What is the greater good of restoring fuel subsidy? asks JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
Atiku Abubakar has vaulted to the top of the opposition pack, riding on the softest of Nigeria’s under bellies, fuel subsidy. The presidency has issued a formal rebuttal, and columnists who agree on nothing else have lined up to knock it. When a government spends a whole week arguing with one man, it is clear they take him serious.
It has also been a week in which Peter Obi’s long-standing defence of the 13 months Anambra spent without state doctors came back into view, and it has not aged well. The strike was the price of reform, and in any case, he has said, it did not affect a great many of the sick. Nobody died en masse. Therefore nothing much happened.
There are similarities in these stories.
Both measure success as the absence of suffering rather than the presence of anything. Neither promises to build. Each promises, in its own way, that things will not get worse, and each expects to be thanked for it. This is the politics of no mass death, and it is practised across every party, by government and opposition alike. We have set the bar of national ambition at survival and are happy to celebrate it at times.
