Opinion
By Steve Osuji
COGNITIVE BLOCKADE AND CRIPPLING INERTIA: Nigeria continues to slide. All economic indicators are red; some are blipping, indicating danger. Those who know are in deep worry. The populace is in a trance, zombified by a never-seen-before strange situation. But the Presidency, the fulcrum of government continues in its empty braggadocio – they doodle and paper over cracks as the ship of state takes more water and totter.
The hard, indeed, harsh truth which nobody wants to speak about or hear, is that the president suffers what this column wants to describe in mild terms as cognitive blockade. His mind can’t seem to process much, not to talk of the stack of presidential duties in a country of over 200 million people. This is the crux of Nigeria’s situation today. It’s daunting enough ruling Nigeria with all of one’s faculties running well…
Nigeria is in a bind, to put it starkly!
PECC AS PECULIAR MESS
Nothing proves President Tinubu’s impaired mind more than the recently inaugurated Presidential Economic Coordination Council (PECC).
Last March, about ten months into the Tinubu presidency, nothing was working just as things are still not working now; a brainwave overtook the presidency. Let’s float a presidential economic coordination council (PECC), someone must have said. Let’s bring all the big names in the private sector, the governors, the ministers, everyone, under a big umbrella, let them find the solutions to our economy by themselves. Something to absolve the president of any blames if the economy collapses as it seems wont to do under Tinubu’s watch.
This is no doubt, some kind of an omnibus madhouse.
Of course, the president lapped up the crazy idea. A bloated list of names were immediately compiled and announced with fanfare. There was a wild stir across the land. Some were clapping and the more discerning cried. This column moaned!
This was of course, an abdication of responsibility by the President, we wrote then. So what happens to the Federal Executive Council, why would governors be engaged in the president’s duties, who would run their states?
Someone with some grey hair must have whispered to the presidency about the folly and futility of PECC. The idea has been kept in the cooler since. But last week, four months after it was first mooted, it resurfaced in a slightly tinkered format.
It’s now a restructured townhall meeting with, let’s say, a pinch of ‘balablu’, if you like.
The president, vice president, Senate President and Speaker would lead, in that order. Instead of all the governors, we now have only the chairman of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF), we have the barracudas of Nigeria’s industry led by Aliko Dangote, Abdulsamad Rabiu, Tony Elumelu, Femi Otedola, among others, (members of the billionaire club that already has Nigeria by the scrotum); there are the psuedo-technocrats and pretenders thereof (who will serve for one year); and 13 ministers (one wonders how their 35 colleagues excluded from the grand ballroom would feel.)
With this, the cabinet has been side-tracked, the Economic team distracted and the Presidential Economic Advisory Council disrupted. This can only suggest acute confusion in the presidency!
BREWSTER’S TRILLIONS
PECC, of course, is poised to be a big jamboree EXPRESSO wagers, and they have been handed N2 trillion to play with in the next six months. They have a rough breakdown of how they must exhaust this huge sum by December and hope Nigeria’s economy would boom again.
It reminds of the classic comedy, Brewster’s Millions: the fellow who must spend a million dollars per day for 30 days, in order to inherit a fortune!
The fund is already allotted thus: N500b will go for health and social welfare, N500b for Agric and food Security, N350b for Power and Energy while N650b will be deployed to General Business Support.
Too many questions and lacunae litter this ‘grand’ economic scheme. Here: is a lack of cash really Nigeria’s problem? How do we manage the little money we have? Where’s the N2 trillion coming from? Is it both a planning and execution council, especially with cash to spend? What about the Federal budget, how does it align with this? And what about the so-called Tinubu economic reform?
Reporting the inauguration last week, the presidency spokesperson describes PECC as being in furtherance of the administration’s efforts at “re-engineering the nation’s economic governance framework.”
HOW TO WALK THE TALK
Those who know President Bola Tinubu will agree that he is adept at talk, talk and more talk. Even in his hay days as state governor, he is not one to transit quickly from blueprints to turning the sod.
For a man who is fabled to be the most prepared to be president of Nigeria, the last 14 months have proved that desire to lead is one thing, ability is another. At a period Nigerians should be reaping the harvests of quality leadership already, Tinubu continues to ‘plan’ and ‘re-engineer’ while Nigerians pine away.
The truth, however, is that he has been crippled by inertia. He is lost in the maze and jumble of governance; he is beset by analysis paralysis.
Now he can’t even see the simple remedies starring him in the face! Instead of overlapping layers of committees and councils, the President could have simply sat down eye-ball-to-eyeball with Mele Kyari (NNPC) and Aliko Dangote to rework the ongoing crude oil management framework in order to unleash the enormous potentials of Dangote refinery for the benefit of Nigeria. With an optimal supply of crude, the biggest refinery in the world would supply petroleum products at slightly lower prices that would help reflate the economy.
This is one quick antidote to the tumbling economy. This of course, presupposes that the president would have garnered some balls to deal ruthlessness with Nigeria’s oil thieves. This move will immediately boost our crude production. No crowd, no council, no long analyses: just neutralise the oil thieves and block the leakage.
Third, he can cut the fat, starting from his office. How could you propose to buy two luxury jets at once after spending about N15 billion on the presidential fleet in just one year.
Fourth, the job is at home, not abroad. Just cut your junkets. And your wife’s silly peregrinations and the VP’s jolly rides. It’s a treasonous offence that the president’s wife reportedly guzzled N473 million of public funds in February and March alone travelling to UK, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Who approved this? In other countries, the president would have been impeached!
And our president is reported to have spent in six months, N3.4 billion, which is far more that his entire annual travel budget of N2.9 billion.
THE CURSE OF SELF-ANNIHILATION?
In the final analysis, we wager that either Tinubu is under the spell of self-annihilation (asasi) or he truly suffers from acute cognitive challenge (oridota).
Otherwise, why would he shun simple economic remedies and prefer the folly of handing out trillions of cash to the money grubs in our midst. Most of them are actually overrated – by the reckoning of EXPRESSO! Many of them cheated and exploited loopholes in the system. It’s only in Nigeria that greatness is measured by the degree of a man’s vileness.
DANGOTE HAS NO MAGIC WAND!
Last word: PECC is perverse ab initio and will amount to nothing. At best, the ‘Big Boys’ will flood our markets with cheap and about-to-expire oriental rice and pasta for Christmas. After that, everyone would disperse leaving Nigerians with long tales.
By this time next year, our situation would have worsened because there’s no real production going on now or later. The 2027 elections would take the front seat and desperate measures (including novel rigging strategies) would be devised for purposes of the re-election.
It would then dawn on us that Dangote and co has no magic wand afterall!
***Feedback:steve.osuji@gmail.com
11TH July, 2024.
C.E.
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