The Nepalese Revolution As A Momentous Paradigm:Nigerian Youths And A Call To Action
By Rev. Fr. John Odey
Part 2
For the continuation of the second part of this series let us recall that saying which origin is traced back to the Ancient Greek thought, particularly to the dramatist, Euripides (480-406 BC). He said: Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad with power. Another Greek dramatist and a contemporary of Euripides, called Sophocles (496-406 BC), has another version of the saying. He said: Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction.
These sayings simply but in the severest of terms tell us about hubris, the type of reckless and vicious pride that is in man. The type of pride and rebelliousness that made the men of old to embark on the building of the tower of Babel to enable them approach God and if possible dethrone him (Genesis 11:1-9).
It is the type of pride which clearly demonstrates the tension between human ambition and the will of God. It is the type of pride that made God the Creator, the Perfect God who cannot make any mistake, to make the most disturbing statement ascribed to him in the Holy Bible: “Yahweh regretted having made man on earth, and his heart grieved.” (Genesis 6:6-7).
One man, in the name of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is taking a country of 250 million people for a ride. And he is riding on our backs free of charge. While the ordinary people whose voices cannot be heard and whose voices mean nothing to him even if he hears them yell abuses and curses on him, most of the people whose voices cannot be ignored are watching without a whisper.
They are waiting for God to come down from heaven and beg Tinubu to change. Such is an outright dereliction of our duty. God is able. But he cannot come down from heaven to do for us what he has given us the power to do for ourselves.
Where is our deservedly revered Prof. Wole Soyinka? Does he like the way that Tinubu is dealing with Nigeria and Nigerians? Does he like the way Tinubu’s administration is forcing bright Nigerians to flee their country? Does he like the way that Nigerians are dying of hunger? Does he like the way millions of our youths are being compelled to see crime as the only means to live and survive? Is he not disturbed that Tinubu has turned governance into a criminal enterprise?
Does it not bother him that Tinubu is selling the future of our children by borrowing billions of dollars only to satisfy his insatiable greed? Does the profligate lavishness of Tinubu and the National Assembly not offend his sense of justice? Does it not bother him that while Nigerians are raped, kidnapped, sacked from their ancestral homes and slaughtered like rams on daily basis, Tinubu virtually lives in France?
Has Wole Soyinka travelled to the moon? What is he telling Tibubu about his crimes against Nigeria and Nigerians? From the day he came to the limelight, this great man, our pride and the pride of the black race, spoke each time things went awry in our country. He spoke each time politicians turned leadership into an instrument of dread and torture. You recall that memorable statement from this great son of Nigeria: The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.
Almost 200 years before Soyinka made this statement during the Nigeria-Biafra war, Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the British Statesman, orator and human rights activist, had told the world: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. At the most critical period in the history of Nigeria, during the Nigeria-Biafra war, Wole Soyinka put his life on the line to save the Igbo from total annihilation.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s tyranny is choking Nigeria to death. Tinubu’s silence over the insecurity in the land is decimating Nigerians and turning the country into the most unsafe place to live under the sun. Where is Wole Soyinka? Because of whom he is, his voice speaks louder than the voices of millions of other Nigerians put together. Why is he not speaking to Tinubu?
In his book: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King Junior wrote: “The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses, rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom. All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands. They are awake and moving toward their goal like a tidal wave.”
The greatest threat to people’s freedom is fear. On the one hand, people who live in fear are like slaves even when nobody oppresses them. On the other hand, when people cast out fear and brace themselves to the oppressive situation that chains them as slaves they gain their freedom. Many Nigerians are beginning to defy fear to ensure that no Prof. Mahmood Yakubu will repeat what happened in 2023 during the 2027 election and get away with it.
Today, any Nigerian who does not know that disinherited and traumatised Nigerians are determined between now and 2027 political election to take back the country from the criminal gang destroying the country must be sleeping through a revolution. Nigerians are tired of being enslaved by criminals parading themselves as leaders. Nepal is here. The revolution is loading.
On April 15, 1912, the RMS Titanic, a British passenger ship, the largest and most luxurious ship in the world as at that time, sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on its way from Southampton, England, to New York City in the United States of America. Before the calamity struck the ship received four warnings about the danger of hitting sea ice a day before the accident.
But since the captains and their crew believed in what the builders of the ship told them, that it would never sink because it was so well built and fortified, they ignored the warnings. And the ship sank when it hit an iceberg near Newfoundland, Canada, and had all of its watertight compartments and other protective measures damaged.
A ship that was 882.5 feet long and 92.5 feet wide just disappeared beneath the ocean! Out of the estimated 2224 passengers and crew on board when the accident happened, 1500 persons died, about 724 persons survived. It was the deadliest peace-time marine accident in history.
Seventy-three years later, on September 1, 1985, a joint expedition led by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, an American and French oceanographer respectively, discovered the wreck of the Titan about 595 kilometres deep in the Atlantic Ocean, South-East of the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
You can never tell! Nigeria is not too big to disintegrate. So many nations cobbled together by the British have disintegrated. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not too strong to be pursued out of the Aso Rock if Nigerians decide to put ethnicity and religion by the side and fight for their freedom. If he insists on destroying Nigeria and Nigerians, he is not so strong as to stop what happened in Nepal from happening in Nigeria.
All who believe that they can treat their fellow Nigerians whichever way they like in the name of leadership without the fear of any repercussion should learn from history. When the revolution begins, the military and the police will shoot and kill as they like. But when the people prove to be determined, they will muzzle their guns and admire the people’s courage. If they allow Nigeria to sink under Tinubu, all of us will sink with it. There will be no hiding place for all of us.
During the Nepalese revolution the criminals who ruled that country up to that point had no place to hide. Something similar is loading in Nigeria. With this preamble we can now continue with Tinubu’s diatribe against President Jonathan for removing the oil subsidy in 2012:
If the banks were to fall twenty times in the future, government would jump twenty times to their rescue. It does so because this government lives a conservative economics placing it in close alliance, if not collusion, with corporate power.
However, because the distance between government and the people is far and genuine level of affection is low, government sees no utility in continuing to spend the current level of money on the people. In their mind, the people are not worth the money. Government sees more value in “saving” money than in saving the hard-pressed masses.
Yet, what does government actually save by this measure? The concept of a government that has the unfettered ability to print its own currency needing to save that currency for fear of insolvency is an anachronism. That his economic advisors would cling to this notion is like a person insisting on taking to the expressway in a horse-drawn carriage.
For a government that prints its own currency, attempting to save in that very currency in order to defend against bankruptcy in that currency is a relic of the gold standard abandoned forty years ago. If government thrashed the fuel subsidy based on considerations that it will run out of naira then it based its decision on a factor that have not been relevant since the time of the Biafran war.
In 1971, the world left the gold standard replacing it with “state” or “fiat money.” Under the gold standard, a nation had to save gold to support its currency or risk insolvency. After 1971, bondage to gold was broken. Since then, the worth of a nation’s currency is not tied to gold which means that the ability of a nation to print currency is not determined by its holdings of gold.
The worth of the currency is based on the strength of the economy and the amount of money the nation prints is determined by that strength as well as the nation’s future economic objectives. A nation can no longer fall insolvent concerning debts or payments issued in the national currency. As long as the fuel subsidy is paid in naira, then Nigeria cannot go bankrupt paying it any more than the ocean can run out of salt water.
In a fiat money system, the problem with the fuel subsidy is not impending insolvency as the government asserts. The serious constraint is inflation. Here we must ask whether the payment is so inflationary as to distort the economy. We have been making the payment for years and inflation has not wrecked the economy. This historic evidence refutes the imminent disaster claimed by government.
In advancing the argument that subsidy would lead to imminent bankruptcy, government reveals its lack of trustworthiness on important matters of fact. Is this the same government that several weeks ago claimed Nigeria was among the world’s best performing economies with a GDP growth rate of 7 percent annually?
It seems government has a vast canvas on which it can paint a number of different scenarios of Nigeria depending on the whim of the moment. While government may alter its portrait of the nation, the people are forced to live one reality at a time. Is Nigeria a fast growing economy? If the nation’s GDP is growing so strongly, the subsidy or a similar expenditure on the people cannot be the lethal burden government now maligns it to be.
Nigerians have a collective stake in the ownership of our oil resource held in trust by the government of the day. What we need then is the effective management of this scarce resource that will beget long term prosperity to the suffering people of Nigeria and not the present racket in which those in power abuse access and control of NNPC and oil revenue to warehouse money to fund their election campaigns.
This brings us to another inconsistency. On one hand, government states the expenditure is unsustainable yet on the other it claims the amount now earmarked for the subsidy will be used to fund other people-oriented programs. However, the two assertions cannot exist at the same time.
If the subsidy is bankrupting us, then reallocating funds to different programs will be no less harmful. A bankrupting expenditure retains this quality whether used for the subsidy or another purpose. Earmarking the funds to something else will not change the fiscal impact. If government is sincere about using the funds for other programs, then it must be insincere about the threatened insolvency.
To Be Continued
