Nigeria and the Road to Venezuela

A fortnight ago former foreign minister and distinguished scholar of international relations, Bolaji Akinyemi, raised an alarm about the upcoming elections; drawing a parallel between what’s happening in our country and the tragedy that has befallen Venezuela: “I cannot but bring to the attention of Nigerians the significance of the latest development in Venezuela where the international community, under the United States, has accorded recognition to the opposition leader as the alternative president as their reaction to what they perceive as a flawed election….(we must) avoid a repetition of the Venezuelan nightmare.”

Professor Akinyemi is one of our ablest foreign ministers -- an oracle of international relations scholarship. His warning must be taken seriously.  

Sadly, we’ve started off on a poor footing. At the eve of the elections at dawn of last Saturday, INEC Chairman Mahmood Yakubu announced that the elections are postponed to 23 February. An unexpected turn of events. We were all in the ornate hall of the Abuja International Conference Centre on Wednesday 13^th February the same man solemnly proclaimed to the world that all was set for the Big Day. The principal reason given for the volte face was that some of the voting materials could not be airlifted due to bad weather.

The social media, however, have been agog with what they believe to be the real reason. It’s alleged that orders had come from the highest echelons of the security services to the effect that airlifting of voting materials to some states be suspended under the pretext of “bad weather”. The aim being to stagger the elections in a manner that would enable the incumbents to know in advance where the wind is blowing and then force a more desirable outcome in the remaining states; using money and the overwhelming apparatus of the state as happened in Ekiti and Osun.

Nothing could have done more damage to our prestige as a country in the full glare of international observers. Nigerians are understandably angry. Many had travelled back home from Europe, the Americas and neighbouring African countries to exercise their franchise. Many had left the cities for their ancestral homelands. Weddings and funerals had been postponed and shops closed down. The costs in GDP run into billions of naira. 

The electorate have smelled a rat and are having none of it. Whilst one can understand INEC saying that electioneering remains banned, I fail to see why they would not open a window for millions that are yet to be issued their PVCs. In mature democracies voter registration is a continuous affair. Any teenager who attains her eighteenth birthday is guaranteed a voter’s card on the same day. I have reason to feel that the disenfranchisement of millions of voters in this country amounts to a deliberate act of mischief. In some states such as Kano, Katsina and Kebbi, we are told, people get registered in the privacy of their own homes. An emigrant youth from Niger Republic recently boasted possession of 7 voter’s cards. It was astonishing that Governors from neighbouring countries were in our country to participate in electioneering campaigns. It actually confirms that those politicians who brought them are not bona fide citizens at all. It cannot be right that millions of Nigerians, particularly in the heart of Abuja, the Middle Belt and the South have no voter cards while foreigners have them in multiples.

I was a participant observer in Abuja last year. I interviewed expectant mothers who had been queuing up from dawn, under a rainy weather, but could not be registered. Some of the poor confessed that they had coughed out as much as N10,000 as bribe money to INEC agents just to get registered. We may be living witnesses of a giant historic fraud!

But are we on the road to Venezuela?

The South American nation of Venezuela happens to  be the homeland of one of my great historical heroes, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco, the revolutionary simply known as Simon Bolivar (1783-1830). He hailed from a wealthy family of mixed African-Spanish descent and made it his life’s mission to liberate the whole of Latin America from foreign colonial rule. The country has officially been renamed after him, as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

With a population of over 31 million and a landmass of 916,445 km2, Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia. It also has vast deposits of natural gas and gold. In the 1930s it was the richest country in Latin America, ahead of Argentina, Chile and Brazil. Today, it is a country in deep trouble. The economy has been in depression for almost a decade, with a staggering hyperinflation rate of 1,370,000% by year’s end 2018. After years of military dictatorship the country returned to democratic constitutionalism in the eighties. In April 1998 a young former military officer by the name of Hugo Chavez won the democratic elections by a very narrow margin. He came to power with a revolutionary mandate.

The right-wing opposition, backed by the land-owning wealthy caudillos and international capital, were determined to see his back. Mass strikes and demonstrations were the order of the day. He was even kidnapped and flown by helicopter to be dropped alive in the Atlantic Ocean. Unknown to his captors, he had set his army to surround thousands of the opposition, just in case. They gave an ultimatum, “bring him back or you are all dead”.  They had to bring him back.

The economic policies of the government were centred on price controls, land reforms, redistribution of economic wealth, massive investments in education, worker-owned cooperatives and economic and political integration within Latin America. So-called “Bolivarian missions” were created to deliver public services to the poor, particularly food, healthcare and education. The UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) noted that poverty rates fell from 49.4% to 23.9 percent. Unfortunately, much of the social spending was at the expense of long-term capital investments. This meant that populism won at the expense of long-term growth, which declined from a peak of 18% in 2009 to a low of 0.5% in 2013 and -18% in 2018.

Hugo Chavez died of cancer in March 2013. His protégé and successor Nicolas Maduro has continued on the same revolutionary path, to the chagrin of the United States and the West. The Trump administration recently announced that they recognise opposition leader Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela. The EU and several Latin American members of the Lima Group have followed suit. The United States has announced intensification of crippling sanctions; threatening to use military force to effect regime change. The country may be on the verge of civil war.

Two factors account for the Venezuela tragedy. First, popular policies  were not anchored on sound macroeconomic principles such as balancing the books, boosting growth and diversifying the productive base of the economy. It has led to hunger and food shortages. More than 3 million have fled the country. Secondly, American sanctions, negative propaganda and covert activities by economic hit men, have destroyed the economy. Former London Ken Livingstone, a friend of both the late Chavez and incumbent Maduro, laments that the Bolivarian revolution made a gross mistake by not killing off the wealthy oligarchs. According to him, “One of the things that Chávez did when he came to power, he didn’t kill all the oligarchs. There were about 200 families who controlled about 80% of the wealth in Venezuela".

Venezuela is part of the wave of populist regimes in Latin America that include Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia and Mexico. Cuba is, of course, their grandfather. Since the Monroe Doctrine instituted by President James Monroe in 1823, the United States has never really accepted the sovereignty of the Latin American countries. It considers the whole of Latin America, the Caribbean and the central Americas as its sphere of exclusive influence. No regime can pursue an independent path in that region without incurring the wrath of the United States. This is the real source of the current tragedy of Venezuela.

If I were Nicolas Maduro I would at once adopt the US dollar as my country’s de facto currency like Robert Mugabe did in Zimbabwe. Hyperinflation will disappear overnight. I would step down from the grandstanding, anti-American rhetoric.  I would sue for peace and institute a government of national unity. I would call the bluff of the foreign interlopers while re-uniting our people over a broad national vision of hope and transformation.

I do not think we in Nigeria are necessarily facing a “Venezuelan Moment”. Our social conditions and historical trajectory is different. This is not to say that hegemonic powers have no interest in what is happening on our shores. What we face is a mortal conflict between freedom and progress on the one hand, and Global Jihad and the forces of retrogression, on the other. If history is any guide, freedom, ultimately, will prevail.