THE JAGANBADIT THEORY OF “CONTINUE TO SUPPLY THE MARKET…”
– Aj Dagga Tolar
Can anyone count how many times in this outgoing 2024 that they used an ATM… I can’t remember when I last used one. But come 2025 they will soon become dinosaurs… And your ATM cards sef… No longer need to do fikifaka going and coming out of an ATM anymore. They have a new permanent lover named Bank POS. Remember the Naira colour change by Buhari and Emefiele, how they greedily made us pay more to have our own money? This is the new logic of banking in the Modern era…your money is not your money… They want more of what is not theirs. So get ready to pay more. Bank POS is charging N200 for N5000. This is how the Ashewo business of exchanging and collecting money is run in our Hotel de Tinubutu Square. So we tested this theory before of “continue to supply the market and were short-change.
And all accordingly endorsed by the IMF and World Bank. The Bank of the Slave Master turned illegitimately to trading in cash crops to the Colonial master. They swapped the Berlin Conference for the Washington Consensus. Along the line dumped Keyne for Milton Friedman. Could you not remind me of Pinochet? We had our own Mobutu, Campoare, and of course our own Abacha. Their love for freedom and democracy has nothing to do with good governance for the working masses. It is a thank-you arrangement for those who swear an oath to not rock the boat and keep the colonial dependency state intact to cater to the greed of the colonial master.
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How we the slaves and the slave master now share the same heaven must be a miraculous change of heart. The Macmillan’s wind of change announcing the former colonial vampires to have repented to now want the good of the former colonies when their definition of prosperity is ever tied to coming over for a free meal on us.
But not so…we are told, that with a free market, everything is free. Yes, there is the freedom for movement of manufactured goods from the West and China to here in the market and every street corner in Africa, Latin America, and the whole of the neocolonial universe. And ours is the freedom to consume. Well, freedom is freedom now.
So this freedom’s definition of the free market says, we can produce raw materials, and those who buy can fix the price they want to buy. But no. We cannot in turn fix the prices of the goods they manufactured. Again Freedom is summoned and invoked to demonstrate how wrong it is to impose any form of price Control. Mr. President doesn’t believe in price Control. Who does it even help? Ask Buhari of 1984. The essential commodities scare all over.
The logic of supply and demand is in full force. Sale now or perish with your raw materials. There is no freedom at our end to produce or fix the price of what we produce. Don’t forget they will be shipping it back to us, and the cheaper we sell, the more considerate they will be to choose us as the ones they will sell to first. But at their FIXED prices. So they are winners at both ends. Independence. We have our flag, our own coat of arms. All na shakara. The State cannot and must not be a player in the marketplace even on behalf of so-called free citizens of the neocolonial universe. Apartheid is no longer in vogue the universe is one. The one universe of the Corporation is the new state.
Or is that the state rules on behalf of the Corporation for Greed and Profit? This is all there is to the economics of neoliberal capitalism. All ready going to war for control for dominance over land, waters, and resources up, on, and underneath the earth’s surface. Capital knows no other means than make war to take as much everything away, even the little owned by common people risking human precious life’s need for survival, to enrich the tiny numbers of the owners of Capital. Yes, the Bankers and financial speculators, owners of Big businesses in oil and gas, Industries, Construction, Electricity and Steel etc … Make them out as the example of the success story of the effective functionality and success of capitalism.
This is how the West continues to rule Africa. This is how Nigeria continues on a trajectory of underdevelopment and retrogression unable to break free from the damned cycle all courtesy of a Roguish Ruling Class mentally enslaved and schooled on the false logic of One World, One God and One Destiny. Na lie. The destiny of the slave master and we the enslaved cannot and will never be one. One eats the other.
To hear the President in his usual staccato of words say that “we just continue to supply the market, we work hard to supply the market” as the ultimate panacea to inflation, upholding the false belief in the inherent regulatory power of supply and demand is to completely miss it. Why dismiss production? The very foundation on which both supply and demand rest. When the same policies’ thrust of deregulation and devaluation is undermining the productive process and liquidating it to a zero state. To stake out the state with all of the muscle of finances it possesses out of the productive process is to weaken the means of production to a state wherein the Western and China imperialism cannot be rivaled and their dominance of the market in the neocolonial universe shall go unchallenged. The state has no business in business. Another lie. The capitalist state is directly involved in business but on behalf of Private Capital. All of its policies are interventions in business are geared in this very direction.
Anarchy and madness are constant features of the market, and they act for only one interest and on the side of greed for profit and more super profit. But Mr. President’s pretense to be tough sees him saying “I have no regrets removing petrol subsidy,” but this is a mere smokescreen. From N167 now N1000+ even with a Dangote Refinery. Not an effort since 1986 to build a new Refinery on the strength of the wealth of the country.
From N450+ to a dollar in the black market pre-May 29, 2023 to N1500+ official price. This is underdevelopment par excellence. From we have saved trillions to unending loans with padded budgets. Tax reforms aimed at increasing Taxes and VAT to milk the lot of commoners to the bone the more.
The chain reaction of this continuous ruineous neoliberal policies on the lives of the working masses is a tale of unending woes. Already brewing unending curses that the police now say is a crime to abuse any public official. Buhari’s decree Number 4 of 1984 all over again, except that it was not Buhari, who left us with a passing shot that we were going to miss him.
AJ Dagga Tolar, is a writer and good governance advocate resident in Lagos.