Dr Ugoji Egbujo
She is neither. Rigour has become outdated, noisy charlatanism reigns. Howlers are everywhere. So Kemi Adeosun scampered to safety. She left her case. The accusation   of blasphemy by Nigeria’s     ‘Almajiris’ , religious or political, is not fought with reasons and arguments. A minister of finance has   a duty to be honest and compassionate,   and a compelling duty to   prevent and stem panic. The proposed emergency economic bill is evidence of direness and government’s appreciation of it.   It’s incontrovertible that   sufficient urgency and dexterity haven’t been marshaled against our predicament. But it isn’t because Adeosun is ignorant or   callous.

The ordinary people are prostrate and bleating miserably. And if their hellish and progressively deteriorating circumstances have been rechristened recession then it must be unholy to describe recession as a mere word.   The anger of the ordinary people   cannot be faulted,   servants and messengers should aspire to clarity. But if recession is a statistical classification, then it has no life outside the set of circumstances it labels. Recession describes preexisting state of affairs. Adeosun was neither wrong nor insensitive. She is neither a   ‘BarkinZuwo’ nor a   Nero . And not   a Marie Antoinette.

But there are mourners gifted in wailing, feeding on the grief of the ordinary people.   They claim cognitive capacities capable of subtle discrimination   but revel in intellectual sophistry and verbal thuggery. Their stomachs can’t remember hunger pangs and their thoughts have never been muddled by suffering. Yet, they find room in the pain of millions to make mischief, to foist   amnesia on all. They have become self appointed chief mourners.   Their naked complicity can’t be atoned by   vacuous empathy or sardonic humour. They, who walked the corridors of power with Corruption, and raised not a whimper.

Adeosun is saddled with a   treacherous economy. All the chicken of the prodigal   era have come home to roost. The rebasingof   GDP and the trophy that came with it was cosmetic nonsense.   “The biggest economy in   Africa”   was a phrase.   The naira   is bleeding and   the   economy, rendered chronically anemic by avaricious tapeworms is   now in shock. With the currency relentlessly emptying its value,she knows that her lips are being watched. Like a   doctor in an emergency room, urgency must be demonstrated but   nervousness is counter productive. The line between   masterly calmness and perception of lack of empathy is thin. While the economy needs comprehensive policies to rebound,reassurances as cosmetic as they seem, are important.

Kemi Adeosun

So she says,   recession is just a word – do not fret. Because recession, a tag that effectively dropped on us about 2 months ago is not a plague,not damnation, not an imminent Armageddon. The attachment   of the epithet does not materially change our pre existing   state of the affairs. Power has forever been   epileptic,infrastructure has always   been neglected, the health system is decrepit . The regularity of workers salaries has been lost since2014. Our foreign reserves were depleted prodigally by the last regime. Unemployment didn’t start today, Abba Moro can attest to that. Millions turned up for his scam.

What exists today despite Reuben Abati and his like,   is an effort to stem the bleeding.   It may have been poorly coordinated, but it’s not   the wanton profligacy of the past. Sophistry is intellectual fraud. Abati insinuates Kemi Adeosun is either out of touch with the pain of   the Nigerian masses or with modern economics. So he decides to teach Kemi Adeosun what recession means. He dismisses any figurative reading of Adeosun and points her in the direction of recession.   Recession, he postulates, exists in brothels where prostitutes , he reveals, have crashed fees   to rescue declining patronage.   Satire is good but any public figure conscious of public morality would look for healthy examples. But opportunism rarely countenances moral constraints. So he counts   the reduction in prostitution as loss.

There is nothing wrong in insisting that this government has contributed to our economic predicament   through its   tardiness. And criticizing the government is a civic duty. It doe not create navel gazing, ferocious”children of anger”.But   with Abati, conjectures become facts very easily. He cites an example of two suicide cases and concludes that suicides rates have been on the increase and rushes headlong to attribute it to recession. Abati wasn’t an editor of a tabloid.   How has he become enslaved to sensationalism?

And what happened to the rigour of   the Patito’s gang? If after reading Emile Durkheim, Abati thinks that   anomie has birthed suicidogenic currents, he may be right. But would he need a soothsayer to tell him that the rampant corruption of the government he promoted   left more moral confusion and ethical deregulation than needed to trigger   a suicide epidemic? An astronomical rise in suicide rate would be the   social complication of spawning   a few “nyoungnyoung” billionaires and private jets and leaving the   vast majority disillusioned

Ordinarily, Abati should be ignored. But since he is a prominent partaker in the collective irresponsibility of the past that contributed to the present misery , his lack of contriteness is particularly irritating.   Left unchecked the   prodigals, unremorseful and unrepentant, will make a   re-entry through the window   grief and desperation . When you   deliberately refrain from speaking out against the Avengers, you must let   innocent others, battered by   the effects of their economic sabotage, grieve.   Mockery must be for those   whose acquisitive   instincts   tucked billions   under the beds of their cooks and seamstresses. Abati   must take   them to the brothels to see the new price lists, to see how the girls now work for nothing.

Wouldn’t you think that an epistle aimed at excoriation would be careful with inconsistencies? Even beer parlour banters are not so totally deficient of coherence. Abati thinks ‘enjoyment joints’ are suffering low patronage like brothels. He could be right. He claims authority . He blames it on recession. But he thinks breweries are still making huge profits. So he needs an ingenuous explanation. Then, he manufactures one. Men, with pockets made lean by recession, go home to drown themselves in liquor and sorrow. Purchasing power has fallen drastically but Ogunpa hasn’t overflowed yet. There is a   desperation to paint the picture of apocalypse. And to counter that fraud, you run the risk of irritating the masses   who are fed up with excuses and the trading of blames. So the likes of Abati guffaw away, feeling redeemed.