Not This Year’s Offence
In the middle of the dry season, the monkey was sitting peacefully on a tree branch when the farmer threw a huge stick at it. The monkey looked around at the farmer’s field. It was parched and devoid of any crops; there was nothing at all in it for the monkey to steal. So, it muttered to itself, “Whatever offence I committed could not be this year.”
The New Year 2024 began last week and, as has been my tradition over the years, I am calling on all segments of Nigerian society with the reason, intention, inclination, capacity, history, tradition, grudge and effrontery to mar the national mood to join in declaring a moratorium on actions that could cause anxiety, grief, horror, anguish and bloodshed in this New Year. Any attack launched on Nigerian people, polity and society since last week cannot be due to any offence committed this year. Neither the government nor its security agencies nor other powerful people have yet committed offences this year, so I urge all combatants with axes to grind not to throw sticks at monkeys in the middle of the dry season.
My first message goes to commodity traders. You bought food products from rural markets last year and ferried them into our towns and cities on trucks and lorries. The lorry owners charged you expensively because they said petrol, diesel, engine oil, grease and battery acid are costly. But that was last year’s fault. How can you charge us expensively this year because of the fuel and diesel prices of last year? Is that fair? Isn’t there in your vocabulary something like beginning on a clean slate?
Even those traders who brought spark plugs, bolts, nuts, bushings, lower arms, shafts, carburetors, injectors, water pumps, discs, radiators, pistons, rings, crankshafts, roofing sheets, plumbing materials, electrical fittings and medicines from China and Europe and ferried them here in containers aboard ships, why should they charge us with the prices of last year? Some of them are even adding to the prices and saying the ships that brought the goods had to turn away from the Red Sea because the Houthis are firing rockets at them. So, if a Houthi rocket narrowly missed a Maersk container ship last year and it had to go round the Cape of Good Hope, must I be the one to pay for the extra fuel and insurance cost?
I am surprised that currency speculators carried last year’s value of the naira against foreign currencies into this year. In your own business of speculation, is there nothing like closing the books at the end of the business year? Just because naira traded at 1230 to the dollar on December 31, must you sell it higher than that on New Year’s Day? How is that different from hurling a stick at the monkey in the middle of the dry season? You know that two days of work were chopped off because of Christmas and another day of work was chopped off because of New Year. Some years ago when this happened, an economist calculated that the national economy lost N1.7 trillion due to the holidays. So where do these traders expect us to get the money to pay last year’s prices for this year’s commodities?
The same thing with Boko Haram. You guys have been fighting for 12 years. You have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people, sent millions to IDP camps, destroyed homes and facilities worth billions and billions and yet, most of your most ruthless ideologues and fighters have been killed, your once fearsome media propaganda machine which used to churn out press releases, pictures and videos is now silent, your “Caliphate” has shrunk from an impressive 40 LGAs in three states to a few islets in Lake Chad and a few caves in the Mandara Mountains, your army has split into two bitterly feuding factions. Yet you are still fighting. For what? Can’t you let bygones be bygones? If it is fanaticism, are you more