On Friday, 12 July 2024, in this space under the title, “Inside Tinubu’s Republic of Hunger”, we drew attention at the rate Nigerians were pummeled by poverty and hunger. Part of the observations was that almost all the failed portions of internal roads in major cities, were being taken over by colony of women, at times with children, begging for money or food.
In Lagos, the sordid sight had become worrisome, with a disturbing dimension of men, gathering in clusters, brandishing banners with such inscriptions, as ebi n pa wa, which according to a friend with better understanding of Yoruba language, translates to “we are dying of hunger”.
We noted that other parts of the country were not spared the ugly spectacles. In the North, South-East and South-South, the trending culture resonated with presence of various bands of beggars at public places. Poverty and hunger have become the unifying factors among Nigerians, the article summarized.
A follow-up piece on “Welcome to Feudal Republic of Nigeria”, on Friday, 2 August 2024, took note of how the ill-digested policies of the government, had further pushed the citizens to the brink, while the leaders luxuriated. The policies which expanded the frontiers of hunger, poverty, unemployment, hyperinflation, freefall of the naira, debt crisis, and exit of multinationals from the country took toll on the people. The Guardian report of December 21, 2023, of a daily meal of N800 approved for a security dog, and N750 for prison inmates being higher than what an average Nigerian household earned a day, captured the situation.
All the instances pointed to the disgusting levels the citizens had been reduced to. But they pale to nothing compared to the dehumanizing status Nigerians are presently being subjected to at designated points where state governments sell staple food items at discounted rates. At Ojodu Grammar School, Ikeja, one of the centres where Lagos state government carries out the exercise, the sight of men, women and youths queueing to buy the foodstuffs, can be revolting. The items are sold at 25 per cent discounted rates on Sundays. 5kg of rice goes for N5,625, 5kg of beans, N9,300, a crate of egg, N3,450 and a kilogramme of tomato at N670.
Each buyer is entitled to only one 5kg of rice, beans, a crate of egg and a kilogram of tomato. For a family of five, that is a drop in the ocean. To make up therefore, couples and their grown-up children file out, early enough at the centres to be able to make individual purchases. The rowdy session at the Ojodu centre on Sunday and the gory sights of Nigerians looking like inmates of Adolf Hitler’s World War II Concentration Camps, was enough to melt the hardest of hearts. Security personnel deployed to the centre to maintain order did not help matters as they pushed around men and women as if they were awaiting trial inmates. Nothing can be more diminishing to a man as being wiped or pinned to the ground in front of his spouse and children.
I can recall passing through such terrible path of queueing for food during the dying days of the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War, when as a kid of less than seven years, we were forced to line up at relief centres for rations that might not come or when they did, were in patches and morsels that hardly matched the wait. But that was a war situation. Biafra, our homeland, was under economic blockade orchestrated by the federal government and its callous foreign collaborators. So, we needed the handouts to survive. That could be understandable. Citizens of countries experiencing internal crisis, drought, flooding and other natural disasters, may also have reasons to endure the undeserving treatment.
But Nigeria’s case is different. The country is not at war and not passing through any pronounced disaster of monumental dimension. There is no reason for Nigerians to file out for the so-called palliatives or whatever they represent. It is simply a case of the wickedness of the leaders at various levels. My colleague, Ikechukwu Amaechi had, in his robust outing on 18 April 2024, titled; “As Tinubu’s government weaponizes poverty”, adequately situated how almost all the fiscal and monetary policies of the current administration were carefully calibrated to make the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. “The people”, he argued, “have been so dehumanised that they have lost every sense of self-worth. Suddenly, an otherwise proud and self-assured people now depend on government handouts – mere tokenism – for survival and they are subjected to horrendous abuse to even get such crumbs”.
The nearest that comes to mind in the circumstance is Joseph Stalin’s recommendations on manipulation and control of the masses. Legend has it that the defunct Soviet Union’s dictator once plucked a live chicken to show how easy it was to control subjugate people. That seems the template our leaders are experimenting in their palliatives and discounted sales, not love for the people.
In April this year, there were reports on nine people being trampled to death and 30 others injured while scrambling for Sallah palliatives at Senator Aliyu Wamakko’s Sokoto home.
On 20 March, two students of the Nasarawa State University died while scrambling for 7.5 kg bags of rice distributed by the state government. Seventeen others, mostly females, were injured. Four days later on Friday, 24 March, at least seven females, with ages ranging from eight to 53, were trampled to death, while others sustained injuries in a stampede at the annual Zakat distribution of N10,000 organised by AYM Shafa Foundation in Bauchi
If you think that the Nigerian leaders would be genuinely moved by such mishaps, you are getting it wrong. They are not given to empathizing with the people. On the contrary, they interpret fellow-feeling as sign of weakness. Seeing the ordinary citizens wallow in poverty or dying over handouts, gives them joy, in a way. It is a crude system in which while the leaders luxuriate in unconscionable lucre, the people fall deeper into poverty.
So, President Tinubu’s declaration the other day in Beijing, China, that he was ready to take harder decisions to move the nation forward, could be patriotic on the surface but must be done with human face for the people for whom the measures are presumably being taken, to live and reap the results. There cannot be a hero in a wasteland, after all.
With the recent hike in the pump price of the Premium Motor Spirit, otherwise called petrol from N617/litre to N897/litre, and the surreptitious increase to N900/litre to N950/litre depending on location, Nigerians are in for more hardship in the days ahead. Already a bag of rice which sold for N85,000 earlier in the month, had by last weekend risen to N95,000. Prices of other consumables are also on the rise.
Nigerians have never had it this rough. The cry over hunger is beginning to assume the status of a national anthem. The question is; how long will this last? There are no indications of when the people will climb out of this dark pit. Beyond the cocktail of propaganda from foot soldiers of the government, there is nothing concrete to give the masses hope that things would be better, soon. Governance entails offering hope to the people and winning their trust. Nigerians are not seeing anything in that direction, for now. It is high time the president was told the truth: this arrangement is not sustainable.
