“Let them eat cake” is the most famous or infamous, depending on the persuasion, a quote attributed to Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution. As the story goes, it was her response upon being told that her starving peasant subjects had no bread.
The French Revolution was caused by a multitude of grievances with bread shortages providing the perfect storm that brought the anger and frustration of the people to the tipping point. And when Marie-Antoinette made the statement either out of arrogance or ignorance being out of touch with the people, there was only one outcome.
Bread was their staple food while cake the queen referred to was considered more exotic and less affordable. Food has played a prominent role in both the history and trajectory of several of the world’s most famous events. The import of Marie-Antoinette’s faux pas is like asking Nigerians who can hardly afford rice to go for fried rice with all its expensive condiments.
There is a lot of Marie-Antoinette in Godswill Akpabio, the flamboyant and loquacious President of the Senate and former two-term governor of oil-rich Akwa Ibom State. As the multiple increases in the pump price of petrol triggered an astronomical rise in transportation costs while Nigerians are yet to come to terms with the insane increase in food price, Akpabio’s reaction and counsel for Nigerians is that they should stop using multiple cars by maintaining only “one or two cars”.
To the number three citizen, many Nigerians maintain a fleet of cars as he does albeit at state expense. If there is an appropriate demonstration that the Bola Tinubu administration and its principal operatives are detached and out of touch with the people, Akpabio typifies it. At the peak of the ##EndBadGovernance protests, Akpabio derided the people after complaining of hunger and hardship. While many Nigerians are now multiple-dimensionally poor, he saw himself as someone who should not be distracted by such tales. While others complained of hardship, he told his followers they should concentrate on ‘chopping’.
The recent increase in petrol prices by the state-owned oil trading company, NNPCL, provided a fresh platform for Akpabio to rub it on Nigerians. He cannot understand why they are complaining. “I haven’t assessed what is happening in terms of pump price increase, but it’s not a pump price increase, it’s deregulation. “If you are taking away the consumer subsidy and then you want people to pay for the actual price of what we consume, it means if you have five cars you will now use one or two”, Akpabio said while addressing journalists after the inauguration of a remodeled press centre in the National Assembly complex. And he assured that federal lawmakers would “step in only if needed.”
Of course, such statements usually end with the illusory assurance that the hard times are short-lived as soon as the reforms the Tinubu administration implements will usher prosperity to the people.
In the era of the French Revolution, bread also played a larger, more important role in national stability. It was an important task of the king to ensure its quality, safety, availability and affordability.
Akpabio sounds very much like Marie Antoinette. When the French people were rioting over the scarcity of bread, she wondered why they should not go for cake if the usual staple food had become scarce, and expensive. It did not matter to her that the people never aspired to eat cake because they were exotic, costly and the exclusive preserve of royalty and the nobles. Our number three citizen could not process the vast implications of the astronomical rise in the price of petrol on the people. All he could think of was that as he maintained a long convoy of Sport Utility Vehicles, so did other Nigerians. While he could sustain his convoy, others should reduce theirs to “one or two cars” only.
As Akpabio, top government officials are so ensconced with the luxury of life at public expense that they sound condescending when they even acknowledge that citizens face harrowing times. The common refrain of the officials is that the hardship is temporary, and the complaint is something they do not understand. Asked about the reforms and the road map to their actualisation, they offer the fabled and meaningless statement that President Tinubu is committed to turning around the economy. I have not heard anyone involved in the management of the economy explain how the ‘reform’ of increasing the price of petrol with its undoubted ripple effect on the economy, floating of the naira in an import-oriented economy, astronomical increase in taxes and policies that are crippling the real sector will engineer growth.
Marie Antoinette’s infamous statement was only the climax on the eve of the revolution. The signs had been there for up to 10 years with riots in various regions while King Louis XVI fiddled and the titled class ignored the ferocious hardship the French people faced.
Akpabio thinks our problem is how to fuel his imaginary multiple cars in our carriages. A bag of 50kg rice has now crossed the N100,000 threshold while the minimum wage is yet to be implemented more than three months after the administration’s apologists celebrated it as unprecedented goodwill from Tinubu.
It was bread in France. It is about rice in Nigeria where many Marie Antoinette control government machinery.
Pius Mordi, a journalist writes from Asaba
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