pannigeriannews 
By Festus Adedayo
When the Nigerian government announced a 30-day temporary fuel price intervention last Thursday, likes began to attract likes. In the government’s announcement, petrol will henceforth be on offer at N1,350 per litre at designated NNCL stations.
That announcement immediately resonated in the Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong›o’s debut novel, “Weep Not, Child” (1964). After all, life, so says Bob Marley, is a stream that will find its course. And, in the words of our elders, whilst the tortoise’s head bears striking resemblance with man’s big toe and the groundnut shell is a look-alike of the cocoon of the rat species called eliri, comparison is allowed.
As Njoroge – the book’s young protagonist – walks past the hot, newly tarred road of colonial Kenya, he suddenly sees far off what looks like a puddle of water. He is excited. It will quench his thirst, he thinks so. Gradually, as he moves towards it, Njoroge discovers to his sadness that the water is an optical illusion, a mirage. Ngũgi calls the puddle “devil’s water”. The author wrote: “Further ahead, the road was trapped in the heat. It became a moving featureless line that shook with the rising waves of hot air. If you looked hard, you could see pools of water. But when you got there, the water had moved further ahead. Njoroge’s mother had told him that this was devil’s water, water that kept on retreating so that you could never reach it, however fast you ran.”
That is what Abuja offered last week – devil’s petrol. It brings Ngũgi’s ghost into the dreary day of the Nigerian. When you dissect the Kenyan›s “devil’s water” imagery, it gives you so many images. For me, it reminds me of my youth in Ikire, Osun State of today. As kids, in mere underpants, we used to rush to a place called Ori Eeru to watch a set of people called the Alalùpaidà and Pidanpidan. They were famously reputed with the power to make things vanish or change form, right before your eyes. If you remember “Ali and the Angel” in the classic New Oxford English Course book, you would relate perfectly with how the devil’s water prices itself out of the reach of the famished.
The Alálùpàídà and the Pidánpidán were masters of trickery. They were illusionists, conjurers and magicians. As Ngügi said, no matter how fast you ran, you could never sidestep these folks in their artifice. So also couldn’t you outwit illusionists. In Ikire, we lined to watch the tricksters bring out various wiles from their pouch of deceit. In the background, the bata drum, famous for its sharp, harsh, and commanding sound, wedged its dry and powerful rhythm into our ears. As it did so, the batá then invoked its ritual authority and spiritual presence on us.
The crowd was held spellbound. Right before us, encircled by the crowd that had gathered, a man was lying on a mat, covered with a white cloth.
There was an ensemble of singers beside the bàtá drummers. They had white loin cloths strapped round them, camwood decorating their faces. As they danced, they sang, “be careful, the world is not happy” – “se pèlé-pèlé, inú nb’áráyé o..”.
Suddenly, a man folds the white cloth, like curtains opening a new scene in a cinema. Then we beheld, in place of the man we hitherto saw lying on the mat, a live crocodile. It flipped its huge mouth open and close intermittently. How this happened, you never could tell. It was like a chimera. The devil’s water.
Last Thursday, the life of an Alálùpàídà and Pidánpidán made sense to me. I was at the Adeleke University, Ede, Osun State. My friend of many years, Prof Adelaja Odukoya, was delivering this year’s Toyin Falola Annual Lecture.
In that lecture, Odukoya reminded us of Brazilian Marxist scholar, Paulo Freire and his famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). A book that critically engaged the relationship between teacher, student, and society, it also explored the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. I instantly remembered the oppression Nigerians go through under their leaders. Like a chimera, the devil’s water, Nigerian leaders lure their people with make-believe policies. Njoroge was lured, too. Nigerian leaders starve their people of water and lead them to the hot, asphalted road where a non-existent puddle of water appears to be what would quench their thirst.
I was just leaving Ede that Thursday when the news of Aso Rock’s most recent Alupaida stunt hit me. That day was Prof Toyin Falola’s day. At the Adeleke University, which holds an annual Falola Annual Lecture, it was another time to celebrate a man regarded as one of Africa›s most decorated and prolific historians. If you needed a modern day ebora who lived in the forest, the African mythological god of the academy – the deity, divinity or earthly spirit made popular by D. O. Fagunwa – Falola is he. Rather than the forest, Falola however lives in books.
If a man has been invited to speak in all the countries of the world, received over 30 to 40 lifetime achievement awards, numerous honourary doctorates that range from 16 to over 28, and high national honours such as the Member of the Order of Niger (MON), he surely is an ebora.
Falola also has an institutional legacy as Chair of the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin. He is credited with having authored or edited over 150 to 200 books on Africa, and has multiple annual conferences, prizes, and book awards named in his honour. It will be incongruous to name such a man as part of the ordinary human ensemble. He qualifies to be an ebora.
My friend of many years, Prof Laja Odukoya, of the University of Lagos, was the Distinguished Lecturer for this year. With his clinical dissection of the lecture topic entitled, “History, Power and Accumulation: Re-imagining Africa in the Globally Disorderly Order,” I left the Adeleke University hall fired, only to be further ignited by the fire of Aso Rock’s Njoroge devil’s water – the 30-day illusion of presidential intervention.
That announcement of a N1,350 price ceiling on fuel to Nigerians provides a very sharp irony.
On one side is what appears as a temporary cushion for the long-suffering Nigerian people.
On another is an underline of how dramatically the goalposts have shifted. Before May 2023, same petrol sold for under #200 per litre. The Nigerian presidency has been waxing lyrical ever since about its economic wizardry stunts of bringing about a spike in macro-economic indicators. Yet, life is harshly unbearable for millions of our countrymen.
Like an Alálùpaídà bringing out the next stunt, FG has now framed its token reduction of petrol price by N60 as a Father Christmas “intervention.” In actual fact, that “reduction” is a transactional publicity stunt that comes tar too late, too little and which underscores the administration’s deep disdain for the Nigerian public. It is a trickery that appears interventionist but which would scarcely and barely be felt by the people. It is a paradox that a government which said, under it, things are looking up for the people, and their situation had improved, is giving out such tokenism and expects to be carried shoulder high. It exposes the magnitude of the economic shift citizens are navigating and the cruelty of their leaders. It also shows how Nigerians’ jugular is being fiddled with by our Alálùpàídà in power for whom everything is trickery. And our suffering, our deaths, make us guinea pigs for their morbid amusement.
Were this a humane government, since almost four years in power, as saner countries of the world have done to protect their people from inclement economies, they know mechanisms that can cushion the blow of “subsidy is gone.” However, the Alálùpàídà have deliberately chosen not to protect us until now when it seems politically convenient. Government has thus elected to treat our fundamental human survival as a temporary promo or seasonal clearance sale. This reflects a leadership that views us the people not as stakeholders, but as desperate subjects easily pacified by breadcrumbs.
Why the N60 “intervention” appears as morbid amusement is that, the characters behind this theatre know that Nigeria’s informal economy, where the poorest of the poor are trapped, relies heavily on petrol. If a Nigerian secures the kingdom of gasoline, all other things shall be added unto them. The Nigerian economy is held together basically by petrol. When pump prices hit exponentially as they have crazily been in years of this government, there is a skyrocket of food haulage costs. The poor are grilled to survive. Electricity grid is plagued by frequent collapses and heavens-high decimated bands’ electricity tariffs. Barbers’ pockets are shaved clean. Tailors are tailored to hell. Cold-room operators’ hearts become cold and deserted like a morgue. Transportation costs compete with the firmament. They are all dying due to the daily costs of keeping the lights on. It is even worse for micro-businesses. Daily fuel costs drill bitterly into their gross revenues, often turning self-employment into a loss-enterprise.
Today, Nigeria battles food inflation that has reached historically frightening highs. Real wages are like the stunts of the Alálùpàídà. Staple foods of middle-and low-income households like beans, bread, gari and rice have suddenly morphed from what they were – basic sustenance – into luxury items. Families become masters of dining table restructuring. They are daily trapped in a consumption and dietary compromise.
All efforts by the Tinubu government to make the crocodile look real have failed. Nigerians see them as Alalupaídà stunts. Simplicita. The upward revision of the national minimum wage to #70,000, though looks high, is killed by a stunted purchasing power which has been eroded completely when compared to pre-subsidy purchasing power. That #70,000 wage can hardly fill a modest family salary earner’s car tank.
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