A nostalgic longing for our “mentors”

July 14, 2011

Newspaper Columns

by Tola Adenle

[As it was in 2003, so it is in 2011. We await Dr. Okonjo Iweala's Economic Miracle, a lady whose presence as minister is so important but so troubling to "those who do not wish Nigeria well" that she received death threats if she took the appointment! Ridiculous at best. Wasn't she General Obasanjo's Finance Minister who encouraged liquidating our debts - at great cost to the country and great benefit to the consultants? She's been singing a new tune since then about [still] the need for “external borrowing” to stimulate the economy, and the debts are already on. Dr. Jonathan as president, though, should remember that he and only he remains the one who will be judged on the state of the country’s economy at the end of his tenure, and not any fancy minister with wide powers. The following essay from eight years ago shows the country keeps on regressing.]

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I must confess that it is an irony to me to hear Nigeria counted among the world’s poorest countries. With her enormous human and natural resources, Nigeria has no reason to belong to this league. …” Dutchman Ron van den Berg, former head of Shell, Nigeria at his departure from Nigeria in 2003. Essay reduced for space.
Thank you very much, Mr. Van den Berg just as I say thank you to the World Bank (or is it IMF?) consultant who, in a send-them-a-message suggestion opined that Nigerians would be better off if everybody gets seven hundred dollars-plus from the oil revenues since there are no benefits to the citizens from the billions earned annually

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Letters to my Niece

Yewande, dear,

When Chief Sam Mbakwe, the NPP Governor of Imo State during Shagari’s presidency cried out for a return to colonialism, most Nigerians laughed at the old man’s Jeremiad lamentations at the prodigal government of immense proportions. The governor, no flippant politician, must have looked far and wide at the Nigeria we had, searched deep, and saw no redeeming value in what the NPN-led government was able to give in terms of leadership before he prescribed – what to most Nigerians back then – a pill worse than political hara kiri.

What? After all the struggles and labors of “our heroes past”? After all that Herbert Macaulay, Ernest Ikoli, Awo, Zik, etcetera fought for; ask the British back? A dog does not go back to its own waste, a Yoruba adage says! Governor Mbakwe was called all sorts of names but before Shagari’s government was kicked out by Buhari et al., that government set Nigeria on her path of no return to the land of external borrowings. Forgive me, dear, for not being able to be categorical about whether Governor M. is still alive now or not but the old man – in spite of Nigerians supposedly being the happiest humans alive – cannot be laughing now.

Permit me a little but necessary detour before I come back to what led to this letter. Four Nigerian passports ago when I first traveled out, I exchanged ninety-seven Nigerian pound (N194) for United States two hundred and seventy dollars ($270). Going back in January 1973, I got three hundred ($300) dollars for under two hundred naira (N198.40). In December 1976, I got a little over fifteen hundred dollars for a thousand naira and to skip some dates to fast forward my story, I got seven hundred and ninety dollars for two naira short of five hundred naira in April 1978.

Enter Alhaji Shagari and by 1980, Nigeria was doing very well getting a lot of foreign exchange from oil and the naira was riding very high. In February 1980, he had been about five months on the Nigerian throne when I got issued nine hundred U.S. dollars in exchange for N498.83. In June of the same year, the naira was still a healthy 1.81225 to the U.S. dollar when a CBN approval translated N1495.11 to $2710, i.e. under fifteen hundred naira for almost twenty-eight hundred dollars! By May 1983, the rate had gone down to around 1.4 dollars to the naira so that seven hundred dollars exchanged for N495.26.

Exit Shagari and Enter Buhari/Idiagbon, the only government that has fought to stem the tide of a falling naira. In fact, the Buhari-led government put up a very spirited fight to strengthen the national currency by refusing the onslaught of the IMF and its cohorts that were bent on living up to their reputation of impoverishing poor countries. That was not the kind of leader wanted for a Third World country, dear, and so, Buhari, aided in great measure by his high-handedness and religious extremism, had to go.

Enter the gap-toothed general with a ready smile on his lips while a dagger hid in one hand at his back. I’ve read often that this guy styled himself an “evil genius” but even if the sobriquet was not self-inflicted, Our Man from Minna certainly lived up to that Dantesque description. He kept Nigerians on a leash and let them believe they were the masters of their own fate: repealed draconian Buhari decrees, threw the taking of an IMF-loan debate supposedly in the public arena. By the time my family and I – like the mythical Nigerian ‘Andrew’ – checked back to the States in the summer of 1988, we needed four naira to purchase a dollar but that seemingly unbelievable rate would pale when compared to forty-six naira we got for each dollar on a visit in 1993. Dear, your own memories go back enough for me not to bore you with the continued slide of the Naira since then but suffice it is to say that a mere five years ago when Abacha died, the rate at the parallel markets was around eighty. What happened between 1970 – or even 1993 – to the naira when then, as now, dollar-denominated crude oil remains our only major foreign exchange earner and we are not a manufacturing nation with lots of goods that we want to be competitive in the world market and must, of necessity, have a weak currency to attract buyers?

I was at a bank in Ibadan the day before this letter when a young lady asked me a question that first surprised me before I understood her: “Auntie, is it possible that our “mentors” come back?” “Mentors?” I repeated, my eyebrows giving away my ignorance. “Yes, mentors; or what do you call our colonial masters?” I was confused and did not know how to answer; so I offered another question: “You are asking if the British could come back to rule us?” “Abi, look at what mess we are in; we make so much money from oil but the country is wretched. We produce so much oil but have to pay through the nose to fill our vehicles and our leaders don’t care because they’ve taken so much for themselves …”

I read the comments ascribed to the departing head of Shell in Nigeria at a send-off party. In a literal equivalent of what the Yorubas would describe as counting the fingers of a nine-fingered woman to her face. Mr. Ron van den Berg said, “I must confess that it is an irony to me to hear Nigeria countered among the world’s poorest countries. With her enormous human and natural resources, Nigeria has no reason to belong to this league. …” The Dutchman should know even if we do not know the exact amount that accrues to this country from oil.

Thank you very much, Mr. Van den Berg just as I say thank you to the World Bank (or is it IMF?) consultant who, in a send-them-a-message suggestion opined that Nigerians would be better off if everybody gets seven hundred dollars-plus from the oil revenues since there are no benefits to the citizens from the billions earned annually

One of the reasons the young lady banker offered for the revolutionary idea of a re-colonization was the picture of South Africa which she has seen on television. “I am sure,” she states “that South Africa, with all its minerals, would have been destitute without white rulers!” We older ones can entertain these thoughts but it would be difficult for us to express for reasons, I am sure, you can understand. Most important of these reasons, perhaps, would be an admission that our generation and that before us have failed Nigeria. Without disputing that fact and with an unusual pessimism on my side, those behind us offer no hope. Born into a corrupt system that seems to offer more to those willing to play by such rules, I think Nigeria is in long-term trouble.

No, my other dear at the Ibadan bank, we cannot and will not be re-colonized but our future is really bleak if change, peaceful or – God forbid – the other type (a.k.a. revolution) does not come. Many of our best brains will continue to emigrate; our young women will continue to travel overseas to work as sex slaves; our social fabric will continue to be torn apart when spouses are forced to live and work in different countries for economic reasons; teenage siblings of opposite sex who are left in the care of barely-older care-givers will continue to impregnate each other while the parents are driven to work abroad by the Nigerian Situation, etcetera.

Get your thoughts across soon, dear, and take good care of yourself. As you’re well, I’m well.

Aunt Tola.

[The Comet on Sunday, October 2003.]

 




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