Omens for 2019


In just a few hours hence, it will be curtains call on the old year 2018 as the new year 2019 rolls in. This rite of passage will be attended as usual by resurgent optimism that most of humanity harbours at a time like this over a new beginning. New years typically are synonymous with new beginnings, and new beginnings for most people invariably come with a fresh burst of hope that things will get better going forward than they were in the outgoing year.
Talented American singer and songwriter, Taylor Alison Swift, quite simplistically articulated this mood in one of her works when she said: “This is a new year / A new beginning / And things will change!” But conventional wisdom as well teaches that time is a continuum, and there really are no absolutely new beginnings. Ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca, made this point more succinctly in his saying that “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Time is fundamentally a continuum, and so mood bursts over yearly transitions have often proved to be a vicious cycle – from high mode at New Year in excited hope, to bottom-out at year end in disappointment over failed expectations, and back to high mode at another New Year in renewed optimism. This happens over and again, but it has never dissuaded humankind from the rebound of optimism that always heralds the onset of a new year. Let me in that upbeat spirit wish you, dear reader, a joyful season and Happy New Year in advance.
The extent to which the incoming year will be a happy ride for us in Nigeria is heavily overcast by unsettled issues in this ebbing year and the general election slated for 16th February and 2nd March 2019. The country already is in the thick of stumping by political actors towards the poll, making the prevailing mood in the land more portentous than is usual for this season when elections aren’t on hand. For instance, the tone of our national conversation presently is palpably less fraternal. Rather, it is adversarial, with markedly low content of mutual goodwill as power gladiators trade barbs in their jostling for advantage with the electorate, which they hope would translate to voter support in the coming poll. 


‘The extent to which the incoming year will be a happy ride for us in Nigeria is heavily overcast by unsettled issues in this ebbing year’


But even with the general election ever more closely looming, the critical requirement of funding for the poll, among other essentials, is yet up in the air. Early in November, the two chambers of the National Assembly approved a supplementary appropriation of N242.2billion for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and security agencies towards the elections, in line with a request by President Muhammadu Buhari. Only that they vired the money from the service wide vote of the Presidency and from 2018 appropriations of 30 ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), rather than from projects injected by them into the 2018 Appropriation Act as Buhari had sought. Not a few people, among whom I belong, hold the legislators crassly self-serving and selfish, because they rigidly insulated their spurious projects in the budget while taking out from programmes and ministries of the Executive that ordinarily should benefit the masses. Truth, however, is also that given the time factor, they forced a Hobson’s choice on the President, who barely seven weeks to the scheduled poll is yet to rouse one way or another into making the required funds available.
Another menacing threat to the impending general election is the ongoing industrial action by university teachers, which has left the public university system in a lockdown. INEC itself has left no one in doubt that its preparations are for real under a threat from this action. Members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) since 4th November threw off their lecterns and dug into war trenches against the government, and they are yet to show reliable signs of backing down. Although the government has voiced strong expectation that ongoing negotiations with the teachers will soon enough break the gridlock, the union said there was no basis for such optimism.  
Meanwhile, not only do senior academics wholly constitute collation and returning officers deployed by the electoral body at varying constituency levels during elections, students of federal universities form the bulk of ad hoc polling staff posted on duty to complement members of the National Youth Service Corps. INEC National Commissioner Festus Okoye was recently reported putting the proportion at 70percent of the ad hoc staff requirement, saying: “It is…important that students of federal tertiary institutions should, and must be in school at least a month before the February 16 presidential and national assembly elections. They are one critical resource, and their absence will have adverse effects on the ad hoc staff requirement of the (electoral) commission.”
University teachers have, of course, attempted to deflect blame for the crisis, but that is by no means the issue. The damage being done by recurrent varsity teachers’ strike to overall quality of literacy in this country can readily be imagined and shuddered at. More pressing, obviously, is the overhanging implication of their present action for the forthcoming poll. It is uncertain to what extent the optimism expressed by government will carry the day, but we really must hope for a breakthrough very early in the incoming year.
An allied issue that darkly overhangs the new year is the threat of “industrial chaos” early in the year by organised labour over perceived delay by government in implementing N30,000 as the new minimum wage. President Buhari had in his 2019 budget address to NASS, penultimate week, announced a plan to raise another technical panel that will interrogate the wage deal. The idea, as it seems, is to explore a common ground with relevant stakeholders, especially state governments that have adamantly cited inability to pay what has been proposed. But labour just won’t have such prevarication and has given the president up till today to send a bill to the legislature enshrining the N30, 000 baseline.
Contrary to the president’s seeming stance, labour leaders aren’t shying away from making the proposed new wage an electioneering issue and have threatened a nationwide protest on January 8 to press home their demand. Speaking with journalists recently, the scribe of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Peter Ozo-Eson, restated workers’ resolve not to accept anything lower than the proposed N30,000 minimum wage. He added: “The minimum wage issue is not a partisan issue. It is one of the issues that will determine the next elections. Workers are not slaves; politics is about interest and seeking one’s own interest. If workers in their states are saying that they will not vote for (governors) because they have not taken care of their interest, you don’t call that blackmail. I have a different name for it: that is democracy.”
An industrial crisis early in January portends disruptive effects for the 2019 poll. With operators of essential services like electricity supply and fuel distribution falling under the three labour centres – the NLC, the Trade Union Congress on Nigeria (TUC) and the United Labour Congress of Nigeria (ULC) – that have joined forces to push the N30,000 minimum wage demand, Nigerians must hope that reason somehow prevails and the threatened industrial chaos averted.
The defining event of 2019 for our country is the general election, and every citizen need pitch in with sacrifices that would ensure its success.

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