To make life worth living, whether under a communal, capitalist, socialist or whatever order, people surrender some of their individual freedoms and liberties to a central authority, sometimes a ‘Leviathan’ that would apply the economies of scale to harness all the potentials to create a better level of individual and collective freedoms and liberties called civilization.
This social contract is not only the greatest good for the greatest number, but actually the optimal benefits possible for everyone under each circumstance, and such cannot be realized without subsidies, so-called, for the generality.
SOCIAL CONTRACT IS SOCIAL SUBSIDY AND A GOVERNMENT REMOVING SUBSIDY IS IN BREACH OF THAT CONTRACT!
Governments across civilizations must subsidize the major arteries of life, especially:
1. Security
2. Food
3. Health
4. Education
5. Housing
6. Energy/Fuel
7. Transportation
8. Sports, recreation, entertainment.
Some governments even go much further than the above.
These are basic necessities, otherwise called public goods which, not every citizen can provide adequately if at all for themselves and therefore obligatory upon governments to either procure or ensure the most optimal conditions for their existence in fulfilment of their part of the social contract. Subsidies are the _raison_ _d’être_ of governance and substance of the social contract. When citizens have these basics, others can go on buying private aircraft, bulletproof engines, bunkers called houses, and so on, and pay heavy taxes on them.
Nigerian rulers fully understood the need for subsidies, budgeted for them in abundance, BUT stole or embezzled the monies. Nigerians demanded an end to this scam, not an end to subsidies (which would amount to an end to governance itself).
Ideological emptiness, colonial mentality, pathological corruption, inferiority complex, actual lack of patriotism, and functional political illiteracy, all interconnected, are the actual problems of the post-1970 Nigerian comprador or clientele bourgeoisie and their intellectual cohorts waxing all manner of apologetics in favour of imperialism; hence the mistakes upon mistakes that President Tinubu started making from the very word go, both in domestic and external policy. He should not have removed subsidy, because there was none in the first place; all he needed doing was to end the thieveries operating as subsidy, arrest and jail the perpetrators, snatch the accumulated profits from them, plough the proceeds into education, further reduce fuel costs and, by so doing, jumpstart the economy into actual growth, jobs, etc. But, they have to work by the IMF/World Bank playbook, not Nigerian aspirations.
– Prof Obasi Igwe.
Professor of Political Science, University of Nigeria Nsukka
