Is there a difference between a shotgun marriage and a union in which both parties come together out of a shared conviction? The tension between the freedom to choose and the inconvenience of another’s options being forced down one’s throat suggests that there ought to be.
Yet in politics more than in marriages, belief is the one ingredient that is in limited supply. We see growing evidence of this, today, in the rise of populist politicians in the advanced economies. In those experiences, politicians are increasingly minded to hitch their fortunes to whichever hobbyhorse is to hand.
How different from this are the conditions of our local politics? Even here, the tension between “us” and the “others” is evidently no less real.
Despite the clear threat to the country from these fissiparous tendencies, the more threatening absence of conviction, the one, indeed, that one may blame this salmagundi of paranoid nationalisms on is in the conduct of the nation’s economic affairs. How to interpret this? All of a sudden, the price mechanism is in vogue. The Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration has tried to free petrol price and the naira’s exchange rate.
Ought we then to worry about how skin deep the latter convictions are? From the mid-1970s, successive Nigerian governments have responded to straitened economic circumstances with a colourful vocabulary: “belt-tightening”, “home-grown alternatives to the structural adjustment programme of the IMF”, etc. Through all the measures that these describe, the default message has been attempts to free the fiscus by shifting large cost elements on to consumers. Only for a while, though.