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Christmas in purgatory
By Chuma Ifedi
ANOTHER Christmas is around the corner. Yuletide no longer comes with its charm, its splendour, its peace and goodwill. Poverty, abject poverty is staring over eighty per cent of us in the face. Our president denies that abject poverty is endemic. According to him, every Nigerian is sure of tomorrow's meal today by Aso Rock calculations. There in the villa, everything comes easy, is spectacular, is in plenitude yet free. Occupants of that worldly paradise do not even have to think of tomorrow. The embattled taxpayer provides everything free even at Christmas.
President Olusegun Obasanjo says that severe poverty is taboo in our domain. He sees our plight from the booming distance of abundant food, regular electricity and potable water within the corridors of power. To the average Nigerian citizen, subsistence is a matter of life and death. Basic amenities are really rare luxuries that arrive like manna from heaven. The irony is that the same president who inflicts all the pain and makes life a hell often wonders aloud how poverty besieges the land. Our president refuses to pay statutory pensions underlined as a right in our constitution. It is certainly not a privilege. Retirees of the Nigerian Railway Corporation have not received pensions for 30 months.
Yet, our president insists that abject poverty is an exception rather than rule. A lot of public salaries for federal staff are still outstanding. Prices of petroleum products escalate seasonably at the whims of the president. Charges for public utilities rise phenomenally also at the whims of the president, yet the citizenry hardly enjoy the benefits of regular light and water as a matter of course. The Christmas period does not provide any relief whatever. Consumers suffer deprivation all the year round.
Military regimes were the scapegoats for the crisis of poverty and hardship. Democracy returned on a platter of gold five years ago. But, we are not better off in any way. The situation has gone from bad to worse " government of the people for the people by the people. A few politicians and their cronies are looting the nation dry turning millionaires overnight. Refineries do not work in spite of billions pumped into them and contracts awarded to invisible beings. NEPA is virtually dormant. NITEL packed up long ago.
The Nigerian National Shipping Line is as dead as dodo. The Nigerian Airways Limited has since been buried. The Nigerian Railway Corporation is gasping for breath. We seem to be in a maze groping in the dark. Rather than devising new structures and ideals, those in authority and power suffocate us with empty platitudes. A team of utopian economic advisers confound our problems, some of them reaping where they did not sow in dollars. Every Wednesday, billions of naira are approved for projects that are never executed. Only God knows what happens to all the surplus crude oil revenue accruing to this country.
The current vogue is reforms, reforms and nothing but reforms. Empty reforms! Whoever expects cosmetic reforms to succeed? Reforms that do not directly address the fundamental factors of food delivery and goods production in our present milieu cannot effectively tackle the crisis of poverty. Very few citizens understand what the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) is all about. Contrary to projections, the State Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (SEEDS) is mere illusion. All the states follow their respective programmes entirely different from the lofty prescriptions of NEEDS! Everybody for himself, God for us. The situation makes the season of Christmas deplorable. We have never had it so bad.
Unemployed graduates do not find this Christmas hilarious by any standards. Merrymaking is totally out of the question. They cannot make both ends meet. No Christmas shopping for them. No new year resolutions in the making. The yuletide scenario is so full of gloom ad despair. For sons and daughters of powerful people, who loot and ask others to pray, the sky is the limit. They spend Christmas wining and dining. Different strokes for different folks. It is the survival of the fastest. Whatever glimmer of hope that emerges is wiped out by the welter of internecine crisis that bedevil the polity. Anambra State burns with the active connivance of the presidency and the police. Plateau State survived devastation by whiskers. Nigerian democracy is indeed at the mercy of the Ubas and the Mantus of this world.
We thank the Nigerian Labour Congress for sparing us the agony of strikes this Christmas. However, our fortitude is threatened by the harrowing travails of poverty, insecurity, uncertainty and bad governance. The tail seems to be wagging the dog wittingly. Come to think of it, why all the rampant corruption everywhere? Latest reports indicate that 55 per cent of the corruption in Nigeria happen in the presidency. What else does one expect in a polity in which crooks are decorated with national honours, where sycophants and mistresses win political patronage as a matter of right?
Transparency International was patently kind to advance Nigeria to the third most corrupt cadre, a far cry from the leadership position we held over the years. We can do better if we put our house in order by investigating fishy proceedings along the corridors of power. A startling revelation this Christmas season coming from the presidential assistant on public affairs is that the presidential Ota farm earns N35 million profit monthly. How come? Even multi-national companies do not reap such monumental bonanza in these troubled times of economic recession. Whatever miracle that makes an ordinary farm prosper so marvelously in black Africa must be supernatural. This feat deserves a special space in the Guinness Book of Records.
A few days ago, the Vice-President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar was quoted as saying: "The President and I are lampooned daily in the newspapers. We have been booed in public events and portrayed as if we actually enjoy inflicting pain on the populace". Nigerians are gravely disappointed and absolutely dismayed by the worsening circumstances of their lives. Rather than celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas, they wish to herald the second coming to weed the corn from the chaff. Nigerians no longer think of democratic dividend which is now as elusive as ever even during the yuletide seasons. Where there is no vision, the people perish.
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