Thank you Cornelius for your inquisitive footnote. As pidgin English will have it, 'English na language, na people for England de speak am.' Although English was imposed on the multi-ethnic Nigeria as official language, the impostors saw to it that only an extreme minority of Nigerians could read, write, speak and understand English language in which Nigeria is governed. What we regard as being educated in Nigeria is fluency in oral and spoken English language but the opportunity to learn it is not available to 98% of Nigerians. Those who imposed English as the official language of Nigeria and the current maintainer of that imposition are obliged to see to it that all Nigerians have access to study and learn the language. To govern a country with a language which absolute majority of citizens neither speak nor understand is fraudulent and criminal. The few in Nigeria who are verse in English language have criminally exploited subsidies, deregulation, privatisation, and liberalization for their own selfish appropriation of our national wealth and propagation of abject poverty within the nation.
Under the sub-title 'Demonization of Subsidy' in his twitter captioned, Subsidy, deregulation, liberalization: Nigerian English's Most Abused Terms, Farooq A. Kperogi asserted, "Just as the American ruling elite have used the media to demonize *welfare,* the Nigerian ruling elite is launching a sustained, all-out linguistic attack on subsidy." Earlier on, Farooq published the photograph of Mohammadu Buhari and credited him with some statements made in 2011 when he was opposition candidate thus, "Nigerians are being deceived on the issue of fuel subsidy by the Federal government.... Fuel Subsidy Does not Exist." Were Nigerians not deceived by the Federal Government on the issue of fuel subsidy in 2011? Was Buhari correct when he said, "Fuel Subsidy does not exist" in 2011? My answer to those questions are capital YES.
To begin with, Nigeria has four crude oil refineries (one each in Kaduna and Port Harcourt, and two in Warri) with installed capacity of 445, 000 barrels per day refinery. A barrel is equivalent to 159 litres, implying that the four refineries should be refining 70,775,000 litres of crude oil per day. Since 1990s the NNPC has been allocating 70 million, 775 thousand litres of crude oil per day to the oil refineries through Petroleum Product Price Regulating Authority (PPPRA). If our good English speaking managers and administrators of Nigeria's four refineries have lived up to their academic qualifications, the oil refineries would have been producing not less than 40 million litres of petrol per day beside diesel, bitumen, kerosene and other chemical products. Consequently, Nigeria would not be in need of fuel import for her domestic use. But throughout these years, the administrators and managers of our refineries have been collecting salaries and fringe benefits without delivering required volumes of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) otherwise known as petrol. Thus, Nigeria is the only crude oil exporting country in the world that depends on fuel imports to satisfy her domestic needs. Farooq would have been helping the masses of Nigeria, if he had accused the managers and administrators of Nigerian oil refineries of abuse of certificates and collecting payments for undelivered goods. A fair minded person would have published names of officials that have been, and are still, collecting salaries and fringe benefits from NNPC/PPPRA for unproduced goods.
Due to the failure of the managers and administrators of the Nigerian crude oil refineries to produce petrol from the 70 million 775 thousand litres of crude oil allocated to them per day, Nigeria has been compelled to import fuel for domestic consumption. Without telling Nigerians what happened to the 70,775,000 liters of crude oil allocated daily to the dormant refineries, Nigerians were told that subsidy was needed to defray part of the cost of importation of fuel in order to make it affordable for Nigerian consumers. There arose Nigeria's fuel importers which jumped in 2006 from five to ten in 2007, nineteen in 2008 and 140 in 2011. In the 2011 Federal Budget, N245 billion was appropriated for fuel subsidy but by December 2011 a total of N1.7 trillion had been paid out as fuel subsidy without supplementary budget request under the watch of the touted Nigerian Harvard Doctor of Economics and a world bank director who was Minister of Finance and coordinating Minister of Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. It was then that Jonathan regime talked of removing subsidy and to increase the pump price of petrol from N65/liter to N140/liter. Buhari and some other patriotic Nigerians asserted that rogues were being subsidized by the federal government and as such fuel subsidy did not exist. Subsequent three separate investigations carried out by Jonathan's regime in 2012 justified the opinion of Buhari on fuel subsidy. The House of Representatives set up an Ad-hoc Committee on Fuel Subsidy which was Chaired by Farouk Lawan. At the House of Reps Committee's investigation on fuel subsidy, the question of volume of daily consumption of fuel in Nigeria was asked. Answering that question, the Petroleum Minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke said that Nigerians consume 52 million liters daily; The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Austin Oniwon said it was 35 million litres per day; The Department of Petroleum Resources' (DPR) said it was 43 million liters per day; The Executive Secretary of the PPPRA ascertained it was 24 million litres per day; and the Finance Minister, Okonjo-Iweala was sure that Nigeria's daily consumption was 40 million litres. To the question of how much was totally paid as fuel subsidy in 2011? Okonjo-Iweala, the Finance Minister told the Committee that it was N1.3 trillion; The Petroleum Minister, Diezani said it was N1.4 trillion while Sanusi of the Central Bank of Nigeria categorically stated that the bank had paid out N1.7 trillion. On the accurate capacity utilization of Nigeria's refineries, the NNPC told the House Committee that 60% of installed capacities of the refineries were utilized, the petroleum minister put it at 30%, while the DPR put it at 15%. At whatever percentage the refineries worked, the Committee enquired, if Nigeria was paying subsidy on locally refined crude oil? The Petroleum Minister said it depends on how one looks at it and the NNPC Group Managing Director said, 'the layman cannot understand how it is done.' The Executive Secretary of the PPPRA answered yes to the same question while DPR emphatically answered no. On the status of the subsidy accounts, Diezani said the account was a virtual one, while the NNPC said there was no account in existence as the layman would look at it; the PPPRA claimed 'the account is a technical one;' while the CBN clamed 'there is no account with us for subsidy,' the Finance Minister posited that 'the account exists but not with a bank.' However, Farouk Lawan exploited his position as the chairman of the House of Reps Committee on fuel subsidy to extort money from those who had collected fuel subsidy without importing or supplying fuel. He had demanded $3 million as bribe from one Femi Otedola in exchange for removal of the name of Otedola's company, Zenon Petroleum and Gas Limited from the list of firms indicted by the House Committee for allegedly abusing the fuel subsidy regime. Farouk Lawan was caught in a video clip on April 24, 2012, at the residence of Femi Otedola, collecting $500,000 cash as part of the $3 million he demanded with the promise to collect the balance later. The video clip was facilitated by special police fraud unit. After the collection of the bribe, Lawan removed Zenon Petroleum and Gas Limited from the list of firms indicted by the House Committee.
While the House of Reps Committee was conducting its own investigation on fuel subsidy, Jonathan appointed the former EFCC Chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, to investigate the fuel subsidy payments. When his report was ready at the end of June 2012, the Minister of Finance, Okonjo-Iweala constituted a committee led by the Group Managing Director, Access Bank Plc, Aigboje Imuokhuede, to look at the payment records to verify and ascertain subsidy arrears paid to oil marketers. On Thursday, July 5, 2012, President Jonathan constituted a 15-man committee on what was termed Subsidy Payment Verification and he hijacked Mr. Imuokhuede from the Committee set up by the Minister of Finance to head the 15-man Presidential committee. Special Adviser to the President, Reuben Abati, listed the terms of reference of the 15-man Committee to include: to further verify and reconcile all claims in the report of the Technical Committee (Nuhu Ribadu) on Fuel Subsidy Payments; to properly identify all cases of overpayment and/or irregular payment; to accurately identify all likely fraudulent cases for criminal investigation; and to review any other pertinent issues that may arise from its work and make appropriate recommendations. The President gave the Committee one week to complete its assignment by Friday, July 13, 2012. Earlier on Monday, 2 July 2012, Okonjo-Iweala had told a Senate hearing committee that although N232 billion was provided for payment of subsidy arrears from 2011 in the total N888 billion budget for oil subsidy in 2012, the sum of N451 billion had been paid as arrears from 2011 in the first quarter of 2012. After all verifications, up and down, back and forward, left and right, the sum of N2.6 trillion, more than half of the 2011 federal budget, was said to have been spent on fuel subsidy for 2011. Many fuel importers existed only on paper and collected fuel subsidies they never imported or supplied. It was found that 3 billion, 171 million, 644 thousand and 336 litres of subsidized petrol never got to the market. In all 71 companies were indicted.
Petroleum Products Price Regulating Authority (PPPRA) is responsible for verification of imported fuel before payments are made. The Chairman of PPPRA between 2009 and 2011 was Senator Ahmadu Ali, a member of the ruling party, PDP. Mamman Ali, the son of the Chairman of PPPRA, Senator Ahmadu Ali, alongside with two accomplices - Christian Taylor and Nasaman Oil Services Limited fraudulently obtained N4.5 billion as fuel subsidy claim from the Federal Government on a purported importation of 30.5 million litres of Premium Motor Spirit (petrol). Jonathan's Minister of Aviation, Stella Adaeze Oduah, was found to have used her Company, Sea Petroleum and Gas to obtain 1 billion, 19 million, 571 thousand, and 609 naira as fuel subsidy she never imported or supplied. Jonathan's Minister of Labour and Productivity, Chief Emeka Wogu obtained 2.7 billion naira as fuel subsidy he never imported or supplied through his company, Pinnacle Contractors Ltd. The former Military Head of State, Abdulsalami Abubakar, obtained through his company, Maizube Petroleum Limited, the sum of 5 billion, 509 million, 407 thousand and 903 naira as fuel subsidy he never imported or supplied. The list is too long to be narrated here. However, the interesting thing is that none of those who fraudulently obtained fuel subsidy payments in 2011 has either been tried, convicted or made to refund the money received. Instead of defending subsidy that never was, Farouk should help Nigerians to recover their stolen assets from fuel subsidy scammers. It is an unjust distribution of our nation's wealth to licence and finance a few cabals as fuel importers under the guise of fuel subsidy while making our oil refineries dormant.
S.Kadiri
Date: Sun, 22 May 2016 08:57:50 -0700
From: corneliushamelberg@gmail.com
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Subsidy, deregulation, liberalization: Nigerian English's Most Abused Terms
Footnote to an enquiry:
and his The Fishermen alone and in concert with other masterly Nigerian literary endeavours, is dynamic, eloquent testimony
supernatural witchcraft of Nigerian political newspeak , not if you are familiar with Reich's pre-Hitler The Mass Psychology of Fascism –
I said no surprise. What after all is political jargon if not in the service of the master race of Nigerian politicians?
On Sunday, 22 May 2016 10:55:00 UTC+2, Farooq A. Kperogi wrote:
How do Nigerian politicians and traveling salesmen sell their wares in the various indigenous mother tongues?
Have words like " subsidy " for example entered into the Yoruba, Hausa , Igbo , Fulani and Kalabari political lexicons
with baggage intact or have they been suitably adapted and adjusted to suit the intentions of the ones selling the ideas?
In Nigeria, the English Language is alive and vibrant - very much so – I heard Chigozie Obioma say so here in Stockholm
and his The Fishermen alone and in concert with other masterly Nigerian literary endeavours, is dynamic, eloquent testimony
to that fact.
Neither should there be any surprise about the evolution of that natural language art and craft or if you so will the hypnotic &
supernatural witchcraft of Nigerian political newspeak , not if you are familiar with Reich's pre-Hitler The Mass Psychology of Fascism –
and not that there has ever been on the horizon or God willing will ever be a depot and demagogue of such savagery that will join
the Fuhrer , Eichmann and others of their ilk for everlasting life in the lowest depths of the everlasting fire.
I said no surprise. What after all is political jargon if not in the service of the master race of Nigerian politicians?
It's the current art of the trade.
George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" 1946 - ought to be revisited as refreshment and a prophetic
precursor of things to come in the language dominions of the British isles and former colonies. He himself, born i
n the India of Empire would today - in the American usage of the term be nonplussed by the the state of the art
and latest developments in his mother tongue in the world of Globalised English
On Sunday, 22 May 2016 10:55:00 UTC+2, Farooq A. Kperogi wrote:
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Twitter: @farooqkperogiThe Buhari government's battle to strangulate the masses through petrol price increase and other infernal neo-liberal policies is being fought on both the existential and semantic planes. Like past governments, this government is deploying intentional obfuscation, evasions, and outright prevarications to pollute national discourse and disguise the uncomfortable truth of its war on the poor. This column will lay bare some of these linguistic deceptions.Some people may wonder why, since last week, I have been concerned with uncovering the deceit in the political language of this government instead of writing about everyday grammar and usage. Well, learning to read between the lines, not just on the lines, is an even more useful skill than mastery of the mechanics of language.
As eminent American linguist William D. Lutz once said, "There is more to being an effective consumer of language than just expressing dismay at dangling modifiers, faulty subject and verb agreement, or questionable usage. All who use language should be concerned whether statements and facts agree, whether language is, in Orwell's words 'largely the defense of the indefensible' and whether language 'is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.'"Devious, manipulative language by government has real material consequences. It can literally kill. We are already seeing the prelude to that in Nigeria. People have been so thoroughly manipulated by the doublespeak of this government that they are even willing to commit self-immolation in defense of government's oppression of them.In 1975, an American linguist by the name of Terrence P. Moran wrote a thoughtful, widely cited linguistic essay on a scientific experiment conducted on rats. In the experiment, a group rats was deliberately starved for an extended period. After the period of the starvation, the rats were divided into two groups. The first group was fed with a sugar-and-water solution, and the other group was fed with a mere non-nourishing-saccharine solution. Both groups felt "satisfied" after being fed, although saccharine solution doesn't nourish. The saccharine-fed rats merely experienced an illusion of satisfaction. As you would expect, the rats fed on saccharine all died while the ones fed on sugar and water lived and thrived."This experiment suggests certain analogies between the environments created for rats by the scientists and the environments created for us humans by language and the various mass media of communication. Like the saccharine environment, an environment created or infiltrated by doublespeak provides the appearance of nourishment and the promise of survival, but the appearance is illusionary and the promise false," Morgan wrote.
Can you find parallels between the experiment on rats—and Morgan's profound extrapolation from it—and the current situation in Nigeria? If you haven't, let me help. Government first engendered a deliberate, cripplingly severe artificial scarcity of petrol for weeks. During this period, petrol prices went through the roof. People got habituated to the scarcity and to the extortionate prices. Just then, government made the products available and increased the official price, which is significantly lower than the extortionate prices of the scarcity period, yet way higher than the price in the pre-scarcity period.This created a sensation of relief for everybody. But, as it true of the experiment with the rats, there are basically two groups of Nigerians: the wealthy and the poor. The sensation of satisfaction that the poor felt—and still feel— in the aftermath of the availability of petrol, which caused some of them, especially in the north, to demonstrate in favor of "petrol subsidy removal," is false and illusory. It is mere suspended animation created by government propaganda and wily manipulation of language with the aid of the mass media. To quote Morgan, "an environment created or infiltrated by doublespeak provides the appearance of nourishment and the promise of survival, but the appearance is illusionary and the promise false."Wait and see what will happen to the poor, helpless people who have not only internalized their oppression but are defending and celebrating it. Marxists call this false consciousness.The demonization of "subsidy"One of the biggest linguistic casualties in this undeclared but nonetheless noxious war on the poor is the term "subsidy." Government propaganda has gone on rhetorical overdrive to demonize the word, to make it into what American scholar Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr called a "devil term." (Weaver later said, "A society's health or declension was mirrored in how it used language.")When you demonize a good word, strip it of all its approbatory associations, you prepare uncritical minds to accept actions that are inimical to their interests. In their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky perceptively show how the ruling elite in the United States contort the English language to blackmail the poor. Institutional benefits for the poor are ridiculed, and terms like "social welfare" are now invariably said with a tone of disapproval. But welfare packages to the rich and the powerful are called "bailouts" and have a tone approval about them.As they pointed out, in democracies "when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force and when the voice of the people can be heard, ... you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda. Manufacture of consent. Creation of necessary illusions."Just like the American ruling elite have used the media to demonize "welfare," the Nigerian ruling elite is launching a sustained, all-out linguistic attack on subsidy.But what's wrong with subsidy? At its root, subsidy, derived from Anglo-Norman French subsidie (ultimately from Latin subsidium), means "assistance." In modern usage, it means "a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive." According to Investopia.com, "subsidy is usually given to remove some type of burden and is often considered to be in the interest of the public." What's wrong with that?Up until this year, "subsidy" was a positive word in Nigeria. In fact, during the 2012 mass revolt against petrol price increase, a protester in Kano inscribed this pithy, profound words on the back of his shirt: "Subsidy is my soul." Of course, subsidy is the soul of poor, struggling people. Without it many of them will simply wither and die. This is true not just in Nigeria but all over the world. Every government in the world, especially in the West, subsidizes basic goods, including petrol and agriculture products. As I pointed out in a previous article, America spends more than $10 billion yearly to subsidize petrol for its citizens and another $20 billion to subsidize agriculture, in addition to sundry economic liberties for its citizens. The European Union also spends billions on subsidies.One of the sneaky ways this government tries to hoodwink people into thinking that subsidy is bad for them is to associate it with corruption. But that's a false association. There is nothing in subsidies in and of themselves that makes them corrupt. Corruption in subsidy is failure of government. Government has a responsibility to ensure that corruption is curbed in the administration of subsidies so that poor people who are the intended beneficiaries of the subsidies aren't robbed of them. Any government, not least one government that derives the social and moral basis of its legitimacy from its anti-corruption credentials, that can't eliminate corruption and ensure that people who need subsidies get them, has no reason to exist.Based on the fuzzy, fraudulent association of subsidies with corruption, the federal government announced late last week that it has removed subsidies on fertilizers. It later "clarified" that it will only remove the subsidies after it has "met farmers` conditions of prompt availability and affordability of the commodity." Same difference.After fertilizer subsidies, other subsidies will follow, and the World Bank/IMF dream of "rolling back the state" in Third World countries would be complete--at least in Nigeria. But what is being rolled back is the obligation of the state to its citizens, not the privileges the ruling elite enjoy.Since the political elite consume more than 80 percent of the state's resources, what would their reason for being be? How about the subsidies they enjoy? Who will roll those back? Why do poor people have to suffer because of the corruption of the rich? Why does the government that has sworn to protect all citizens say it's incapable of fighting elite corruption that stands in the way of delivering help to people who need it?Deregulation/Liberalization:When Channels TV asked Ibe Kachikwu to explain to Nigerians what exactly the government was doing with its petrol price hike, he was caught flatfooted. "I try not to get into the semantics of deregulation or no deregulation but the reality is that we are liberalizing." Steady, Kackikwu, whoa there! Whoa!
It was French philosopher Voltaire who once said, "If you wish to converse with me, define your terms." Kachikwu can't define his terms, doesn't know if what government is doing is "deregulation or no deregulation," but he is certain that they are "liberalizing." Talk of obfuscation.Related Articles:Unraveling the Monumental Fraud in Petrol Price Hike
Petrol Price Hike: Time to Occupy Nigeria Again
Fuel Price Hike: The Language and Grammatical Illogic of a Regulated Deregulation
Biggest Scandal in Fuel Subsidy Removal Fraud
Photo Essay of Occupy Nigeria Protests
Why Ordinary Americans Are Also Angry with Goodluck Jonathan
Labor's Treachery Against the "Occupy Nigeria" Revolt
The Grammar and Vocabulary of Fuel Subsidy Removal
"Premium Motor Spirit Otherwise Known as Petrol" and Other Petrol-Inspired Grammatical Boo-BoosFarooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
402 Bartow Avenue, MD 2207Social Science Building 22 Room 5092Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
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