By Austin Isikhuemen
We are in that era again. Of strident calls on the citizens for belt-tightening across the land. It is only the very young that would not feel a sense of déjà vu. We have seen and heard all this before. Belt tightening is not a term with which we are unfamiliar. Did we not experience it in 1984 in the Buhari-Idiagbon era that came to ‘correct’ the ills of Shagari and the NPN crowd that were thought to be very profligate?
What of when the gap-toothed General did his own shifting cultivation in 1986 and we had the dubious IMF debate? Everyone then turned economist and the government worked from the answer to the question with the citizens none the wiser. We agreed to tighten our belt. We are back again and mentions of belt and tightening are renting the air and have suddenly gone viral on social media and TV talk shows. One common denominator in two of the belt-tightening aftermaths has been one particular guy that was shoved aside earlier and handed over recently. Coincidence?
I am quite familiar with belts and have been wearing different kinds since elementary school. Some are made of leather, denim material, plastics, imitation leather and cloth. One of the things I found out early was that there were some clothes for which you never need a belt. Agbada also called babanriga, usually worn over caftan. For ease of the wearers who come in different shapes and sizes, the tailors simply sew a hollow loop on top of the ‘trousers’ and pass a rope-like cloth through and that is what is adjusted and tied around the waist to keep the trouser in position. For real trousers won with shirts and suits, a belt is a must. With holes in various positions the belt can be tightened or loosened as required.
The belt in current conversations, especially from the presidency, has nothing to do with sartorial matters but everything to do with economic issues and political abracadabra. When you hear a man who hardly wears shirts and trousers continue to harmer on belt-tightening as an economic strategy, you need to look carefully at those being targeted. You are never sure if there is a belt under his babanriga or caftan! When they, therefore, call on everyone to tighten their belts as a solution to our economic quagmire exacerbated by an action they took, they may well be exempting themselves and co-travellers.
Does distinguished Ahmed Lawan wear trousers with belts that can be tightened? How frequently? Even distinguished Godswill Akpabio, since his election as Senate President, is now more distinguished by the voluptuousness of his well-cut agbada and cap with the sleeping figure 8 emblazoned. The trousers and suits Amaechi and BAT sewed for the telemarketing of 2015 were discarded by PMB as soon as the ‘change’ was achieved. So, when the government tells us to tighten our belts as a way to get out of the fiasco they created, they must know those of us they are addressing. Not those who never wear a belt!
This week, we have seen Lagos roads filled with pedestrians who could not afford transportation fares to go to work. They looked more like refugees escaping from a war-ravaged zone. There was no Lie Mohammed to spin it as a keep-fit stroll. Most of them wore belts. But they have had to adjust the belt to the last hole due to the vicissitudes of the fuel subsidy removal with which the inauguration was celebrated in May. Indomie noodles sales have skyrocketed as that appears to be the only affordable food on the menu of most Nigerians. Transportation costs have put things like tomatoes, onions, yams and pepper out of the reach of poor Nigerians. Rice? That one left with Grandma Onochie‘s rice pyramid to NDDC!
For salary earners, their entire pay packet goes into fueling their old cars and any requirement for spare parts and repairs make the next month’s pay an immediate victim. A popular car pimping engineer showed the photo of his fuel gauge on Facebook today and the ten thousand naira purchase only filled it to half of a quarter. That amount which bought 52.9 litres of petrol on 28th May, 2023 now buys only 16 litres. Yes. It is that bad! That guy’s belt may be on the last hole. Now he is being told to tighten it further. It can only be done now by punching more holes nearer the buckle. He is tightening the belt anyway because he has no choice, not because the government says so. But, is the government tightening its belt or do the government men wear belts at all? The signs do not indicate so.
The humongous amount of money said to be budgeted to buy SUVs for our ‘honourables’ is not only ethically outrageous but aesthetically incongruous with the government’s call for belt-tightening. Seventy billion naira. That is seven million in one thousand places! Pray, is it SUV they use to make laws? Is an SUV a biro, a book or a brain that without it you can not make a law? If you do an audit of the Senators, old and new, I can bet that you will not find any without two or more SUVs in their garage. In that Senate today are retired governors that used their positions to pass laws that already provide them SUVs every three years for life. Yet, they need new SUVs as status symbols as a ‘distinguished’ in the hallowed chambers that almost became hollow through unbridled rubber stamping the last time around.
‘Bayo Onanuga and ‘Dele Alake should please tell the President that this SUV National Assembly at this time would not do Nigeria any good and that it is an early sign that the belt-tightening is for the downtrodden alone. The optics are bad. Very bad. It is not also lost on us that the SUVs being bought are all going to be imported from foreign lands. Of course, they must be in car shops of the connected already. What if, to join us in the belt-tightening, NASS members lead by example by forgoing these obscene luxuries for once and making the motions of tightening their own belts with the rest of us? Or buy Innoson SUVs to save foreign exchange and plough the funds into our economy? Is that too much to ask of men and women who have sworn to serve Nigeria?
The odium does not stop at the national assembly alone. Theirs is loud because it gets discussed. What of the executive branch? The MDAs and Governors and other sundry Honourables that push us out of the roads with their black-tinted SUVs and mad-dog hilux pickups. Who counts those and how many are they? What do they cost? More than or less than 70 billion naira? How can those without belts to tighten collect what is called hardship allowance? Hardship? Insane! And those vehicles are fueled at taxpayers’ expense – those same folks who cannot take buses now due to lack of transport fare. Those who die of hunger or disease now can not partake in the eldorado being promised by those they do not even trust.
The last time around, we were promised that many presidential jets would be sold to save costs and depart from the wasteful ways of the former ruling party. How many were sold and how many are left? I never heard of a sale. Five thousand naira was bandied about as the money to be paid to unemployed graduates. I know quite a few unemployed graduates from the electioneering of 2015 to 2023. None got the five thousand. Did your folks get it? I know a lot of poor market women who scrape here and there to send their children to school. I never saw any that encountered Pastor Osinbajo’s trader money. Did you? Across the land are retired folks whose pension and gratuity have not been paid. Some are restricted to their leaking homes by arthritis and other old age ailments. They are all among those being told to tighten the belts that they do not have today. Yet they watch elected officials who should lead the charge scrambling to buy SUVs with sums that can pay all of them in their Local Government Area their owed gratuity.
What if we repair our roads that the last government falsely claimed as their achievement? We now know they were economical with the truth. If these roads are all good, would they still need these SUVs? Do they know that the cost of fueling those fuel guzzlers would soon make people abandon their V8s? Or do they hope to stay in NASS forever and corner enough to last a lifetime? What is happening is that lenders visit our country and see the cars they can never dream of driving are the toys the loan applicant plays around with. Did we not see a regime in this country that decreed low profile and made 504 the highest car for public office and the head of state modelled that profile himself? Did we die? This craze for SUVs at government’s expense sound both childish and insensitive at a time the poor is being told to tighten their tattered belts.
People have pointed out the absurdity of a Presidential convoy of more than a hundred cars long and how those optics run counter to the belt-tightening imperative. That’s not the only theatrical absurdity in these times that need to be curbed. Have you seen the spectacle of men shuffling in large billows of starched agbadas made of very expensive fabrics making the motions of being busy? Why can we not consider just a caftan or ‘senator’ two-piece clothes at this time rather than one man wearing, in one go, enough clothes to sew for two? It will not only be a sign of seriousness and belt-tightening; it will also reduce laundry costs on our honourables and public officers. Wearing such voluptuous and luxury-exuding outfits and telling hungry folks to tighten their belts is a mockery of their condition of penury.
20th July 2023
