Two weeks after Chinua Achebe published A Man of the People, his most political novel which ends with a prediction of a military coup d’etat, Nigeria experienced its first coup on January 15, 1966. This incident led a lot of analysts to declare Achebe a prophet. Achebe, humble as ever, declined he was a seer. In an interview with John Agetua in the mid-1970s, the raconteur and thinker drew a powerful analogy between the prophetic ending of his novel and someone watching a drunken driver drive recklessly and warning that the car would have an accident only for it to occur shortly. This kind of prediction did not require the third eye.
I have in recent times been warning the Igbo people that, contrary to the popular notion that President Goodluck Jonathan is a great facilitator of development in Igboland, he will end up as perhaps an unintended great destroyer of Igbo socio-economic development. But I did not know my warning would prove prescient so soon. Like Achebe, I am no prophet unless you regard my annual declaration that December 25 will be Christmas with plenty of rice, stew and chicken to eat as a great work of prophecy.
The news from the South East geopolitical zone and the rest of Igboland is quite dispiriting. The news speaks of unprecedented de-industrialisation; the media is awash with reports of how terrible electric power supply has been of late, even by Nigerian standard. The situation has become so unbearable that, for the first time in history, both corporate and individual consumers have been out in the streets in Enugu and Ebonyi, two states well known for docility, demonstrating against the paradox of poor power availability and unprecedented high bills. According to the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), about 600 companies employing one million persons in the South East are threatened by the deteriorating power condition.
In Anambra State, the situation may be worse. As The Guardian disclosed on Wednesday, February 8, every town in the state is enveloped by darkness. A few days after the president-general of Nnewi Town Development Union addressed a press conference bemoaning the situation which has led to the closure of 16 manufacturing firms in the town in the last few months, MAN addressed the press on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, alleging that the privatisation of the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) since November 2013 is sounding the death knell of its member organisations. Innoson Industries say that despite spending a whopping N60 million monthly on diesel used by numerous giant generators, the company is compelled by EEDC to pay N100 million every month for providing power epileptically. For those who may not know, EEDC is the only firm supplying power to the whole of South East.
No person should be surprised at this sad turn of events. The Jonathan government was strongly advised by both experts and non-experts in 2012 and 2013 against selling Enugu DisCo to Emeka Offor’s Interstate Electrics. For instance, the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) and the National Council of Privatisation (NCP), in a joint report, stated that Interstate has neither the technical expertise nor the financial wherewithal to do the business. But within 72 hours, the NCP reversed itself in a show of what Nigerians call ‘government magic’ and in October 2012, announced Interstate as the preferred bidder for not only Enugu DisCo but also Abuja DisCo, thus becoming the only consortium to win two bids! It eventually settled for only Enugu DisCo. Even when it was time for payment of the $126 million required as the preferred bidder, Interstate did not have the money. The August 21, 2013, deadline was extended by 20 days for it alone, of all the consortia which bidded for DisCos. The rest is now history.
Why on earth should the Jonathan government insist on handing over Enugu DisCo to Offor? Does the outgoing government want Enugu DisCo to go the way of the petroleum refineries which have not recovered since Offor’s turn-around maintenance (TAM) contract under the Sani Abacha dictatorship?
The more painful part of the South East electricity tragedy is that the Eastern Electric consortium promoted by the five South East states governments and other personages was described by the BPE/NCP as financially and technically suitable for the job, only for the government to violate its own rules in the most brazen fashion and hand over Enugu DisCo to a favoured group.
Rather than Igbo leaders seeking to halt Jonathan from further destruction of our homeland, a number of prominent Igbo politicians are clapping ceaselessly for him because of their personal pecuniary gains at the expense of their own people. It did not matter to people like former Governor Peter Obi that Jonathan declared on August 31, 2012 at a town hall meeting in Onitsha, which Obi himself attended, that he would go into exile if the bridge was not completed in 2015.
• C. Don Adinuba is head of Discovery Public Affairs Consulting.