By Olatunji Dare
The doubters and unbelievers scoffed and screamed “transforwetin?” when President Goodluck Jonathan announced in his Inaugural Address that was set to pursue a programme of national transformation. They may not have noticed it, but the National Transformation Train has departed and is chugging along.
Emblematic of this singular development, coming after years of stasis, is the revival of the moribund railways.
First, the Lagos-Ibadan passenger train, which had been inoperative for decades, was restored to commission. The celebration had hardly ended when it was announced that the passenger train will now run as far as the Kwara capital, IIorin, offering services to suit every pocket, from tidy third class compartments to luxury sleeper cars, and everything in between.
It is now possible to envisage that day, six months away or perhaps year, when the service will run all the 700 miles from Lagos to Kano and reclaim its old name, the Kano Limited, if you are boarding from Iddo Terminus, and the Lagos Limited, if you are embarking from Kano.
Rehabilitation of the Kano-Port Harcourt rail link, leading to restoration of the old Port Harcourt Limited passenger train, can be expected to start thereafter, if it is not already in progress. And all this is without prejudice to the projected railway line that will run from West to East, and to the construction of new, standard-gauge rails for high-speed trains.
What has been achieved in this area thus far is more than a transformation. It is a quiet revolution. It accords well with Dr Jonathan’s quiet style, and he deserves praise for it.
His efforts at transforming two other areas of Nigerian life have been less productive, however, and promise to stir up much more controversy and resentment than he could have expected..
The first is the review of the Constitution.
Here, false step has followed false step. Dr Jonathan began by seeking to extend the term for the president and state governors from a renewable four years to a non-renewable seven and six years respectively, claiming that the move was informed by altruism and altruism only.
He followed this implausible claim with a hint that he would be coming up more than 50 additional proposed amendments, all of them to be discussed and debated by the National Assembly and enacted in into law subsequently.
Fifty odd amendments, from the Presidency alone, not reckoning with other changes that the National Assembly itself and other political actors in Nigeria might propose, many of which could end up becoming national law?
Was this not writing a new constitution through the back door?
Why not a people’s Constitution? Who is afraid of a Constitution of the people, by the people, and for the people?
More recently, Dr Jonathan has set up a committee of eminent Nigerians to distil from previous constitutional conferences thoughtful proposals that for one reason or another never saw the light of day and bring them up for consideration.
This is a welcome improvement, but the whole thing still reeks of an attempt to write a new constitution through the back door. The documents they are supposed to draw on were prepared either by persons handpicked for that purpose, or produced by ‘elections” that were a sham through and through.
Here, I recall the so-called Constitutional Conference contrived by the loathsome Sani Abacha to avoid coming to terms with the election on June 12, 1993, of Moshood Abiola as President. Where it was not massively boycotted, as in the Southwest, it was greeted by apathy for the most part.
Even a political stalwart like Ikemba Emeka Ojukwu garnered only 124 votes to win in his Nnewi constituency, yet went on to declare that the resulting “mandate” was superior to that of “June 12.”
Something constructive or even positive may well have come out of that misbegotten conclave. But it cannot be a substitute, nearly two decades later, for decisions freely arrived at by freely chosen representatives of the people.
Why are Jonathan and his strategists so averse to a Constitution founded on the will of Nigerians, one that would be truly warranted by the preface, “We the people. . .”?
Transformation by subterfuge: That is how one must characterise Dr Jonathan’s efforts in the second area in which he is seeking transformation, namely, “removing” an alleged “subsidy” on petrol.
He did not run for president on a promise to abolish the phantom subsidy if elected. On the contrary, he claimed it as one of the factors that qualified him above others for the top job that he maintained the flow of petrol and petroleum products uninterrupted, with the unspoken assurance that he would continue to do so if elected, and the implication that he would also continue the practices that made the continuous flow possible.
Now, it as if he is staking his entire Presidency on “removing” this imagined “subsidy.” Disdaining his accustomed caution, he has proclaimed to the whole world how much would accrue, calculated to the nearest one million Naira, from cutting the alleged price support.
No ceteribus paribus. No mutatis mutandis. No exceptis excipiendis.
So many zillions will accrue to the federal exchequer from ending the pesky subsidy, which will now be use to build all the refineries and hospitals and schools and seaports and the waterways they did not build since they started cutting it in 1986.
How they can be so precise about how much would be realised from ending the alleged subsidy when they do not know how much oil is lifted or exported or refined or imported or consumed? It is all so emblematic of the national pastime of planning without fear and without research.
It does not matter whether the price of oil or the exchange rate or consumption patterns change, or the industry is policed more tightly to check fraud: the Jonathan Presidency has determined that the revenue that will accrue from terminating the alleged subsidy is as good as money in the better banks and the plan for spending it has already been perfected. The only problem is how to ensure that the winfall is judiciously spent.
Softly, softly, Mr President, lest you plunge the country into avoidable turmoil.
Take off for a moment the fedora that serves you so well as a politician. Put on instead your long-abandoned fedora of a scientist trained to gather and verify evidence, to draw conclusions and proceed only on the basis of sound evidence.
Don’t join your appointees in chanting the tired chorus that the “subsidy” must be ended. Ask them to show that the “subsidy” is not imaginary. Ask them to prove its existence with nothing less than the rigour of scientific inquiry.
Ask them to lay before you the pricing regime in all other petroleum producing countries relative to per capita income.
Ask them, Dr Jonathan, ask them slowly and deliberately why ExxonMobil can report a profit of $10 billion for the third straight quarter – much of it from its Nigerian operations — after all the creative book-keeping, whereas Nigeria has been running its oil industry at a colossal loss year after year.
Courtesy: The Nation (Nigeria).