2023: COUPS, CULTS AND CHAOS (I)
Raise your hand if 2023 has shown you shege!! Globally, it has been an exhausting year filled with old and new wars, geopolitical competition, coups, elections, natural disasters, and a general soar in economic inflation so much so that people now make memes and videos of the few items they purchase during grocery shopping. In all, good news has been in short supply.
This year started with election fever and a foolish economic policy beautifully disguised as an innovation designed to deliver Nigeria from its economic debacle. In October last year, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, announced that it planned to redesign, produce, and circulate new series of N200, N500 and N1,000 notes. The three notes represent the highest denomination of Nigeria’s eight legal tenders.
Following the launch of the new designs on November 23, 2022, by President Muhammadu Buhari, the new currency notes were circulated from December 15 2022, with both the new and existing notes considered legal tender until January 31 2023. However, many Nigerians have expressed worries and disappointment over the scarcity of the new naira notes and the apex bank’s handling of the process. Meanwhile, the Ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, was in turmoil over the naira redesign. The Presidential Candidate of the APC set the tone for the crisis when he protested the policy in Abeokuta, Ogun State capital, last year.
The complications that followed the cash scarcity is one that Nigerians will not forget in a long while. I remember running from pillar to post trying to get cash just so that I could give my son money for lunch at school. I would go to the bank dressed in scrubs and beg the security man to allow me to enter. On several occasions, I wore a suit and flung my hospital ID haphazardly, posing as a bank staff just so that I could gain access. Once inside, my account officer who had stopped picking my calls due to my daily pestering him for cash, would have to attend to me. I remember the filthy N200 notes that were once given to me and how I grateful I was to the bank manager. My own money fa! And yet I nearly knelt from gratitude! Another time, my account officer called me late in the evening to deliver N20,000 and we had to meet at a filling station with him looking over his shoulder, eyes darting in every direction looking every inch like a guilty drug dealer!
In the markets, old peasant farmers who did not have bank accounts would bring their farm produce from the villages and it would perish because no one had enough cash to buy a sack of tomatoes. My neighbour wept when she saw an old man sell a sack of sweet potatoes for only N5000 just so that he could have money for transportation back to his hometown and to feed his family. Many farmers and businesses have not recovered from that cash crunch.
Amidst the cashless wahala, Nigerians headed to the polls in February and in a heavily contested election, Tinubu emerged as our new President. This year’s elections yielded some very surprising elements and more than ever, Nigerians were divided along ethnic and religious lines. The BATists Vs the Obidients. The muslimmuslim ticket brouhaha. Yorubas Vs Igbos. North west vs north east. The politics was very dirty as it was exciting.
In March, Open AI launched GPT-4, a large language model for ChatGPT, which can respond to images and can process up to 25,000 words and the world as we knew it was never the same again.
The latest version of ChatGPT is reportedly ten times more advanced than its predecessor. This triggered heated debates over whether AI is unleashing a new era of human creativity and prosperity, or opening a Pandora’s box that will produce a nightmarish future. Optimists pointed to how AI was unleashing scientific breakthroughs at an unprecedented pace across a range of fields, enabling rapid drug design, unlocking medical mysteries, and solving seemingly unsolvable mathematical problems. Pessimists warned that the technology is developing faster than the ability of humans to assess and mitigate the harm it might cause, whether that is creating mass unemployment, hardening existing societal inequalities, or triggering humanity’s extinction. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of AI, quit his job at Google to warn of AI’s dangers, and technology leaders like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak signed an open letter warning that AI poses a “profound risk to society and humanity.”
Being the realist that I am, I embraced the beauty that is ChatGPT. No more tedious reports, formal letters and racking my brain for senseless assignments. With one prompt chat GPT could do all that and more. For now, let us embrace the beauty of this technology and worry about its effects later.
On 17 March, following an investigation of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, marking the first arrest warrant against a leader of a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The 123 member states of the ICC are obliged to detain and transfer Putin and Lvova-Belova if either sets foot on their territory.
Two thousand twenty-three was supposed to be the year that Sudan became a democracy. Instead, the Sudanese people got a civil war. On April 15, 2023, RSF forces attacked SAF bases across the country and fighting brouk out across Sudan. The conflict had its roots in the protests that led Sudan’s military in April 2019 to overthrow the country’s longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir. The new military junta struck an agreement with civilian groups to share power and work toward elections. However, in October 2021, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, led another coup. In December 2022, the two men yielded to popular pressure and agreed to lead a twoyear transition to civilian rule. That agreement made Burhan and Hemedti co-equals and called for the RSF to be integrated into the SAF. Neither that agreement nor the marriage-of-convenience between the two men lasted as a new war started on the 15th of April. The RSF captured Khartoum International Airport and the presidential palace in Khartoum. Numerous Nigerians especially students are caught in the crossfire with many of them braving the Sahara Desert by road in an effort to return to Nigeria.
A few days after war broke out in Sudan, on the 20th of April, Elon Musk’s Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, launched for the first time in a test flight from Texas. It exploded exactly four minutes after launch. Luckily no one was injured in the uncrewed test ship that airlifted on that Thursday morning.
On the 25th of April , a mass cult suicide is uncovered in Shakahola forest in Kenya. 429 followers of the Good News International Ministries are found in shallow graves throughout the forest, with over 613 people missing. The incident gained attention in the early weeks of April 2023 when a man contacted the police after his wife and daughter left Nairobi, Kenya, to join Paul Nthenge Mackenzie’s remote Good News International Ministries in Kilifi County and did not return. When police entered the community to investigate, they discovered emaciated people and shallow graves. Fifteen members of the group were rescued by police; they stated that they had been ordered to starve themselves to death to “meet Jesus.” The fifteen followers were in poor condition, and four died before they reached a hospital. So far, 429 bodies have been found.
Madness is global, I tell you. However, one of the biggest news in 2023, was on the 5th of May when the WHO ended its declaration of COVID-19 being a global health emergency. With this announcement, we all heaved a collective sigh of relief. Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid19 technical lead and head of its program on emerging disease, said that the emergency phase of the Covid-19 crisis is over, but the disease is “here to stay” and the coronavirus that causes the disease is not going away any time soon. In simpler terms- the crisis may be over, but we are not completely out of the woods, just yet.
On the 29th of May, President Tinubu was sworn into office and proceeded to drop the bombshell that we had all heard rumours of. In his inaugural speech he declared “The fuel subsidy is gone.”
And with that, Nigerians entered one chance!