By Nik Ogbulie
Kongi may have a bumper harvest this year even as he is waking up very late to till the soil; one function he has been good at. His massive followership ladden in salient advocasies has been on leave as he went on slumber. But we all knew that Kongi is our bone and must rise again.
The drama that ensued in his Abeokute metropolis yesterday returns his hunger for good governance even under the pressure to choose silence over actions by those who are bent on squandering our commonwealth. It is a welcome development that he remembers the subject of one of his epic classics, The Man Died…
The decision by the Nobel Laureate to fly a motorcyclist to an important event in the face of the ravaging cost of fuel, produced some 30 meters away from his abode, hit him as the only way to save himself from the anarchy of the stupid social service pricing and governance ineptitude. Paying N1500 per a litre of fuel to attend an hour event within the neighbourhood makes him a part of the hoard in our illiterate communities who see money as water. Soyinke felt so bad that if he chooses to drive one of his two cars to the event, he must be parting with about N80,000, a little above the country’s minimum wage, in the next one hour. Considering his trajectory as a humanist, advocate, and a kitchen economist, that cost does not make sense. That is why he took Okada, a popular transport alternative, forced on Nigerians by our various do-nothing governments which now see the alternative as modern in the face of huge corruption ravaging our economy.
For a man who had protested various streams of fuel price increases and the subsidy policy of the previous government’s, this issue would have since been settled in such a way that Nigerians should have been a country to copy by many others. Unfortunately, we did not act at the right time or, we rather would have allowed some indescribable sentiments to becloud our sense of moral judgement. For instance, the subsidy removal protest at Ojota over ten years ago would have been an action capable of diminishing some of the reasons why Kongi has taken the Okada ride today. This is why our ancestors had noted that you must remove the burning hands of a monkey from fire before it becomes that of a human being. Had our nepotic protesters focused on the reasons for an early removal of the subsidy as planned by the previous government, the current development would have been uncalled for. Much more of such situations capable of worsening the fuel challenges are still avaluable and Wole Soyinka and some of his kind may be in in the forture, to the the extent that they may be in a precarious situation that they may have to trek from Oke Muson in Abeokuta to Ijebuode.
I have started seeing bicycles that are effortlessly usable on the major roads without much hassles. It is not impossible that fuel price will continue to rise based on the economic variations that are being pushed into the system from fuel producers, marketers and merchants that are creating favourable windows that are unavoidable.
What can Kongi do if he wakes up tomorrow and sees our refineries adjusting pump prices to N2000 per litre? It is already happening on cooking gas and premium motor gas and people are rushing to purchase while adjusting their pains.
Kongi has already kicked off the protest in a manner not to offend his friends in government and manufacturing and may still be expected at Ojota on the long run, when all the Okada riders must have relocated to Guinea Equitorial. Unfortunately, that would be Kongi’s poorest harvest!!
