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Author: Olu Obafemi
Posted to the web: 7/9/2005 10:31:33 PM

When your family Masquerade accomplishes a bout of smart summersault and acrobatic display in a dancing contest at the Village Square; you are bound to be highly elated. This must be a moment of bliss for President Obasanjo and his team—what with the 60% debt relief offered recently by the Paris Club, the Supreme Court ruling which throws out the challenge of his Presidential election by his erstwhile subordinate, Major- General Buhari of the ANPP, confirming the President’s 2003 electoral victory, and of course, the recent triumphant outing of Siasia’s Flying Eagles at the just-concluded World Youth Championship finals in which the literal robbery through a rabid collusion of the Referee and the Alec smartness of the Argentinian team, denied Africa the glory of lifting the Cup, for the first time, ever.Occasionally, when blessings come, like when troubles pour, they come not in trickles—in single spies—they come in torrents. Obviously, part of the credibility of criticism is objective evaluation. This is an instance in which President Obasanjo deserves to be gently patted at the back, if one can reach his back. The man has been a victim of vilification, for the woes of this country—a legacy of leadership inheritance, and his ovation, if any, has been dismally low. Then, all of these from nature’s armoury and obvious industry!In sharing this season of joy with the Government, we need to reflect properly on the nature of the recent, victorious outing of Government and its real implication for the future of the country. What is actually a factor of visionary and committed leadership, and what aspects of the positive happenings have emerged from sheer luck or reaping bounties from other people’s dare? No doubt, when good things happen to a nation, the symbol of the nation inherits the kudos. Ditto, when things turn sour and bitter, the leader gets the entire diatribe and vituperation. But it is always important to identify the real contribution of people as individuals or interests to any such successes as well as delineate what the input and failings of the powers-that –be to that to the celebrated realities is.Let us begin with the most concrete—in material terms-- of the recent showers of achievements, the eighteen billion-debt reliefs. There are those who do not find much worthy of celebration in a relief from an imposed, not properly incurred debt. Economic analysts have traced the debts, with their crippling effects, on the nation’s fiscal status and the entire economy as a product of a ‘sinister conspiracy’ between some major Western banks, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and some visionless, unpatriotic Third World Governments. Too much money pouring from oil through OPEC’s policies went into the coffers, not of the oil-producing countries, of certain foreign banks, opened for some roguish leaders from the Third World. These funds were later said to have been manipulated into loans (international debts, not to the private concerns who took them originally, but to governments) with baiting, low interests, which nations are then cajoled to take for dubious and non-concrete development projects. Recovery of these loans, whose interests have been exponentially increased, were now to be made through IMF at conditions which can only increase the indebtedness, interminably, to the effect that the more you pay the more you owe. The argument is that these debts were not owed in the first instance. Indeed, the stringent ‘conditionalities’ have imposed criminal hardships on the ordinary citizens who knew nothing about the dubious debts to start with. Such mortal IMF/World Bank conditions of granting and recovering loans include the infamous, indeed ignoble, Structural Adjustment Programme (with a befitting acronym, SAP, which sapped the electorate of these so-called debtor nation to the bone- marrow). Structural adjustment to poverty is ensured by those conditions which compel governments servicing these loans to cut down, most drastically, on public expenditures on vital welfare programmes, leading to social tension and violence by the repressed citizens of these debt-paying countries. The bottom-line of the argument of these critical economic analysts is that we have no business paying any debt at all, let alone rejoicing for some kind of relief which still imposes hardship on the country, as even the 40% to be paid back—through buy-back strategy– can still throw our budget into swamping crises.A more positive or favourable way of looking at the issue is that the Nigerian Government has made an effort, which has yielded positive fruits. For all the years we have engaged in disputations about the genuineness or otherwise of these loans and debts, we have continued to service them, from our national budgets. This is the first real productive and successful effort by any Nigerian government, including those who put us in this debt logjam in the first instance, to achieve any form of meaningful reduction. Yes, we are asking for either debt-repudiation or debt-cancellation. The search must continue, even if it means more foreign trips for the President and greater negotiations. We must continue to find a means of rebuffing this dubious indebtedness to foreign monopoly capital. But in the interim, this government has inched its way into a less vicious nook of the G8 heart. It must be appreciated for that and encouraged to embark on a more concrete struggle to take the nation out of the vicious debt circle that continues to wreak economic and social havoc on the nation’s body politic.Next is the joy that the Flying Eagles have brought to the entire nation—at a time when the national confab and the resultant imbroglio from it, have increased our nation’s blood pressure. Samson Siasia and his lads have provided a temporary balm to our wounded souls by that triumphant and self-achieved victory in the YWC. Even though, as Rueben Abati has eloquently surmised, the government, via the NFA, the football administrative department has worked tireless to make the victory impossible, and that the exploits of the Flying Eagles were achieved against all odds—through sensitive leadership of an indomitable coach and patriotic dare of the boys themselves, the victory is a national event and Mr. President has a genuine right to relish it, whole-heartedly. But the larger issue of ensuring in future that Governments reap only from where they sow implies that greater and more purposeful infrastructural and material support require to be ensured, such that will ease the rigours which sportsmen and women and their coaches go through. The NFA have no business pretending that they are a part of this victory. Indeed, there is a sense in which they constitute themselves into a clog on the wheel of the Flying Eagles’ triumph. The victories have been won in spite of the NFA and the Sport Ministry. In sharing the glory and appreciation, which the happy nation and its leaders must expediently, shower on the heroes of FIFA, the Flying Eagles, the NFA and the Nigerian government must put resources into areas where they intend to harvest dividends. The victory is good for the government and the entire nation, but beyond material compensation, the state must ask for the recipe for preparing for and winning sporting laurels from the likes of Orji Kalu, the Pillar of Sports and the Enyimba football Club of Africa.As for the supreme Court judgement, which puts paid to the challenge posited by ANPP flag-bearer, Muhammadu Buhari, to Chief Obasanjo’s Presidency, the best way for government to celebrate is to ensure that the electoral machinery of this country is so structured that electioneering irregularities are rendered impossible in the future of elections, and at all levels. Polls must begin to make meaning as an instrument of massive political participation in all sectors of the polity. In spite and because of all the happy tidings of the moment, government needs to bring greater material smiles to the wrinkled faces of Nigerians—wrinkled by poverty, unemployment and want.