Nasir el-Rufai and the Anti-Subsidy Revolt  By Adagbo Onoja Newsdiaryonline Wed Jan18,2012

El-Rufai

Last week’s subsidy war was, in every sense, a revolution, however understood. It must be a revolution when a very complex society like Nigeria puts aside all divisions and rises with a categorical No to a major public policy. No one who wishes Nigeria well can fail to take note of this unity from below which is the distinguishing feature of the subsidy war in contrast to all previous unifiers that Daily Trust’s Mahmud Jega competently recollected in a recent column. President Jonathan and the PDP whose fuel subsidy regime provoked this unique unification must be happy to have made that accidental contribution to Nigeria’s political development. This unity from below must have been an unforgettable political education for all the unpatriotic and dishonest Nigerian elite as they must have seen their collective demise if the unity is sustained beyond the subsidy conflict. For, the subsidy revolution was thus not just a critique of Jonathan but a resounding rejection of the theory and practice of deregulation in an economy characterised by wealth without production.

Last week’s revolt and the security challenges that have defined contemporary Nigeria such as the ascendancy of zero-sum minded ethnic militias since June 12, the incidences of kidnapping/abduction since 2004, persistent emigration especially of the intelligentsia, terrorism, the unacceptable level of inequality/income gap and, above all, the deligitimation of the state they combine to engender must be taken as dangerous indicators of Nigeria’s share of the ‘fragility of stability and inevitability of instability’ foretold. This is in the sense that the instability defined by these manifestations is what comes to a country when you try to remove or reduce the role of the state in a society at Nigeria’s level of development. One has to know the role of the state in the history of rapid social transformation in Europe, North America, Asia and even Latin America to appreciate this point.

Unfortunately, instead of allowing the state to deliberately organise and guide the Nigerian society to that level of development before we start talking of liberalisation or deregulation, local and foreign interests intoxicated with a buccaneer mentality kept pushing for deregulation even before Nigeria itself attained anything near W. W. Rostow’s take-off stage. Their victory came in 1986 when they successfully got the then Commander-in-Chief, General Babangida, to formally commence de-statisation via SAP, pushing the Naira to find its value/level.

In the end, it was not only the Naira that found its value/level by floating in the foreign exchange market but every other social reality, from ethnicity to university admission to election to violence to womanhood. That is how Nigeria came to be in a state of emergency today as the misery of the many has set them to seek meaning of life in exclusivist and even counter-cultural identity tents or in militant materialism.

The point is that in a semi-industrial or rapidly de-industrializing economy like Nigeria, the decision to privatize or not to should have been a product of nothing less than a strict referendum. There are a million reasons why this should have been the case but the constitutional provision thereto might be cited as the most concrete one.

As conservative as the late Rotimi Williams who chaired the Constitution Drafting Committee, (CDC) in 1975, he and his camp came to a negotiated accommodation with the ‘radicals’ therein to produce what became the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy which, in principle, outlawed privatisation by providing against concentration of wealth in few hands. In fact, we must salute the men (and women) who made that provision because they anticipated the post Cold War situation in which “fierce new assertions of nationalism and sovereignty spring up and the cohesion of states is threatened by brutal ethnic, religious, social, cultural or linguistic strife”. All the identity exertions resulting in genocidal blood letting we have witnessed in contemporary Nigeria are, in the last instance, traceable to the illusion of hinging capitalism on making some people rich, stinkingly rich and making others hopelessly poor.

The starting point of the argument against privatisation in an African country like Nigeria is that the most urgent challenge of governance is a government that must play the role of direct job creation by investment in the productive areas in agriculture, manufacturing, construction not only in order to redress the imbalance in access in class, ethnic and regional terms but also accomplish the type of manufacturing that will place Nigeria on competitive global map. Instead of this development strategy, the privatisation gang under Obasanjo started absolutising foreign direct investment and the private sector, the same private sector that Obasanjo himself had described as baby capitalists and which is already severely constrained by our present level of primitivity, our very low technology usage and level of integration.

The other starting point is the argument that all the countries in the developing world that could be said to have made it from poverty to plenty did so in patriotic revolt against the IMF and the World Bank and the interests and forces they represent. So, a nation can suffer no worse tragedy than when you had a cabal of lumpen ideologues around a survivalist Obasanjo arguing cleverly for privatisation and were ready or determined to and actually experimented with human beings in the wage freeze, employment freeze, the rounds of removal of subsidy, etc between 2000 and 2007.

Of course, we entered the tragic years in which auctioning of government property became halo and heroic much, much earlier than the coming of OBJ in 1999 and his privatisation gang. Wholesale auctioning of government companies has been the tradition since the late 1980s. Today, Nigeria is the worse for it. It has lost all the economic, strategic and symbolic reasons for establishing giant public enterprises-Ajaokuta, NITEL, NEPA, to mention just the signifiers.

However, the expectation was that this malfeasance would end with the military in 1999 so that we could get on with our lives. But instead of that, it intensified. Both President Obasanjo and Vice-President Atiku Abubakar started chanting ‘sai privatisation’. It was very sad when President Obasanjo said in July 1999 that “government shall not seek to do that which experience has proved it is least competent to handle”. He was marketing the unfounded argument that state owned enterprises were haven of corruption, inefficiency and bottlenecks of all sorts. They are unfounded because we know of governments and countries making profit from hotels, insurance companies, airports in the world today and some of them are in Africa.

But while one is persuaded to a great extent by the argument of an economist who observed OBJ closely in these matters that, for regime survival, OBJ had to submit to the IMF/World Bank in principle even while unable to fully suppress his nationalist tendencies which manifested in his periodic swing between neo-liberalism and nationalism, this was not the case with the ideologues who served him, especially people like Nasir el-Rufai and subsequent heads of the BPE, the main agency which operationalized the privatisation rip-off. And this is the point about the shock in Nasir el-Rufai’s current exertions, from emergency journalism to public intellectualism, from pre-emptive alignment to resorting to the strand of populism that was an anathema to his politics when he saw himself as the rising star in power. It borders on a man running from pillar to post. And this sends a signal.

But people like el-Rufai who suggest themselves to us as the thorough going alternative to what is existing must manifest a coherence between their past and their present. So far, there is this observable and worrisome gap between the Nasir el-Rufai of yesteryears and the new-look Nasir el-Rufai. We must draw attention to this if, indeed, his current exertions are truly in the service of the countdown to the New Nigeria. The logic is simple.

The greatest factor missing from Nigeria’s powerful pack for greatness is the subjective factor, what social realists like Achebe love to call the trouble with Nigeria. That is the subjective push that will mix the objective factors in the correct transformative formula for Nigeria to get out of the mess we are in now. It is never going to be one individual in him or herself because no such individuals exist but it will, nevertheless incorporate the role of the individual in history.

In other words, we are not looking for a Mister Clean but someone who, like the late General Murtala, would start by placing his own share of unexplained wealth on the table and, by so doing, acquire the moral authority to ask everyone else to follow suit. In this way, there is a chance for everyone to start on a clean slate because the boss has put everything on the table instead of merely asking others to do so while hiding his. This is why the messiah’s past must correspond to his or her present. Applied to el-Rufai, I will give a number of examples of gaps that does not satisfy this requirement. I stand to be corrected in all cases.

The Nasir el-Rufai we can claim to know is the one who believed and still believes in deregulation and ruthlessly and unapologetically promoted it as a member of the Obasanjo regime. He did so to the point of reportedly telling off anyone who wanted such issues to be subject of public debate to go and form a communist party. The analogy is that the PDP where he then was had no room for debating deregulation.  There is something that is, therefore, not clear in his current populism against deregulation without him formally renouncing his stand on deregulation. Otherwise, he is suggesting that deregulation is only wrong if it is done by others but it is okay if it done by the el-Rufais.

Certainly, deregulation in the sense in which it has been handled in Nigeria ever since is unpatriotic and objectionable. But even more so is el-Rufai’s variant because, unlike Jonathan’s, he was prepared to use fascist methods. First of all, the so-called Abuja Master Plan was absolutised and given the status of a religion. Secondly, the tactics used were pre-emptive and thuggish. It is not surprising that Nigeria recorded that number of internally displaced persons in peace time. By the testimony of the Nigeria Police Force, the reckless demolitions increased the crime wave in Abuja. In fact, there is a sense in which one could say that Nasir el-Rufai is going through God’s response to the cry of the Nigerians whom he assaulted and sacrificed to a god called Abuja Master Plan within the context of making Abuja a haven for investors. Hence he is finding it impossible to get his political acts together.

One manifestation of this must be his disruptive entry into the zoning debate around mid 2010. Without studying the arguments for zoning either as developed by hard headed NPN intellectuals in 1978 or as edited and applied by Nigeria’s political First Eleven in the G-9 in 1998, (Alex Ekwueme, Solomon Lar, Adamu Ciroma, Bola Ige, Abubakar Rimi, Francis Ellah, Iyorchia Ayu, Jerry Gana and Sule Lamido), this guy surfaced from nowhere to urge then Acting President Jonathan to be prepared to ignore zoning. He was one of such earliest voices. While the death of Umaru Yar’Adua left Nigeria with little or no alternative to Jonathan as successor unless, for any reasons, he declined to contest, the reality of zoning to the survival of Nigeria at this point in time should have dawned on anyone at all that this was something that was best sorted out behind the scenes by the party mandarins and other stake holders so that the government formed after Yar’Adua could have been a product of consensus rather than the turbulent and bloody contest the April 2011 elections turned out to be.

Not anything like that for all-knowing, over-brilliant el-Rufai whose psycho-dynamic equilibrium knows peace only when he is on the high horse, even on sensitive issues. Otherwise, everyone knows that without zoning, the power elite in Nigeria will easily destroy the country in their reckless struggle for power. The North was naturally apprehensive in the wake of Yar’Adua’s death. A very senior citizen of the North had written a short advice on the issue for a very limited audience. His argument was simple: wherever a sitting president dies in power, it disrupts every other subsisting arrangement and Nigeria cannot be an exception. In any case, zoning itself is about fairness and the North in particular should spearhead the Jonathan cause because there has been an alliance between the North and what is now the South-South. This argument never became a consensus but it was gaining ground. Then entered Nasir el-Rufai and the Edwin Clarks of this world with their mouth and the rest is now history. It is so nice that he finds himself ringed out by the time Jonathan acquired his own momentum. Talk about the wages of opportunism and you have a classic case study there.

Our great friend then moved on to attack General Buhari, asking him and IBB to quit politics. Today, he has gone full circle, from Atiku Abubakar (to whom he ought to remain grateful), then to OBJ and now to Buhari. Fear anyone who is comfortable with three completely different sorts of persons, especially General Buhari with whom el-Rufai shares nothing in common.

In 1984, General Buhari shocked the system when he accepted the minority report of the Privatisation Committee set up by his government to study the issue. I use the word shocked because the minority report was written by Mahmud Moddibo Tukur, the radical Historian from ABU, Zaria who came from ASUU intellectual and political traditions. Now, compare Buhari’s patriotism with what el-Rufai did as DG of BPE.

So, in tendency terms, Mallam el-Rufai has nothing in common with General Buhari. His migration to General Buhari should worry us because it is such convenient marriages that produce political upheavals later. In short, moving over to Buhari is only a strategy of staging a come back after having blown the opportunity of first time in power on the alter of technocratic terrorism.

Even his declared preference for deregulation is very surprising because it went against the injunction that the educated African must never forget the context of agony and misery of the silent majority, no matter one’s own class insertion or consciousness. There is a sense in which he was acting strange by suddenly locating his powers in the role of pushing the views of the global policy mill and becoming intellectual vanguard of privilege.  Was it the World Bank or personal power agenda he was advancing?

Since the World Bank once disowned el-Rufai, the suspicion that he was advancing and defending his own interests in the way he auctioned State Owned Enterprises as DG of BPE and as FCT Minister seems grounded. In all cases, he did it contrary to the injunction that if some individuals, especially those who have become powerful by the nature of our society, do not moderate their behaviour, the country will see disaster.

There is something suggestively suspicious in el-Rufai’s politics and I pray to God that I am wrong and that el-Rufai is right. But the root of my suspicion is how el-Rufai entered civil society politics, for example.  Before the end of the Cold War, civil society politics in Nigeria was essentially based on sacrifice. That of the student movement is the classic example of what I am talking about. It is true that one or two individuals made financial contributions to civil society organisations in the course of June 12 struggle but it never was a case that someone came in with a road show agenda external to civil society itself. That was what el-Rufai did in his Save Nigeria Group alawada, ignoring the complexity of balancing and safeguards built into power rotation in Nigeria. For someone whose name no one heard either in NANS or in the politics of the Muslim Students Society (MSS) during his campus days, isn’t this really suspicious?

While I do not accept the bungling argument of ‘our great party’ (the PDP) that opposition hijacked the subsidy war, (any opposition that doesn’t take advantage of such an opportunity must be a miserable opposition), I do not think that an ideological gate-crasher is welcome in so far as the subsidy war was a war against the ideology of deregulation. And Nasir el-Rufai is the most ruthless deregulator in Nigerian history to date. The evidence is the Senate probe report. 

It is in this context that the Senate probe of the entire privatisation exercise is a radical, in fact, revolutionary exercise even as David Mark who is presiding over the process is but a student of ‘undue’ radicalism. But such is the zigzag ways of history that we cannot deny him radical credentials if, within the context of the urgent need for the rump of the Nigerian elite to re-think development strategy from this so-called market economy and its scheme of privatisation, the probe provides the countdown to the intra-class cleansing that should herald the emergence of a dedicated core of unrepentant developmentalists as opposed to the sophists of fascist inclinations, like Nasir el-Rufai, if you like.

Mr. Onoja (adagboonoja@gmail.com) wrote in from Ibadan, Nigeria