By Ugoji Egbujo
The president has tried his best to restore hope. But hope has become so elusive. He floated the naira, and it started floundering to embarrass the government. The masses must endure and help the president not to lose his own hope. So once we gather at official ceremonies, we must stand and recite the pledge. That is all he is asking for, for now. These things are done in North Korea to show loyalty and patriotism. We will sing the national anthem, sing the pledge and sing ‘On Your Mandate’. We are not the only hungry people in the world.
If foreign investors see us singing the Pledge and Mandate happily, they might overlook the bandits, who have chased away farmers from farms, and bring in the elusive dollars for us to enjoy. As the president has said, we must emulate the Super Eagles. They didn’t lose hope when he told them they were playing boring football. And we can all see the reward. The APC governors have patriotically sent them 200 million naira to renew their hopes. Our Foreign creditors will like that.
The President has begged us to stop painting our country in bad light. We are not children. Therefore, we must stifle and squash all news on rampant kidnapping, bad roads, corruption and food inflation. After all, these things happen in other countries, too. When people are kidnapped, we must go to our churches and mosques to pray quietly for the country. When we gather money and pay ransoms to free our relatives from captivity, we must agree with the security agencies that they stormed the bushes and defeated the bandits and rescued the hostages.
Because if we allow the security agencies to take the glory, our country will be seen as a serious country where crime and impunity do not reign. We can’t go about tweeting pictures of the battered bodies of murdered Ekiti Obas being thrown into the back of a pick-up vehicle. Is that how we want to attract tourists? We must help a government that wants to restore hope in tourism to stabilize the naira. So, our youths on social media must patriotically let sleeping dogs lie sometimes.
Then, the issue of petrol cost. Hairdressers are even complaining. Our mothers didn’t use electricity to do these things. This government means well. It removed petrol subsidies to save the country, and fuel prices jumped. When it saw the masses crying, it decided to borrow money to distribute N8000 to millions of households. Only a magnanimous president would have bothered. Since then, hasn’t he suffered trying to give workers a new minimum wage?
Even though the naira he has been trying to help with his world-class financial engineering skills ingenuity has been disgracing itself, he has resisted pressures from international agencies to remove the subsidy, which has smuggled itself back to drain the treasury. That shows he is an astute president. He fights today and runs away to fight another day. Let nobody deceive himself by thinking that the president is afraid of the social repercussions of subsidy removal. He is courageous and methodical. At the right time, he will treat the stubbornness of petrol subsidy. Though a brave man, should he hurry to swallow something larger than his anus?
Patriotism entails the ability to stomach hardship in the interest of national unity. But Nigerians are Jeremiahs. Because of a slight change in the price of rice and bread, some disgruntled women allowed themselves to be used in Minna, Niger state. They must think they are hungrier than Imo women who are suffering and smiling and sitting at home on Mondays. Do they believe the government doesn’t know they are hired agents of political destabilization pretending to be hungry?
How can a bunch of people enjoying the low cost of living in Africa be crying and disturbing a hardworking government? Even if the price of rice, beans and cement have increased sharply in the last month, is that why some people in Kano joined with placards bearing inscriptions in King’s English to scare the government. But not minding the minnows and the mischievous rabble-rousing political masterminds using them to sow disunity from the shadows, the government has graciously decided to share food to quieten them.
Yes, it’s an unprecedented achievement. Which other government in the history of this country shared food from the national reserves when there was no emergency or natural disaster, and just after sharing borrowed money? The government is bending over backwards because it’s a listening and humane government. But some people think the government is timid and afraid of protests in the north. Let them remember that the security agencies are equipped to deal with troublemakers. After all, we have just acquired additional helicopters and weapons for about one billion dollars. Yes dollars. Nobody should test the resolve of this government.
If unpatriotic people can’t emulate the Super Eagles, they should at least emulate the great Wole Soyinka. Instead of bad-mouthing the federal government, the erudite professor said he wouldn’t hold the government to account until after one year. Even if the naira falls to 5000 per dollar and people start dropping off in the streets, he will be quiet for about a year. That is patriotism. The only people he will focus on now are the Gbajue people, who tried to truncate our democracy with their noise in 2023. They are the people that should get the heat. It’s even possible that the Gbajue dissidents, rather than unscrupulous banks and thieving politicians, are responsible for the rascally behaviour of the naira. If the market women in Minna had emulated the professor, the police wouldn’t have arrested their leaders for disturbing the government.
Patriotism means a government must be allowed to settle down. But these people on social media exaggerate things to sow ideas in the army. The president goes to France to rest, and they shout that he is sick. The government shares borrowed money, and they cry that politicians are carting away our national patrimony through sham Palliative Schemes. Betta Edu and Kogi airport notwithstanding, the social media critics are truly a mob of nattering nitwits.
How can they accuse the president of practising ‘share the money’. Wasn’t it this president who discovered that the then ruling PDP used ‘Share the money’ philosophy to bankrupt the country under Jonathan? If the Tinubu government has derailed hopelessly, as they are insinuating, how did the Super Eagles reach the AFCON final? Haven’t these folks heard the NFF testify that the Super Eagles reached the final because they keyed into the president’s renewed hope vision by manifesting ‘No gree for anybody’? Unpatriotic people will start 2013 whataboutery now.
The president should ‘not gree for anybody’ who thinks he has renewed Sapa. It is true he had promised to recruit 50 million youths into the armed forces to cure youth unemployment and stop the insurgencies and banditry. But is that enough to warrant the acidic criticisms? They should give him his eight years and see. Can’t they see that the price of agbado and beans has skyrocketed and affected the plan? They should give him time. But casting aspersions and making the president lose hope is not good. They are even digging up the president’s tweets against Jonathan to justify their unpatriotism. Times have changed. That was the Shoeless age. This is the Emilokan era. Unpatriotic people should focus on their governors and local government chairmen.
The youths don’t know they are a major part of the problem themselves. Yahoo Yahoo and banditry are perpetrated by the youths. Are they the only jobless youths in Africa? They can’t find jobs and so? Jobs are online. The other day, the CBN governor revealed that one of the principal causes of the naira depreciation is the number of young Nigerians seeking foreign education abroad. Yet these young people think the politicians and bankers are consuming the dollars.
Politicians only buy delegates and run political transactions in dollars to avoid EFCC. The youths carry dollars and hand over to oyibo universities. Can’t these young people stay at home and study here? Even if the standard of education has fallen, can’t they just get the education like that and use it to do political, military, police and civil service jobs here? Some lazy youths said the CBN governor was told half-truths to the House of Reps.
These youths are irreverent. They said if the CBN governor wasn’t an analogue civil servant, he would have factored in foreign remittances of about 20 billion dollars per annum before insinuating that the one billion dollars spent annually on foreign education was wasteful. They even said that the CBN governor craftily didn’t go into details of medical tourism to avoid irritating the president, who was resting in France. It is youthful insolence rather than corruption that is killing the country. Imagine asking the CBN governor if the dollars the Federal government wasted on the 400 people sent to cheer the president at the climate change conference in Dubai was captured under foreign education.
Trouble is brewing, but telling the government that it is wallowing in self-deceit is unpatriotic. So, patriots are quiet, and the country is teetering on the brink.
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