Government as dispenser of pain

By 

Okey Ndibe

Nobody at this stage should be in any doubt about President Olusegun Obasanjo's determination to deregulate the price of petroleum products.

Two weeks ago, the president told a group of journalists that his government could not continue to subsidise the products for the benefit of neighbouring nations. Published in The Guardian of Tuesday, February 27, the interview itself carried the unequivocal caption, "Obasanjo says no going back on fuel deregulation." The caption as well as the details of the interview were revealing in three quite substantial senses. First, as an example of Mr. Obasanjo's style of governance, his utterances betrayed a failure of statecraft, a broad term for the political methods on which a leader depends to achieve his programmes. If the accent of the interview is anything to go by (and I don't see why not), then our president's statecraft leans too heavily on a martial cast of mind. This is not a new charge, nor, by any means, an unfair one. Those who were worried from the very beginning that Obasanjo's presidency would embody strident echoes of a dictatorial style have not been disabused by any stretch. All too often, Mr. Obasanjo acts as if he were invested with plenary powers, as if, indeed, his place in the republic were secured, not through the ballot, but by the unquestionable authority of the bullet.

Of course, that deportment has brought him some political grief. He has disaffected the legislative arm as well as the human rights constituency. But the highest price he has had to pay, in my view, is the sense among a widening group of ordinary Nigerians that he has lost touch with their pain and tribulation. In this respect, Obasanjo's insistence on raising the price of fuel (for that's what the grand debate about deregulation amounts to) strikes me as cruelly ironic. For it brings to mind the second revelation about the character of the man who is our president. It should be recalled that Mr. Obasanjo's first attempt to raise the price of fuel marked his most profound loss of public sympathy. On that occasion, as now, the president persisted ñ against all wise counsel in pushing the idea that there was no alternative to increasing the price of fuel.

That obstinacy was perceived by the common Nigerian as betrayal. It was proof that the man who ran their lives thought little of their long privation under Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha and Abdulsami Abubakar. That insensitivity was politically costly. By dint of that

imperviousness, Mr. Obasanjo squandered much of his public goodwill. As far as the ordinary Nigerian was concerned, the president was just like the rest of them: an inflictor of pain, a dispenser of penury. The president's orchestration of another deregulation refrain is troubling in several ways. At best, it bespeaks a man with no sense of history. But in an even more serious manner, it may point to a president whose short term memory is seriously impaired. If Mr. Obasanjo was unable to sustain a case for increasing fuel prices last year, in what ways does he think the variables have changed? What new grounds has he advanced to make such an explosive and forbidding issue more hospital to the public palate? How more tenable is that argument today? My fear is that the president has little or nothing new to shore up his case for deregulation. If anything, he appears to hark back to the same dated and unimpressive argument. He believes that subsidies create smuggling of petroleum products into neighbouring countries, which then creates perennial domestic shortage. According to The Guardian, the president suggested that those opposing deregulation "were beneficiaries either as owners or part-owners of the means of supply of the product." Finally, he argued that "because of the non-competitiveness of the prices of petroleum products in Nigeria, no investor would like to establish a refinery" in Nigeria.

Nothing in the president's summation sounds fresh or compelling. Or rather, the only compelling instruction here is what his statements reveal, once again, about the man who leads us. To base a case for deregulation mainly on the rampancy of smuggling is to confess to basic incompetence. Which, I am afraid, is the third lesson to be drawn from this debate. Let us not forget that fuel is smuggled across our borders in tanker haulers. And that Nigeria has a full complement of the police, the army and customs officers to combat such smugglers. If these state apparatchiks are incapable of so ordinary a charge as arresting tankers smuggling fuel, how do we justify their existence and their claim on a huge slice of the nation's resources?

Incompetence and corruption, not subsidies, are the problem. Since 1999, Nigerians have seen little improvement in power supply. Nor have they got better fuel supply. Mr. Obasanjo himself has suggested that fuel scarcity is like a jinx, like juju. Ordinary Nigerians should feel no obligation to assume additional suffering just because those who presume to lead them can't figure out how to solve simple problems. Instead of insisting on the ruinous course of deregulation, Mr. Obasanjo should increase the competence quotients of his administration. He can do this by summoning those who run the Customs and Police and giving them marching orders to apprehend fuel smugglers and the profiteers from the illegal activity. If he and his team are confounded by this goal, the president must cease decreeing deregulation as the answer.