By Sam Omatseye
The Emir of Kano was playing to a feudal gallery. Aminu Ado Bayero was not speaking to the First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, when he asked her to tell her husband, the president, that hunger is in the land.
The monarch was in a mood of vanity. He exhibited himself to the Kano street as their advocate. A few days later, the EFCC unveiled a crooked plot under his watch. About 10 warehouses advocating hunger in Kano became news. They were hoarding food. The paradox is inescapable. So, too, the hypocrisy. I would love to hear the emir say a thing or two about the saboteurs in his enclave, the vermin in Kano blood. Maybe he should telegraph a message to the first lady, and nuance his position by saying, yes, there is hunger in the land. But some people he watches over as spiritual leader are also responsible for the pains. That means, he, too, by default, is failing in his duties to his people.
He forgot that the president, just as he has done to other states, has put his governor in custody of billions of Naira in the past eight months, more than any Kano governor has ever received. He should also address the question to his governor who just swept to victory in a flush of court victory. Last year when his neighbour was president, he did not convey similar message when no one could access a naira and food rotted in the market. The beloved monarch was speaking to the first lady without looking at his blindside.
Emir Bayero is not alone in that orchestra. The emir reflects a distorted sense of the state of the country. There is a barrage of messages, a good deal of them deliberately staged online, to make the president a harbinger of poverty.
This sort of storytelling imperils efforts to separate suffering from lies. But because many are unhappy in the land, those who know the whys and wherefores of the problem and the virtues of the president’s actions have joined the fray for one reason: to pull down the presidency. It is cynicism clothed in love of the masses.
There have been a few writers, pundits on television and politicians who have found foul traction in harping a tale of woes. First, we must know that most of these folks did not like the president before day one. Hatred did not turn instant love for him. Some of them prophesied in their secular pulpits that he would not win the primaries. He did. That he could not win the elections, and he did. That he would not be sworn in, and he was. His victories intoxicated their fury.
Two, we know that a majority of the voters, combining both Atiku and Obi in the ballot, beat Tinubu by about six million votes. But the election was about who had the most votes and it was one man. They don’t like that man. So, he ascended the throne with headwinds of malice. When those same people set free volleys of vitriol, it is not exactly because they love this country more and hate Tinubu less. Rather, they are gloating at the challenges of the hour by posing righteous angst. They are pretenders of love of the people. What they are will in due time be known. For now, they are, like the emir, playing to the gallery. They are not nuanced. They either do not understand economics or are unwilling to learn.
Now they pretend they are against subsidy and the exchange rates as though their candidates did not append the policies. There have been spinoffs of the actions. One, the rot in the CBN. What have they written or commented on the efforts to detoxify the top bank.
During the campaigns, many of them accepted the logic of subsidy removal and collapsing of exchange rates? What of the revelations about the stage after stage of rapine of our collective cash vault? Have they tried to analyse the consequences for the nation?. We heard of billions of dollars taken away by gangsters in suits and clever heads. It reminds one of Leo Tolstoy’s line that “all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.” In our case, superfluity of peacock moguls.
There have been revelations about the commercial banks hugging bales of dollars. What have the epistles of voice and pen done to relate the malaise of the banking elite with the naira as a sick baby? Have they shown how it is easy to destroy, and that it takes time to repair? Do they know this? Yes, unless they lie to themselves.
Have they come up with any alternative solutions to the efforts of the president? Those who are congenitally afraid of IMF and throw darts at the institution with all its imperfections are still hostage to the caskets of Marx and Lenin. But, for most, it is hypocrisy.
Many of them were on the take during the elections from the other parties and are writing and gesticulating as saints scented and sent from heaven.
If they want to say there is inflation, I will agree. It is serious? I will say yes. It is urgent? I will nod. But they should back their umbrage with new solutions. As Antonio Machado wrote, “new roads are made by walking.” They are standing still and pointing fingers at muddy stains in the walker’s coat. Some have parroted palliatives is not a solution. The government never said palliatives is a solution. It is to ease the burden until the fruits of policies come. I will agree that Betta Edu stalemated the humanitarian ministry. I suggest that the presidential committee streamlines the register speedily and set the palliatives back on course. Yet, last December, a lawmaker announced that bags of rice were handed lawmakers to distribute to their constituents for the holiday. All the same noisemakers read it. Why did they not hold our lawmakers to account? No one contradicted the legislator, so I believe him. Why did anyone not ask their constituents to protest on the streets against them? We should not make an era out of malice or cause out of grudge. Agbaero and company can protest now but when their candidate supported naira design and the poverty that resulted, they did not howl on the streets.
How many of them have asked the governors, like Kano, to account for all that the president has handed them since May last year? The tendency is to hold the president responsible. President Tinubu would not shy from it. But he has 36 governors in charge of the people. I know a few that are in sync, like Delta State Governor Sheriff Oborevwori with the distribution of grains to farmers. The BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has released money to traders. Ogun State’s Dapo Abiodun just announced N5 billion for that purpose. The President asked the governors to “spend the money,” not “spend the people.”
The epistle mongers remind me of Moliere’s play, The Imaginary Invalid, about a man who keeps imagining he is sick and piling up a series of sicknesses he does not have.
The afflictions of today are enough. Let those so-called wise men with grandiloquent pens and purple rhetoric not add new ones. As Fashola noted in his new book, Nigerian Public Discourse, “anger is not a strategy.” This is a time for succour, not sour grapes.
