Is Nigeria on the way to serfdom?, By Uddin Ifeanyi

Cooped up at home in consequence of the 10-day protest against bad governance in the country that kicked off on Thursday, last week, it was inevitable that the many recent contradictions that describe Nigeria would intrude on one’s thoughts. First, however, the facts around which these contradictions swirled. Nine years of Mr Muhammad Buhari’s rule of the country were a waste. The former army general’s government’s acts of omission all derived from one failing: the man hadn’t the foggiest idea of how an economy works. From that vantage to his administration committing outrages against the Nigerian economy was, thus a short haul. The ban on food imports drove prices up without strengthening local food production capacity. The vulnerabilities in this sector were of a different vintage: the nation’s breadbasket leaked atrociously. The central bank’s cash sequestration policy wiped out the rural (cash-based) economy, even as its unorthodox policies ran down the balance on the gross external reserves — to no observable impact.

The Tinubu government was, thus, handed a poisoned chalice. But to the extent that it took office from a party that it was an integral part of while out of it, it was always complicit in its predecessor’s mismanagement of the economy. Especially when it is not on record as having adverted the country’s attention to the long-term dangers that the Buhari government’s economic “follicies” posed to the country. Accordingly, at the heart of the tragic circumstances currently unfolding is the fact that the incumbent federal government’s loyalty to this oath of omertà, this code of silence about the ruinous political activity of the All Progressives Congress party in government over the last decade continued in the Tinubu government’s refusal, on assuming office, to give evidence to the people of how bad things were — inflation, unemployment, hopeless national productivity levels, the rising cost of the national debt to the exchequer, anaemic balance on the gross external reserves, etc.

From this followed several contradictions. The incumbent federal government had campaigned for the last general election on its technocratic nous. According to its most graphic patter, it was going to bring about reforms to the organisation of the Nigerian state akin to those that it had wrought in Lagos State, where (I guess the pitch was for non-residents of the state) it had managed to turn the place into Nigeria’s answer to Qatar. While reality has turned out to be a tad less dramatic, almost invariably, the people have judged the slew of policy initiatives put in place by the government since 29 May, 2023, against this narrative. I have no doubt that the freeing of prices by the Tinubu government in critical sectors of the economy was the right thing to do. First, they were inevitable, given the dead end into which the Buhari government had steered the ship of state. They were also bound to happen if the economy is to begin to allocate increasingly scarce domestic resources efficiently.

But the reforms didn’t gel with the people. In part because they caused serious problems — adding to rising prices and unemployment, for one. In part because they were inconsistent with the messianic messaging that the Tinubu government rode into office on the back of. But largely because the government found it well nigh impossible to engage the people on the fact that there is a lag (in the case of the central bank’s attempt to bring inflation down by raising domestic borrowing costs, of about 18 months at least) between when reforms are enacted and when they begin to bear fruits.

In the ensuing gaps between where the Tinubu government was coming from and where it is, between where it is and where it wants to go, and between both these contradictions and what the people feel, the 10-day protest suggested itself as a thesis. As with most things Marxian, this dialectic was a neat (if not quite useful) device for explaining most phenomena. The truth is that since the inauguration of the Tinubu administration the burden of deprivation and volatility borne by every Tunde, Okoro, and Muhammad in the country has increased exponentially. By refusing to offer explanations that help us navigate these troubled waters, preferring instead, to invite God’s wrath on the opposition that has emerged in this vacuum, the federal government is only making things worse.

For, in truth, from Bangladesh to Kenya, the relevant authorities have offered a stark lesson in how not to respond to popular angst — curfews, shoot-to-kill policing, and disrupting the internet to prevent people talking and organising. Bad governance enfeebles democracies. And as successive military rule here has demonstrated, strong-arm tactics lead to autocracy and serfdom.

Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.