Cost of Living Crisis: America, Europe and Nigeria

Pope Leo to Donald Trump “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic or political gain”

Beyond Nigeria, there are people and institutions whose fortunes I follow with an emotional investment that defies explanation. Roger Federer was one. No one ever wielded the tennis racket with such skill and aplomb. Arsenal Football Club is another. A Federer victory could brighten my day; Arsenal defeat could spoil it. Such attachments are harmless enough in sport. In politics, they invite a sterner reckoning. Barack Obama inspired a different kind of investment. His election offered the exhilarating possibility that America might, at last, begin to outgrow the racial poison that has accompanied it from its founding.

Eight years later, in a cruel twist of irony, fate dealt America, a supreme antithesis of Obama with the election of Donald Trump as American president. In its recurrent flirtation with the politics of hate, racism, misogyny and white nationalism, the Republican party played John the Baptist to the arrival of Trump. He was the logical consummation of a trend that was set in motion by the dog whistle of his Republican forebears. It was from the ranks of the party I first learnt the espousal of the cruel misogyny “doctrine’ of legitimate rape’. Meaning you must always have your way with your spouse regardless of her feelings.

Trump was a gifted dissembler who gainfully pandered to the raucous glee of the Republican party base in search of their 21st century McCarthy. No one needs to believe in conspiracy theories to share the concern about his fidelity to his sworn oath of office where Vladimir Putin is concerned. If the latter ever wished for a corrosive and polarising agent in America and the Western democracies, he could not have gotten a better client than the American president. James Carvile was on a CNN Smerconish show the other day, lamenting that Trump was a traitor and if he wasn’t, then he was surely behaving like one. As the wit goes, “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck”.

Let us dispense with the polite fiction that Trump is merely a politician with an abrasive manner. He recognised the resentment provoked by Obama’s presidency and made himself its political beneficiary. His birther campaign was a racist lie, sustained for years in the service of one message: that a Black president could be made to seem foreign in the country whose people had elected him. It was an assault not just on Obama but on the idea that Black citizenship could ever be accepted without qualification.

If, as some have noted, Trump’s rise to the presidency was a racist backlash against the emergence of Obama, his recent repudiation in the mid term American elections was no less a counter backlash (to this backlash) in which America rediscovered the legitimacy and utility of its diversity.

America will, for long, replay the iconic scenario of the election of Keisha Lance Bottoms as the first black female governor (of Georgia) in American history coupled with the simultaneous election of seven other African American ladies to high executive offices in the state. There was the unprecedented election of a Latino lady as governor of Texas, four black governors, an elected Muslim to the Senate and another elected black Senator ever from the state of Mississippi. To Trump belongs the credit of helping to categorically clarify the choice before the American electorate with the subtlety of epic fury.

So profound was the danger he posed to society that Pope Leo had to insinuate himself into the election (and broke with the papal tradition of political abstinence) to exercise his civic responsibility to vote, leaving his fans and followers to second guess his preference and take a cue therefrom.

Europe presents its own warning. Rising costs of food, energy and housing have put intolerable pressure on households that did what they were told to do: work, pay their bills and expect a modest degree of security in return. When that bargain fails, the far right arrives with its well-rehearsed list of culprits. The migrant is blamed for the housing shortage; the foreigner for the wage packet that no longer stretches far enough. It is easier to find a vulnerable person to accuse than to repair an economy.

For a number of years now, Nigeria has been grappling with a similar cost of living crisis which has occasioned sporadic street protests and demonstrations. With the 2027 general elections in view, a standard bearer of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, Prince Justice Faloye has attributed the Nigerian instance to the adoption and pursuit of Neo Liberal economics policy. 

“2027 Presidential elections feels like a death sentence when one realizes that the three major contenders all support Neoliberalism, the political and economic ideology behind Nigerians’ poverty and underdevelopment ever since the former head of State, General Obasanjo started with the removal of education subsidies. Since then, subsidy removals, devaluation and privatization has pushed two third of Nigerians into poverty, lowered infant mortality and life expectancy, as neoliberalism policies continued to kill the common citizens”.

The removal of the petrol subsidy and the liberalisation of the foreign-exchange market have brought immediate pain. Any supporter of these policies who cannot say so plainly has forfeited the right to ask Nigerians for patience.

Nonetheless, while accepting the premise that the most vulnerable segment of the population deserve concomitant mitigation measures to cushion the hardships attendant on the policy deployment, I will argue that these neo liberal policies reserve the potential to set the political economy of Nigeria on the path of progress and development consistently pursued. At the root of the free market philosophy is the ethic of a positive correlation between productivity and reward otherwise understood as the work ethic. Subversive of the work ethic is the resource curse and the rentier economy syndrome within which Nigeria has been mired for the better part of its post colonial existence. The underlying logic of the syndrome is that you do not need to work to make money.

I do not intend to reopen the redundant debate on doctrinaire political ideology (a subject) to which I lay no exemplary expertise or originality. I claim no more than the indulgence to speculate on the merits of the specific macro economic stability measures that the present government has doggedly embarked on for the past three years namely the twin policies of the floatation of the naira and the removal of the oil subsidy. Both measures are predicated on market efficiency and they have been efficient in stabilising the Nigerian economy.

I have long argued for constitutional reform, particularly decentralisation and the devolution of powers. Too much of our national life depends on access to the centre. Even before that deeper reform is achieved, we can insist on economic rules that diminish the power of patrons and gatekeepers. A Nigerian should not have to know the right person to obtain an opportunity that ought to be available by right.

In this regard, those measures constitute a unifying instrument. No section is more favoured than the other. As we gradually reduce the areas in which the discretionary power of the government is reduced the more cohesive and coherent the society becomes. I know of no government in ancient and modern history (other than that of the delinquent Jewish king, Rehoboam) which purports to impose pain and distress on the people as an instrument of governance. If these are the inevitable consequences of a policy in the short term, then they must be measured against the objectives they are intended to serve.

This is why I resist the suggestion that our choice is between compassion and reform. We need both. Preserving a system of privilege because dismantling it hurts the poor is not compassion. Dismantling it while leaving the poor to absorb the shock is not justice. In a discussion about the alleged lack of patronage for the Yoruba, my principal observed that the better service would be a level playing field on which any Nigerian could earn an income without let or hindrance. I agree. The objective should not be to secure a more generous patron for our own people. It should be to build a country in which patronage matters less to everybody.