THE current severe economic crisis suffered by millions of Nigerians caused by increased petrol prices and the fall in the Naira’s value, which led to the fall in real wages and general devaluation of life, can be traced to the actions of a few against our national economic interests. This continued sabotage of our energy sectors and economy in general shouldn’t be trivialised as corruption but economic treason. President Goodluck Jonathan made a distinction between stealing and corruption when he said good accounting systems can reduce outright stealing but corruption is more difficult to curb. We have been inundated and desensitised with reports of corruption since independence, as corruption allegations have even become political tools for regime change. However, we ignore the fact that corruption could become economic treason if it is against the economic interests of a nation, a crime that could be punished with life sentences, if not the death penalty. It is becoming obvious that our political class is guilty of economic treason that arrests our economic development and leads us further into a poverty trap with each successive regime. Or how do we explain not knowing exactly the amount of mined crude oil, our main national resource? Or the continuing sabotage and nonfunctioning of our petrol refineries costing us a third of our import bill, which instead of tackling with an iron fist, was used as an excuse to withdraw oil subsidies and floating of the Naira. Or the inability to generate half of our electricity capabilities of 13GW for ten years due to gas pipelines and transmission sabotage until the opposition came into power and it reduced suddenly.
In all cases, the beneficiaries of economic sabotage point to historical, economic exploiters. Our plight of collective economic exploitation started with slavery, whereby external civilizations set out to economically exploit us by arming detractors to take over our polities and capture millions of Africans to farm American slave plantations, in order to exploit our genetic makeup that can resist the insect life of the plantations and for our skills in planting sugarcane, cotton and tobacco copied from our ecosystem. After 300 years and disruptive slave revolutions, especially the Haitian Revolution, our enslavers had no choice but to stop their importation of Africans for slavery, and they started the process of keeping Africans on African soil for economic exploitation. This was achieved by dividing the African continent into plantation nations known as colonies, where Africans were to plant crops and mine natural resources for the colonial masters’ use, while acting as markets for the colonial produce. This new economic system of colonization that evolved from slavery was eventually challenged in the agitation for independence which most Black African nations got from 1957 to 1967, thereby creating independent nations legally free from colonial rule and economic exploitation. However, not only in Nigeria but all Black nations, the physical and political chains were slackened, while the original economic chains of exploitation remain tightened by evolving to other economic exploitative models.
Over Sixty years of independence, it can be argued that our political class that evolved from the class of colonial administrators, who were trained and indoctrinated to run an exploitative system by the colonists, continue to conspire with foreign interests in the arrested economic development of our new nations. Most Black nations have remained in the colonial economic straitjacket of mono economies geared towards satisfying the needs of foreign powers. They remain entrenched in primary production, not being able to industrially process their local output, nor diversify their economies to provide income and employment. To compound our arrested development, the coloniality of knowledge and power sources actually justifies the dehumanization and enslavement of our peoples. Especially since the late 70s, instead of pushing the right and obvious economic liberating policies, our political classes have been guided by international financial institutions and their enslaving economic ideologies, whose agenda appears to retain us in the neocolonial economic system by further pauperizing our people through removal of subsidies and breaking of social contracts, as well as constantly reducing real wages through devaluation by floating our currencies.
The amount of our productive value wiped away by Bola Tinubu’s IMF/WB policies in the last one years is greater than the amount of productive value taken off our shores during any year during slavery, or the amount exploited in a year during colonization. Not to talk of the 10yr reign of APC under Muhammadu Buhari and Tinubu during which the value of our currency has fallen from $1 to N190 to N1600, cutting real wages and our property values be tenfold. On getting to power, Buhari claimed that our coffers had been embezzled and emptied to justify his devaluation of our currency. Under him, our oil exports dropped by a million barrels a day, claimed to be stolen, not to mention the lack of any system to accurately account for the crude oil mined by companies of our previous Western enslavers and colonizers. Our foreign debts soared by 500 percent from under $10 billion to over $50 billion. There would have been nothing wrong if the debts were used on capital investments in economically empowering infrastructure, but they were squandered on cost of governance items.
Regardless of what Buhari and previous governments did, the economic problems could have been easily resolved by the Tinubu administration and not compounded as being witnessed. The problem was tied to the fall in oil revenues that provides 85 percent of our foreign exchange, which led to the inability to service our debts and furnish the foreign exchange market for our import demands. Instead of removing energy production subsidies and floating the Naira to destroy livelihoods and businesses, our national economic interests should have been, to stop the theft of our crude oil and to cut our import bill by half, since 33 percent of the import bill is due to fuel and oils imports that could be resolved by reopening our refineries, while the 21 percent due to vehicle importation could be cut by all government tiers using only locally produced cars. The sabotaging of the refineries for over 20 years, costing us $28 billion in unfulfilled repairs over the last ten years (Dangote Refinery cost $20b) is not mere corruption, it is economic treason that should attract the death penalty or life imprisonment for those involved, especially since it resulted national economic deprivations in real wages, productive output and property values that has led to the deaths due to poverty.
This administration is also culpable of criminal negligence or economic treason since it should have waited for the rejuvenation of the refineries by all means necessary and immediately cut the importation of official cars, but instead embarked on removal of petrol subsidies and floating of the Naira. It is difficult to deny a conspiracy when both its public partners like NNPC and private owned oil companies benefit from the continued importation of fuel against our national economic interests. Another mind-boggling energy problem bordering on economic treason is our electricity sector.
Around 2012, President Jonathan announced the increased electricity capabilities to 13GW and promised 18 to 24 hrs of electricity supply which was witnessed for a few weeks or months, before dropping due to sabotage of gas pipelines. At the time the Minister of Energy, Prof Nebo stated that the government won’t be able to fulfill its promises of constant electricity supply due to what he called The Gas Wars. However, he didn’t identify those carrying out the subversive war of attrition against our energy supplies. Some suggested that it was waged by generator importers but it was unlikely that the diverse marketers could unify for such war.
As the 2014 election drew closer, the whole nation was in darkness with electric and fuel shortages until the day President Jonathan returned to his hometown. Buhari enjoyed increased electricity supply for a few months until the sabotage of gas pipelines resumed for the remaining of his tenure. With Tinubu coming to power, electricity miraculously increased by about 40% with no issues of gas pipeline sabotage, making some joke that the Deltan militants employed to blow them up had move to Abuja. Yes, the populace has gladly accepted and is using the constant electricity, but without questioning how it was achieved, who was waging the Gas Wars, and whether it had finally been put to rest. The only complaint has been the increase in tariffs not tied to the increase in cost of providing new electricity plants, leaving the question of whether the extra monies demanded were used to pacify the Gas Wars mercenaries.
In the USA and UK tampering with energy or communication installations attract long jail sentences since it’s tantamount to treasonable economic sabotage. Until Nigeria start treating such economic sabotage as treason, the political and business elite will keep selling the country to selfish, corporate and foreign interests like during the slave trade and colonization. They will stop economic development and keep us as a neocolonial state that serves interests other than those of the nation.
- Prince Faloye,, President of ASHE Foundation think tank, is Afenifere’s National Publicity Secretary.
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