By Prof Okwudiba Nnoli
The Nigerian petty bourgeois are revisiting the decision to remove fuel subsidy. How do we understand this revisitation? Is it the result of a genuine concern for the suffering poor, to play to the electoral gallery of the voting poor, the usual petty bourgeois penchant for insulting the intelligence of the poor, the calculated or uncalculated effort to confuse and confound the electorate, and/or an advertent or inadvertent ruse to divert attention away from the true causes of the suffering and hardship being endured by the poor?
However, the poor are not listening or paying attention to the petty bourgeois effluvium from the discussion. It is irrelevant to their pursuit of life. For many decades now the poor have lived their hardship and developed a coping mechanism to carry on with their lives regardless. It is the current lowest echelon of the petty bourgeoisie that is worried and angry about the hardship. They are yet to develop a coping mechanism. For long they have consumed the propaganda that it is possible to alleviate poverty or even eradicate it. They are the ones listening to the conversation.
It is clear from this revisitation that the current generation of Nigerian politicians and their intellectual bedfellows failed to carry out an exhaustive debate before lifting the fuel subsidy. There was near unanimity among them that the subsidy should be removed. Therefore, sloganeering replaced debate. Simplism counted for deep thought. Fiat, consisting of unsubstantiated generalizations, was mistaken for policy. The minority cried out for the poor and predicted increased suffering for them. However, they were the minority; “they should have their say”.
In the past, fierce debates attended important policy proposals. For example, in the run up to the 1979 Constitution a fierce debate raged for years before, during and after the promulgation of that Constitution. It continued in my edited book titled: Path to Nigerian Development, published in 1981 by The Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Similarly, the extreme hardship of the Shagari regime popularized by Jim Nwobodo’s electioneering jingle : “Otanisi negbu anyi”(We are dying of hunger), and the intellectual debate and resistance to the IMF Structural Adjustment Program in 1989 found expression in my edited book : Deadend to Nigerian Development, published in 1993 also by CODESRIA.
Today, such debates have been ousted by militant partisan propaganda often accompanied by vitriol, abuses, threats, intimidation, blackmail and conspiracy theories. The playbook is filled with constant pounding of brazen lies, misleading information, conspiracy theories, rejection of truth, spinning of alternative realities, distractions, deflections, deceptions, disrespect subterfuge, hostility and dishonesty. Honest debate is replaced by impulsive reactions built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, bureaucratic impotence and copycat mentality.
Thus, the revisitation discussion has still not gone beyond cliches, slogans and diatribes similar to those of 2022/2023. Three general areas of interest emerge from it : the poor as numbers, money as the dominant bone of contention and the solution of the problem of subsidy as the answer to the problem of poverty in the country.
The obsession with the poor as numbers is palpable. What is the numerical figure of poor people created after the removal of subsidy compared to that before its removal? How many have been pulled out of poverty? As is usual with the bourgeois and petty bourgeois the poor are relegated to statistics, stripped of their humanity. Blood, sweat, brains, heart and the psyche are banished from discussion. The same is true of exploitation, repression, injustice, discrimination, disrespect, humiliation, hopelessness and helplessness which adversely affect the dignity, self respect, self worth, self confidence and ambition that are not amenable to manipulation by even self confirmatory statistics.
The emphasis on money is ubiquitous. The money expected to accrue from subsidy removal has not positively affected poverty and the poor. The opposition argues. The government responds by directing attention to the states and the macro-economic sector of the economy. Expect a trickle down from the rapidly growing macro- economy to the micro-economy. It demands. The problem with trickle down economics is that you have to wait until “hell freezes over”. Before you know it, palliative becomes the permanent solution.
There’s even disagreement over the palliatives. The opposition claims that the use of palliatives failed because it was not properly planned. The government disagrees and points to the various measures it has instituted, including the new ‘students loan’ program. It is illuminating that the rich are not part of the palliative regime. They are not beneficiaries of trickle down economics. Theirs must be “bubble up” economics. Conspicuous consumption of luxurious goods and services has rapidly increased. The critical questions are: why are the poor not under “bubble up” and the rich not under “trickle down”?
More importantly, the discussion gives the false impression that once the problem of fuel subsidy is resolved, poverty would be eliminated. This is why there’s no mention of the yearly rate of increase of people descending into poverty; no historical analysis. Just throw money at the problem and all will be well. Money that eventually returns to the rich through corruption. Are the rich not getting richer with or without fuel subsidy? Of course, they are getting richer given the increased purchasing of private jet airplanes, ownership of sixty-four properties, frequent air travels, students enrolled in private educational institutions together with the fantastic tuition fees they pay, palatial buildings popping up here and there, and ultra expensive luxury cars coming into the country. All that the rich wanted from subsidy removal was constant supply of petroleum products and they have gotten it.
The truth is that fuel subsidy removal is not the major cause of poverty in the country. It only adds to the existing poverty but only very minimally. Therefore, what is missing in the discussions of fuel subsidy before and after its removal is the actual cause of poverty, its persistence, expansion and intensification.
It is the petty bourgeois system of living. This system consists of two core or fundamental parts or subsystems: the state and production, including the values, beliefs, ethics, mindsets, historical struggles, vested interests, structures and institutions directly or indirectly associated with them. From 1973 to date patriotic and progressive academics and intellectuals have been warning about the negative impact of this system on the growth of poverty.
Economically, the system has been in a free fall that has cascaded into a downward spiral of poverty, which has become asymptotic. It is illuminating that even during periods of petroleum revenue windfalls this spiral persisted. The 1973 windfall was hailed by the profligate Gowon regime as providing us with enormous wealth which we could not expend. The lack of executive capacity malaise! In an attempt to chop our money we created more poverty by clogging our seaports with commercial ships. Obviously money is not crucial variable in the causation of poverty as the arguments over fuel subsidy removal would suggest.
What else is being missed by this revisitation of fuel subsidy and its removal? It is the integration of the specific variables of the policy with systemic variables. Let’s not forget that the demand for subsidy removal was not an isolated one. It was an integral part of the Structural Adjustment Program demanded of Nigeria by the IMF. Others are privatization, downsizing of state and its work force, devaluation of the Naira and the removal of all subsidies. The anti-people regime of Obasanjo and Atiku quietly and systematically implemented all the demands except the removal of all of fuel subsidy. Popular pressure forced it to remove a little of the subsidy at a time.
What are these other systemic variables that cause poverty? They are some of the features of the state subsystem and the production subsystem. Those of the state include its : authoritarianism, exploitation, repression, injustice, inequality and illegitimacy. Those of production are related to : its delinkage from the country’s environmental, physical, biological and geographic niche, the unwillingness to apply science and technology to the transformation of the niche resources, the consequent inability to innovate, the marginalization of the traditional needs and consumption patterns in production, copycatism in production, high import propensity, and an emphasis on, as well as orientation to, consumption instead of production.
Many have witnessed periodic harassment of petty traders and petty skilled workers and artisans by legal and illegal levy/tax collectors who brutalize the poor in the process and destroy their goods, seize their instruments of production and otherwise push them into deeper poverty. Claude Ake speaks of the coercive unilateralism of the Nigerian state, the unprovoked use of coercion and violence against the poor. For example, in 1980/1981 the Shagari regime seized many thousand hectares of peasant land to build a dam on the Sokoto Rima River. In the process it drove over 15,000 farmers away from their land without any prior dialogue, serious program of resettlement, or compensation. Five years later a third of the farmers had not been settled on any land or house. When they protested they were repressed. Poverty increased as a result. The same is true in Bachama land and on the Mambilla plateau. The state acquired very many hectares of farmland for agric multinationals. The local ethnic groups had to fight an interethnic war over the remaining farmlands thereby adding more poverty to that generated by the loss of farmland.
Similarly, poverty also increased when the Babangida regime began to implement the IMF sponsored Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), which included the privatization of state enterprises, downsizing of state work force and removal of state subsidies. By the time that Obasanjo left office only subsidy on petroleum products was still outstanding. All this was done in spite of popular protests and riots against the program, in which lives were lost.
The exploitative character of the Nigerian state also contributed to the persistence, expansion and intensification of poverty. As an employer it is notorious for underpaying its workers. Its minimum wage is always lower than the cost of living, giving rise to frequent strikes in the country. The most notorious of these strikes are the 1964 general strike and the recent 8-month ASUU strike. It waits until a threat of strike or the commencement of actual strike before increasing wages.
Even then the agreed wages are below the cost of living and are not regularly paid, particularly in the public sector. Workers were sometimes owed salaries for upwards of a year. On their own part the private sector employers often traded unemployment for low wages. In the end the owing of wages was replaced by the retrenchment of workers.
In addition, the state often favors the private sector employers over their workers, always using the Court of Arbitration to break strikes for them. By controlling wages but not profits and prices, it condones and even promotes exploitation in the private sector.
In 1993 Ibeanu’s research reported that while it cost the ADARICE company of Enugu state between N10 and N20 in labor wages to produce a 75kg bag of rice, the market value of that bag of rice was as high as N200. In other words, the farm laborers received only about 10% of the social product of their labor which was much less than the minimum wage at the time. Poverty kept spreading.
State repression has spread it even more. The state rascality displayed in the punitive attacks on Odi in Rivers State and Zaki Biam in Benue state rendered vast populations homeless and penniless as hundreds of houses were razed to the ground or burned down while instruments of farming were destroyed. Many people had to start making a living afresh. In another respect the death in detention of the Boko Haram leader sparked off a civil war that is littering the region with Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) that have vastly expanded poverty in the country. Other insurrectionist groups have since taken up arms against the government to expand the pauperization. The “Stay at Home” of the insurgent IPOB had a similar effect while it operated.
Similarly, the injustice that characterizes the Nigerian state increases and intensifies poverty in the country. The government turned a blind eye while oil multinational companies polluted and otherwise devastated the sources of livelihoods of the Niger Delta peoples. Worse still in 1999, Human Rights Watch found that people affected by this devastation were brutalized by state agents for attempting to raise grievances with oil companies. In some cases the state security forces threatened, beat and jailed complainants even before they presented their cases. Others were repressed simply for putting forward an interpretation of a compensation agreement, or seeking adequate compensation for land or water ruined by the operations of the oil companies. Some protest leaders were even tried and sentenced to death by a state Kangaroo court, and hanged by the state.
Furthermore, by failing to ensure justice in the conflict between Fulani herdsmen and farmers in various parts of the country the state has badly affected food production in the food baskets of the country, as well as in other food producing areas, littering them with IDPs of desperate poverty and destitution. Similarly, the unwillingness or inability to provide justice in the Hausa-Zangon Kataf violence, events leading to the Biafran war, the war itself and the Tiv uprisings of 1962 and 1964-1966 led to untold devastations which greatly expanded and intensified poverty in the country.
Advertent or inadvertent acceptance of inequality by the Nigerian state also contributes to the expansion and intensification of poverty, especially the psyche of the poor. This inhuman value persisted throughout 1960-1966 and 1979-1983 and beyond. The country was polarized between the “big men/women “ and the “small men/women” often separated by the municipal housing plan. Abuja city plan mimicked the apartheid South African Bantustan housing plan that separates the poor and the rich, with obvious differences in the amenities provided to each.
In a survey by Margaret Peil in 1976, she reported that the poor welcomed military rule because it would end the rule of the “big men/women “. They felt that military rule would make the society more equal because “the big man would fear the military. He won’t be free to maltreat the poor anymore “.
The rich often cornered for themselves resources meant for the poor such as fertilizers, palliatives, market stalls and houses built for the poor. They then sold these items to the poor at very exorbitant costs. The rich would then flaunt their wealth in the face of the poor in the form of conspicuous consumption. These practices have continued to the present day.
It is not an accident that the poor are practically the only ones who go to jail. The number of them relative to that of the rich who are in prisons throughout the country is illustrative. Petty bourgeois court system is structured in such a way that it discriminates against the poor. They cannot meaningfully participate in court proceedings because of their low level of education and inability to pay for lawyers to represent them. The bail system is so beyond their financial capacity that most of them languish in jail while awaiting trial. Some stay more years in prison than they would if convicted for the crimes they would be tried for. Even the court culture is alien and frightening to them. With so many bread winners and potential bread winners in jail poverty can only expand.
The last but not the least feature of the Nigerian state that contributes to poverty escalation is governmental illegitimacy. Not the illegitimacy that the petty bourgeois associate with irregularities in elections. It is one associated with the system of rule itself. It is the unreflective exclusion of the poor from the daily activities of government. None of them is ever invited to the National Assembly subcommittees’ public hearings for the consideration of their draft bills; town hall meetings, copied from America, never involve the poor and no one cares. There is no member of the poor classes in the annual delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, or in any government delegation whatsoever. The commissioning of government projects, government sponsored banquets and related social jamborees are reserved exclusively for the rich.
No aspect of law and policy making, implementation and feedback ever involves the poor, the sole victims of the mess and hardships that result from the failures of government policies and decisions.
Nevertheless, there is no definition of of democracy or government that says that one must be rich to exercise one’s rights of participation in one’s government, or that such rights can only be expressed at elections. Therefore, the poor have not been able to have their lives changed positively through state action. Unfortunately, such participation by the rich is the main basis for their wealth and life style of conspicuous consumption. Consequently, the poor and poverty continue to expand and intensify.
However, by far the most significant contributor to the expansion and intensification of poverty is the Nigerian economy, especially its mode of production. It is grossly incapable of creating sufficient jobs for new entrants into the labor market. Structured to ignore the environmental, physical, geographical, geological and biological niche of the country, it knows no innovation and, therefore, nothing about creative production.
Consequently, it cannot transform the resources of the domestic environment. It cannot meet the demand of production to satisfy the needs and traditional consumption habits of the local population. Instead, it leeches on the products of the innovation of foreign niches. Its economy is dominated by the importation of foreign goods and services. An economy that cannot innovate can only copy. It cannot create enough wealth for its people. It is vulnerable to external shocks based on what valuable minerals it can export to foreign countries. The presence of crude oil in the country has so far saved the economy from collapse. However the instability in the global crude oil market has had very negative impact on poverty expansion and intensification in Nigeria.
The Nigerian leaders try to obfuscate, confuse and bamboozle the people with the cliche of trickle down economics, a worldwide hoax. The objective is to give false hope to the poor whose living conditions continue to decline, and whose community continues to receive a net inflow of new entrants .
The private sector just cannot create new innovated products. The rich are merely involved in consumption economic activities and not in production, not to talk of creative production. The petty bourgeois have gobbled up the public sector in defiance of the Constitution in order to feed their life style of conspicuous consumption. Their proposal to move from consumption to production is another scam. The petty bourgeoise cannot produce. It is not a creative class.
Today, the current generation believes that the suffering generated by the removal of fuel subsidy is unprecedented in the history of the country. Indeed, however, it is child’s play compared with the “Otanisi”(head-biting) hell of a living of 1979-1989. While wages were being buffeted by repressive laws and anti- worker fiscal policies, prices of goods and services, which provided profits to the rich, enjoyed an unlimited freedom to rise even by exponential proportions.
The composite consumer price index for all items increased from 204.8% in 1980 to 516.6% in 1987, an increase of almost 300%(Olowu, et al, 1990). The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) estimated that between 1982 and 1983, the prices of various consumer items rose between 100% and 300% (Bello-Imam, 1987).
Between 1979 and 1989 the price of garri increased by 700%, rice by 1,700%, beans 1,350%, plantain 900%, yam 3000%, sugar 2000%, frozen fish 900%, soap 900% and toilet roll 1,200%(Financial Post, 1989). From January to December 1983 detergent increased in price by 500%, vegetable oil 500%, tea 444%, milk 350%, motor tires 400% and engine oil 750%(Bello-Imam, 1987).
What makes this period of austere hardship and suffering the worst so far in Nigerian history is not the high prices of these and other goods and services but their scarcity. They were hardly available in the markets and stores. Civil servants, university academic and administrative staff, as well as private sector employees often spent four to six hours every working day and most of the weekend searching for these “essential commodities “, many times without finding any to buy. The shortages reached such a level that various Departments in most institutions and companies had to organize bulk purchases paid for and shared by their members. The UNN Political Science Department had its purchases delivered to the home of the then Head of Department, Professor Odenigwe in Amokwe in Enugu state. Every member of staff had to journey to Amokwe to collect his/her share whenever any consignment arrived. It was bizarre but real, unforgettable and clearly unprecedented.
The truth is that the Nigerian economy is fragile, unstable and in persistent decline. The slightest shock from whatever quarters unravels it, causes a precipitous decline that pauperizes a growing number of people. During the period 1962-1966 the political shock of the Tiv uprising, political instability in the Western Region, and the 1964 General Election led to an intolerable cost of living collapse and the worst general strike in the history of the country.
The inability to manage the windfall crude oil revenue of 1973 was the shock that led to the Otanisi austerity measures and the destructive living conditions of 1979-1989. Poverty and destitution followed. Now the removal of outstanding subsidy on petroleum products has shocked the economy into another round of precipitous decline that has devastated living standards. More shocks should be expected in the future.
Thus, over the decades poverty has piled on poverty to cause a cumulative effect on the phenomenon. Therefore, at any time in history we are not dealing with the poverty caused by the extant shock on the economy. Instead, we are also dealing with the effects of the historically accumulated poverty. The asymptotic development of this process means that the same shock in the past and present would have different effects on poverty with that of the present carrying the impact of the past and the present. We are dealing not with the impact of policy but that of the system. Consequently, all regimes present and past bear the responsibility for any spike in poverty. Both the civilian and military regimes, as well as all the regimes that have ruled the country are equally culpable.
The inability to realize this truth lies at the heart of the failure of any regime and every regime to have an effective anti-poverty policy. Their recipe is palliative. Money is thrown around randomly and halfharzardly at social categories that are arbitrarily labeled as poor. Corruption ensures that much of that money returns to the rich. The poor are asked to wait for the trickle down effect to take its course. They are still waiting for hell to freeze over!
In order to go beyond palliatives and eliminate poverty one must address the system not the policy, the historical decline not just the spike in poverty caused by specific shocks. When this is done it will be clear that the following programs are necessary and sufficient to end poverty : a comprehensive program of free education up to the tertiary educational mg level, free healthcare, free housing, full employment, unemployment benefits, comfortable pensions and gratuity, social security insurance, elimination of high income disparities, transformation of the economy to emphasize production over consumption, building production and consumption with the niche as a fulcrum and emphasizing the innovation of the niche resources and traditional consumption habits as the live wire of the economy.
Of course, the petty bourgeois will exclaim : impossible to implement, unrealistic, utopian, theoretical, socialism. Their objective is not to argue or dialogue but to discredit, obfuscate, confuse, deflect, distort, condemn and reject. Nevertheless, only one sentence is necessary: the petty bourgeois are not willing to commit class suicide.
Such an anti-poverty program is not in the objective interests of the petty bourgeois. Therefore, they cannot and should not be expected to undertake such a revolutionary transformations against themselves. Only the poor can undertake such a revolution because it is in their objective interests to do so. The defeatists and cowards who run away from battle before it even starts would sneer at the ability of the poor to execute such a far-reaching change. Clearly, as an organized force, the poor will prevail. Nigeria has no choice. It is a matter of time.
Nnoli is Emeritus Professor of Political Science, UNN
