The Politics Of Blood(Y) Tonic
It was one lovely Saturday evening on November 1, 2014. I had just declared my interest to contest for the governorship of Abia State about a week earlier. I was invited by one of the wealthy political stakeholders in the state for a chat in his sprawling Victoria Island mansion in Lagos. As is customary, I brought some drinks and kola nuts along. I had struggled with this practice as what I was used to was that when visiting someone, the host would be the one to offer drinks and kola. But my friends insisted that in the “business” of politics, it was the guest that provided these things. Of course, the host may also offer his own compliments, if he wished. The difference was that the drinks and kola from the host would be in such quantities that would be consumed there and then, while the one brought by the guest would be in fairly larger quantities for storage and future use. It may be a carton or two of choice wines and some pods of kola, and oftentimes, ‘wedged’ with cash. I was learning very fast. Shortly after the exchange of pleasantries, my host took me to an inner sitting room for private discussions. To my chagrin, my host went, “you know you are a very good candidate for the role you are aspiring to and as such, I will go straight to the point”. He then fired, “one thing that will determine whether the stakeholders would support you or not is your preparedness to continue with the tradition of the “blood tonic” which select stakeholders receive every month from the government”. I was initially confused. Blood tonic? I may not be a medical doctor, but the man did not look anemic to me and even if he did, I didn’t think he needed the intervention of government to treat it. The more I thought about the concept of this blood tonic that must be administered monthly, the more confused I became. I was later to understand that the man was talking of the sharing of public money to the political elites in the state, a practice which, sadly, continues till today.The way it works is that after receipt of Federal Allocation from Abuja, the state shares a certain percentage of the money amongst its listed elites, before providing for salaries and other government commitments. So, the blood tonic is, believe it or not, a first line charge, before any other expense is considered by the state. By sharing public money amongst them, the silence of the elites would have been bought, so that those administering the state would have a field day to do as they wished. Any wonder why, no matter how bad things become, you will hardly hear anything from these “stakeholders” and even when you did, it would be the singing of praises of the administration or the making of excuses over why things are going bad. Sometimes, the excuses would go from blaming previous administrations to blaming the populace itself for being difficult to govern.
The despicable blood tonic practice compares largely with what, in Economics is referred to as “primitive accumulation”. In Classical Economic theory, as propounded by the father of Economics himself, Adam Smith (1723-1790), primitive accumulation which he actually called “previous accumulation” of capital, refers to the buildup of capital as a factor of production to promote division of labour. The theory assumes that there must have been some capital that pre-existed and predated division of labour.
He argues that “the accumulation of stock must naturally be previous to the division of labour, so labour can be more and more subdivided in proportions only as stock is previously more and more accumulated”. For instance, “a weaver cannot apply himself entirely to his peculiar business, unless there is capital beforehand stored up somewhere, either in his own possession or in that of some other person, a stock sufficient to maintain him, and to supply him with the materials and tools of his work, till he has not only completed but sold the output of his web. This accumulation must, evidently, be previous to his applying his industry for so long a time to such a peculiar business”. More current thinking was to contend with Adam Smith’s theory, insisting that even before the concept of Division of Labour, particularly in the hunter gatherer era, some exchange no matter how crude, was actually existing. In the era in question, bows and arrows were not made by the hunters themselves and their “products” were not consumed strictly by the hunters and gathers and their families.
It was not until 1867 that Karl Marx (18181883) came up with another argument which did not outrightly dismiss the concept of “previous accumulation”, which he rechristened “primitive accumulation”. He departed from Smith’s operationalisation of the concept and insisted that since labour was the only factor of production that can transform inputs into outputs, both capital and land were not factors of production as it is only when labour is applied to them that value can be created. His argument went further to explain that primitive accumulation only serves to alienate labour from land and Capital for the purpose of promoting Capitalism. According to Marx, “the process which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour”.