THE POLITICAL COSTS OF FUEL PRICE HIKES

By

Mike Ikhariale

In a recent submission, entitled Issues in Nigeria's Petrol Palaver, I attempted to point out the apparent fiscal imperatives confronting the government that seem to compel it to want to arbitrarily increase the of price of anything within its control, especially petroleum products. Our analysis there brought into bold reliefs the contributory roles of corruption and managerial incompetence in the fiscal morass in which the government is deeply mired in and from which it may never recover if it continues to adopt the same flawed logic of the greedy taxman to overcome its fiscal problems. The essential contents of that logic is the tendency to continue to levy the victims (the people) while pampering the villains (the leadership) with the proceeds, a process that by itself undermines our fledging democracy as the people do have a limit to endurance. As clear as that analysis was, a few people wrote to query my unwillingness to see the government’s side of the story, no matter how feeble and defective. I think it was self-evident in that essay that the implementation of the case as proposed by the government would entail some inescapable socio-political consequences, which must be faced as squarely as possible.

Basically, the national Balance Sheet is currently in a mess because the custodians of the national account have misunderstood their stewardship role for that of the owners. In other words, the situation in Nigeria is akin to that of the corporate book-keeper who unlawfully swapped roles with the proprietor of the enterprise by helping himself out greedily by plundering the till in his custody without any restraint. At bottom, the true signification of a representative political order such as a functional constitutional democracy is manifested in the duty of the government to dexterously husband the national resources on a footing of good faith and fiduciary obligations on behalf of the population. The tragedy so far is that those who found themselves at the political helms in the country, military and civilians have woefully misunderstood this cardinal injunction of modern governance. They continue to treat the business of government as legitimate extensions of their personal estates and, in turn, perceive state power as an instrument for personal aggrandizement. The truth really is that this is the age of accountability.

Herein lies the import of the "come and eat" conception of public service as crudely articulated by Minister Sunday Afolabi in his infamous presidential ‘dinning table’ altercation with Uncle Bola Ige. Afolabi is right as to what is happening in government even though his comment may sound a bit outlandish. With all the gluttonous commitment to depleting the national coffers, Abacha, the arch thief, never got as far as admitting that all that he was doing in government was to ‘eat’ everything that is in the kitty. As far as one can remember, the Kanuri man hopelessly attempted to cover up his ‘thief thief’ indulgence by wearing a very dark pair of ‘Area Boy’ goggles. At least, he pretended that he was in the service of the state and not on an open grazing spree as it is now the case. How is this sordid situation related to the fuel crises and the resultant popular disenchantment it has generated for the regime? Simple. Under Abacha, the outlets through which the nation was defrauded were very few and the participants were limited to only those who were close enough to him as personal friends, gay lovers and badge wearing cronies or those who chose to enlist as buffalo soldiers in his macabre scheme for self-succession. Today, every senator, very office holder, wants to be distinguished in the imperial consumption of state provided largesse. Mark you, we have more than a hundred of them, and if each wants to be a little Abacha, you can then figure out what that would mean to the national economic balance sheet. A step down on the National Assembly’s ladder, you are confronted with hundreds of teddy Abachas who sit in the House of Representatives whose aggregate voracious impact on the national revenue would be more like a locust invasion than that of mere robbers who only come at night and also stealthily. These distinguished men and women do their plundering ‘as of status and constitutionality’. In other words, corruption has now been deregulated, popularized and even democratized in the new dispensation! The joke making the rounds nowadays is that all official cars in Abuja now have spare Ghana-must-go-sacks in their car booths, the way you need a spare tire in anticipation of the usually heavy city ‘Naira rains’.

When you replicate the wasteful fiscal consequences of several ministers, those with or without portfolios, governors, councilors and the motley crowd of advisers who have to act and look ‘presidential’ at public expense, you can then imagine the catastrophic implications of a governing philosophy that parasitically emphasizes entitlements and imperial grandeur at the expense of service. So, without knowing it, we have in the process made democracy far more expensive to run than the much-maligned dictatorship. Make no mistake though; the fact that democracy is being mismanaged for now does not in anyway distracts from its intrinsic quality as the best approach to national development. One can not even foreclose the possibility of the eventual disgorging of these loots in the people’s tribunals someday. The critical question however is whether what we presently practice is a genuine democracy. So, there is hope in democracy. A political system cannot be more genuine than the operators; hence, you cannot successfully run a democracy in the absence of true democrats. The anxiety of the nation and that of the international community to do away with the military dictatorship as hastily as was possible paved the way for the present crop of pro-Abacha politicians, who sold out when it mattered most, to have obscenely over-ran the political terrain of Nigeria in the aftermath of the change. Certainly, that is not going to last for too long. The revolution will soon start to eat its products, so to say. Therein lies the significance of our thesis that the current temptation on the part of the government to raise prices so as to enlarge the sharable or edible resources available to its corrupt officials has its unavoidable alternative costs.

Government may, as usual, deafly go ahead and impose the price hikes but I can see such becoming a major turning point in the political stewardship of the current leadership. Obasanjo has to become a far much bigger and a far more belligerent Abacha to be able to handle the destabilization that would result therefrom. Surely, there will not be anything near a military coup as some have carelessly hinted. No. My calculation is that the military cannot afford to shoot themselves out of the system of Nigeria by showing their corruption stained khaki so soon because it is a lot more profitable in the circumstances for them to hide in the barracks than to risk the assault of a newly emboldened nation. It will be an institutional disaster because the army has lost its moral legitimacy to be counted as a viable national institution in Nigeria, irrespective of what General Malu and his colleagues may still be thinking of themselves. Where does that leaves the political process? It means the direct evocation of people’s power if and when necessary. Our politicians would have to come to terms with this reality: political power is conferred only on the basis of trusteeship and not on over-lordship, as is the practice with our leaders right now.

The politicians on the scene seem to be partially aware of this awaiting waterloo. Witness the frantic attempts to prevent the emergence of new and truly democratic parties. Given the huge stain, which is associated with the ignoble fact of their ancestry, the current political parties being the products of an illegitimate and leprous military concoction, one would have thought that the anxiety to detoxify the system through the enlistment of other uncontaminated parties would be higher on their part. The embarrassing reality of their political bastardly has started to dawn on many of them hence their frantic attempt to stagnate the political process by renouncing the well-founded call for a national conference and also refusing to inject appreciable equity into the resource control debate. Somehow, these issues would continue to pop up, willingly or not, as they have come to define the emerging contours of the federation’s power relationship in the post-Abacha Nigeria. It would have been better for the leadership to read the contemporary mood of the nation accurately and then move along accordingly, rather than pursuing an anti-people party caucus-determined indefensible lines of action. If Obasanjo finds it politically expedient to ignore the constitutional delict enmeshed in the Sharia frolic of some Iran mimicking governors, he ought to know that it is even more politically suicidal to want to take on an already enraged section of the nation by unfairly picking the battle gauntlet against the legitimate resource control demand of the south. That explains why the dimmed prospects of the year 2003 has already overwhelmed the most optimistic supporters even before they have gone halfway into their stewardship.

Some political strategists have indeed argued that as elections are still far away, this is perhaps the right for the government to push through all unpopular policies, hoping that the people will soon forget. I humbly disagree with this line of reasoning because it is risky to assume that Nigerians are forever amenable. On the contrary, the signs on the ground are that the present crop of leaders should consider it time up politically if the government goes ahead to implement the proposed price hikes on petrol. Incumbency and political manipulation would just not do. This likely outcome has nothing to do with the genuineness or otherwise of the case for immediate price increases. It is a matter of a calculated resolve by the people who have had enough. When all that they hear about is the allocation of hefty sums of money as furniture allowances for virtually absentee legislators, millions and millions of Naira in the form of allowances, ministerial fights over table manners on the presidential ‘eating’ table, it is going to be a hard sell, as we have already noted, for the government to convince the nation that the money further accruing from the new prices raises would not be blown away to meet the voracious appetites of those in government. I do not see how the government can afford to douse such a well-founded fear of the population without a radical change in orientation. Even without the frustration of the aggravated economic burden which the petrol price increase portends for the poor, the truth is that it would require more than ‘paper democracy’ for those currently polluting the political firmament of Nigeria to have a second time because the larger Civil Society did not battle the military to a stand still only to hand over power to lackeys and the hangers-on of the same military. If they did not know what political power meant in 1998, the position is certainly evident today and it should be a lot clearer by 2003. This is where the problems lie for the regime; its political foundation is built on a rentier class that cannot show its true identity when the chips are down because it represents everything the people fought against. If the present government truly likes democracy, it must be prepared for the democratic imperative of a true and decent power shift to the People this time around. There should be a qualitative shift from those presently parading as power men and other proxy forces towards those genuine patriots who heroically did battle with the dictatorship in the streets when these characters played safe. As should be expected, these are the people now giving the inchoate democracy a bad name, as they did not labor for it in any way.

Consequently, Obasanjo may simply concentrate on this term as his first and last or indeed consider it as his ‘second’ term, haven actually been there before, if he goes ahead to raise the price of petrol at this very time. Certainly, not all that is possible is probable, and vice versa. It would be obvious that even if he forces his way back to power in 2003, he would just be a clay pigeon waiting for an inevitable destruction. This chilly scenario should be clear to any serious student of third world politics, which is often played around fiscal rascality, and declining resources. In the absence of this politically self-destructive petrol politics, there would have been no serious obstacles on the way of Obasanjo in 2003 as long as he is prepared to accept the reality of the fact that the olden times of ‘trial democracy’ is gone and power has to begin to assume truly democratic characteristics. That would of course mean a fundamental rethinking in the Obasanjo camp. Unless this rethinking involves putting the people first and foremost, it would just be a wishful thinking by basing his political calculation on the assurance of his present henchmen whose real credentials so far is that they were with Abacha. What has counted, and may still count positively for Obasanjo, is the overriding need for the nation of Nigeria and all those who love her to avoid the path tragically trodden by the DRC after Mobutu or Somali after Barre. No one should underrate the depth to which the Nigerian State sank politically and socially under the irresponsibility of the military. Nigeria is a thoroughly debilitated state being held together by a tenuous nostalgia, and perhaps good fortune, and it could snap if unduly over-stretched by malevolent forces such as that of the Sharia and the Niger Delta situations portend.

Even if Obasanjo eventually survives the impending petrol war, it would still be in his best political interest to begin to move away from the cabal that presently hedged him in a political capsule and start looking forward to striking fair and workable accords with the people across the length and breadth of the country on whose endorsement his political future certainly must necessarily lie. More importantly, he must make peace with the aggrieved nations of the oil producing areas well beyond the palliatives being presently offered. That would involve a thorough search for those things that are dear to them. They are simple and well known: food, shelter, education, employment, security, electricity, fuels and, in the phraseology of Awolowo, the good life more abundantly. The much talked about dividends of democracy is all about these basic amenities and it would remain an illusion if the government continues to push ahead with its blind and suicidal approach of putting the People last.

As things stand now, it would seem as if the Obasanjo system has prematurely ran out of workable ideas. Falling back on price increases at this stage is clear evidence of blurred focus and managerial bankruptcy. It would not be out of place at this juncture to advice the president to humbly consult with General Babangida and ask for his assistance in identifying the immediate needs of the people. The history of governance in Nigeria, so far, shows that no leader has been as smart as IBB in identifying the needs of the people and attempt to tackle them. He went about it by engaging quality hands and giving them a reasonable elbow room to function as professionally as possible, something that Obasanjo is finding very difficult to do as a result of his fabled ‘over sabi’. But like a person, who will never be greater than his destiny, IBB himself would, for some arcane reasons, mess up the core essence of these projects by trying to cut unnecessary corners at the point of implementation.

The annulment of the June 12 election is the best evidence of his political masochism. Without any doubt in my mind, if IBB has been able to bring to fruition any one of his several beautiful ideas, Nigeria would have been a different place today. On the other hand, Obasanjo has not been lucky enough to get good advice or he is personally not smart enough to be able to auto-generate feasibly viable and implementable ideas to animate his presidency. These are things that IBB had in abundance and Obasanjo is acutely short of same. Some of his ‘advisers’ have been whispering to whoever would listen that "Oga does not take advice, he claims he knows everything via experience". So far, too many party members have been saddled with too much responsibilities or ‘eating’ outposts to the exclusion of the larger but far more creative population. It is not enough to brag that a politician can help rig election and assume power, it is equally important in this age of political accountability that power, once won, be profitably deployed in the interest of the people who truly owns it.

If the prices of petroleum product are increased as planned, the agony of the people will be magnified and the dividends of democracy would be diminished proportionately and democracy as presently practiced in the country would be discredited because it is not enough for members of the leadership to be festering their own nests while the people watch them helplessly. As long as election represents paydays for politicians, each election should also determine how far the democratic project would go. The government can indeed salvage some of its political life if it can muster the courage to demand of its member’s transparent sacrifice and patriotism. Nigerians may be more accommodating if they could see signs that the leadership is also partaking in the inevitable belt tightening penance.

Labor President, Adams Oshimiole and his army of protesters may not find much to do if by tomorrow the government decides to lead the way in the true deregulation spirit by halving the present jumbo allowances of its members, the legislators and other government officials as contained in the recently published income guidelines which reads more like a greedy and prodigious self-allocation of the nations’ resources by those who are charged to husband them for the people. The arguments about deregulation would start to achieve their desired effects if there is evidence that those in control are about to take the lead in probity and frugality in service. But the whole case for deregulation and other policy options will fall flat as long as the leadership continues to live off the sweat of the people through extremely extravagant oligarchic socio-political masturbation. The times so far spent in scheming to spend and enjoy the resources of the nation by those in control would have been enough to work out some developmental ideas that would make the provocative manipulation of petrol prices totally unnecessary. After all that Abacha and his predecessors did to the economy future leadership should ever be prepared for some transferred malice from the people and in this connection, the present leadership did not help matter by its well-exhibited kleptocratic mentality. So, the people are furious and rightly too.

It is foolhardy for the government to think that the electorate does not understand the reality of the situation. Any attempt to distort the will of the people would only accelerate the much expected payday for, as they say at Onitsha market, ‘every day for the thief, only one day for the owners’. For Nigerian politicians, they cannot twice be lucky. Shenanigans like consensus candidacy and other electoral manipulations have ran their courses and it is pointless at this day and age to want to fall back on them. Even for the sake of argument, it could be said that the theory did fail its chief protagonist, Abacha, as he did not even live to see the inevitable negative outcome of his project, which failed and would still have failed, anyway.

Even if the oracle has decreed that the prices of petrol must go up in Nigeria, the president still has the discretion to plead that its implementation be delayed until an opportune time or carried out gradually. But for him to go ahead blindfolded immediately may unwittingly provoke a conflict of interests among the pantheon of gods. And should the deities quarrel, it is often their intercessors that suffer. The opportunity cost of not delaying on the price hike prescription for now is the impossibility to control its negative outcome later as you cannot eat your cake and still have it. The people in whose interest the government purports to be operating are yet to see the justification for the increases. If anything, they have articulated unassailable counter arguments why it would not be to their advantage. More importantly, they believe that the government has not justified its demand for more money in view of the unmitigated wastage that abounds in official circles. In this connection, the government has the choice to cut costs on its own volition or penalize the people for its own waywardness and the people also have the prerogative to choose not to allow themselves to be made scapegoats of a defective governing style. Either way, what is at stake now is a test as to where true sovereignty lies in the nation. Who will blink first?