kayode.komolafe@thisdaylive.com

It was instructive that even after labour suspended the week-long strike that began on January 9, some eminent Nigerians still staged a  protest march in Lagos to protest the deployment of soldiers. The march convened  by septuagenarian lawyer and political activist, Mr. Tunji Braithwaite, attracted the participation of  octogenarian constitutional lawyer, Professor  Ben Nwabueze, former minister of finance, Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu,  and a number of intellectuals and activists. The protesters were sadly tear-gassed by the police. 

This act  agents of the state  would remain a stain on the democratic credentials of the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan.  History would   record it   as one of the monumental mistakes made by the government in handling the popular protest.  The moral of the action of the senior citizens who took part in that march on Lagos streets was that the culture of protest  cannot be killed no matter the mutation the Nigerian state has undergone.
It has, of course,  been widely acknowledged in many reviews of the events  that the issue has transcended price of  petrol. It has developed into a full-scale interrogation of the governance process with penetrating questions being asked about the workings of the system. 

However, the incident referred to above has brought out a hidden irony in that episode of the subsidy struggle. Dr. Kalu, now a septuagenarian, was in his younger days in the 1980s the high priest in the temple of deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation and other capitalist drugs to Nigeria’s economic ailments. Now, if the Jonathan administration had its way the January 1 increase in fuel price would  just be greeted with a mild, academic debate on the merits of deregulation. After all, those who defend the government’s policy hardly mention fuel price hike. They would rather regale you with the many gains of deregulation.

The profound irony should ordinarily have interested policymakers that a personality of Kalu’s ideological orientation would join the protest. The protest against the deployment of soldiers was a derivative of the protest against fuel subsidy removal. We should be conscious of the history of the policy now presented  as a new-found  economic wisdom in this land. For Kalu to join the protest,  it could probably mean that this is not the way he would go about the  deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry when he was the oracle of Structural Adjustment Programme in the regime of President Ibrahim Babangida. Significantly, instead of a mere debate on the implementation of deregulation  the focus has shifted to larger  issues of governance and the management of the fuel subsidy is just one of them.

So while, for instance,  some  proponents of  deregulation of the downstream sector of the oil  industry  claim  that the policy is the panacea to corruption, the protesters insist that corruption, as an issue on its own,  has to be tackled  with or without deregulation. Take government out of it and the problem is solved, so goes the argument of  our deregulators . But the tone of the protest is  that this administration cannot abdicate its governance responsibility. Deregulation is no answer to  the problems of governance including corruption and incompetence.

The private sector, as the  global crisis of capitalism  has shown since 2008,  is not immune to corruption anywhere.  Contrary to the arguments here that there is an economic injunction which says that publicly owned refineries should not work there are successful state-owned oil companies including refineries  in other countries. According to the  last week’s edition of  “The Economist”,  the world’s ten biggest oil and gas firms, measured by reserves, are all state-owned”.  While policy makers here hold on to their rigid faith in market fundamentalism to solve  all problems not minding the social consequences, those who once benefitted from market forces are rethinking their systems. As the discussions at this year’s economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, have shown even successful capitalists are now questioning why  the system is incapable of tackling growing inequity to which the Occupy movement is a response. If you domesticate the matter, those who  believe in deregulation here seem to underrate the magnitude of the pains that would arise from the policy.

This brings us to another huge irony in the debate. The same people that the officialdom project as the beneficiaries of deregulation were the ones who took to the streets unimpressed by the one thousand and one benefits of the policy as claimed  by government.  In a gross misreading of the situation, Oxford professor, Paul Collier, described the popular protest as “ the  power of the street” and likened the historic action of the Nigerian  people to the “sad folly of the Tea Party” in his January 15, 2012 piece in the “Financial Times”. Ironically, Collier is the author of the acclaimed book on economic development entitled “The Bottom Billion”. According to him the youths should be demonstrating in support of the government for stopping the “squandering oil revenues” on subsidy. Collier could not see that the protest was against pushing more millions  of Nigerians into  the bottom billion of the global poor by  a deregulation policy not well articulated.

It is more ironic on the part of Collier that he has drawn a parallel between a progressive action of the  Nigerian people  and the ultra- conservative shenanigans of the Tea Party in the United States. The Yoruba have a   saying that “a ki mo iya Oso ju Oso lo” ( you cannot claim a greater knowledge of Oso’s mother that Oso himself).  But Collier is claiming to know the interests of the Nigerian people more than the same  people who have been victims of the bitter consequences of anti-people policies for decades now. That is why Collier’s professional colleague, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the American Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, says we should  be wary of technocrats  and experts when they arrogantly dismiss people’s resistance to their harsh policies as “populist”.

Yet another irony is the insinuation that those who benefit from the big   money-making of fuel importation were the sponsors of the protests. The battle cry of the protesters was that government should as a matter of policy  promote local refining of fuel so that the  huge subsidy associated with fuel importation would disappear. The protest was, among other things, against the national shame of Nigeria  being the only OPEC member lacking adequate internal refining capacity. How can the protest be in favour of those  who have found a most profitable business in fuel importation?
It is precisely because the fuel subsidy debate is replete with ironies that deregulation policy should be further examined.