What is the greater good of restoring fuel subsidy? asks JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
Atiku Abubakar has vaulted to the top of the opposition pack, riding on the softest of Nigeria’s under bellies, fuel subsidy. The presidency has issued a formal rebuttal, and columnists who agree on nothing else have lined up to knock it. When a government spends a whole week arguing with one man, it is clear they take him serious.
It has also been a week in which Peter Obi’s long-standing defence of the 13 months Anambra spent without state doctors came back into view, and it has not aged well. The strike was the price of reform, and in any case, he has said, it did not affect a great many of the sick. Nobody died en masse. Therefore nothing much happened.
There are similarities in these stories.
Both measure success as the absence of suffering rather than the presence of anything. Neither promises to build. Each promises, in its own way, that things will not get worse, and each expects to be thanked for it. This is the politics of no mass death, and it is practised across every party, by government and opposition alike. We have set the bar of national ambition at survival and are happy to celebrate it at times.
A doctors’ strike that runs for 13 months kills quietly, and in ones. The mother who does not survive childbirth. The child lost in a delivery that should have been routine. The patient whose treatable illness turns terminal in the months of waiting. None of these becomes a headline. None registers on the crude instrument of mass death, which counts only the disasters loud enough to embarrass a government and ignores the attrition that is how failure actually kills here. To govern by that standard is not to govern at all. It is to preside, and to hope the catastrophes stay small enough to deny.
The promise itself has been cleverly framed this season. Restore the subsidy to cut your costs, the argument goes, not to feed the powerful and their friends. Headline inflation eased to 15.43 per cent in July, but food inflation rose to 20.31 per cent, its fifth consecutive monthly climb. At the level of feeling, a promise to make life cheaper tomorrow is close to unanswerable.
But feeling is not policy. Notice the word carrying the entire weight: targeted. Atiku insists he is not restoring the old import regime but a targeted intervention aimed at domestic production, and he has disowned an aide who suggested it would be restored and later withdrawn. But targeted is the part nobody has been asked to explain. Targeted how? To whom? Through which register, verified by whom, at what price per litre, and at what monthly cost against national consumption of roughly 47.4 million litres a day?
History is not gentle here. The subsidy was never the friend of the poor it is now claimed to have been. For decades it was among the most efficient machines this country ever built for moving public wealth to the connected few, and the market woman paid for it in taxes and in inflation while the importers and the holders of allocation collected. A further fact has gone missing from the argument entirely. The Petroleum Industry Act made the subsidy regime illegal from the end of June 2023. To restore it is not merely to spend. It is to amend the law in order to rebuild an instrument the country abolished because it was looting us.
Lest this be read as a case against one side, the government governs by the identical bar from the opposite direction. The opposition offers relief from pain today. The government offers relief tomorrow in exchange for pain today. Both negotiate with the electorate in the currency of suffering. And the cushion promised at removal was never built at anything close to the scale of the pain it was meant to absorb, which is why a promise to turn the pump price back is landing as well as it is.
Why do we accept it? Because we are tired, and a tired people will choose relief over vision every time. When the days are hard, “I will stop the pain” beats “I will build the future,” and any honest campaigner knows it. The low bar is ratified by an electorate too exhausted to demand more, and the two feed each other in a loop that produces, election after election, managers of decline rather than builders of anything.
The question we are trained to ask is which candidate will hurt us less? It is the wrong question, and asking it is how we keep arriving here. The question that changes a country is the one we almost never put to those who seek to lead it. What will exist at the end of your term that did not exist at the beginning? What is the greater good, to Nigeria, of restoring fuel subsidy?
Make them answer in figures, because figures can be checked. How many of the 774 local governments will have a primary health centre staffed, stocked and open at two in the morning? How many megawatts will reach a factory floor rather than a press statement? A candidate who can only promise that the pain will stop, or that the pain was worth it, is playing at the level of ‘no mass death.’
Two things are true at once. The promise has been excellent politics, winning Atiku the ear of a people in pain. It would also be poor governance. But the disagreement is not the danger. The danger is that an entire election can be conducted in the language of suffering, one side promising to end it and the other insisting it was worth it, and that whoever wins will have been elected to preside over our survival rather than to build anything.
Survival is not an achievement. It is what is left when nobody builds. And in a sense, has been Nigeria’s ultimate tragedy.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing