The topic on everybody’s, well, almost everybody’s, lips now is tax reform. Everybody has become an expert, so everyone is discussing it: the experts, the neophytes, and even those who do not give a hoot. Nigerians love to talk, dissipate energy, joke about it, and then move on as if nothing happened.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu knows his countrymen well; perhaps that is why he never loses sleep over our vituperations; he gets what he wants when he wants it. In faraway France, he promised to continue with his policies without losing focus. Did you not see that barely a few days after a supposed nationwide protest against hunger and bad governance, his government increased fuel prices and has done so two or three more times since then?
We used to have activists on and off campuses, with the academic staff unions holding the flag of justice for the people, the labour union leadership being altruistic, firebrand lawyers railing against bad governance, and our student unions being positively revolutionary. These days, almost all these classes of people are peopled by opportunists and scammers desperate to make money by all means.
Our labour unions call strikes only to negotiate behind the backs of the unsuspecting workers; student union leaders have lent themselves as tools in the hands of politicians, even fighting their lecturers at the behest of those who have let education deteriorate, maybe because they have also realised that their tutors, who should guide them aright, had sold out and were running after the crumbs from the tables of those whose children are studying abroad while killing education here.
Our labour leaders, who should be proffering solutions to make the country industrialised and productive for more people to be gainfully employed and our currency to be stronger, are busy negotiating away our future with political leaders so that they would belong and own mansions and imported vehicles and clothes, enriching foreign businesses while killing local production. Opposition politicians who should keep the governments and their representatives on their toes are falling over themselves to get patronage from the government of the day.
Many of our lawyers have sucked in law knowledge but have not been grounded on morality. And so they can stand for thieves who can buy their services with the baseless claim that they “are innocent until proven otherwise.” They pull every trick in and out of the law books to frustrate the case so that their thieving customers (better than clients) can never be found guilty.
Some of our judges are now impervious to shame and give judgements that are not only scandalous but can potentially destroy a nation. In passing their dollar-induced judgements, it is no longer news for a lower court judge to go against a precedent set by a higher court, sometimes even a Supreme Court judgment!
With all these, it becomes frustrating to talk about Nigeria. But we are stuck with it as we have none better and cannot all japa. Even if not for our sake, we must continue saying what is right for the sake of the country, our children, and the children of our children.
The North, now fragmented along ethnic and religious lines, need not cry over the potential loss of revenue facing it now if we had not betrayed ourselves, become selfish and lazy.
To begin with, the North could be said to be relatively united and at peace with itself up to the Second Republic. In the First Republic, a Tiv Christian invited a Kanuri Muslim to his town to contest an election and he won. Alhaji Ibrahim Imam, a politician from Borno, was the Secretary of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) but later became a patron of the Borno Youth Movement (BYM). He was, however, denied the opportunity by the NPC when he wanted to contest for a seat in the Northern House of Assembly in 1961. Mr Joseph Sarwuan Tarka of the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC) offered him a ticket to represent a Tiv district in present-day Benue State in 1961.
When then Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello, Colonels Maimalari, Apogu Largema, Kur Mohammed and a host of other northerners were killed in the 1966 coup, the northern Christians were as grieved as their Muslim counterparts because they saw themselves as one. They put not only their profession but life on the line in seeking revenge six months later. The Sardauna was such a unifying figure who could travel hundreds of kilometres to go and celebrate with northern Christian minority kids – he did that when Sunday Awoniyi excelled in school.
But over time, we started segregating in the North, backstabbing and marginalising others based on ethnicity or religion. This was a chink in the North’s armour, and, with cracks like these, outside influence for long awed by, and envious of, the North’s seeming oneness, put various wedges into the cracks and widened them. Now, many walls have fallen, perhaps irreparably. We have become more like the Arabs who cannot work together and, therefore, allow their enemies to use them against one another.
However, for the north crying because most headquarters of business concerns are located outside it, what did its leaders do to make the area conducive so that manufacturers and large businesses can be headquartered there? What did they do when President Goodluck Jonathan disrupted the dredging of the River Niger that could have made Baro a business hub and all settlements along the coastline financially vibrant? When the government of Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani Muslim leader, came, what did he do to remedy it?
What did they do when cotton farming was dealt a fatal blow during President Olusegun Obasanjo’s term, thus turning the northern textile sector moribund, sending thousands into the labour market and denying the North revenue and tax by either derivation, consumption or both?
To be continued…
Hassan Gimba, anipr, is the publisher and CEO of Neptune Prime.
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