By Adekunle Adekoya

THE Yoruba people of South-Western Nigeria have a language that has greetings for almost any circumstance, a fact from which many jokes have been generated. If rain is falling, there is a greeting for it. “E ku ojo!” is the refrain you get from neighbours and passers-by. If the weather is what it is now, you get “E ku ogbele yi!”, which is both a greeting and subtle inquest into how you’re coping with the dry weather. The Naira re-design policy implementation has impacted the citizenry in many ways, intended and unintended, and the Yoruba man/woman simply looks at his neighbour and hails: “E ku oro owo Buhari yi o!” This is both a greeting and commentary on general experience regarding the currency policy. It is also an invitation to share experience on how one has been coping.

Apart from having a greeting for every situation, the Yoruba language has a rich repertoire of proverbs for just about any experience. One such proverb, which suits the president’s actions and how that has impacted us all, is the one about a White man, who as he was about to leave, pooped on the chair he’d been sitting on. “Bi Oyinbo ba nlo n’ilu, a su s’aga.” 

President Buhari went out on a limb to reassure us all, and indeed, the rest of the world that he is committed to ensuring that another elected administration takes over from his on May 29, 2023. Like his predecessor, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan who scored a first by conceding victory in the presidential elections of 2015, Buhari named a transition council which was inaugurated last Tuesday. Naming and inaugurating a transition council ahead of the elections is a first, here.

Commendable as this is, our experience as a collective in the last two weeks has poured cold water on this otherwise laudable development. The cash squeeze occasioned by the Naira re-design policy authorised by the president has made life unbearable, and if you add the lingering petrol scarcity, life and living in Nigeria was thrown back to the Hobbesian description of being “nasty, brutish, and short”.

I have always wondered the historical experience that triggered the emergence of this proverb. Was there a White man that actually pooped on his chair on the eve of his departure anywhere in Yorubaland during the colonial times? I am still searching for an answer. But those who profess deeper understanding of the language beyond ordinary usage say that the proverb is used to describe the antics of people, perhaps officials, who are leaving a particular place. Knowing that they will never come back to such a place, they start doing things that can best be described as unpleasant, safe in the knowledge that the effects cannot be felt by them.

Is petrol scarcity one of the legacies that President Buhari will be bequeathing to a nation of peoples that have endured his rule for eight years? For three months, petrol became gold and was sold whimsically at any price the seller(s) dictated. Till tomorrow, nobody has told us what happened, beyond drivel from officialdom. Add the currency re-design policy and its implementation. The unintended effects of this policy, as noted earlier, had hit the average Nigerian very hard, especially the vulnerable sectors of our population. This has made people react in very many different ways, some violently. In fact, there was palpable anxiety that the situation, if not nipped in the bud, may trigger anger on a national scale, following protests that broke out in parts of Oyo, Edo, Benue, Kwara, and Delta states last Wednesday. In the areas where there were protests, bonfires were made while some bank branches were torched. Earlier, ATM machines were vandalised by people on queue for the new notes which were not available, even as the old notes were declared illegal tender.

Now, the president, in a national broadcast said that only the N200 note will continue to be used till April 10, even as the N1,000 and N500 old notes remained out of reach. Now we are all looking for new N1,000, N500 and old N200 and N100 notes, all of which remain elusive. Is this how President Buhari will finish strong?

With Buhari’s transition committee inaugurated, the send-forth activities have begun. Meanwhile, the peoples of Nigeria remain hungry. Before the naira re-design policy, things were bad enough, with prices of foodstuffs and other essential commodities going through the roof into the sky, space-bound. As things stand, people who have money cannot get it to spend easily. Buying and selling is being done through bank transfers, which has created another headache of its own. The lack of cash has triggered a stampede of electronic transactions that the portals and switches seem incapable of handling. POS terminals are choked, while many bank apps seem overwhelmed. People can’t buy and sell as they wish because the medium of exchange, the currency notes are not available. That is the country Buhari is handing over. He is the Oyinbo man that has pooped on the chair as he prepared to get out of town. The incoming president must do the job of a sanitary inspector.