If you hopped onto a horse galloping in a race inside the Nigerian First Lady’s tummy, its hoof would not hit a single stumble. That was how unmistakable the air of triumph was in Abuja last week. The catalyst for this sudden, infectious jubilation was the grand launch of the $1 billion Household Prosperity and Empowerment Social Protection Project (HOPE-SP) inside the State House Banquet Hall. At the centre of the spectacle stood Pastor Remi Tinubu, whose mini – khimar – the traditional scarf covering the head, shoulders and bosom of Muslim women – flapped excitedly as she paced the rostrum. The poor velvet scarf seemed itself in a celebratory mood, synchronising perfectly with the carefully orchestrated joy hovering over the rocks of the Federal Capital Territory.
It is three years and three months after President Bola Tinubu famously declared an abrupt end to the petrol subsidy. On one of his off-cuff junkets to France, he attributed his yanking it off to a spirit that suddenly pounced on him. With the $1 billion HOPE-SP, the administration was loudly signaling to Nigerians that real, tangible hope had finally arrived.
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“What’s better than money?” Crime thriller king, James Hadley Chase, asked decades ago. Madam was the pond-skater, Ìròmi, dancing on the face of the river. $1 billion was the Kongo, the drumstick, with which the drummer hit the raw face of the hide; this time, not underneath the river. You could see the drummer itself inside the Banquet Hall. You would conclude the Khimar had just won a contest. As the Pastor paced the rostrum, her Khimar, wary of being left out of the joy, disentangles from the embrace of her neck periodically. And flaps on her laps. Madam rescues the insolent folk, straps it again on her neck, like a mother forcefully hoists a needlessly crying irritant child on her back. The scarf mirrors the infectious joy hovering over the rocks of the FCT.
To the administration’s loyalists, this $1 billion gamble was the ultimate trump card, a definitive response to Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and the relentless commune of ungrateful critics who have spent months hammering the President’s economic policies. Waziri Adamawa had not just become a pest to the bazaar in Abuja. He had become a piercing arrow that penetrates right inside the esophagus of the First Family. You could see the recent flurry of frenzies of presidential hirelings trying to outpace one another in the job of deflecting Atiku’s tantrums.
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Lately, Atiku has adopted the posture of an unsparing Wolé-Wolé (sanitary inspector), peering into every corner of the presidential family’s cooking pot. He brings to mind Irish Assistant Commissioner of Police John Lynn, the CID official nicknamed Ọkùnrin Oníjògbòn yẹn (That Troublesome Man) by Mama H.I.D. Awolowo. During the dark political crisis of the Western Region in 1962, when Chief Obafemi Awolowo was locked in battle with the federal powers-that-be and their region accomplices, Lynn’s team relentlessly raided Awo’s official residence at No. 7 Bell Avenue, Ikoyi, and his home in Ikenne. Exasperated during one such intrusive raids, Mama H.I.D. famously marched into her kitchen, hauled out a cooking pot, and asked Lynn if he would like to inspect that as well! Today, Atiku, like Lynn, has become a piercing arrow penetrating the esophagi of Aso Rock, leaving presidential hirelings scrambling to outpace one another in deflecting his political arrows.
Predictably, on the $1b bailout purportedly for Nigeria’s suffering masses, both Atiku and Obi raced to the blacksmith’s forge for a weapon with which to attack what they view as an expensive medicine-after-death. They see the administration’s sudden benevolence through the lens of a classic Yoruba proverb: “Tèmi ò ṣòro, tí kì í jẹ kí ọmọ alágbẹdẹ ní idà” – it is the ambivalence of the blacksmith’s son, who insists that urgent tasks are simple and can wait, that leaves him without a sword when crisis strikes.
Yet inside the State House, the conviviality continued unabated. An old man sitting by the Banquet Hall doorstep eventually caught the First Lady’s attention, drawing on her Ososami, Ibadan upbringing of kindheartedness to the elderly. He implored her to take a fable to the President, which he said he amply entitled ‘The Tortoise, the Weaverbird, and the Midnight Harvest’. It goes thus:
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In an ancient animal kingdom, Alábahun, Tortoise the Trickster, was king. He held suzerainty over forest activities, as well as on all crawling and flying animals. On all of them, he held supreme authority. Surrounded by all animals in the kingdom, Tortoise radiated the majesty of his regal stool.
Then, suddenly, like a child seized by an unannounced convulsion, King Tortoise announced to the generality of animals in the kingdom that he had just discovered an answer to the food crisis of the kingdom. Henceforth, he proclaimed in a sudden decree, the communal granary, forest animals’ commonwealth, would thenceforth be locked. All animals, he proclaimed, were banned from foraging in this fertile valley source of daily meal. Keeping the granary locked, said King Tortoise, would bring greater prosperity and wealth to the kingdom sooner than the animals imagined. The animals were aghast. To them, it was a case of the proverbial Weaverbird (Eye-ègà) using its beak to pull out what it had moulded, which the Yoruba translate to Ègà f’enu kó’lé, ègà f’enu è tu“. Where in the name of prosperity, does a leader kill his people in instalment?
As if the animals were seers, a terrible famine gripped the forest. It met bitter outcry. Weaverbirds (Ègà) and other forest creatures grew frail and emaciated, gathering at the palace gates to weep for their dying young. But, Alábahun remained locked inside his high stone walls. Palace canaries (Ìbákà), like Old Major in Orwell’s Animal Farm, sang loudly of a golden future time of riches more than mind can picture urging the populace to keep toiling for freedom’s sake. “…For that day we all must labor. Though we die before it break…” Once in a while, Alábahun himself walked to the palace balcony to see the starving animals. In sweet-smelling voice, he pleaded understanding, and need for sacrifice today for a better tomorrow. “Endure the dry season for a glorious harvest” was the palace mantra.
Apparently suffocated by the cries of the dying animals whose hungry voices grew too loud to ignore, Alábahun finally directed the royal guards to prize off the lock of the granary and unlock the forest’s treasury. He ordered a massive, unprecedented caravan of grain to be distributed to the starving animals.
The grand wagons finally rolled into the public square. As they did, the palace expected songs of praise for this royal benevolence. Alábahun stood upon his balcony, anticipating the forest to erupt in dance. King Tortoise stood upon his balcony expecting wild applause, but met only a heavy, mournful silence. The silence below was heavy.
“You watched us perish for seasons, and now you bring out baskets of corn. Is it for our funeral or that of our children? Is it now when hundreds of our children have already closed their eyes in life-long sleeps?” cried the older animals.
A fierce debate divided the forest. To many, it was mourning time. Palace’s grand grain distribution came at the animal kingdom’s most vulnerable time. It was a frantic afterthought that could not undo the months of harrowing pains and slow starvation. The heavy rain of abundance had finally fallen, but only after the soil had completely hardened into stone. As the old adage warns: “Òjò t’ó rò l’éyìn ìkórè kò lè gba iṣu t’ó ti joro” – the rain that falls after the harvest is over cannot save the rotten yam.
Animals who deigned to collect the grains were put off by palace couriers’ antics. They pilfered so many sacks of grains and the few left had been eaten up by weevils. They dissolved into dust even before they got to the nests of the poorest birds and holes of kwashiokor-ed animals. The wind blew the husks into the dry air, creating a golden dust storm that blurred the line between the palace and the valley. The heavy rain of abundance had finally fallen, but it came only after the soil had completely hardened into stone.
“That is the end of my story” the old man said.
And I suddenly woke up. A river-like beads of sweats cascaded off the pores of my flesh.
It was a dream!
Same last week when the $1 billion social package was launched, the administration announced that state governors will soon roll out lower transport fares nationwide. They will use Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) and electric vehicles. It will be backed by a planned network of 1,000 refueling stations and over 120,000 converted vehicles. Administration supporters frame these roll-outs as a long-awaited answer to public suffering. Like the crowd that cheered Christ’s entry into Jerusalem – where He warned the scolding Pharisees that the stones would cry out if the people stayed quiet – the First Lady’s flapping Khimar served as Aso Rock’s celebratory “stone,” cheering relief where critics saw only ruin.
To the opposition, however, this sudden rush of belated interventions by a president who fiddled for three years and three months while the people died reflects the tragic pattern of an economic wastrel. This parable of the wastrel reminds me of a musician after my heart. He was High Chief Adedara Ar’ú’nra L’ójà Oba,legendary Ijesa musician. Those days while walking the streets of Oke-Oye in Ilesa, I saw ‘Dedara, as he called himself, playing draught with country-folks somewhere close to Saint Margaret Girls’ School. He was Ijesa’s sonic signature, their musical identity and cultural signature. Adedara presented Ijesa people’s unique musical repertoire and history to the outside world.
Adedara then famously sang of the dog-in-the-manger, the wastrel who refuses to farm, prevents others from farming, and seizes both their hoe and cutlass: “Kò ṣe, kò ṣe, kò j’ólúrè se; ó gb’okọ Olúrè, ó dè gb’àḍá rè o.” The wastrel was the man who declines to embark on a productive venture and would not allow anyone to so do; he seizes the hoe of the willing and his cutlass as well.
The fundamental flaw of the Aso Rock social protection model lies in its heavy reliance on transactional optics over structural economic survival. In three years, three months, Tinubu more than quadrupled tax payments; mercilessly devalued the Naira; replaced astronomical school fees with loans; pedaled food prices to rooftop height and flushed proceeds to federal hangers-on and state governors.
Nigerians have died in their thousands; many lost their manhood as the economy castrated them from performing their household head roles; businesses collapsed; many committed suicide. High drug prices have sent many to their graves. Yet, Tinubu’s Ìbàkà bird aides reel out robust World Bank economic figures to invalidate our oozing flood of tears. If economy under this government has had positive effects on the people, why celebrate this $1b with this fanfare? Why is it now that government suddenly realizes that hopeless Nigerians need hope and buffer? What lifeline will government give the dead and their mourning families?
Distributing grains like Alábahun did – or Naira, as Tinubu proposes to the so-called poorest of the poor, turns governance into an act of emergency relief distribution, rather than sustainable empowerment. This is after after policy fires had already scorched the economic landscape. When a government inflicts macro-economic shock therapy on its citizens, without immediate, synchronized safety nets as the Tinubu government has done since May 29, 2023, any eventual palliative, no matter how grandly packaged inside state banquet halls, feels less like a lifeline, with greater optics of an afterthought. You cannot systematically subject a populace to severe economic attrition for three years and three months, yet expect a sudden shower of palliatives to convert widespread mourning into dancing as Alábahun did.
Ultimately, the $1 billion HOPE-SP initiative risks becoming another monument to misplaced timing. If the underlying cost of living remains astronomically high, temporary cash drops and subsidized transport schemes will be swallowed whole by inflation, leaving the structural roots of poverty untouched. The administration must realize that true “Renewed Hope” is not measured by the flutter of celebratory scarves in Abuja, but by whether the ordinary Nigerian can afford to eat, work, and survive without waiting for King Tortoise’s belated granary to open.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
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