OBASANJO’S BLOODY FINGERS

By Biko Agozino

“The lice of poor performance in government - poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed - if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality - are very much with us today. With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood’.” – Obasanjo

The press release by General Olusegun Obasanjo concerning the state of Nigeria is full of evasions and half-truths. It is not ‘lice’ that make the lousy ‘fingers’ of Obasanjo and his fellow genocidists ‘not to be dry of “blood”. Their fingers are dripping with fresh blood because the killings have continued unabated since the launch of the genocide against the Igbo who wisely voted massively against the Buhari regime that Obasanjo helped to impose.

For full disclosure, Obasanjo is expected to admit his complicity in the ongoing genocide and offer unconditional apologies to the Igbo in particular. He should join all well-meaning people to demand for atonement in the form of reparations. Obasanjo should admit that the gruesome killings by security forces, terrorists and herdsmen that he lamented follow the pattern of the genocide against innocent Igbomasses. Unless Nigerians admit and make atonement for this foundational genocide, the culture of genocidal violence will continue to wet the fingers of genocidist rulers with ‘blood’, according to the laws of karma.

However, despite all his human limitations and with all his involvement in crimes against humanity, Obasanjo remains exceptional for being the first head of state in Nigeria to hand over power to an elected successor and he did so twice though he has been accused of imposing flawed successors. He is also the first head of state to appoint more women to offices in his administration although some suspect that some of those women may wear the #MeToo pin against him.

He was able to settle the dispute with Cameroon over Bakassi without plunging Nigeria into a wasteful war with our African neighbors, though he could have better planned the resettlement of the Nigerians expelled from there or negotiated the admission of Cameroon to the opoen borders of ECOWAS. Similarly, Obasanjo had a magical way of resolving some political crises in other African states by, for example, persuading militarists to yield power back to civilians just as he persuaded Charles Taylor to step down in Liberia, though some suspect that he bargained corruptly with bags of public funds.

Despite the massive corruption in his administration, Obasanjo was and remains the only head of state to establish a special economic and financial crimes commission, EFCC, with which a sitting Inspector General of Police from his own ethnic group was convicted of corruption and jailed and some governors from his own party were indicted, though the EFCC under him allegedly went after mainly his perceived political opponents.

It is exceptional that apart from Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dr. Obasanjo is the only Nigerian head of state to publish books even if they were allegedly ghost-written for him by his research assistants; nothing stops other politicians from appointing their own research assistants. He is the only Nigerian head of state to initiate a presidential library even if the funding involved massive corruption by governors who donated public funds, according to Gani Fawehinmi. Obasanjo remains the only Nigerian head of state, with the exception of General Yakubu Gowon whose arranged Ph.D. yielded no publication so far, to recognize his own intellectual limitations and return to school to pursue an advanced degree.

Obasanjo is also the only former Nigerian head of state to call for Nigeria to beg 'agitators to stop' because there is enough cake to be shared. Obasanjo should go ahead and lead by example by offering a personal apology of his own and by calling on his fellow genocidist commanders to join him in offering reparations from their fabulous ill-gotten wealth. Obasanjo should call on Britain and Russia which facilitatedthe genocide against the Igbo to offer apologies and reparations to the Igbo too.

The call by Obasanjo for a Coalition of Nigerians is too little too late since he also recognized how crucial it is for Nigeria to be involved in the leadership of Africa. The coalition-building should involve all other states in Africa towards the United States of Africa that the first president of the country, Azikiwe, called for in 1959 and which Nkrumah and others echoed. With almost all Nigerians demanding the restructuration of the country, focusing exclusively on the internal colonial boundaries of Nigeria is unsatisfactory.

As Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe and Chinua Achebe remind us, the genocidal culture that was initiated against the Igbo in Nigeria has since spread throughout post-colonial Africa. Moreover, the African masses have transgressed the porous colonial boundaries in search of their daily livelihood in spite of heightened insecurities and genocidal threats. We need to recognize this reality and urgently build the Peoples Republic of Africa to guarantee the freedom of our people and collectively protect the masses against the imposed genocidist states ruled with blood-stained fingers across Africa.

WAS OBASANJO’S LETTER PLAGIARIZED FROM ACHEBE?

By Biko Agozino

Did General Olusegun Obasanjo plagiarize his so long a letter from Achebe’s There Was A Country without crediting the author? Obasanjo cited an academic research paper on allegations that Nigerian politicians are protecting an indicted drug dealer who is a member of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party even after the trial and appeal courts ruled that he should be extradited to the US for trial. This unusual reference to an academic source in Obasanjo’s self-opinionated lambasting of an administration that he helped to arrange is the only content that appears original compared to the contents of pages 243 to 258 of There Was a Country, a book that Obasanjo pretends not to have read or heard about. According to Achebe in part 4 of the book:

‘The post Nigeria-Biafra civil war era saw a “unified” Nigeria saddled with a greater and more insidious reality. We were plagued by a home-grown enemy: the political ineptitude, mediocrity, indiscipline, ethnic bigotry, and corruption of the ruling class. Compounding the situation was the fact that Nigeria was now awash in oil-boom petrodollars, …. A new era of great decadence and decline was born. It continues to this day’ (p. 243).

 

If Obasanjo's ghost writer had done basic literature review for his term paper-like letter, he would not have tried to reinvent the wheel of Achebe and he would not have placed all the blame on one individual party leader, President Jonathan. Achebe saw the problem as a task not just for the politicians but also for the followership and especially the ‘intellectuals, particularly writers’ who faced the ‘conundrum’ and tried to find solutions instead of blaming the problem on ‘our complicated past and the cold war raging in the background.’ He charged the intellectuals with the task of developing a new program, from the grassroots, through which to rescue the nation. But Obasanjo atomized the problem by blaming it all on one man. To Achebe, Nigerians needed to fight this enemy with every means at our disposal rather than abandon it to the rulers as Obasanjo seems to suggest.

 

Of course, Obasanjo appears to be in agreement with Achebe that the first task for Nigerians is to ‘identify the right leader with the right kind of character, education and background.’ But whereas Obasanjo focused on Nigeria almost chauvinistically, Achebe saw the problem as one that faced all of Africa – the problem of ‘where Africa had been, and where it needed to go’ (p. 244). Goodluck Jonathan is not the president of every state in Africa but the problems identified by Obasanjo do not apply exclusively to Nigeria. Achebe correctly identified the problem as that of the second struggle for libration: ‘For the second time in our short history we had to face the disturbing fact that Nigeria (and Africa by extension) needed to liberate itself anew, this time not from a foreign power but from our own corrupt, inept brothers and sisters!’ (p. 244).

Achebe confessed that after waiting around for a while, he and other intellectuals decided to enter into partisan politics to see what difference they could make from within. He and others (such as Eskor Toyo, Bala Mohammed, Wole Soyinka, Bala Usman and S.G. Ikoku) joined the ‘left-of-center Peoples Redemption Party’ of Malam Aminu Kano and Achebe was elected the Deputy National President. Their goal was to stir Nigerians into asking critical questions such as how to conduct a free and fair election, how to elect the right kinds of leaders who would not seek to prolong their tenure or turn into a dynasty as Obasanjo attempted in his Third Term bid and as he now accuses Jonathan of planning to attempt. Achebe concluded that his 'sojourn in politics' was completely disappointing and that he was frustrated to realize that despite the fact that some upright politicians like Aminu Kano existed, the vast majority of the politicians were there for selfish greed (as Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe predicted in his 1983 essay on ‘Entreeism’). The intellectuals had grand ideas all right but Nigeria lacked the ‘strong leader’ who would implement them, an idea that Obasanjo echoes in his long-winded letter.

Unlike Obasanjo who obsessed with one single leader in his letter, Achebe declared that the problem of leadership exists at every level from the local government council to governors and all the way to the presidency. As a dictator, Obasanjo may be more accustomed to thinking of the leader as a maximum superhero who swoops down from Asokoro Mansion and takes care of his cronies but that is proof that he does not understand the extent of the systematic problem that Achebe analyzed. Achebe specifically identified the problem of godfatherism as one that Nigerians must get rid of from the political process but Obasanjo still fancies himself a godfather of sorts and asked Jonathan to forward his open letter to some other godfathers who allegedly share his concerns. Achebe used the model of Igbo democracy to illustrate the emphasis on achievement as opposed to ascribed monarchical privileges and challenged Nigerians to deepen democracy as the very antithesis of military rule whereas Obasanjo warns of the possibility of return to military dictatorship based on his understanding that it is one Ijaw man, rather than the ‘ruling class’ that Achebe fingered, who is destroying Nigeria, warning that he may be the first and last Ijaw man to rule the country. Why?

Whereas Obasanjo cited the Central Bank of Nigeria in accusing the Jonathan administration of not accounting for a mere $7 billion in oil revenue, Achebe quoted the World Bank as estimating that Nigerian rulers had stolen $400 billion from the public since independence. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation immediately attempted to correct the accounting of the Central Bank of Nigeria and suggested that, ironically as Fela Kuti put it during Obasanjo’s military dictatorship when $12.2 billion went missing and they set up an enquiry that concluded that ‘money no loss o, them dabaroo everybody’, naming Obasanjo personally as the conductor of what Fela called a system of International Thief-Thief; NNPC suggests that no money is missing today.

Achebe indicated that Nigeria was ranked at number 14 on the Failed States Index in 2011 and while Obasanjo openly accused the Jonathan administration of running a killer squad, Achebe concluded that; ‘In many respects, Nigeria’s federal government has always tolerated terrorism’ by turning a blind eye to ‘ferocious and savage massacres of its citizens – mainly Christian Southerners; mostly Igbos and indigenes of the Middle Belt and others – with impunity’ (p. 251). Achebe saw the solution in the dismantling of the 'conveniently incompetent' Nigerian federal government and its culture of mediocrity through the democratic political process. Obasanjo’s solution appears to be that of entrenching his own discredited political party in power by humiliating the figure head out of office for a candidate of Obasanjo’s choice to enter and use what he called 'carrots and sticks' to fight insecurity rather than rely mainly on the militarist strategy of the present administration, a strategy that Obasanjo himself fashioned and implemented in his previous administrations.

It is welcome to know that President Jonathan has avoided a public mud-slinging response to Obasanjo’s letter and opted to pay him a personal visit to discuss the important issues raised in the letter. The president should thank Obasanjo for his rightful contribution to the national conversation but remind him that the problem goes beyond any individual and envelopes all Nigerians as Achebe pointed out. Obasanjo should also be advised to avoid claiming that it is African leaders and foreign investors who begged him to help the Nigerian government because it is his patriotic duty to help his country given his position as a past president who is a member of the national security council and also a leader of the ruling party. Obasanjo’s identification of quality education as one of the solutions to what he called a ‘culture of hatred’, insecurity and poverty is a solution that could have been lifted out of Achebe’s book except that Achebe privileged free and fair elections as the foundation for all the solutions, a foundation that Obasanjo failed to lay. Achebe concluded with a postscript in which he called on Africans to emulate the example of the great Madiba who was wronged but habored no bitterness and who relinquished power after only one term despite a claim recently by Obasanjo that he had tried to persuade Mandela to stay on in power.

Beyond Achebe’s focus on the ineffective rule by an inept ruling class, Biodun Jeyifo, in his epic review of There Was A Country, has also called attention to the exploitative nature of the economic system in the country as deserving a transformation. Three good pieces of advice that Obasanjo gave to all Nigerians, not just to Jonathan, are that those in leadership position should not see critics as enemies to be eliminated, that the military alone cannot defeat terrorism and so by implication, some carrots need to be extended to the victims of terrorism as reparations despite President Jonathan having inexplicably ruled out reparations, and that leaders should not see themselves as representing only their own ethnic groups. Such pieces of advice are straight out of Achebe’s There Was a Country. 

All Nigerians should be required to study Achebe's book and they will agree with me when I say that the answer to the question in the title of this blog is no, Obasanjo did not plagiarize from Achebe; some of his complaints are voiced by the masses in the country all the time. President Jonathan should respond to ex-President Obasanjo with humility, admit his short-comings and ask for even more constructive criticism from all Nigerians. Truly, Obasanjo has sinned (like all) and come short of the glory of critics but the testimony of a rogue who flips to become a prosecution witness against his accomplices remains admissible in a court of law and in the court of public opinion. Set a thief to catch a thief.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech.

Why Obasanjo May Be Heading To Hell

By Biko Agozino

General Olusegun Obasanjo who misruled Nigeria for eleven years recently went to Ibadan to curse corrupt and inept rulers of Nigeria, including himself, when he stated: ‘Maybe we are all going to hell’. He may have intended the ‘we’ to refer to all Nigerians but if I understand him correctly, he was referring to those of them with full responsibility for the misgovernmentality that has bedeviled the country before and after independence. No sane person will include blessed and hard-working Nigerians, high achieving individual Nigerians who excel internationally against all the odds and the victimized impoverished Nigerians who suffer a life of hell on earth due to the wicked misrule or incompetence of General Olusegun Obasanjo and his class allies among those who are condemned to hell fire by his own mouth. And some Nigerians have already said Amen to Obasanjo’s self-curse.

Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, saw things differently as early as the 1930s when he wrote a ‘Beatitude to the Youth’ of Africa in which he said alliteratively that ‘Blessed Are the Youth’ but in which he also concluded by echoing that ‘Cursed are the Old Africa’ for obstructing the emergence of the Renascent Africa and the new Africa. Then again years before he died, Azikiwe renewed this clear distinction of his by stating that ‘History will vindicate the just’ in a statement that concluded by re-emphasizing that ‘God shall punish the wicked’.

In the curse against himself and people like him, Obasanjo actually revealed the open secret why he suspects that Nigerian misrulers are jinxed. He stated in that rambling self-righteous monologue that he went to visit Mwalimu Julius Nyerere because Nyerere recognized Biafra and Nyerere gave him a simple riddle that he is yet to unravel. According to him, Nyerere told him that his ministers in Tanzania will claim that they were not corrupt and yet their infant children had numerous choice properties in Europe and North America. Why would Nyerere say that to an ethnic war-lord like Obasanjo?

Perhaps Obasanjo was arrogantly campaigning for support for the ongoing genocide against fellow Africans and had the cheek to go and attempt to bribe the revered Nyerere to end his recognition of Biafra. Instead of ending the recognition, Nyerere went ahead and named major streets in Tanzania after Biafra in protest against that monumental injustice of the genocidal killing of more than three million Africans under the command of Obasanjo and his hell-bent misrulers who cruelly declared that ‘all is fair in warfare’. Those iconic street names remain today in Tanzania while Obasanjo and his cursed fellow misgovernors abolished the historic name of the Bight of Biafra as if that will wipe away the evidence of their genocidal crimes against humanity. Today, simply flying the flag of Biafra in commemoration of the innocent dead in Nigeria (as is done in enlightened countries that use the opportunity to create flourishing tourist industries) will invite extra judicial killings that go on unabated.

If you are superstitious, you may point to the Igbo genocide as the cause of the curse that Obasanjo said was upon him and his class of ‘irresponsible’ marauders. The Bible commands that ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ and I understand that the Koran teaches that ‘If you kill one of God’s children, you kill all of God’s children.’ What part of that commandment do self-accursed misrulers like Obasanjo and his ilk not understand? They did not just kill one or two or three of God’s children which is bad enough – they killed three million plus. And yet more than forty years later, they have not offered any apology and they have not offered any reparations. As Nigerians always say, God is not asleep, and so it is no surprise that Nigerian misrulers are a condemned bunch, from their own horse’s mouth. They are all going to burn in hell for their evil deeds, according to Obasanjo. Why not? Except that God is a loving and forgiving God, quite unlike the unrepentant tyrants who are only paranoid about their deserved place in the afterlife. Repent!

It is not only Nigerian tyrants that appear to be cursed due to what Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe relentlessly condemns as the foundational genocide of post-colonial Africa – the Igbo genocide. All the countries that facilitated that genocide have apparently also been cursed: The Soviet Union has vanished from the world map and its successor, Russia, continues to battle insurgents in some of its regions; the UK is about to be dismembered given the impending vote for independence by oil-rich Scotland which will probably be followed by Wales and by Northern Ireland all of which already have their devolved governments; and Egypt which provided the air force pilots that bombed Igbo women in market places during the war now appears to welcome the chickens back to its own roost as the same officers trained by Mubarak when he was the commander of the air force college during the Biafra war now devour their own people in the thousands. What goes around comes around also in Northern Nigeria where the pogrom against the Igbo started and in the Middle Belt where most the killings took place when train-loads of escapees were waylaid and slaughtered. But the native doctor who concocts diarrhea cannot hide his own buttocks in the sky according to an Igbo proverb because when the rain falls, it won’t fall on one man’s housetop, sang Bob Marley.

General Gowon who presided over that genocide has gone around the country asking people to pray for Nigeria. I wonder what kind of prayers Nigerians pray for their country. It is likely to be the same self-glorious prayer that they say on their televangelist call-ins when they always ask god to destroy their enemies. Rarely do Nigerians admit wrong-doing and ask for forgiveness of their sins. 

When Chinua Achebe tried to heal the sore-ridden conscience of the nation in There Was a Country, the unrepentant blood-thirsty tyrants that were still alive and their phantom ‘intellectual’ lackeys pretended to be offended by the objective truth and went on boasting that the genocide against the Igbo was justifiable. Gowon’s initial ignorant comment was that he ‘did not know if Achebe will be getting a penny from that book’, a baffling response from someone who holds a doctoral degree from a top UK university.

Of course, no genocide is ever justifiable and condemning genocide is not about getting pennies. Thus General Gowon who reacted emotionally to There Was A Country without reading a single page of the damning book, has recently started singing a different tune. Perhaps for the first time, he now admits that lots of innocent fellow Nigerians were killed and their properties destroyed due to the abuse of power during the war and that there is a need for justice to be done to our fellow citizens. Belatedly, Ohaneze Ndigbo has set up a reparations committee to seek the reparations that were demanded in the recommendations of the official Justice Oputa Panel report which President Obasanjo attempted to suppress but was unofficially published online.

It is tempting to agree with the superstition that Nigerians, nay Africans and people of African descent globally are cursed. I have heard highly educated Africans explore this hypothesis that everywhere black people are in power, nothing seems to work because, as a pejorative saying among Diaspora people of African descent puts it, black people can’t run snow. Some of the people who hold this mistaken belief yearn for the re-subjection of black people to the terror of oppressive white rule or direct colonialism as the panacea for the perceived ineptitude or wickedness of black misrulers. But history is not a mystery.

Personally, I do not agree that Nigeria is cursed, for as Ola Rotimi would put it, The Gods Are Not to Blame. There are historical and structural reasons why people of African descent are suffering the incompetent leadership that we are burdened with today.  As Obi Igwe put it in one of his gospel songs, what we need are leaders (Ndi ndu, also literally, forces of life) and not rulers (Ndi ochichi, also literally, forces of darkness). There are some concrete steps we can take to reverse the ineptitude at the leadership level and uplift our people from avoidable penury in the midst of plenty:

First, I call for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be declared as a public holiday in memory of the millions who were genocidized in Biafra. During that day, every year, let all Nigerians embark on a general fasting and all the money saved on food and drinks should be donated to the Igbo reparations fund while parents will use the opportunity of the national demonstration of penance to teach future generations that what was done to the Igbo must not be allowed to happen again in Africa. This could be done also by using the day of mourning to promote history literacy through the communal reading of the history of the genocide.

Secondly, the Federal Government of Nigeria should allocate 100 billion naira every year for at least 40 years to the Fair Igbo Reparations Mandate (FIRM) as a token recognition of the inhumane crimes committed against our people by our own government. No group of Nigerians would lose anything when the government eventually recognizes that killing three million of our people was completely wrong and pays reparations. The amount suggested here annually is chicken feed compared to what one of these hell-bent misrulers steal with impunity relentlessly.

The Federal Government of Nigeria and Ohaneze Ndigbo should demand for the foreign countries that supported the genocide to contribute to the Fair Igbo Reparations Mandate because when this evil is recognized and forgiveness is requested through the token payment of reparations, the knock-on effects in the national conscience will yield a greater consideration for human life, create massive wealth that the cosmopolitan Igbo will spread across the country and across Africa for the benefit of all, and help to produce conscientious leaders who will help Nigerians and Africans to reach their full potentials.

Finally, Nigerians should follow the example of Nyerere, Nkrumah and Du Bois and recognize that evil against any African anywhere is not an internal affair of any country or state. Rather, we should fast forward the unification of Africa into the People’s Republic of Africa in a way similar to democracies of scale that are more viable because unity is strength. When Africa is finally united in a continental government, no single group of Africans will ever be able to wake up one morning, slap their buttocks, and embark on ethnic cleansing in Africa because the rest of us will rise to put an end to any attempted genocide in Africa by internal or external forces.

The Artful Dodger Subsidy Withdrawal

By Biko Agozino

A colleague asked me to comment on his treatise on the just announced Nigerian policy of removing subsidies from petroleum products. The colleague started by stating that petrol is cheap in Nigeria and that the subsidies served as a form of wealth re-distribution especially given that there does not appear to be any other way of trickling down the oil wealth to the impoverished masses. He did not go the extra step in his logic to recognize that if his premise is right, then removing the subsidies is tantamount to raising taxation on Nigerians by executive fiat and without legislative authority. Not that it will be too difficult to obtain legislative rubber stamping with Ghana Must Go (or Imo Must Go from Abia and vice versa) bags.

I told him that his premise that petrol is cheap will probably be contested in Nigeria because the pump price in most locations is well above the #65.00 per litter that is the official price available only at the few NNPC Depots where you are more likely to run into ‘No Fuel’ cardboard notices. This means that when the government removes a subsidy that was not there in real terms to begin with, then the fuel hawker will put his own jara on top, the okada rider will raise his fares, the garri trader will inch up the cost of eba by factoring in the cost of transportation and the cost of kola at roadblocks, and the landlord will raise rents, schools and hospitals may charge more to cover the costs of gas; hence the inflation my colleague rightly predicted. 

The colleague had good advice for sister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to take it easy, because Nigeria is not the US where the World Bank and IMF are located and where the policies of those International Monetary Organizations are never imposed, no matter the level of their fiscal crisis. In the US, for instance, they have welfare policies for the unemployed and the aged but nothing like that exists in Nigeria despite the fact that the US owes tens of trillions of dollars as budget deficits. In the US, citizens are copying the popular struggles in North Africa by organizing the Occupy Wall Street campaign that has spread to cities across the country while in Nigeria, there does not appear to be a popular uprising against even worse income disparities and higher unemployment rates. 

Only the labour organizations in the country are mounting a credible opposition to the proposed subsidy withdrawal. The Nigerian Labour Congress has called on the government to cut  all 'unnecessary spending' as an alternative to the withdrawal of subsidies (This Day, 10/17/11). The NLC has been the leading voice campaigning for a starvation minimum wage of 18,000 per month that state governments are reluctant to implement. The Trade Union Congress has accused the government of corruption for claiming that it will spend #1.2 trillion this year on subsidy while only #240 billion was budgeted for that and the NNPC retaliated by calling organized labour 'enemies of the economy (The Punch, 10/17/11). The SSANU has termed the withdrawal of subsidies a 'declaration of war'. The Academic Staff Union of Universities threatens strikes over the refusal of the government to implement the extension of retirement age to 70 years at a time that the trend in other parts of the world is towards early retirement.

The US reduces gas prices by reducing taxation at the pump, compared to Europe. In addition, Europa and Americana give their corporations hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts and stimulus packages, farm subsidies and business start-up capital, such as the $500,000,000 given to the solar company, Solyndra, that just folded up after pocketing half a billion (yes, with a b) US dollars from Uncle Santa. 

As Finance Minister under President Olusegun Obasanjo, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala had announced a fifty billion naira credit for cassava farmers, promising that 30% of that would go to female farmers but she was quickly moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and my guess is as good as yours that some big ogas simply chopped the 50 billion naira just like that. Similarly, Comrade President Yaradua ear-marked 200 billion naira to be disbursed as grants to Nigerians but he was quickly incapacitated by illness and his death was never investigated as Wole Soyinka demanded while the 200 billion naira he proposed just vanished without Nigerians asking questions.

In the US, the debate is whether to raise taxation on the richest one percent to the level being paid by the middle class but the Republicans, calling president Obama a class warrior to his delight, have vowed to maintain the Bush era tax cuts for the richest one percent and are seeking to cut welfare and Medicare entitlements for the poor as their preferred strategies for balancing the budget. Across Europe and Asia, huge sums of money are being doled out as corporate welfare while in Britain, welfare and social services have been drastically cut by the current Conservative government. The recent riots in England and in Greece and the current mass protests occupying Wall Street in America are obviously connected with on-going class warfare against the poor by the rich and the powerful as professor Stuart Hall clearly indicated in a recent article in the UK Guardian. Worse policies appear to be heaped on Nigerians and they continue to endure the hardship along with the insecurity that is bred by phantom capitalism.

My colleague outlined the projects on which the government intends to spend the savings from the withdrawn subsidies but none of the plans for the estimated six to ten billion dollars savings has any reference to the suffering people. Rather they propose to use it to patch up roads that they have multiple times budgeted to patch up with vanishing funds, open new refineries that would soon be handed over to private investors at a discount, generate electricity, build infrastructure, all euphemisms for sharing and chopping the savings because all those things they want to start doing are things they had revenues to do before. For instance, President Obasanjo spent $10b or more on power generation while generator tycoons continued to kill whole families with CO2 poisoning; power ko, power ni. 

No American president will wake up and slap a huge tax on the citizens in the guise of subsidy withdrawal without facing a recall election or mass protests even from members of his own party. What President Obama is trying to do is to get Congress to approve additional stimulus of $450b with which to help to create more jobs in America but Republicans in Senate and even two Democratic senators have blocked that move simply because it includes proposals to raise the taxation rates for millionaires back to what it was under President Clinton.

If you ask me for an alternative since President Jonathan has presented Nigerians with a fait accompli, then for the first five years, all the $10b annual savings should be disbursed directly to the Nigerian people for business start-ups, research budgets in the sciences and humanities, scholarships funding, welfare benefits, housing, free medical access and publicly funded education at all levels for all... That will work out at one thousand five hundred billion naira a year and so every corner of the country will be touched by the entrepreneurial and industrial revolution that will be unleashed when such grants are disbursed transparently. Some of the start-ups will fail but those that succeed will make all the differences in job creation and the government will eventually recoup the investment through corporate taxes and income taxes from the employees in addition to value-added taxes from their sales.

All those Egbesu, Area or Bakassi Boys running around looking for someone to kidnap for ransom or the Boko Haram activists looking for something to blow up may just go back to school, or go to any city and open up a small business or return to their villages and set up an agro business with their #1m naira grant and employ five or more desperadoes or team up with other grantees to set up medium sized cooperative businesses. After five years, then let the politicians give Nigerians half the savings and embezzle the rest as they always planned to do and let EFCC chase after them for that. Of course, as the NLC implied, the government could implement such a massive grants programs to Nigerians without imposing draconian taxes in the guise of withdrawing subsidies

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech. agozino@vt.edu