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Living with tyranny in a
democracy
By
Adetutu Folasade-Koyi,
National
Assembly Correspondent, Abuja
Nigeria�s
own Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka once wrote that, �The man dies
in all who keeps silent in the face of tyranny.� Another proverb says that
he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.
Now, you
will begin to wonder what this column has to do with �fight� and �tyranny�
today? Let�s embark on a journey of Nigeria together, and then you will
understand why Nigerians may have to take their fate in their hands and,
collectively, fight against tyranny.
No one
can claim ignorance of the fact that the nation is not at peace. The
Comrade Adams Oshiomhole-led Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) is fighting the
Federal Government, having positioned the organisation as the only viable
opposition in the land. You may want to ask what about the political
parties? Well, if you are resident in Nigeria for more than three years
now, you will not need any tutorial about the emasculation and
factionalisation of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and the Alliance
for Democracy (AD). Where they should have served as a platform for
challenging the government, labour is the last �man� standing.
For more
than the life of this administration, the NLC has consistently put the
government on its toes and has also, consistently too, demanded that the
implementation of its policies should be done not only with a human face,
but also with the milk of human kindness. Can you just do a quick
flashback to the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida? When the tightening
of the noose on the neck of the common man was becoming too much to bear,
President Olusegun Obasanjo, as a former military ruler of Nigeria and in
his capacity as a statesman, stood up to be counted and asked Babangida to
administer Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) with the milk of human
kindness. Now, almost two decades after, the same words now turn round to
haunt this administration. The same situation, if not worse, is exactly
what is happening now.
As an
undergraduate almost a decade ago, kerosene was the next cheapest form of
petroleum product to cook with. As a student, N30 will give you more than
four litres of kerosene. Later, during the National Youth Service
programme, while serving in New Bussa, it was only a miser of a corper who
used kerosene stove. For most corpers then, the best method of cooking was
the hot plate. But last week, a survey of filling stations in Abuja
revealed that a litre of kerosene is now N63, diesel is N56, while the
�cheapest� is petrol, which initially was N54 but as at Friday afternoon,
it rose to N70. The only conclusion I could draw from that crazy price
regime is that, walahi, it is a lot better for the common man to buy a car
and forget about using kerosene. For his culinary duties, switching to gas
may just prove to be a better alternative!
The world
over, even in established democracies, nowhere is the common man made to
bear the brunt of fluctuating crude oil prices as it is done in Nigeria
today. Our leaders travel to advanced democracies and they know that even
in those countries, the common man still has a reason to be grateful to
their government. For instance, in the United States of America, the
democracy Nigeria strives to copy in its entirety, farmers in that country
still enjoy a form of subsidy from the government. A government official
once told me the story of how government had to upturn agricultural
produce in the ocean when prices of those products crashed and almost left
their farmers despondent. He even confirmed that, that would not be the
first time the US government would be doing that to save its farmers.
Back
home, this administration has already set up the Senator Ibrahim Mantu-led
Cushioning Committee. The nation waits to know what the committee would
recommend as palliatives. Already, there are murmurs of how grossly
inadequate N5 billion is coupled with the President�s promise of reducing
the yoke of tax burden on the citizenry. Anything short of a subsidy may
not really work because how many Nigerians really pay tax anyway?
The other
day, in Abuja here, a colleague uttered what initially looked like a joke,
but which, with the benefit of hindsight and with recent happenings, may
just turn out to be true.
He said
that Obsanjo would only end up confusing labour with its frequent
increases in fuel prices. �Oshiomhole has not even been able to exhaust
negotiations with the Federal Government that it should order the PPPRA to
revert fuel prices to their old levels and now, there are rumours that
fuel price will increase to N75 again. Now, if you are Oshiomhole, which
fuel price will you negotiate for now? Government is just tinkering with
the fuel prices with the indication that labour will just end up being
confused on what to even negotiate for,� he explained.
With all these �interesting�
developments in the land, will it still be auspicious for the common man
to keep silent in the face of self-imposed tyranny, when it knows that the
Almighty has blessed the nation with more than abundant natural resources?
The only voice that can articulate the common man�s suffering, for now,
seems to be the NLC. Of course, the wise man knows the time to fight and
run away. That was why the NLC, had, ab initio stated that it would first
embark on a four-day warning strike, after which it would be suspended for
re-appraisal. Labour has promised to meet tomorrow and strategise for the
mother-of-all-strikes if government does not accede to its
request.
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