By Kunle Oyatomi
There’s this oft-stated legend about two men viewing a glass of water filled halfway. Asked what he or she sees, one says the cup is half empty. Sociologists describe them as pessimists, who would always have a negative outlook to life because they refuse to acknowledge other aspects of the scene. They believe that they have been permanently conditioned by a negativity that would guide them in the present and throughout life.
However, when you ask the other person about what he or she makes of they make of the glass, they would say it is half full. According to the watchers, this class of people are optimists, who look on the bright side of life. Such people are said to have the last laugh in a contest. Remember the saying, He who laughs last, laughs best. What does this mean? It has a simple meaning: ‘Even if someone is not successful now, now he or she will succeed or be a winner in the end.’
Now, I put President Bola Tinubu and his administration in the class of the optimist whose reading of the glass with mid-level content insists that the cup is half-full, not half-empty. The analysis here is that, you’re expecting the glass to maintain a progression that will eventually admit more water to make the glass full. That’s the optimist.
But you can’t say the same about the pessimist. When he says the vessel is half-empty, he’s in effect making a negative prophecy: the water level in the cup will still go down, and finally drain off, and make the cup completely empty. That is the way of pessimists. Like the sailors in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, their cry is, ‘’ Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any to drink.’’
Today also in Nigeria, there is an air of despair. There are protests everywhere, north, south west and east. Even in such conservative northern states as Niger, there are protests. Citizens are being ravaged by hunger, misery, poverty, defiant hyper-inflation, loss of jobs, inability to meet such basic needs as paying school fees, food shortages, unemployment, closure of workplaces etc. All these have coupled with cases of insecurity like banditry, assassinations, murderous hostage-taking kidnappings, armed robberies, violent sackings of communities etc. are all the order of the day under a government which is less than a year old in office. These are frightening omens capable of upsetting the most hopeful optimists, while creating communities of pessimists.
But the point to add is that these challenges have not come upon us overnight. They are the consequences of either past negligence to boldly tame them or lack of political will power solve the problems permanently.
The choice before Tinubu therefore is to follow the beaten track of going soft with the challenges and allow them to grow bigger and be inherited by the future. He is rejecting this option and insisting that we must deal with them once and for all to save the coming generations the heartaches of the present. We must be careful not to throw about snide remarks and commentary to discourage the efforts of President Tinubu and his kteam. The administration’s efforts are already, for instance, yielding positive results with regard to the stress on the Naira, our national currency. In mid-February, the Central Bank Governor, Olayemi Cardoso, spoke of the inflow of a whopping $1.8b into the system. Cardoso says this is the outcome of Tinubu’s reforms. He declared: ‘’…With the policy reforms being implemented by the federal government, there is light at the end of the tunnel.’’
That such a huge foreign sum is being injected into our economy is evidence of the trust credible global investors have in the government’s policy inclinations. Hear Cardoso again: ‘’As long as we can sustain a positive trajectory, I am confident that we get out of this (distressing times) and the foreign exchange market will begin to moderate itself.’’
Let’s remember that all these are meant to actualize the vision of making Nigeria a producing nation, rather than what we are at the moment, a consuming nation of foreign goods and services.
This is the appetite that has led to a weakened Naira and a loss in local production. That is what should be first tackled, namely returning to industry that builds the infrastructure for indigenous enterprise, manpower and consumption. You can’t have a strong economic footing without these components of growth and development. You can’t compete in the international space without them, regardless of your size or enormous resources. You need tough policy measures to make them profitable to the citizens.
I don’t Tinubu is bereft of the empathy virtue not to be aware of the hardships his compatriots are passing through. I think we should sympathize with as the Hercules upon whose shoulders the lot has fallen to carry the burden.
The optimist that he is, Tinubu isn’t seeing our cup of prospects, progress and prosperity as half-empty, but half-full, with more water to stream in for the vessel to be full for full economic recovery.
...Barrister Kunle Oyatomi, a former editor of the Sunday Vanguard Newspaper and Publicity Secretary of the Osun State Chapter of the APC, is a member of the Independent Media and Policy Initiative, IMPI. NNL.
