By Ochereome Nnanna
BEFORE I discuss Happy New Year from President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) let me start this write-up from the appropriate beginning by wishing you Happy New Year 2012, late as it may seem. My people say whenever a man wakes up is his morning. Mine comes without pains.

Today, we will engross ourselves in matters arising from the general strike over the withdrawal of the subsidy on petrol which has seen prices skyrocketing to as much as N140 to N150 per litre in parts of the country. I have been under pressure from my readers to say something and declare my stand on the matter. I will in a jiffy, but first, let me make a few observations or ruminate on issues which might also have been nagging your mind.

I will rate the compliance ratio of this strike at not less than 75 percent. It has been a total success in Lagos and adjoining states and the Federal Capital Territory and its surrounding states. But in the entire nine states of the former Eastern Region of Nigeria, life has been close to normal in the markets and on the streets.

But for the government and some corporate offices (like banks) which remained shut for obvious reasons, it has been as if the strike does not exist. There is a number of reasons for this.

Number one is that the South East and South-South is the President’s combined political home front. You can verify that by the amount of electoral support he got in these two zones during the presidential election last year (in fact, they actually made him president with the support of votes from other zones). These are the zones where the sentiment to support the President’s admittedly painful policy is more obvious than in others.

Official prices

Secondly, these two zones as well as the three zones of the North (outside Abuja and environs) never really enjoyed free flow of fuel at official prices. The only time that petroleum products were freely available and at official rates (especially at Christmas, the most important time of the year when people of these areas travel home) was during the Jonathan years as President (2009 to 2011).

Thirdly, the recent Boko Haram attacks in the North affected the people from these areas most (especially Igbos) and to many of them, this threat is more important than fuel subsidy removal.

On the other hand, in the South West (particularly in Lagos) the strike has been total, and Lagos being the former federal capital and the economic nerve centre of the country, portrays a more credible picture of the feelings of the generality of Nigerians over the subsidy removal.

However, only the blind, deaf, dumb and stupid will fail to note that the daily “shows” staged at the Chief Gani Fawehinmi Square, Ojota, championed ostensibly by civil society groups, was hijacked by opposition politicians, notably of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).

CPC/ACN ‘holy’ alliance

It would appear as if the aborted CPC/ACN alliance meant for the presidential election of last year was successfully consummated at Ojota in the past week, with the more successful ACN providing the logistics and facilities (including the total support of the Ahmed Tinubu media empire which supplied Fela’s “rebel music”) while the CPC’s Pastor Tunde Bakare and the Odumakins supplied the seditious and venomous verbal abuses directed at the person of the President (which went as far as calling for the “fall” of a democratically elected government).

Bakare in particular forgot he was a man of God and called the President a “thief”! Compare this with the Chief Missioner of the Ansar Ud Deen Muslim group, Sheikh Abdur Rahman Ahmad, who also addressed the teeming crowd, keeping to the issues at stake.

He courageously (unlike his conspiratorially silent Northern counterparts) condemned Boko Haram’s murderous campaigns as the handiwork of ungodly agents of oppression while assuring that those plotting a religious war between Christians and Muslims would “fail forever”. That is how a man of God speaks! Well, Bakare only calls himself a “preacher”, anyway.

Compare also the comportment of CPC/ACN politicians at Ojota to the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) throughout the week in Lagos, Abuja and other parts of the country and you will admit that organised Labour and genuine civil society groups comported themselves with great example, keeping to the issues and preaching against violence in carrying out a legitimate democratic agitation.

The strike also generally went well in the three zones of the North apart from violent sparks in Niger and a few other states. Some say the presence of security forces helped to keep things in check. However, I (happily) noticed that Boko Haram was rather less active during the week even though they were presented with more soft targets to attack. There wasn’t much politics in evidence in the way the strike went in the North generally. Just like the East, the former Northern region in general has enjoyed very little of the subsidy regime as petrol has only been freely available and at the subsidised official rate only during the Jonathan years.

Genuine grievances

Clearly, President Jonathan wanted to use this fuel subsidy removal to show he can take tough decisions, but I think he and his team of economists sorely under-estimated the weight of this assignment. When the subsidy on kerosene, aviation fuel and diesel was removed some years ago, there were isolated complaints but not enough to drive the common people into the streets because these commodities are not as commonly used as petrol. Everybody in society uses petrol to run his/her vehicle, tricycle or commercial motorcycle in the absence of credible mass transit programs such as trains, boats, trams, and the dearth of cost-effective inter-city bus services.

They use petrol to drive their generators at home or places of menial occupation in the near-absence of public power supply. They also need it to drive their pumping machines in the face of government’s failure to provide potable water, and those who cannot afford it buy water from those who use petrol to extract water from the ground for sale. Petrol has become the economic lifeblood of the average Nigerian on which he depends for his survival in the face of leadership and government failure to provide basic amenities.

Removing the subsidy on this precious commodity is like removing the very ground on which the people stand. Nigerians are angry because leaders elected to solve problems only go there to enjoy the bounties of office while repeatedly pushing austerity measures on the masses.

The most maddening part of the story is the corruption in government and the oil industry in particular. Nigerians have been made to know that a cartel (cabal) in the oil industry has been frustrating efforts of government to repair our sabotaged refineries and get new ones built, after hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in turn-around maintenance efforts. The same cartel is said to be responsible for diverting the subsidised fuel we import to other countries for filthy profit. Government says the only way it knows of to deal with these cartels is to remove the subsidy and divert the gains to fast-tracking of public capital amenities. On the other hand, the people feel that government is punishing the common man for the sins of the cartel rather than dealing with them as a responsible government should. People think government is weak. A commentator on television put it very clearly thus: “government must deal with the cabal or allow us (the people) to deal with them”.

For most people, the most annoying thing is that the cartel is neither faceless nor nameless. There is hardly a chieftain of the current ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) establishment that does not participate in the nefarious activities of the cartel or benefit from them. That is why it is so difficult for the government to touch it. Even if you bring in General Muhammadu Buhari, he will only sideline the PDP-cartel and establish a CPC one. When he was the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) Chairman he used a cabal of young Fulani professionals such as Nasir El Rufai and the late Salihijo Ahmad for the execution of over 80 percent of the contracts, with more than 70per cent of the projects being sited in the core North.

The anger of Nigerians, therefore, goes way beyond the removal of fuel subsidy. It takes into account apparent inability of the Jonathan administration to deal with the clearly identified enemies of the Nigerian nation as exemplified by the cartels in the oil industry and the sponsors of the murderous campaigns of political Boko Haram. The President has already confessed to us that his government, the security agencies, the National Assembly and other estates of the state are full of them. He has thus created a picture of himself as one who is unable to confront these powerful forces but rather chooses the easy way out by pushing the burden on Nigerians. And he chose a time when most Nigerians, especially Easterners, were in transit without knowing what was in store for them.

Way out

So what is the way out? Government has tried to remove the subsidy on petrol through an authoritarian strategy perfected under the military and it has backfired. Government had calculated that after a few days of the strike, Nigerians would become hungry and start deserting organised Labour to look for their daily bread. Minister of Labour, Emeka Wogu, never hid this expectation in his media utterances.

It has not quite worked out that way. The indications are that Labour, in tandem with civil society and the people, will toughen their stand unless a breakthrough is achieved in the talks with government. Oil production, according to the Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers Union (PENGASSAN) would be shut down by yesterday (Sunday). There were threats in several quarters that the strike might result in the breakdown of order. People are becoming hungry and broke and there is no knowing what they might resort to when they’ll break loose. When matters are allowed to drift towards Hobbesian extremes, anything can happen, and we don’t want to play into the hand of our enemies circling overhead like patient vultures.

There is no doubt that the subsidy regime has become clearly unsustainable. In making fuel available to all Nigerians at official price over the past two years or so, the Jonathan government recorded an astronomical rise in the cost of subsidising petrol.

Unless we retrace our steps by doing something about the subsidy, dealing with corruption in the oil industry and generating a democratically acceptable roadmap towards the use of the proceeds of subsidy removal to massively invest in capital development, Nigeria will be in the shoes of Greece, which is now borrowing to pay salaries of public sector workers.

The subsidy must go. The corruption must go. The secrecy in the oil industry must go. People must pay for their sins against the Nigerian state and the Nigerian people. There is no removal of subsidy without the others being done. And yet, subsidy must go.

The only way to go about it is for government to lay the cards on the table before Labour and the Nigerian people. Let the ongoing dialogue resolve the issue of subsidy removal. Let us solve this problem together.