dandy.

Yet the toadyish, sadistic “Fulani” emir who cheers while the people incinerate in infernal economic policies is causing his underlings to whisper that the truth-telling emir is being favored by the president out of a sense of ethnic solidarity.

Maybe the Sultan of Sokoto also secretly has tinctures of Yoruba (and possibly Kanuri) blood freely flowing in his veins that caused him to be defended and protected by the Tinubu presidency against a planned deposition Sokoto’s APC government for his alleged sympathies for the previous PDP government of Aminu Tambuwal.

 “And to the Deputy Governor of Sokoto, I have a simple message for you: Yes, the Sultan is the Sultan of Sokoto, but he is much more than that; he represents an idea, he is an institution that all of us in this country need to jealousy guard, protect, promote, preserve and project for the growth of our nation,” Vice President Kashim Shettima said at North-West Peace and Security Summit in Katsina State on June 25.

The truth Sanusi and his defenders don’t want to confront is that he is a deeply unpopular person in Kano. He is the only past emir in living memory whose appointment as an emir sparked a violent, spontaneous mass revolt because he wasn’t on the shortlist of princes recommended for emirship by the kingmakers. Sanusi Ado Bayero, Aminu Ado Bayero’s older brother, was the choice of the kingmakers.

Most people know that one of the central pillars of support for Aminu Ado Bayero is a scion of old money in Kano who detests and resents Sanusi and who is extremely close to Tinubu. The NNPP people know this. They know that Bayero’s Ilorin maternal identity (which Tinubu and his people don’t recognize as “Yoruba”) is incidental to the issues.

They also know that Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and Tinubu had struck a deal that required Kwankwaso to spare Bayero in exchange for a favorable Supreme Court judgment and a chance to serve as a minister in Tinubu’s cabinet. His betrayal of this deal by dethroning Bayero hurts Tinubu deeply.

More than this, though, the dangerous game of reactionary ethnic purism that Sanusi is playing and that his minions in the political arena are trying to instrumentalize for national political machinations would inflict incalculable injury on identity formation in the North.

The North, even the Muslim North, is an intricate tapestry of multiple ethnic identities. These identities are united by a higher, overarching glue. In the case of the Muslim North, that glue is Islam, which is causing an ethnogenesis to emerge from a mishmash of identities. To delegitimize or alienate a Kano emir because he traces maternal ancestry to the geographic fringe of the North communicates to the people from that place that they are unwanted, that they don’t belong.

It reminds me of the grave error of judgment that northern Muslim elites made during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, from which the North hasn’t recovered.

Obasanjo threw an opportunity for the North to really live up to its “one North, one people” mantra and it failed. Of all Nigeria’s former regions, the North is the only region that was ruled as one and that was unbroken until the regional structure was disbanded. Suddenly, because of Obasanjo’s appointments, a northerner who was a Christian was no longer a “northerner.” Even a northerner who was a Muslim (such as Ibrahim Ogohi) wasn’t a “northerner” unless he came from the Northwest or the Northeast.

Obasanjo was clearly smarter than northern leaders because he destroyed the myth the North cherishes about itself by testing it. Tinubu may be inadvertently doing the same thing to the emirate system. If you don’t manage your diversity well, a smart, competing outsider will always exploit it to divide and conquer you. 

When I sat down to write my column this week, I was overwhelmed by the multitude of issues I wanted to address: the presidency’s pushback against New York Time’s factual reporting on the unprecedented economic crunch in Nigeria that was exacerbated by President Bola Tinubu’s twin policies of subsidy removal and floating of the naira, the political and judicial shitshow in Kano regarding emirship, the unabating suffering in the land, minimum wage, etc.

Every country, including the United States where I live, has problems. I always recognize that. But it seems to me that Nigeria’s problems are peculiar because they are always the same year in, year out, and people who should solve them don’t even pretend to be interested in solving them. They repeat the same motions, mouth the same sterile and predictable defenses, and hurl the same insults at critics.

So, I asked myself if there was even any point in my writing. Who reads what I write anyway? Of those who read, who cares? Of those who care, who is in a position to change anything? Am I wasting my time by writing about issues that won’t change? Should I take an emotional break from Nigeria?

This isn’t the first time I am grappling with these questions publicly and privately. I am sure I am not the only person who struggles with these questions.

Many people have wondered what I stand to gain from my passionate interventions in Nigerian affairs when I am not a direct victim of the dysfunction of the country and won’t be a direct beneficiary of the systemic overhaul I desire for the country.

I used to think people who asked me these questions were shortsighted. I still think they are.

But I am, right now, just sick and tired of being sick and tired. We owe debt for this colorful expression to the late African-American civil rights activist from Mississippi by the name of Fannie Lou Hamer.

At a memorable speech she delivered at a rally with Malcolm X in Harlem, New York, on December 20, 1964, in support of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s Congressional Challenge, Ms. Hamer said, among other things, “And I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change.”

My own emotions are different from Hamer’s. I am not even in the emotional state to ask for a change because I’ve been doing exactly that for more than 20 years. I think I am once again suffering from what I called outrage fatigue in a 2021 column.

It is, as I pointed out, instigated by sustained sensations of powerlessness, hopelessness, mental exhaustion, and cynicism, which ultimately lead to indifference and even compassion fatigue.

My outrage usually flows from a wellspring of righteous indignation over injustice, avoidably missed opportunities, elite cruelty, and preventable existential catastrophes. It is nourished by expectations that its forceful ventilation will jolt people to act and cause policymakers to make amends for the good of the society.

That was what Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist James Earle “Jimmy” Breslin meant when he said, “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

But outrage, rage, and even compassion, are not a permanent condition; they are intrinsically temporary. It’s impossible to keep your sanity while you are in a perpetually agitative emotional state. In other words, outrage fatigue is an unconscious self-defense mechanism. It’s the mind’s way to decompress and regain equanimity.

It’s bad enough when outrage changes nothing and when both the people on whose behalf you’re outraged and the people whose bad behavior activated your outrage use you for target practice in throwing vituperative darts for daring to be outraged. But it’s worse when people pretend that the consequences of ignoring well-intentioned outrage are unanticipated.

I wrote scores of articles warning that the neoliberal path to development that the Tinubu administration has now wholeheartedly embraced would result in exactly what Nigeria is going through. In fact, before Tinubu was sworn in as president, I wrote that removing petrol subsidies would instigate an unmanageable economic catastrophe that would make governance difficult.

It turned out that more than a decade ago Tinubu himself had written almost exactly what I have been writing about the consequences of subsidy removal on the economy. Now his media aides are pretending that they don’t know that his policies are responsible for the unexampled inflation that’s destroying the lives of common people.

Today, every section of Nigeria is enveloped in profound existential turmoil thanks to both the inability and unwillingness of the government to confront the problems that afflict the country.

In Kano, we now have two emirs, a federal emir and a state emir, and the judiciary just added fuel to the kingship fire raging in the state through what Professor Auwalu Yadudu fittingly called a “strange and baffling” judicial pronouncement.

Meanwhile, Kano State governor Abba Yusuf (who I used to like) has reverted to his default destructive vengeance that I advised him against in previous columns. He has reportedly sent bulldozers to tear down the palace where the “federal” emir lives. Recall that the governor’s first major “project” upon being inaugurated as a governor was to go on a frenzied destruction spree of opponents’ properties.

In my September 23, 2023, column titled “Why the Kano Verdict Can’t Stand,” I wrote:

“After its expected victory, though, NNPP’s Abba Yusuf and his benefactor Rabiu Kwankwaso need to rule with grace and maturity, not vengeance and infantilism. Destroying buildings is no governance. Plotting the dethronement of monarchs that didn’t support you is a page from Ganduje’s sordid playbook. They need to be different. Success, they say, is the best revenge.”

Like the federal government, they didn’t listen. Well, the law is clearly on the side of the Kano State government on the controversy regarding who is the emir of Kano. Although I think Sanusi Lamido Sanusi is a debauched egomaniac, he is right now the rightful emir.

The federal government has no power to determine who is a king in any state of the federation. Femi Falana has also pointed out that federal courts have no jurisdictional competence to sit in judgement over kingship matters.

So, the Kano State government just needs a little more maturity to let the judicial process play itself out. Destroying the residence of Aminu Ado Bayero is the sort of destructive infantilism I counseled against, but which seems to flow in the DNA of the governor.

To be honest, I am just tired. A popular leftist American bumper-sticker slogan says, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Well, I am paying attention. It’s just that I have reached the elastic limit of my outrage because Nigeria’s tragedy is self-inflicted, predictable, and preventable.

For more than one year, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has been grappling with the nightmare of eight months withheld salaries following last year’s strike. It’s a miracle that after that assault on their psyche they still remain sane. Consider the progression of the assault, then reflect on the outcome, and then make up your mind. Firstly, the strike was about more than a decade of unfulfilled promises and broken agreements signed by the federal government. It was not ASUU that broke agreements. The strike then dragged on for about eight months. Secondly, the government disregarded its own part of the blame and decided, because it had the power and the purse string, to punish ASUU for feeling short-changed. Salaries were thus withheld.

Thirdly, the government also encouraged a splinter union, the Congress of University Academics (CONUA), to be carved out of ASUU on the pretext of ASUU’s unreasonableness in pursuing its rights or being too rigid in demanding respect for agreements. Effortlessly, right became wrong. Still sane? Then consider this final detail. Both President Bola Tinubu, who was then candidate for presidential election, and Chief of Staff to the President Femi Gbajabiamila, who was then Speaker of the House of Representatives did their utmost to broker a truce between the warring teachers and the presidency, but failed. Both are now in office. Last year they did the talking, but this year they could, if they choose, walk the talk. So far they have not. So ASUU is still holding the short end of the stick, is blamed by the public for the long and debilitating strike, has endured a traumatic splintering of the union, and is still eight months short on their wages.

It is not even clear anymore whether anyone understands the issues at play, or how to define academic work: whether it comprises only teaching or it combines so much more, including research and projects supervision, among others. Everyone knows that the last administration had little regard for education. The new administration claims to regard it with awe. If it won’t or can’t walk its talk, then it should at least come out and defend the iniquitous decision to punish the teachers on multiple fronts. Perhaps they can convince the public that the sun revolves around the earth after all. If that is the case, the teachers, it is guaranteed, will gladly denounce Copernicus and charge Galileo with the intellectual crime of suspected, rather than formal, heresy.

The other day President Bola Tinubu announced that Nigerians are going through the equivalent of childbirth pains, but his administration is determined to ameliorate the pains, provide succor and make life better for all. During his Presidential campaigns, he told Nigerians – emi lo kan, that is in Yoruba -“it is my turn”. He also told us “e lo fokan bale”, that is don’t worry, I would be there for you as he explained that phrase. He, practically, spiritually wished himself into power and has since his assumption of office with all the baggage about unresolved court matters, confronted, through proxies, big challenges from the People’s Democratic Party and the Labour Party (LP).

What we see is that the President has continued to play “Rose Garden politics”, grab the power, hold it, and be seen to be taking charge and be seen also to be doing so, even as the opposition continues to raise questions of legitimacy. It is the courts that would determine that, eventually, but more than any other time in Nigerian history, the judex is in the eyes of the storm, exposed to the most excruciating scrutiny. Indeed, the judiciary in spite of itself has been dragged right to the bottom of the arena, in what when reviewed would come across, as one of the most difficult moments in the history and trajectory of the Nigerian judiciary. Our Lordships are in a difficult place. They carry a burden to do justice, and they also have to be seen to be doing so. They are faced with a political arena where expectations about risks and outcomes are the subjects of confrontation. The judex are expected to be above board at all times and to dispense justice without minding whose ox is gored. The more liberal characters in this conversation claim that they are looking for justice, and that justice is the “be-all-and end-all” of the judicial process. But. really, what is justice? Pontius Pilate sked “what is truth? And I wager a bet that the present imbroglio over the 2023 Presidential elections would not be resolved on the basis of questions of legitimacy, but law, public policy and public interest. I stand to be corrected if the pendulum swings otherwise.

This piece however is not necessarily about Tinubunomics, stricto senso, as the title indicates. It is about what I consider the satirical sides of the same phenomenon. Abroad, out there are the details that Nigeria’s inflation rate is now 22.79(%. Fitch, an international rating agency tells us that we should in fact be looking at 25.1% in due course, and that real GDP growth is likely to slow down to 2.7% in the face of high living costs. Debt service to revenue ratio is about 97%, so high that members of the Afenifere, a socio-cultural group, have also now become emergency economists- much better than stoking the fires of ethnic difference- and are now offering economic counsel about how to eliminate debt and increase productivity, growth and values. Meanwhile, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has just met – the first MPC since President Bola Tinubu assumed office, the first to be presided over by Mr. Folashodun Shonubi as Acting Central Bank Governor. Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) stands at 18.5%, and this is the first MPC meeting in a long while without the embattled, suspended Governor of the Central Bank, Godwin Emefiele.

Foreign Exchange Rate is as high as N868 to the dollar in the parallel market. Jobs and productivity are negatively impacted. Money supply is at an all-time high at over N9 trillion, pressuring the FX market. What should be our expectations then, today as the MPC concludes its meeting? What is the balance of risks? Nigeria’s MPC faces a dilemma like never before now: to tighten, ease or retain? Whichever way the MPC decides today, the signs look ominous. Traditional orthodox economics has not worked here for as long as we can remember because the fundamentals of this economy are askew, the necessary alignments between fiscal and monetary policies are not in place, productivity is low, growth is abysmal. Let us leave the economic jargons to the economists. If you have two or three of them in this space, they will express different opinions, quoting dead theories lacking connection with contemporary Nigerian realities and claiming, each one of them, to be right. You are better off avoiding their voodoo and mischief. Nigerian economists are only good when they gather to pick up appointments at the Policy Advisory Committees that the Federal and State Governments often aet up or when they hold their annual peppersoup-ing and jollof-ing conferences where they write reports that are at best photocopies of statements from the IMF, the World Bank, and the rating agencies. Many of them would soon show up as government appointees at both Federal and State levels, to collect government patronage and shake heads like experts. I doubt how much of an economist anybody can be in this environment, mouthing dead theories that don’t work here! Even Afenifere, a socio-cultural group is trying to fill the void! In some states, governments have declared shorter working days as if that is the solution. The economist and their clients have failed this country.

It is therefore about time that we brought this thing out of their textbooks and face hard reality to console ourselves as the affected people. There seems to be an emergency consensus that Tinubunomics, or “Jagabanomy” as it is otherwise known, is not working, 60 days in the making and implementation. We have been told “e lo fokan ba le”- our hearts are already palpitating. Mr Bayo Onanuga and Senator Dayo Adeyeye have both appealed to us to be patient, and that after these initial pains, there would be “everlasting joy”. Which everlasting joy, please, Senator Adeyeye? Our grandchildren are destined to pay back all the money that the APC government has borrowed with all the accrued interests? Nigeria is at a point right now that if it were possible, the dead would rise and carry placards in protest! The living are docile and is that because there seems to be some silver lining to this “childbirth pain”, to borrow President Tinubu’s words, that we are all going through? Tell us.

With due respect, I take my narratives from the streets. Yes, the country is hard, people are in pains, but has anyone noticed, especially in Lagos that thanks to Tinubu, people are now likely to become the most fit population in the world. Ordinarily, Nigerians do not like to walk about. They prefer the comfort of commuting up and down, and if possible, in air-conditioned buses and cars. This is beginning to change. What I have seen in Lagos is that more and more people are beginning to trek to work or wherever they want to go. Very early morning or at any other time of the day, it is normal to see people on their feet taking the entire stretch of the bridge, or the street, making small conversation by the side and heading towards a destination that is known to them. Thus, with the removal of fuel subsidy, Bola Tinubu has turned Nigeria into one large, fitness gym! Nigeria is the trek-a-thon country that may soon enter the Guinness Book of Records. Nigerians are beating the road with their feet more than the people in South Sudan, Syria, or Afghanistan due to the cost of fuel and public transportation. In the UK, the government is considering adding a few seconds to the green man at the traffic lights to give porky Brits some time to cross the road, because most of the population is obsess and slow. In Nigeria, the people are busy trekking. In due course, Nigeria would be left with persons looking like broom sticks, and no one should be surprised if Nigerian economists tell us that such a development would be a plus for public health.

Tinubunomics has also made us very attentive. I never used to check the fuel gauge in the car. But I do now. In fact, I don’t only check the gauge, I step out of the car to monitor the gauge at the fuel station and I note down the number of litres pumped into the car. This is no longer the time in Nigeria to act as a big man at fuel stations, sitting down there like a dumb fellow checking the phone while the fuel is being sold. Many of us are now fuel station policemen. It is not safe to trust the driver. It is not safe either to trust the fuel station attendant. Often, I have been tempted to take the fuel pump and serve myself. There is a way those attendants handle the pump. It looks like they have a method of reducing your purchase. Whatever happens, once I get back into the car, I ask questions about the fuel gauge. Is it full? Is it by the middle or is it around a quarter? This is something I never bothered to double-check in the past. But having now to fill a car that ordinarily takes N16, 500 worth of fuel with over N50, 000, I guess one may be excused for becoming a fuel gauge police. President Tinubu’s fuel subsidy removal has tuned all of us into vigilantes. The only fear is that the number of persons with hypertension may be increasing without our knowing it. By the way, many car owners have abandoned their vehicles. They say driving a car is no longer a status symbol in this country. It is better to join the masses in the national trek-a-thon especially if you live around Ikeja! In Lagos, many wives and husbands who work on the island no longer go home. They stay back in the part of the city where God has put them. Tinubu has effectively separated families to teach that romantic lesson that distance makes the heart fonder. People are learning to stay where they earn their daily bread, without going up and down. We, the people are learning how to save costs.

Many husbands who are able to still go up and down have also learnt to redraw the map of their movements. What I have observed in this our Lagos is that husbands now go home early. What I know in this Lagos is that it is possible, and that has been the pattern over the years, for a husband to leave his office and go around town like a piece of smallpox affliction for hours: he stops somewhere to take isi-ewu, he goes off to an “Igbinedion joint” (If you know, you know), then he stops by at a tarmac somewhere to take a “point and kill delicacy.” Some other days, he mixes that up with a stop-over at Calabar Kitchen or any other favourite restaurant/tarmac of his choice. He burns petrol driving from one point to the other meeting up with friends, before he finally makes his way home in the evening either to hit the sack or slap, hit, punch his questioning wife or snarl at the children! Omo, that lifestyle is changing oh. Husbands now go home. They can’t afford the high cost of fuel. Tinubu may have reduced fuel subsidy but he has also introduced by stealth a national family stabilization and planning programme. Many housewives are silently praising him. Their yeye husbands are adjusting to the new economic reality and learning to come home when they should. It looks like practical economics. While the National Economic Council is talking about the possibility of increasing the national minimum wage, by the way, employers of labour in the private sector have been busy playing deaf and dumb. Have you heard any private sector employer trying to increase staff salary? They are all playing deaf and dumb, making the dire situation in which Nigerians have found themselves look like a government problem. Many husbands are now under strict control.

Major losers in the equation would include Tinubu’s allies: the National Prostitutes Association of Nigeria. In the course of the campaigns in 2022, their National Executive issued a public statement saying that they were solidly behind Tinubu, and they were standing on “his mandate”. They even promised to offer discounted services if Tinubu won. Have they? It is now appropriate to ask the Oloshos of Nigeria: How market oh? The simple answer is this: market is bad. Many years ago, as a romance journalist, I used to write a weekly column on prostitutes and brothels. I am not telling that story here, certainly not today. But what I know for a fact is that customer traffic is the oxygen of a prostitute’s life, and as a patron, you must know the best time to get a good bargain. Tinubu has ruined the market for our Nigerian and ECOWAS sisters! People are adjusting their personal budgets and the olosho has been yanked off. Side-chicks are also groaning! I am just waiting for this category of allies to write the President to remind him that they also supported him during his campaigns and that it would be unkind to deny them their own already assured palliatives that do not require National Assembly approval. They may even propose their own economic blueprint.

Please note further that with one policy move, the Jagaban has also solved the problem of traffic hold ups in Lagos and the expressways. The other day, I travelled out of Lagos, something I try to avoid if I can, because the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is a prolonged nightmare for motorists. I was advised that the roads are freer these days and so I ventured out. To my utter shock, traffic moved, not just on the Expressway but also inside the city. By removing fuel subsidy, Tinubu has taken the additional title of Chief Traffic Controller of Nigeria. He has put an end to traffic congestion on many roads. On my way back to Lagos, the road was also free. Most of the problematic people who go about causing problems on the roads had gone home to their wives or concubines. Half of them are more or less stone-drunk anyway. Tinubu-mycin has put them where they should be.

I am aware nonetheless, to wrap it all up, that what I describe as the positive sides of Tinubunomics, or Jagbanomy may be dismissed as a threat to growth and productivity. But let’s look at it this way: since economists like to calculate the strategic value of the informal sector, I would like to know for example: how much value do prostitutes and brothels add to the Nigerian economy? Or perhaps, peppersoup joints? Needless traffic logjams? We have been told by at least two persons from the Tinubu camp: Mr Bayo Onanuga and Senator Dayo Adeyeye that we should all be patient and calm down. Sirs, Nigerians are the calmest and the most patient people in the world. We just want good governance, results and leadership. Is that too much to ask for?