Tomorrow is here!

Today is the tomorrow you prophesied about yesterday. For good or for ill, 2018 is a child of preceding years. As we welcome the new year with hope (what is man without the tonic of hope), we must necessarily review the one we have only just consigned to history, the year 2017.

This time last year when we were engaged in the usual ritual of hope dispensing and invocations, we had no way of knowing that President Buhari would take a 103-day medical vacation in the UK (May 7 to August 19) after an earlier one from January 19 to March 10. The president’s absence affected governance badly. Major decisions were left thoroughly alone until the president resumed. Perhaps this was the only way the Vice-President who was holding fort for his boss could demonstrate unalloyed loyalty in a rumour-suffused environment where Ayodele Fayose, the tempest of Ekiti State, claimed falsely that the president was on life support.

Truth be told, Nigeria suffered from all the delayed decisions and the recent release of a list of appointees which included the names of six (or seven) dead people and some from the opposition party, is but a tip of that iceberg. Biola Kazeem on Twitter lamented that, “Herman Hembe, accused of corruption by Aruma Oteh and sacked from House of Reps for electoral fraud, was appointed as board chairman”. Award-winning poet Ikeogu Oke humorously wondered, “Shouldn’t we be celebrating rather than criticising these ground-breaking (nay, gravebreaking) appointments as another of our country’s or government’s contributions to the annals of the incredible?”

You can’t blame the new SGF if you understand the strange ways of government.

Before that gaffe, top government officials with albatrosses of the ethical specie, Messrs Babachir David Lawal (SGF) and Ayo Oke of the NIA were kept in office until the resumption of the president. Mercifully, they’re now history.

There are silver linings, though. Agriculture as a business is on the upswing; 84 abducted Chibok schoolgirls were released in exchange for Boko Haram suspects; Customs revenue in 2017 topped an unprecedented N1 trillion before the end of the year; government repeated the anti-Ebola feat achieved under the Jonathan administration by chasing monkey pox out of our borders; corruption is no longer condoned by government; illegal arms continue to be intercepted at the ports; the war against Boko Haram terrorists is being prosecuted with seriousness; and Nigeria qualified for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

The dying days of 2017 also witnessed the return of fuel scarcity all over the country. It was the single most devastating blow to government perception by the citizens as many people spent Christmas Day on fuel queues.

The National Assembly has been baying for blood since its members could not bully the president to release the chunk of their sleaze cream called ‘constituency projects’. Somehow, someday, we will have to frontally confront the demons of legalised lootsharing which informs the thinking of many a legislator: “Those in the executive arm are stealing their own, why can’t I take my share here?” The NASS however has my full marks for standing against the sale of the National Theatre and Tafawa Balewa Square, both in Lagos.

The main opposition party, PDP, bounced back to life with the largely successful holding of its national convention. It was never going to be stress-free but the party still managed to elect a new executive — except that the aggrieved have now stormed the courts to seek a rerun. Déjà vu? The internal bickering all but outshone the return of former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar to the party. This is tragic because we need a vibrant opposition party to act as a counterpoise to the party in government and deepen our democracy.

As predicted, the secessionist agitation of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), led by Nnamdi Kanu, for all persons of Igbo extraction to relocate to ‘Biafra’ by October 1, with a threat that the governorship elections in Anambra State would not hold — went up in smoke. So did the counter-threat by the Arewa Youth Consultative Forum asking all Igbos to leave the North….

One major point however refused to die, or indeed was underlined by the IPOB and Arewa agitations (and before then, OPC, Middle Belt Forum and MASSOB campaigns), Nigeria is in dire need of restructuring. Even the best manager in the world cannot make a success of running our unitary contraption successfully. It has not worked because it cannot work. The longer we wait before devolving more power and more revenue away from the centre to the states and local governments, the more we will continue to underachieve.

Some good news: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected that the Nigerian economy will expand by 1.9 per cent in 2018, but with a population growth rate of 2.7 percent, the total picture is not so cheering. A lot of money will be splashed on projects in all sectors, especially infrastructure. The government has an eye on the 2019 elections and would want to end 2018 on a hurrah.

That may not have any impact on the Naira in the citizen’s pocket, though. Assuming the exchange rate remains stable at N365 to 1$, if you save N1 daily starting from January 1, 2018, you would have saved $1 by December 31, 2018. Tomorrow is here already. Happy New Year!