‘To rule over graves’
By
AS an undergraduate in the Nigerian university in the 1980s, I was part of a students underground that mobilized against the military government of Nigeria. One of the remarkable events of that era which I remember vividly was the students protests against oil deregulation. Ibrahim Babangida, the gap-toothed mystery had come to power. A few of us were prescient enough to understand, that this Freudian case, was going to take Nigeria through times that would not be exactly called a joyride.
He smiled, he did the back-slapping, hand-pumping routine familiar in American political populism but he also shot brutally from the hips. He had a way of paying absolute attention-almost as if enraptured by the superior view of intellectuals. Babangida had a man like Professor Wole Soyinka almost gushing out what seemed them to be a great revelation: ‘this one listens!" It was a real relief, after the stony-faced brutality of the Buhari-Idiagbon era. And oh, he broke the gates to the gilded tower, fished out some of the gilded names of the academe, and took them on the merry-go-round.
The first, the brilliant, conservative historian and scholar, Sylvanus Cookey he set to the first task: he gathered around him a mix of intellectuals and set them to keep talking. Their task was simple - although couched in the lubricated tongue of the media and in the cold-war fashion, as the ‘politburo’, a somewhat over-ambitious name - their job was to find something of a new political direction for Nigeria. Everybody took it seriously and the nation was suffuse with the brightest ideas that it could muster. The Marxist newspaper columnist, Edwin Madunagu, a crucial member of that panel did not realize in time that the ‘Politburo’ was all part of Babangida’s silly jokes - well practical jokes - on Nigerians!. Poor Eddie went right down to the route of marshalling a ‘minority report’.
Now, that is not quite the point. Just that it requires the logic of hindsight to see the brilliant thesis behind General Babangida’s strategy for power. For a long time, it worked. He kept Nigerians distracted while he fiddled with their lives. Creating what the latest World Bank reports credit to be the most ambitious (even if failed) economic engineering in Nigerian history. One point, however, was that it was all deliberate. I find it awesome that Nigerians did not quite see the London Times comment a week after Babangida’s ‘bloodless’ coup in August 1985, which had something about the fact that that for the first time a government had been overthrown in Africa because it did not succumb to the International Finance Corporations policies, and that the powers that be in New York and elsewhere had somewhat become impatient with the "tiresome flag-waving nationalism" of the Nigerian government.
It was a reference of course to the overthrown Buhari-Idiagbon government. The truth must be told at this point, that the internationally backed plot to overthrow that government was a trade-off for the soul of Nigeria. One just has to contrast the radical policies, and the brilliant long-term insights of Buhari’s Economic Minister Dr Onalapo Soleye, whose economic plan was to reduce the debt burden, the surplus import deficits and to revive indigenous production and control distribution. The Buhari government attacked monopolies and hoarders, to free the economy from the strangle-hold of entrenched interests who had cornered the import license racket. But more importantly, it stood up to the larger global economic interests, and even repudiated some of the debts that had factored in the overhang.
Centered thus on a clean, transparent fiscal strategy, a new muscle was forming around Nigeria’s withered macro-economic frame before the Babangida coup happened. We need only to look and understand the backgrounds of two of General Babangida’s key plutocrats, who controlled planning and economic administration in the life of that regime: Dr Chu Okongwu and Kalu Idika Kalu - both conservative economists, Harvard trained and with backgrounds in jobs, consultancies and other ties with the International Monetary Fund, seemed to be key hatchet men for these institutions in Nigeria. They both designed and supervised economic policies, which unhinged the social safety nets, and the critical balance of Nigeria’s economy. What occurred was the total breakdown of the system. It was dutifully called ‘economic engineering’. But in fact, it was economic genocide.
I do recall that some of these policies found among its greatest trumpeters, empty, blatantly ignorant bankers, industrialists and other familiar government spokesmen, who did grand analyses of each year’s budget with such gusto that it seemed that the rest of us were nitwits. Chu Okongwu’s often well-crafted budgets, would somewhat decisively discombobulate even the numerally educated. So, what often happened was the emperor’s garment scenario- in which men affected knowledge of this thick, unfamiliar economic broth’s, just to feel like not quite dim. Anyway, the result is here with us. My poor father who retired as a director in the public service cannot draw a decent pension, and so lives in poverty. Schools have broken down. Refineries have collapsed. The economy is in shambles. Those are ‘the long-term effects’. And they are here with us.
As I said, one of the things which we fought as young undergraduates years ago, was the battle against the removal of petroleum subsidies. This led to the oil subsidy protests in 1988. We did not succeed. Schools were closed down indefinitely. And with force of arms the subsidies were forced down Nigerian throats. It was all part of the IMF ‘conditionality’. We still live in that reality of regular deregulation. In case Nigerians do not know, the Obasanjo government is a continuation of the Babangida government. They not only have the same friends - the IMF, World Bank and WTO – they swim in the same currents. They would kill us, and it would not matter. For as long as their friends in New York and London are happy. But it is well: someday they would rule over graves.