In 279 BC, King Pyrrhus of Epirus found himself at war with the mighty Roman Empire at the Battle of Asculum. Following the bitterly fought battle in which both sides suffered heavy casualties in a narrow victory for the Epirote army, Pyrrhus reportedly lamented that his victory was to no effect. While he had decimated his forces in defeating the Romans, they were able to leverage their fearsome recruitment and supply networks to regroup quickly, as good as new. In the impending battle with this new group, his forces would stand no chance.
The historian Plutarch recorded his famous words as “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined!” From this quote and its surrounding situation came the term “Pyrrhic victory,” which refers to a victory that comes at such a great cost as to render it ultimately pointless. One very important modern day example of a Pyrrhic victory is what is playing out presently in Nigeria’s political and economic arena. The successful reinsertion of Nigeria’s military-coup establishment into power in 2015 was a victory whose ongoing cost will ultimately render it utterly pointless.
First the crisis…
Already, Nigeria is at the point where it is following the Yugoslavian disaster-economics template to a T, complete with kamikaze money printing to fund recurrent budget deficits, capital controls to steal citizens’ forex savings, and a currency that has lost already 50 percent of its value in just 6 years. Interestingly, Nigeria is also closely tracking the Yugoslavian experience in the political space, with the central government increasingly unable to maintain its legitimacy beyond brute force, and a multiplicity of separatist sentiments and movements.
A short thread using the story of Yugoslavia to explain the suicide economics that is printing huge amounts of unbacked money to fund government budgets. pic.twitter.com/RXrvh7evU5
— David Hundeyin (@DavidHundeyin) April 11, 2021
The military-coup establishment won its much-desired election victory in 2015 and finally achieved the Babangida and Abacha dream of transitioning itself into a pseudo-military dictatorship wearing civilian clothes. However, like all Pyrrhic victories, the cost of this win was not properly calculated, or perhaps it was and the people concerned simply did not care. In Nigeria, it is equally likely to be either of the two. First was the economic cost – the naira and dollar cost of running Nigeria using discredited tactics and outdated paradigms from the 20th century.
Nigeria is also closely tracking the Yugoslavian experience in the political space, with the central government increasingly unable to maintain its legitimacy
Nigeria’s public finances have never truly recovered from the Buhari government’s 2016 decision to propose the largest budget in the country’s history at a time of significant income shortfalls. When a proposal for a $30bn loan did not fly in 2016, the military-coup establishment turned to its other favourite source of quick and unaccountable money – quantitative easing. While Governor Godwin Obaseki’s comments about the FG printing N50bn-N60bn to make up the last FAAC distribution made headlines and caused panic on social media, this is not in fact a new thing.
A US dollar now exchanges for close to N500 on the parallel market as the net effect of excess naira in circulation without increased foreign earnings is felt. For now, the naira’s rate of inflation is still classified as galloping inflation, which is terrible but not unsurvivable. This will not hold out for another 4 years before collapsing into a hyperinflation nightmare if foreign earnings do not significantly jump. And then there is the political cost of the military-coup establishment’s Pyrrhic victory.
In 2015, Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB were just Nairaland fodder, and not at all influential outside of that little social media space. Since Buhari’s Pyrrhic victory, not only has IPOB grown into a genuine political force with an armed wing, but the southwest of Nigeria has also birthed its own separatist movement and its own ethnic champion, Sunday Igboho. Almost every region in the country now has its own paramilitary “security outfit” which is almost exactly what happened in the leadup to the Balkan Wars. Buhari and his small ethno religious interest group have won the victory, but they – and Nigeria – will overwhelmingly lose the war against economics and basic human political sociology.
Then the opportunity
Amidst all our doomsday scenarios and scary numbers, we must however, remember that the flipside to any period of great upheaval is the ability to significantly reinvent and reform the status quo. As I mentioned recently in this column, the Nigerian state’s diminishing ability to fund itself presents a window of opportunity to fundamentally redraw the metaphorical lines in the political sand that define Nigeria’s corporate existence. For example, if by the time this administration leaves office, Nigeria finally defaults and faces its Argentina or Yugoslavia moment, that is exactly the best moment to achieve significant political change.
Using the idea that entire decades pass with nothing happening, and then decades happen in some weeks, those of us who are active in the political space should keep our eyes peeled for the exact moment when the gigantic federal government in Abuja finally buckles under its own weight and ceases to exert genuine influence. Such a moment could be when Abuja loses the ability to pay its approximately 300,000 men with guns around the country, or when it loses their trust in its medium of payment (naira).
Seizing that moment will mean pushing through all the political changes that Nigeria has been crying out for over the past few decades – a new constitution that is agreed on by Nigerians, not by a select group of soldiers, fiscal federalism, dismantling of the centralised Nigeria Police Force, total restructuring of the armed forces and change of their operational doctrine from regime protection to defending the constitution, I can go on and on. We know what the issues are and there is no shortage of reading material to flog that particular dead horse.
The point is, the self-inflicted impending apocalypse is not necessarily bad news for Nigeria. In fact it could be very good news indeed, depending on how it is handled when it happens. As long as we know what we are doing when it happens, we could very well end up disrupting the military-coup establishment out of power once and for all. Or we could woefully mishandle it and fall into a Somalia-style Hobbesian state.
.It could go either way, but we have to at least try.
