“Every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: ‘Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path.’ If you don’t ask those questions, your governance will not be good.” — Pope Francis

THE headline of my commentary here last week was: “When government goes to sleep, the citizens suffer.” Well, it is very bad that those in government all seem to be fast asleep. When a person is asleep, his/her sensory frontiers are in a state of suspended animation — the senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch will come alive again only when such a person awakes.

Again, it is bad enough that the senses of our people in government are in a state of sleep, such that they are totally impervious to our feelings. They are also completely disconnected from the realities of existence that we face, such that they carry on the way they are carrying on, caring not a jot about our collective fate. In fact, people in government — elected or appointed — are in such a comfort zone where the bliss engendered by their positions makes it impossible for them to be empathetic when it comes to the plight of the people that elected them. 

If the above were not so, would anybody whose senses are not in a state of sleep condone/approve another astronomic rise in the pump price of petrol? The situation was bad, as in BAD, from May 29, 2023 when subsidy on petrol was unthinkingly removed. Since then, we had been managing to live, pardon, exist, as we all battled to make ends meet with the sky-high prices of goods and services, especially food items. Then, when we seem to be adjusting to that, just when prices of pepper, tomato, and other food items started coming down, the only thing government sees fit to reward our resilience and cooperation with was to slam another astronomical rise in the price of petrol on us. Just how do people in government expect us to cope? How can the politicians and the mandarins that work for them expect us to continue paying for their inefficiency and corruption?

One recurring argument for the rise in petrol pump price is that it will help curb smuggling, while the apologists continue to say that the petrol being used in neighbouring countries was smuggled there from Nigeria. Is curbing smuggling not part of the duties of government? Isn’t there a government department whose duty it is to curb smuggling? Is smuggling no longer an economic crime against the state? Why do we have agencies and departments of government that do not do their work and we continue to pay them?

The most annoying part of the recent hike in the price of petrol was that many people in government started dodging the issue. That is political sakamanje. The Minister of Petroleum Resources issued a statement that the Federal Government did not authorise any increase in price of petrol, saying that with the PIA (Petroleum Industry Act) in place, the agencies in charge are now in the private sector and government does not tell them what to do. I differ because raising the price of petrol in Nigeria has always been a political matter, and non-political authorities have never had the power to do it. Even the NNPC itself, despite indications to the contrary, was denying it. The question, as the Americans would say, is: “whodunnit?”

All the while, Mr President is comfortably in China on a state visit. I saw footages of him and his host, Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, and could not resist extrapolating differences between the two leaders. Physically, our president is dark complexioned, while Xi is a lot fairer, like most Asiatics. Xi is several inches taller, and is not bespectacled like our president. But deeper, Xi and his people in government are striving daily to ensure that life is better for the average Chinese, and the result is available for all the world to see.

Last week, I recalled what I read in a book titled Who Will Feed China: Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet, written by Lester Brown, and published in 1995. The response of China to the alarm raised by the message in that book is known to the world in the vastly improved agricultural production in that country, with a corresponding rise in the quality of infrastructure and growth of industries. Since we are there to beg, we are also a witness to the growing prosperity of China.

In any case, if the leaders of China had not pulled the country up from the mire of poverty, we would not be negotiating a currency swap deal with them, while Chinese firms could not have overtaken Western competitors in our construction sector. Still comparing Tinubu and Xi, and conceding that the Chinese mind is as resolute as it can be when tough decisions need to be taken, it is improbable that Xi would have treated his people with the utter disdain and disrespect that Tinubu is treating his fellow Nigerians, considering the impact of his economic policies on fuel and energy and flotation of the naira, which is worsening everything. Naira flotation should be scrapped, and government should return to the fixed exchange rate regime.

The reason is simple: an object that has nothing to buoy it cannot float. There is no production going on in the country; most manufacturers are either dead or gasping for breath, while multinationals are fleeing. I urge the president to bring back from China the will to work hard for the people, which includes making all the MDAs work like they never did before. For Nigeria to get out of this economic mire, there is need for very hard work at all levels and strata of government — federal, state, and local. This is not the season for sakamanje; the reality is that our existence as a nation is under threat from food insecurity.