Before I put finger to keyboard, Godwin Emefiele – known to his friends as Mefi – ate his words. How it must have hurt his ego. Ouch! Or did he shout Yee!!!
Some of us knew he would buckle before he would buckle up. He kept all on tenterhooks. But we knew it was coming. No one is congratulating him because he did no one any favours by that. The poet Robert Burns said, “suspense is worse than disappointment.” We are not going to thank him for the miseries.
To reflect the discordant notes – no pun intended – of his CBN, my cell phone flashed with a text message from Mefi’s financial temple. The message read: “Don’t wait till January 31, 2023, to deposit your old N200, N500, and N1,000 banknotes with your bank and agents.” This was out of touch with the news that he had given Nigerians up to Feb 10 to deposit old bills. CBN news divided against itself? Was it latency in his system. His CBN is too late for its late news.
It was a miserly one-week concession. But the man did not address the fundamental question. How is he going to avail us of the new notes? The news occludes the fact that the problem is the man at the apex bank and not the people. Or shall we say, he knows he is the problem or one of the coterie of men oppressing the people. He knows he is just playing a foolhardy spoiler.
When APC presidential flagbearer Bola Tinubu sounded the alarm in Lisabi’s lair, his foes resorted to their adversarial impulse to attack him, including Atiku Abubakar. Then he, too, learned from his master and lined behind him. The CBN, he said, ought to rethink. I would have said he was changing his mind in tandem with the words of George Bernard Shaw that “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Atiku changed his mind to endorse Tinubu’s Abeokuta speech because he had no choice. His opponent was thinking for him. A tear for him.
I used the phrase Lisabi’s Lair to refer to the Abeokuta warrior who liberated Egbaland from an imperial tyranny. So, when Tinubu stood twice in Egbaland in Emilokan One and Emilokan Two, he was standing on the eponymous shoulders of an Egba war chief who would not yield to a suffocating despot. Every March, the Egba celebrate the 19th century farmer who tuned his ploughshares into a sword. Tinubu was bellowing from his martial shadows.
So, Mefi’s action to put off CBN’s deadline was at once a vindication of Tinubu’s outcry and silencing of those who thought he was paranoid. If he was paranoid, Mefi has put paid to it. We all are in the dread-lock of Mefi’s policy. He has to make the new notes available. He should liberate them from the owambe parties where the new notes have become new commodities fueling inflation. Rather than introduce new currency, he has turned the currency into new products. The new products have brought a new cartel of corrupt bankers. They have induced scarcity, and therefore enacted courtiers of new naira. We can call it the cult of Mefi’s new naira notes. Only the initiated can get them.
Is that not what Tinubu implied? Mefi says the new notes are plenty in circulation. The people are not seeing them. The banks are not confessing to their possession. The same story with fuel scarcity in the country. The hierarchy of Nigerian oil says there is no fuel scarcity. But the people are suffering in long lines all day and night waiting for fuel. We are fulfilling two classics of literature. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, where everyone is expecting Mister Godot, and no one is seeing him. Or Samuel Coleridge’s Poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the line, “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.” In the case of the ancient mariner, they saw the water, the sea. They just could not drink it. Here, the cash is invisible and the fuel is invisible. But they are everywhere.
The people must be blind. NNPC alone has the eyes to see the fuel. Mefi and his bank alone have the eyes to see the new notes. We all need to beg both Kyari and Mefi to give us what Apostle Paul calls the eyes of understanding, so we can see both fuel and new notes. We are like the citizens in Jose Saramago’s novel titled: Blindness where all the citizens in the city are turned into blind people. Some are more blind than others. A new set of powerful people rise out of it to tyrannise the majority.
If we have fuel and car tanks pine, do we blame the fuel or the people who should supply? If we have notes and the people cannot spend them, do we blame the people or the officials who should supply? If correction lies in the hand that committed wrong, to who shall we complain?
That is Tinubu’s point. And professor Itse Sagay echoed the same ideas. It reflects a deliberate immiseration of the people. Tinubu says a set of people with the government he called saboteurs are working with opposing politicians to cast the ruling party in bad light for electoral sabotage. Suddenly, they started saying he blamed the president. He has come to clarify, without diluting his charge, that he was not referring to the president who only a few days earlier had called him Mister President, and he responded Yes sir.
A shadowy group can frustrate a leader within a government. They call them fifth columnists. The word derives from the lips of General Emilio Malo, a leader of the republicans who wanted to overthrow Francisco Franco’s ultra-conservatives in Spain in 1936. General Malo was leading a four-column army during the Spanish Civil War into Madrid and quipped that sympathisers within Madrid would furnish a fifth column to rout the city. His prediction foundered and Franco led the country until the 1970s. Hence, Tinubu vowed that the fifth columnists would fail. He came short of re-invoking the ‘Olule’ term this time.
We have seen in the life of the Buhari administrations that some groups have undermined their leader. Recently, the DSS was trailing Mefi while the president was praising him. They didn’t brief their commander in chief, apparently. We can recall the same thing with EFCC’s Magu.
Those who Tinubu beat at the primaries are still nursing an old wound. But let us remember Shakespeare’s words: “It is better to play with a lion’s cub than an old one.”
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected Columnist with the Nation Newspaper.
