The Iceman Cometh: Juxtaposing Tinubu’s scorecard 

It will appear as if Eugene  O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh which is this article’s headlamp is nuanced in Nigeria’s socio-political development trajectory. The Iceman Cometh is a play that explores the lives of an elemental group of disillusioned individuals in a disreputable situation or circumstance.

The themes of hope, delusion, and of the human desire for connection are artfully handled by the author even as the characters confront their own shattered dreams and face the harsh realities of their lives. The Iceman in the play is synonymous with a criminal who commits homicide.

He is a liquidator, a murderer, a man slayer, all rolled into one.

Even though set in 1939, the play’s thrusts or old patterns have not been completely replaced even in our time. A similar or identical series of social pictures could be assembled for Nigerian life from O’Neill’s play. The lives of many Nigerian socio-political players seem preserved in the characters moving through The Iceman Cometh.

The central theme of The Iceman Cometh is alcoholism, self-destruction and self-pity encapsulated in death. Even as people’s dreams distract them from the reality of death, it is assuredly lurking in the corner.

The one-year in office scorecard of the Tinubu presidency reads like scenes in The Iceman Cometh. The drunken characters perform out of inebriated impulse, poor or half-baked knowledge and an unduly high aim and ambition. Or how else does one explain the administration’s ill-digested neo-liberal economic policy of the removal of subsidies; of a mindless increase in various taxes; and of a questionable floating of the Naira?

It is vain to expect that the removal of subsidies and the imposition of a self-abnegating mode of increased taxes are capable of stimulating growth. Only a stark or abysmal lack of knowledge will ignore or be oblivious of the age-long social desideratum that recognises that an economy is easier stimulated with production and consumption subsidies. Most forward-looking economies do.

Heroes and heroines of fiction, villains and even naive adventurers afford us interesting indications of generic social attitudes that we can adjudge correct or outrightly anti-people. We learn from history the status of the traitor to the cause of the people, and of corresponding contemporary attitudes towards, for instance, usury which has lingered from medieval times and has given us our modern Shyllocks in terms of governments that are comfortably ensconced in anti-people policy initiatives.

A given social situation will seem to determine the possibility or otherwise of the realisation of certain economic imperatives. We can determine in general outlines what economic models or praxis are possible in a given society and which are self-evidently impossible. We therefore cannot fashion a general or a priori rule.

As the Nigerian society is becoming increasingly pauperised with the bullish application of neo-liberal economic policies, it is proper to interrogate their continued passing off as genuine or worthy even as such examination is sure to expose their implied, or latent, social implications.

The people flourish in an atmosphere of buoyancy,  exhilaration and of freedom from economic cares particularly under a social welfarist regime. But when their growth and development are stunted in a neo-liberal socio-economic configuration engendering profit inflation, there emerges a general obliqueness of the relationship between the individual and the society. In his ‘The Critique of Political Economy’, Karl Marx approvingly admits that “Certain periods of highest development of art (and of science) stand in direct relation with the general development of society or with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its organisation”. Highest development records are attained during periods of general development or of the exercise of welfarist policies.

The concept of humanism will tend to support in far more symbolic or meaningful relations the social welfare paradigm as being more protective of our common humanity and shared values than the neo-liberal option particularly regarding our own peculiar circumstances. There exists in the neo-liberal economic model a social relevance that is tangential. By this is meant that such a model is not central to the general development striving of the community particularly when practised in a situation of pervasive objective deprivation or lack.

Unless one holds the view that an economic model is merely a framework without an inbuilt justification for its formulation or existence, will one not see the intrinsic value of the social wefarist theory and praxis over the remoteness of the neo-liberal postulation.

Tinubu’s government’s lack or absence of a reasoned industrialisation blueprint has willy-nilly occasioned the unfancied choice of a ridiculously expensive and environmentally inapt 700 km Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway with a corresponding doubtful multiplier or beneficial effect over and above the 1400 km Lagos-Calabar railway plan traversing over 20 bubbling human settlements. That plan has been irreverently put in the cooler.

Cavalierly removing transportation subsidy and smugly ignoring a general capital infrastructure outlay that has direct benefits for the teeming poor and the potential to stimulate a productive economy,  the Tinubu government has awarded a whopping sum of N15 trillion for the building of a needless Coastal highway.

In Tinubu is an unhealthy or curious admixture of the mismanagement of short term development indices and an uncanny lack of ideas respecting a long term economic growth trajectory that could provide employment across board for our teeming youth population, chart a course for industrialisation, etc.

Increasing taxes and removing subsidies have combined to make the poor poorer. Both actions have demonstrated the utter contempt in which the people are held and exposed the government’s unmerciful lack of empathy for the struggling masses even as it has not deemed it fit or proper to reduce the inordinately high cost of governance.

It is strange that politicians who started off as progressive social welfare advocates and gained their popularity on the basis of their people-friendly advocacy could turn round to become neo-liberal economic evangelists spewing out policies that burden and impoverish the masses. These ones were the humanist ideologues of social welfarism yesterday who decried the vulgar sociology of neo-liberalism.

This curious contradiction is not relieved by a strange ethical reasoning that the ideological turncoat has merely travelled the path of engaging the surviving feudalism in his new formation and will soon return to tow the line of avowed determinism which assumes that consciousness must precede existence.

Today, the people are being urged to await a new, improved Tinubu after this time out, as if there is another time yet.

In Greek mythology, the story is told by of the Nightingale and the Swallow. The Swallow urged the nightingale to take up residence under the roofs of men and live under them, as she herself did. “No, thank you. I have no desire to revive the memories of all my past misfortunes”, the nightingale retorted. The lesson here is that some people afflicted by a stroke of bad luck wish to avoid the place where the misfortune occurred.

In Nigeria, the takeaway from this aphorism is rendered in free-flowing Bible reference as “Affliction shall not arise a second time”.

In many of the parameters for the universal gauging of the performance of a government including policy consistency, coherence, congruence, harmony, integration, and chart-able growth and development pattern, the Tinubu government scorecard relives the plot in The Iceman Cometh.

We must devise a plan to deny The Iceman  his amateurish handling of our processes, going forward. We must deny him relevance.

Rotimi-John, a Lawyer and Commentator on Public Affairs, is the Deputy Secretary General of Afenifere .