Nigeria’s mystery of three queues

DAILY TRUST

A few years from now, historians will beam their searchlights on an uncommon phenomenon taking place in Nigeria currently: the mystery of three queues, to proffer explanations whether they were a coincidence or not. In virtually all towns and cities in Nigeria right now, you are either queuing for petrol (we call it fuel) or the redesigned naira notes, or you have joined a queue to collect your PVC.

Historians will try to establish whether there is any correlation among the three queues. They will need social, economic and political historians among them to be able to analyse the phenomenon in ways that capture the real reasons for the confluence of these queues at a given point in time, the point being the year 2023.

Talking about the time dimension to these chaotic lines, one fact emerges clearly: these queues have links to our nation’s past, which has refused to go, despite how much we try to dislike it. They have to do with our past which has more or less swallowed our present and cast a shadow of doubt over the future. They represent all that is wrong with us as a nation.

Take the petrol queues, for instance. They are the representation of a collective failure by successive administrations to get right the pricing of a product that has a pervasive influence on our everyday life. We have watched in utter dismay the display of incompetence by officials of government to deal with an industry that is infested with hawks.  That explains why we as a nation have failed to price our petrol with the objective of being able to cover costs and hence ensure the sustainability of supply over time.

The queues remind us that we have all along failed to lay a foundation that sustains productivity, knowing that economies improve when factors are fully deployed in the productive processes. Instead, our oil industry has been one marked by rent-seeking, where people become rich overnight by just standing between the suppliers and consumers of petroleum products, demanding and collecting rent for adding nothing to production.

Nigeria’s oil industry has produced perhaps the largest number of millionaires than any country but many of them cannot point to any value they have added to that industry and the economy. This is the spirit that has ruled this industry, and because those responsible benefit from it, they do not want to see an end to it.

If you are at the PVC collection arena, then you are one of those who are stretching out their hands to reach out to a future that beckons on us all. But the reality is that everyone there has a different interpretation of the past, as reflected by the petrol queues. Some are there to collect their PVCs so they can vote to ensure a continuation of the present. It is their choice. Others are there to collect their voters’ cards so they can vote for a change, whichever way they define that change. It is also their choice, defined by their perception of reality.

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