I grew up to know Nigeria as a nation of regulations, due process, ease of doing business, austerity measures, structural adjustment program, removal and reinstatement of fuel subsidy, but I have observed that such regulations are always directed at the citizens, without the political class, its political and social architects and cronies enumerating their roles and leading by example.

I have been following the conversation on the ease of doing business, but I am yet to come across a conversation on the ease of doing governance. I wonder why in the social, economic, and political calculation and priority of the Nigerian political elites, they do not understand this simple arithmetic that there is no such thing as the ease of doing business, where there are no concrete and patriotic efforts directed at the ease of doing governance. Does the political class not know that the superstructure of the ease of doing business rests and derives its elixir from the structure of a healthy economy?

I think it is time for us to understand that the ease of doing business does not only answer to the reenactment of law but in the reengineering of the social, political, and economic construct upon which Nigeria rests.

By the way, when we talk about ease of doing business, which business and whose business? Is it the business of the political elites and their conspirators, aimed at helping them to be richer at the expense of the Nigerian state and the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the hoi polloi?

‘The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), in a report about poverty and inequality from September 2018 to October 2019, said 40 percent of people in the continent’s most populous country lived below its poverty line of 137,430 naira ($381.75) a year. It said that represents 82.9 million people,’ reports Aljazeera.

Here is the food for thought, how many of these Nigerians does this ‘ease-of-doing-business’ being legislated plan to bring out of abject poverty?

How does a nation globally adjudged to be making very little progress in eradicating poverty by mouthing the strange song of misplaced priority, known as ease of doing business?

In his 2018 report for Quartz Africa, Yomi Kazeem noted, ‘in the second-ever Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) index compiled by Development Finance International (DFI) and Oxfam, Nigeria placed bottom in a ranking of 157 nations. The CRI Index ranks the commitment of national governments to reducing the gap between rich and poor citizens by measuring three factors considered “critical” to reducing the gap: social spending, tax policies, and labor rights. Nigeria ranked bottom of the index for the second consecutive year.’

I think what Nigerian people need now is the ease of doing life or ease of existence, only achievable by the citizenry holding the political class accountable to the people and not by brandishing a law before the people in a nation which by all obvious socio-economic and political indications is just a few miles away from the state of nature, where life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’ according to Thomas Hobbs.