Rotimi Fasan
The manner the Northern political establishment, represented especially by governors of the far North and most of their legislators, have reacted to the introduction of the tax reform bills explains why President Bola Tinubu’s proclamation of the removal of petrol subsidy within hours of his assumption of duty as president on May 29 last year, should be seen as the appropriate step to take.
To the extent that Nigerians, including his major opponents in the election, were and are still of the view that petrol subsidy in the Nigerian context was no longer serving its purpose, to that extent was the president right to have scrapped the cartel-driven scam on his first day in office.
In years to come and should the envisaged benefits of the tax reforms begin to materialise, then would Nigerians realise the wisdom in Bola Tinubu’s latest action of initiating reforms of our moribund tax system.
Had he left room for the same fruitless debates that had crippled previous attempts at the removal of subsidy as some of his critics who got wise by hindsight have suggested, we would still be debating the issue today, 18 months down the line, while the country rush furiously into economic ruin. We would, indeed, still be recriminating and pointing fingers at one another, blaming nameless groups and individuals for the wreck that the Nigerian economy has become.
The government, meanwhile, would remain paralysed by inaction. It has become the past time of some Nigerian politicians to politicise every issue by way of ethnicising or regionalising their discussion. They have turned official indolence into some kind of art and love the sound of their own words.
There is no part of Nigeria where hard work is disdained and laziness is embraced as an organising principle of everyday conduct. There is no region in this country where people wake up in the morning and simply loiter around or look towards others for their means of survival. People rise each day and go about their business no matter the state of the economy or the weather. No matter the tragedy, man-made or not, Nigerians always rise to the occasion. They are among the hardest working and least demanding of people. They are their own providers, hardly ever making demands of their leaders.
But some politicians take advantage of this and while angling for personal gains in the name of group interest, they lead outsiders to view people from their parts as free loaders whose goal is to take what belongs to others while giving nothing in return. This is the untenable situation that the Northern political establishment has placed the average Northerner today.
They make the long-suffering and hardworking people from that part of the country look like a disgruntled mass of loafers who contribute nothing to the national coffer but are content to share in whatever others put into it. This is a lazy view of things that contradicts the evidence of inter-group experience of life in Nigeria.
This mistaken view has, unfortunately, stayed long enough with us as to have besmirched the reputation of an entire region and its people as well as strained and provincialised national conversations. The only beneficiaries of this state of things are its manufacturers, the political elites that feed off the suffering of their own people. They pose as spokespersons of a beleaguered people and pretend to champion the common good while they are, in fact, driven by self-interest.
Suddenly, the likes of Ali Ndume, an increasingly disgruntled senator from Borno-south and the governor of his state, Babagana Zulum, are portraying the tax reform bills as a declaration of economic war against the North. They have devised and perfected different strategies to achieve their aim while hiding behind their fingers to seek a perpetual suspension of discussions of these bills under the guise of calls for more consultation.
Ali Ndume has been inconsolable as he keeps ventriloquising on this issue as he has done on virtually every other issue that he has viewed from a regional angle since Tinubu became president. His problem appears to be a deep-seated sense of irrelevance that he counterposes by a straining for the recognition of the president. In one breath, he claims not to care if the president notices him and in another breath laments forlornly that he is being blocked from seeing the president.
He feels ignored and no doubt desires some form of personal recognition from the president. He is in the same boat as Salihu Lukman, a former National Vice Chair of the APC in the North-West.
Lukman who started out with mild criticisms of Tinubu graduated his criticisms over time and ended up self-flagellating to the point he had to resign his appointment in and membership of the All Progressives Congress. It is in this company of attention-seeking critics of Tinubu that the APC chieftain, Jesutega Onokpasa, seems to have found home following the President’s appointment of Daniel Bwala.
They are people who have apparently misjudged and exaggerated their political relevance, threatening retribution, to wit, withdrawal of support for the 2027 election for both the real and imagined offences of the president. Their sense of frustration has clouded their judgement and is leading them in the perverse direction of the outer darkness of political life.
It is not difficult to know what their problem with the president is. They seek personal reward despite their protestations to the contrary. A presidential nod in their direction is bound to silence them. Yet, in this ongoing controversy about the tax reforms bills, Ndume, Zulum, as are others in the Northern Governors’ Forum and the Northern caucus of the National Assembly, are in the minority. But they have been busy scaremongering, manufacturing excuses and conjuring demons the passage of the bills portend. While Ndume has shamelessly vowed not to read or study the bills, Zulum claims the successful passage of the bills will render the North poor and unable to meet the salary bills of workers.
We all know theirs is an expression of elite fear- the fear of losing their monkey dey work, baboon dey chop status that the reform of the VAT revenue sharing formular represents. People are now being forced to think. The hardship occasioned by the economic, social and political reforms of the last one and a half years is compelling Nigerians to truly ‘’think outside the box’’. While Nigerians may yet have to wait before they can see the promised gains of its economic reforms, the social and political reforms of the Bola Tinubu administration have been truly transformative and their immediate gains lie in how they have forced us all to confront the fundamental issues of governance in our march towards nationhood in a structurally balanced federal system.
