The Politicisation of Politics
Politics has probably one million definitions but, for the purpose of this article, I mean the art of winning, keeping or jostling for state power. There is nothing wrong with politics, even though the conduct of many politicians tends to give it a bad name and you always hear a lot of decent people vowing to never dive into the “murky waters of politics”. Politics could be dirty but it does not have to be. Politicisation, on the other hand, is the framing of issues for political gain by those who have won or are jostling to win state power. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but it almost always leads to political polarisation, where commonsense has the tendency to disappear without a trace.
When I say “politicisation of politics”, therefore, it should be understood within the context of the Machiavellian politics “marked by cunning, duplicity, or bad faith” — as the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes it. Machiavellian ethics are built on the maxim that “the end justify the means”. It doesn’t matter what you do to achieve your goal — it is your goal that matters. That is the philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli, the Italian political philosopher whose classic treatise, The Prince, ranks among the most famous books ever. Machiavelli said his experience and reading of history showed him that “politics has always been played with deception, treachery, and crime”.
From my balcony, I have been observing recent events under President Bola Tinubu and I am asking myself: haven’t I seen this kind of politicisation before? With kidnappers on a renewed rampage, someone whispered to me that “the north” is trying to destabilise Tinubu’s government because some “juicy appointments” have been taken away from them. Truly? Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, former vice-president and PDP candidate in the 2023 presidential election, has called on Tinubu to resign if he cannot tackle the insecurity in the land. Really? The relocation of certain offices of the CBN and FAAN from Abuja to Lagos is being described as an attempt to relocate the federal capital. Sure?
In truth, there is nothing new in this sort of politicking. In 1999, when President Olusegun Obasanjo directed that the headquarters of the Nigerian Maritime Authority (NMA, now known as Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, NIMASA), and the Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA) be relocated to Lagos for administrative convenience, there was a similar outcry that he was trying to relocate the federal capital. Nearly 25 years later, Abuja remains the federal capital. The outcry over relocation is always from one region. If Abuja is indeed a neutral territory — as it was intended to be when the capital was moved from Lagos — why are the northern senators the most concerned?
Claiming that a part of the country is “fighting back” for losing power is not new either. In the early years of Obasanjo’s first term as president, there were ethnic and religious killings in several parts of the country, most notably Kaduna, Plateau and Kano. We were told then that fifth columnists were at work to end the “nascent” democracy because they were not comfortable that a southerner was in power and “restructuring” Nigeria. They wanted the military back, we were told. Almost 25 years later, ethnic and religious killings have not stopped, no matter who has been in power — Muslim or
Christian, northerner or southerner — and, well, the conspiracy theories have not stopped either.
Nigerian politics has been predominantly Machiavellian since the return to democracy in 1999, but the endless politicisation of our politics appeared to have fully taken off in 2009 when President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua fell terminally ill and it became glaring that power would return to southern Nigeria in less than four years of moving to the north. There were calls on his deputy, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, to respect the power rotation arrangement in the PDP by not running in 2011. He did run and did win — with the backing of major northern power brokers — but that did not stop accusing fingers being pointed at “the north” when Boko Haram terrorism and insurgency exploded later.
Recently, when Atiku asked Tinubu to resign over the renewed insecurity in the country, it brought back memories of what the APC said to President Goodluck Jonathan ahead of the 2015 general election. At the time, Book Haram was at the height of its power. Alhaji Lai Mohammed, then APC’s spokesperson, asked Jonathan to resign. We are in 2024 and the APC is getting a dose of its own medicine. We spent valuable time then debating who was behind Boko Haram. We spent valuable time under President Muhammadu Buhari debating who was behind “Fulanisation”. We are spending valuable time again debating who is behind kidnappings under Tinubu. It is our political culture.
N75,000, an increase of 24% and 21% respectively. Remember that these increases occurred within one month.
As said earlier, the presidential emergency on food security is yet to translate to lower or stable food prices. The situation is worse today than when the emergency was declared. There is an urgent need for a review of the measures introduced and the effectiveness of their implementation. A good starting point is to understand the remote and immediate causes of constantly rising food prices in the country and to deploy not just medium-term to long-term measures to address them but also provide some drastic and immediate reliefs.
The immediate causes of high food prices are the two signature reforms of the Tinubu administration: petrol subsidy removal and forex rates unification. Even when increase in petrol prices has been paused for some time now, both reforms have led to increase in transportation costs. Diesel is used for inter-state movement of goods and for powering the generators of small and large companies processing food items. Diesel is deregulated and its price is not paused, even though VAT on it was removed. Also, we import a significant amount of finished and intermediate food items. For example, most of the inputs used for making a common food item like bread are either imported or made from imported items: flour, sugar, yeast, and butter. A dollar exchanging officially at above N1400 (compared to N463 on 13th June 2023) will definitely impact the prices of these items and the final table price of a loaf of bread.
Beyond the immediate, Nigeria has also had to deal with external and internal challenges that negatively impact the prices of food. These include the supply chain disruption from COVID19, the global spike in inflation, the effect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and lately increase in shipping costs due to the activities of the Houthi rebels around the Red Sea. It is interesting to note though the external drivers of the pressure of food prices are cooling off. The Food Price Index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) shows that food prices fell back to the 2021 levels in 2023. In January 2024, the FFPI was 118 points whereas it was 160 points in March 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. (Nigeria obviously didn’t get the memo or operates by other dynamics).
Internal drivers of food inflation include low agricultural productivity per hectare, food production tracking below population growth, transportation, storage and processing constraints, the impact of climate shocks, burst in money supply, and the crippling effects of the insecurity that has kept farmers out of the farms in most of the north central, northwest
and north east zones, zones that are considered the food baskets of the country.
To address rising food prices, we need to remove the constraints within our control. We need to improve the productivity of our farmers through access to better and more affordable inputs and expanded access to extension support and finance. We need to bring more land under cultivation, upgrade our farming practices and improve irrigation-fed farming so that our farmers can farm all-year. We need to invest on all points of the agriculture value chain and improve logistics around storage and transportation to reduce the premium between the farm-gates and the markets, especially in urban areas. We need to stabilise our exchange rate. And definitely, we need to improve security all over the country, most especially in our rural and farming communities.
However, most of these things will take time. Even if we increase and subsidise seedlings, fertilizers and other inputs to farmers, it will take at least three months to grow basic grains like maize (which might end up being exported to the Sahel on account of insecurity there and lower value of our currency). In the intervening period, food prices will keep soaring and most Nigerians will keep hurting. We have to do something quick to avert the probability of destabilising food riots. We need to remember that the human capacity to tolerate pain is not perfectly inelastic.
I have two proposals. One, the government should ask the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) to immediately halt changing the foreign exchange rate for duties from N951/$ to N1,356/$. The upward adjustment by NCS will definitely impact costs of imported goods including food items, as importers will duly pass the high cost to consumers in higher prices. I know that we have put NCS in the perverse position of seeing itself as a revenue-generating agency at the expense of its trade-facilitation and border protection mandates. Beyond the usual bragging rights, the agency takes 7% of whatever it ‘generates’ and thus has the incentive to charge higher and keep more with absolutely no consideration for the bigger implication.
A legitimate concern can be raised around the danger of different exchange rates. But this is not the rate at which dollar is given to some privileged people which leads to arbitrage opportunities. It is largely a revenue trade-off for a larger and more strategic cause. If the price of petrol can be paused at N650/litre even with dollar officially exchanging at above N1,400, the forex rate for duties can be frozen too, even if for a short period.
Two, the government needs to remove or reduce tariffs on key food items like rice, wheat and sugar for a limited period of time, say three to six months. These are strategically and symbolically important food items. Rice is one of the most widely eaten and aspirational grains in the country, wheat is the main ingredient for bread (a pre-cooked, ready-to-eat, and very versatile food item) and sugar is used in the production of a vast range of food items.
Currently, our tariffs on wheat, sugar and rice are 85%, 75% and 70% respectively. These high tariffs, clearly intended to increase local self-sufficiency, put the consumers at the receiving end, especially at a time like this.
Reducing or removing tariffs will surely reduce government’s revenue and will diminish the profitability of local producers of the items. But government can absorb the revenue shortfall, given that it is also earning more revenue from savings from petrol subsidy removal and from Naira’s depreciation, extra revenue whose immediate benefit to the citizens is difficult to ascertain. We also need to balance producers’ welfare with consumers’ welfare. Protecting only local farmers and a few manufacturers at the expense of the rest of the population doesn’t make practical and strategic sense. Besides, everyone is a consumer, as even farmers cannot grow everything they need. Local manufacturers will also be hurt when, due to high prices, disposable incomes plummet and companies that use their products fold up because of plunge in demand. Continuous spike in food prices is an ill-wind that, ultimately, blows no one any good.
We are not in a completely uncharted territory here. In response to the global food crisis of 2008, late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua took some drastic and immediate measures. These included the regular release of grains from the strategic grain reserve, importation of 500, 000 metric tons of rice (worth N80 billion at the time) sold at subsidised prices, and the removal of all duties and charges on imported rice, including custom duty, 7% surcharge, VAT and ETLS levy. The removal of tariff on rice was from 7th May to 31st October 2008. In a paper titled “The Political Economy of Food Price Policy in Nigeria,” Aderibigbe Olomola, a professor of agricultural economics, stated that the prices of rice plunged by 45% on account of suspension of levies and duties on rice imports.
Nigeria may not have the money to import rice to be sold at subsidised prices now, and maybe that is not even a wise use of scarce public resources. But government can sacrifice or take less tariffs on rice, wheat and sugar for a brief period and strategically engage the farmers and few local companies (just three companies in the case of sugar) whose protection and guaranteed profitability will be impacted for a brief period. National interest offers a compelling justification.
This is President Tinubu’s chance to quickly take an action that will improve the welfare of most Nigerians and avert a larger crisis brewing beneath the surface. The ball is fully in his court.