“The road to serfdom”, By Uddin Ifeanyi

Mark Manson (“Every Thing Is F*cked”), argues that “For every action, there is an equal and opposite emotional reaction.” From this vantage, the response of the “State House” to some Nigerians taking to calling President Bola Ahmed Tinubu “T-Pain” was to be expected. The cease-and-desist warning issued by the state house, last week, was itself, unwittingly, from a position of pain. It gave vent to the federal government’s discomfort that despite the president’s best intentions for the country, and his best efforts (remember that so tired was he from these efforts that he only just returned to work from a furlough) at realising these intentions, the payback from key sections of the people he leads, if this new nickname has any meaning at all, is to further hold him in derision.

Beyond this first take, though, the state house’s response to the president’s new nickname reaches much further than the causal connection between reactions, and their equal and opposite feedback. Since assuming office, the gut response of the Tinubu government to dissent and opposition has been as good, if not better than that of, any of the military governments we have had since independence. Our current government has tried to squelch strikes called by civil society groups and labour unions to protest deteriorating living conditions. It has threatened charges of treason against domestic entities perceived to be on disagreement with it. In other words, it has not acted, thus far, as if its mandate derives from the electorate.

Ironically, the “T-Pain” sobriquet is itself an emotional reaction to a bucket of stimuli. The pains that the Nigerian people have been through in the last one year are rivalled only by the ones much older citizens went through in the mid-1980s – when we had to queue for “essential commodities”, when poor queuing etiquette was rewarded most rabidly by jackbooted soldiers, and when the call to the people to tighten their belts, as part of a national programme of economic austerity continued to ignore the fact that the last hole in the average Nigerian’s belt was as close to the buckle as the laws of biology and physics permitted.

I still believe that the Tinubu government could have made a more convincing case around both the stimuli it was reacting to in the design of its policy responses, and the nature of the responses themselves. Indeed, it could, arguably have successfully made two such cases. The first case, that it inherited economic mayhem is readily made. Between President Muhammadu Buhari and CBN Governor Godwin Ifeanyichukwu Emefiele, fiscal and monetary policy gumption was observed in the breach in the years before Mr. Tinubu took office. The transmogrification of a policy intended to drive electronic financial transactions into one that denied the economy of cash completely may have been the most stupid of what was then advertised as a new homegrown heterodoxy, yet it was but one chapter in a very ugly tome. Coming into office after 8 years of this madness, things were always going to be hard. The central bank’s dollar coffers were barer than Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. The national exchequer was no better – that is, before accounting for the debts and contingent obligations that the two previous joint managers of our macroeconomic space had added.

Attempts to fix this problem were going to be harder still. But in order to soften the popular response to the hardships that were on the cards, the federal government simply needed to let the people know how bad things were, what fixes it was going to implement, the time-horizons for these fixes, and how much displacement in living standards the people were going to have to bear. What we have learned over the last 12 months is that only governments that feel accountable to the people do such things. As has become painfully clear, the knee-jerk response of the incumbent federal government is that of an unelected junta, and not that of a democracy.

If the Tinubu government’s understanding of its relationship to the people were that of an elected government, accountable at elections, then it would understand that if the “State House” can warn Nigerians not to address our president after a certain fashion, it means the “State House” can also insist that we address him far more ingratiatingly. Whichever way you look at it, Enver Hoxha would have been delighted by the “State House” – straight out of George’s “1984”!!!

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