Daily Independent Online.
*
Friday, June 11, 2004.
Between water and petrol
By James Tar Tsaaior
E-mail: [email protected]
There does not seem to be any thriving kinship between
water and petrol. Ordinarily, at least. The two bodies, to appropriate
cartographic codes, are parallel or latitudinal lines that do not share points
of convergence. To further dilate their different identities, one is a liquid
while the other is a gas. And if you try a scientific laboratory or even
ordinary experiment by yoking the two together by violence, they will go their
separate ways. The density of water over petrol will make it settle comfortably
at the bottom while fuel floats with reckless abandon on the surface. No
kindredship exists between alien bodies, they return their verdict.
But in a strange sense, water and petrol do have a
basis, a cause to coalesce and harmoniously work together. Take an automobile
system, for instance. Petrol courses through the labyrinthine arteries and
veins of the engine system and endows it with soulful existence. Water, on the
other hand, regulates the heating mechanism and reins it in so that it stays
within acceptable temperature levels to avoid dysfunctional, overheating
events. Here, there is a basis for cooperation even though this cooperation
becomes a crisis point when the two bodies come into direct contact hyphenating
the very health of the mechanism they so assiduously want to serve.
On another score, and intriguingly, too, water and
petrol have had the misfortune of being violently yoked together and treated as
if they are Siamese twins that cannot be hived off from each other. This time,
this new found relationship between water and petrol constitutes, defines and
animates our national discourse; indeed, inhabits and determines its lexicon.
This discursive existence is at the behest of
government, its agents and agencies where it has become fashionable to discuss
water and fuel as if they are comrades or bedfellows. With repetitive urgency,
government and its overzealous officials have advanced the puerile and
pedestrian water-petrol dialectical argument to justify the upward review in
the pump price of petroleum products.
It was nauseating and sickening to hear a
fundamentally flawed argument from the hallowed portals of power that a bottle
of water costs more than a litre of petrol only to treacherously justify why
the price of a litre of petrol should be jerked up. This perspective is
fundamentally flawed because water and fuel have nothing in common, at least,
as far as the upward review of petroleum rates is concerned.
In a similar vein, this argument comes off at a
tangent and flies in the face of circumcised rhetoric because there is,
fundamentally, unequal access between the tiny minority and marginalized
majority to these two commodities in this nation today. How many Nigerian
citizens, for instance, can sustainably take Ragolis or Eva water at the end of
every meal? Do they even have the food, not to mention these
“luxuries” artificially created by those in power?
Again, is it not the rich and powerful that patronize
these water bottling companies? Don’t the poor masses rely on their
streams, creeks, rivers, and wells for their water needs? And when
circumstances painfully dictate in the event of these drying up or getting
polluted by irresponsible government policies, is it not pure water (certainly
not bottled water!) that comes to the rescue? Are the taps which government
arrogate benevolence to itself for providing (as if this is not a legitimate
responsibility or inalienable right) not perpetually dry or completely
non-existent after claiming they have been provided?
Truth in this argument congeals in the fact that
there are plural alternatives to water sources in this country even if these
can be fertile to guinea- worm infection and other sundry diseases, which can
be deadly, anyway. This is not the same with petrol. And every citizen’s
life hangs precariously on it.
With or without bottled water, life continues. With
or without petrol and the several increases that lead to its scarcity, life
continues or wobbles. But with disastrous repercussions. One, there is usually a corresponding
adjustment in transportation costs whenever fuel prices are negotiated to suit
an unsympathetic government. Yet this is concomitant with spiraling
consequences in the astronomical costs of essential goods and services further
driving them within the reach of the rich but beyond the poor masses who
constitute the majority.
One fact continues to send our collective imagination
roaming wild without any hope of a secure tether someday. Why is this
government so hostile, inhumane and unsympathetic to the people? This
government alone has increased the prices of petroleum products many more time
than previous governments put together and yet without any concrete results to
show for it.
With this latest jerking to N50 per litre of petrol,
I am genuinely concerned about Lagbaja whose musical negotiation of this
retrogressive phenomenon of manipulating petroleum pricing to a thermometer has
been revealing as it has been refreshing. But Lagbaja will have to return to
the studios to incorporate this latest ingenuity by those who have the monopoly
of conventional wisdom and the eternal prerogative to twist the rest of us
round their little fingers.
One thing must, however, be trumpeted on the
mountaintops, valleys boulevards, alleys and footpaths of this nation.
Government, its agents and agencies especially the Petroleum Pricing Regulatory
body, the PPPMC have no moral propriety by subjecting the Nigerian people to
recrudescent rhythms of suffering, crisis and death. Any pious and implacable
defence of the present increase is objectionable, infamous, unpopular and
unacceptable.
It is the auspicious moment to unmask the real forces
behind this dance of shame that ritually turns our national blessing into a
curse, our heirloom into a dunghill and our nationhood into a balkan. And
government, its agents and agencies should be told in the most unequivocal and
unambiguous language that there is no semblance between water and petrol. And the masses of the people are the
only competent group to do the telling. And tell, they must, this time.
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Tsaaior teaches English at Lagos State University, Ojo
