Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is dismayed by the
current fuel scarcity.
He wonders why successive governments find it
difficult to fix challenges facing the country.
He is particularly disturbed by the blame passing
by those charged with the responsibility of
making the country work.
Soyinka, in a statement yesterday on the state of
the nation, could not understand why the
generality of Nigerians are being exposed to
unnecessary hardship caused by the fuel scarcity.
He recalled government’s promise to deal with
the situation during a similar fuel crisis in 1977.
He attached to his statement which he entitled
BLAME PASSING – The New Year Gift to a
Nation, the bromide of the June 7, 1977 edition of
the Daily Times in which President Muhammadu
Buhari, who was Petroleum minister at the time
said the fuel crisis ‘may be over next year.”
He said in the statement: “In the accustomed
tradition, I wish the nation less misery in the
coming year. A genuine Happy New Year Greeting
is probably too extravagant a wish.
“The accompanying news clipping from June 1977
came into my hands quite fortuitously. It is forty
years old. It captures the unenviable enigma that
is the Nigerian nation. It is however a masterful
end-of-year image to take into the coming year,
not only for the individual now at the helm of
government, General Buhari, but for a people
surely credited with the most astounding degree
of patience and forbearance on the African
continent – except of course among themselves,
when they turn into predatory fiends. When many
of us are blissfully departed, an updated rendition
of this same clipping – with a change of cast here
and there – will undoubtedly be reproduced in the
media, with the same alibis, the same in-built
panacea of blame passing.
“Let this be called to our collective memory. Even
before the current edition of the fuel crisis, other
challenges, requiring immediate fix, had begun to
monopolize national attention, relegating to the
sidelines the outcry for a fundamental and holistic
approach to the wearisome cycle of citizen
trauma. “This has been expressed most recently,
and near universally in the word “Restructuring”,
defined straightforwardly as a drastic overhaul of
Nigerian articles of co-existence in a more
rational, equitable and decentralized manner.
“Such an overhaul, the re-positioning of the
relationship between the parts and the whole
offers, it has been strongly argued, prospects of a
closer governance awareness of, and
responsiveness to citizen entitlement. An overhaul
that will near totally eliminate the frequent
spasms of systemic malfunctioning that are in-
built into the present protocols of national
association.
“I recently ran the gauntlet of petroleum queues
through three conveniently situated cities –
Lagos, Abeokuta and Ibadan – deliberately, this
Friday.
“Even with ‘unorthodox’ aids of passage, this was
no task for the faint-hearted. Just getting past
fuelling stations was traumatizing, an obstacle
race through seething, frustrated masses of
humanity, only to find ourselves on vast stretches
of emptied roads pleading for occupation.
“As for obtaining the petroleum in the first place –
the less said the better. I suspect that this
government has permitted itself to be fooled by
the peace of those empty streets, but also by the
orderly, patient, long-suffering queues that are
admittedly prevalent in the city centres.
“It is time the reporting monitors of government
move to city peripheries and sometimes even
some other inner urban sectors, such as Ikeja and
Maryland from time to time to see, and listen!
Pronouncements – such as the 1977 above –
again re-echoing by rote in 2017– are a delusion
at best, a formula that derides public intelligence.
“Buying time. Passing blame. Yes of course, the
current affliction must be remedied, and fast, but
is there a dimension to it that must be brought to
the fore, simultaneously and forcefully? This had
better be the framework for solving even a
shortage that virtually paralyzed the nation.
“Just to think laterally for a moment – what
became of the initiatives by some states nearly
two decades ago – Lagos most prominently – to
decentralize power, and thus empower states to
generate and distribute their own energy
requirements? Frustrated and eventually
sabotaged in the most cynical manner from the
Federal centre!
“The similarity today is frightening – for nearly
four days on that earlier occasion, the nation was
blacked out near entirely. We know that one
survival tactic of governments is to keep their
citizens in the dark over decisions that affect their
lives but, this was literal!
“And yet each such crisis, plus lesser ones,
merely reiterate again and again that this national
contraption, as it now stands, is simply –
dysfunctional!.
“What this demands is that, in the process of
alleviating the immediate pressing misery, we do
not permit ourselves to be manipulated yet again
into forgetting the MAIN issue whose
ramifications exact penalties such as petroleum
seizures and national power outage.
“These are only two handy, being recent
symptoms – there are several others, but this is
not intended to be a catalogue of woes. Sufficient
to draw attention to the Yoruba saying that goes:
Won ni, Amukun, eru e wo. Oun ni, at’isale ni.
Translation: Some voices alerted the K-Legged
porter to the dangerous tilt of the load on his
head. His response was – Thank you, but the
problem actually resides in the legs.
“The providential image above sums up a defining
moment for both individual and collective self-
assessment, places in question the ability of a
nation to profit from past experience. Vast
resources, yes, but proved unmanageable under
its present structural arrangements.
“As the tussle for the next round of power gets
hotter in the coming year, the electorate will again
be manipulated into losing sight of the BASE
ISSUE.
“Its noisome claque in the meantime, the
automated mumus of social media, practiced in
sterile deflection and trivialization of critical
issues, unwittingly join hands with government to
indulge in blame passing and name calling – both
sides with different targets.
“From the anguished cry of Charley Boy’s Our
Mummu Done Do! to expositions from academics
such as Professor Makinde’s recent intervention,
the public is subjected daily to a relentless
barrage of awareness, underlined in urgency.
Nobody listens.
“One wonders if many people read. And certainly,
very few retain or relate – until of course the next
crisis. The Labour movement declares that it
awaits a guarantee of the ‘people’s backing’
before it embarks on any critical intervention.
“Understandably. There is more than enough of
the opium of blame passing on tap to lull
mummus into that deep coma from which – give
it a little more time – there can only be a rude
awakening.
“Sooner than later, but not as soon as pledged,
the fuel crisis will pass. And then of course we
shall await the next round of shortages, then a
recommencement of blame passing. What will be
the commodity this time – food perhaps?
“Maybe even potable water? In a nation of plenty,
nothing is beyond eventual shortage – except of
course, the commonplace endowment of pre-
emptive planning and methodical execution. Forty
years after, the same language of re-assurance?
“There is something rotten in the state of Naija.”
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