The Nation Newspaper

Category: Ropo Sekoni

  • Lessons, as corruption fights back

    The complaints about Buhari’s travels; his slowness to take action; his unusual reticence about issues that require proper verification; his attempts to take loans to fund the 2016 budget; etc., may be acting like the character of Achebe’s fiction who finds refuge in cynicism, when what is needed is forthrightness 

    The people had become even more cynical than their leaders and were apathetic into the bargain….Let them eat, ‘was the people’s opinion…It may be your turn to eat tomorrow.—Chinua Achebe in A Man of the People

    Serious-minded people would have to be foolhardy or over sanguine to expect corruption not to fight back with vigour in a country that has luxuriated in venality for decades. There was no time to learn lessons from General Buhari’s war against corruption thirty years ago: he was quickly removed from the scene before he could gather his weapons to prosecute the war.  Now as a civilian president, who has sworn to make the fight against corruption the core of his manifesto, he and official and unofficial members of his army against corruption should start learning lessons from the ongoing war to protect the country’s commonwealth.

    One year is not too short for political officers, technocrats, and party leaders who believe that corruption is inimical to the progress of the society to know that President Buhari cannot fight this big war by himself. Some cynics are already saying that Buhari is a one-man army against corruption. It was understandable to attempt to fight corruption with one loyal assistant that Tunde Idiagbon was in 1984 under a military system. In a democratic system, the political and social environment allows for plural voices including the voice of those the regime of change has set out to discipline: venal men and women in political and bureaucratic power.

    Clearly, the forces against the war on corruption are strong and well organised to deflect attention from the importance of such war or pooh-pooh the efforts that go into the various battles so far. Many people calling for speed on the economic front are forgetting why the economy is in its current parlous state: looting of the treasury by those charged to protect it in the past. Those who use social media to give President Buhari such appellations as Baba Go-Slow, Deaf and Dumb, Johnnie Walker, etc., are more interested in distracting him from the real problem that had caused all the economic problems they want Buhari to solve in a jiffy. Almost invariably, most of such critics of Buhari speak on behalf of: a few people that may have looted the nation’s purse for personal use or to create overseas savings for their children. It is reassuring that Mr. President has chosen to ignore those critics; otherwise, he would not be able to achieve anything about fighting corruption, an area that is certain to make many politicians and civil servants who have benefited from the governance style of the past uncomfortable.

    Contrary to popular expectation in a government dominated by members of the party of change, there seem to be members of the ruling party who are ready to shout down those bent on expunging corruption from the country’s public service. Otherwise, the majority in both houses of the National Assembly should have created a better working condition for the president’s fight against enemies of the state who have pretended for long to be servants of the state.

    Ironically, there are ordinary citizens, like the ones captured in Achebe’s A Man of the People. In a fictive counterpart of Nigeria mired in political and bureaucratic corruption in its infancy in the 1960s, Achebe’s narrator, cautioned those calling for morality in public service: “Let them eat…It may be your turn to eat tomorrow.” The complaints about Buhari’s travels; his slowness to take action; his unusual reticence about issues that require proper verification; his attempts to take loans to fund the 2016 budget; etc., may be acting like the character of Achebe’s fiction who finds refuge in cynicism, when what is needed is forthrightness. The subtext to many of the complaints being heard about Buhari, including those from the main opposition party reads more like finding ways to demonise the main man behind the war against corruption.

    Despite efforts by opposition members and some misguided ruling party members to make the fight against corruption look like overkill, the president and agents of change in his ruling party should listen to public opinion on the imperative to wage the war against decades of bad governance that has brought the country to its knees to the point of having to look for loans to repair its economy. Citizens are getting the impression that the government is more interested in catching just agents of stupendous corruption. Without doubt, identifying, prosecuting, and punishing big men and women who, to borrow Achebe’s phrase in A Man of the People, “have stolen enough for the owner not to notice” will help to serve as deterrence to would-be corrupt men and women in our public service. But the war on corruption needs to be taken to areas where the amount looted may not be humongous enough to be given names with the suffix of gate, such as Dasukigate, Badehgate, Amosugate, Oronsayegate, etc.

    For example, in what looks like a minor crime: the existence of ghost workers, citizens need to be reassured that the mania of having ghosts at every level of government is given the attention it deserves. Discovering existence of ghost workers is not new in the polity. Every government since the return to civil rule had found ghosts in our MDAs and had announced the removal of such ghosts from the payroll. No government has been able to give the names of those involved in hiring and paying ghosts. It is remarkable that the new minister of finance has not wasted time in dealing with this menace. But citizens need to be assured that those responsible for hiring ghost workers, paying them, and even giving them tenure-track appointments are identified by name and position. It may not be possible to identify the ghosts themselves (since ghosts have no identity), but it should not be hard for the current government to identify those who receive the salaries paid into the bank accounts of ghosts and those who assisted in opening checking or saving accounts for ghosts and paying money into such accounts. Once identified, such people should be made to return the money paid into such illegal accounts, before arraigning them in what may be an interminable court process.

    Anti-corruption agents in all MDAs and federal institutions should pay attention to illegal use of public funds. I sent my assistant to buy me some roasted plantain a few days ago. The paper in which the Booli was wrapped contained information that should be of interest to those in the ruling party who are serious about stemming or ending corruption in public life. The wrapping paper contained important information about a federal college of education in the Southwest. It reads like minutes of the council of the college in question. The college had bought bags of rice at Christmas time many years ago for local chiefs, ranging from the Kabiyesi of the town to major and minor chiefs. Some of the funds given to a federal college of education to improve teaching and learning had been used to buy bags of rice for traditional chiefs to eat. If this culture exists (as it must) in other tertiary institutions owned by federal and state governments, resources that could have been used to expand the frontier of knowledge in the country must be used habitually to maintain the stomach infrastructure of parasites in different parts of the country.

    Citizens should not leave the fight against corruption to President Buhari and his supporters. It is not just a Buhari/APC war; it is the war of men and women of conscience in our society. More than anything else, it is the stridency of public opinion that can assist the fight against corruption in the land. Like the war against Boko Haram’s terrorists, intelligence is of the essence in the war against thieves of state.

  • Government and citizen relations: FRSC’s speed limiter

    Government and citizen relations: FRSC’s speed limiter

    That one of the functions of FRSC is to prevent or reduce accidents by enforcing speed limits does not make it the responsibility of citizens to buy devices to limit speed

    In general, the relationship between those in charge of governing the country at all levels and the citizens they govern appears to avoid the principle of social or political contract. Complying with the principle of democracy that expects citizens to yield their power to govern themselves to representatives and in the process expect those authorised by elections to govern the society to provide public order and welfare of citizens hardly lasts beyond election time in our country, especially in years before the era of change. Nowhere is the condescending attitude of government to citizens more evident in recent times than in the decision of Federal Road Safety Commission to impose purchase of speed limiter on citizens.

    Road safety touches everyone not just drivers of vehicles. And precisely because it affects everybody, there is no one single policy to cover it. Instead, the common sense approach is to look for a collection of means and policies which, while aimed at different groups, will together contribute to the overall goal of accident prevention on our roads. Sadly, speed delimiter is not one of them. There are numerous examples, including those of best practices across the world that Federal Road Safety Commission and other promoters of speed delimiters can copy or borrow.

    The history of FRSC is too well-known to be repeated here. One of the world’s most fertile minds, Wole Soyinka, encouraged the government of Babangida to support an agency capable of protecting road users from road abusers. The agency in its infancy was to provide services that the regular police force could not provide because of its own technological and moral deficit. At that time, as now, police on the highways created roadblocks to extort money from drivers in the name of checking their ‘road particulars.’ Under the military, the FRSC grew phenomenally to the point of becoming a major Internally Generated Revenue agency during the last sixteen years of post-military rule. First, under the guise of enhancing the unity of the country, it took over functions that belong to local governments in most federal democracies: issuance of driver’s licence, vehicle registration, and schools certified to issue certificates of completion of traffic rules and regulations course to applicants for driver’s licence.

    The latest of FRSC’s commercial ingenuity is the introduction of speed limiters that all vehicle owners must purchase to make it compulsory for them to drive within speed limit. The reasoning behind this new policy is rooted in the supposed empowerment of the commission by the National Road Transportation Regulation (NRTR) 2012, enacted to replace the FRSC Act of 2007. Without doubt, citizens and the media must have been asleep when this regulation was enacted. In addition, lawmakers sent to the National Assembly to represent the interests of voters must have failed to brief their constituencies adequately on such an important regulation. But that a law is already on the book does not mean that it can be used to embarrass citizens without just cause.

    The law that passes the responsibility of government to citizens and enjoins citizens to spend money to provide a service that their tax money was designed to provide needs to be reviewed. This regulation may be entrepreneurially wise, especially in view of FRSC’s boast that, if properly enforced, it can bring about N1 billion to the agency in the first instance. But in terms of democratic culture, it is a decision loaded against citizens who are being asked to pay for public order twice, through tax and through purchase of speed limiter.

    That one of the functions of FRSC is to prevent or reduce accidents by enforcing speed limits does not make it the responsibility of citizens to buy devices to limit speed. What is required of citizens in the context of social contract is for citizens to act as socially responsible members of the society by driving in compliance with the posted speed limit. Such discipline is acquired through civic education and proper training of aspiring drivers in road etiquette and proficiency in driving. On the other hand, it is the duty of FRSC to first provide visible speed limit signs along the roads and to enforce speed limit by taking other steps that societies that manufacture speed limiting-devices do to ensure road safety. In the first place, speed limiting devices do not prevent cars from moving beyond certain specified limits. If speed limiter works like magic, it will perhaps be more cost effective for FRSC to insist that vehicles that come to this country are built by manufacturers with engines that cannot go beyond a specified speed limit. Manufacturers of such devices recognise that speed limits vary from one neighbourhood to the other.  For example, where the speed limit is 25 kilometres, a vehicle that is set not to go beyond 100 kilometres can still do 75 kilometres in a 25 kilometre zone, if human discretion is disregarded, as it seems to have been done by fanatics of speed limiters in FRSC.

    Secondly, FRSC acts in a way to make citizens suspect that the desire to generate revenue is more important than investing in law enforcement by an agency charged with providing public order. If speed limiter is a magic wand, why would a government agency insist that there is a particular kind of such device that vehicle owners must buy? If different cars can be driven in the country, shouldn’t it be expected that speed limiters manufactured by various companies in different parts of the world can equally provide efficient service, like the vehicles imported to the country from all corners of the globe? What is the reason for FRSC’s insistence on a particular brand of speed limiter? Such insistence disrespects citizens’ right to choose the goods they want to spend their hard-earned money on.

    Thirdly, by insisting on the use of speed limiter to enforce speed limit laws, FRSC acts as if it wants to pass the buck. In other countries, law enforcement agencies procure the gadgets they need for making citizens obey traffic regulations. Speed limit signs are provided at strategic places for citizens to see. Radars are deployed to check drivers that exceed speed limit; traffic safety officers are deployed to stop such drivers and slap them with traffic violation fines that they are compelled to pay. Proper vehicle worthiness regulations are enforced by properly equipped agencies. In terms of cost effectiveness, one radar can identify millions of road users while each speed limiter functions only in respect of the vehicle that carries it. It may be better for the government to equip FRSC adequately to enforce speed limits without over stretching the budget of citizens in a country where each citizen is compelled to act as provider of municipal service—from providing electricity through generators to providing water through boreholes and providing maternity service to pregnant women through praying centres.

    As we enter the second year in the regime of change, the government needs to adopt a new orientation that mandates government ministries, departments, and agencies to imbibe the culture of social contract, in preference to pretending, as FRSC does, to have a good public order enforcement system. The basis of any democratic constitution is belief by citizens and their representatives in the principle of social contract; delegation of power by citizens to politicians through voting and support of the government through tax in exchange for provision of security, public order, and policies that enhance citizens’ welfare.

  • Welcoming Buhari’s social protection initiative

    Welcoming Buhari’s social protection initiative

    The new social assistance programme will also enrich social contract between the state and the citizenry and create a culture of accountability and trust between governments and citizens

    Nigeria must put the welfare of its citizens at the core of its development policy—a people-centered development…It is time that we followed the examples of Brazil and India by introducing a system of direct social security payments to the poor by creating a phased social Insurance Scheme to assist certain groups in the population with social welfare payments through a phased programme, starting with young people under 30 and unemployed and senior citizens over 70.—APC 2015 Manifesto

    With the announcement of the legislature’s approval of the 2016 budget which, despite rumours to the contrary, includes the 500 billion provision for social assistance to vulnerable citizens, millions of citizens are likely to be excited about welcoming the beginning of a comprehensive welfare state under a government that campaigned on the manifesto of change. It is also salutary that President Buhari has decided to stick to his campaign promise, despite the parlous state of the economy and the purse of the nation. The commencement of this kind of change in government-citizen relations occurs at an appropriate time for citizens and pressure groups to add their voices to the development of a multi-phase social protection programme.

    Social security is a major policy and if given a good chance to develop, it will eliminate the pains arising from destitution for citizens in our society. The new social assistance programme will also enrich social contract between the state and the citizenry and create a culture of accountability and trust between governments and citizens. While the citizens must be ready to adjust to changes that are dictated by teething problems in the implementation of this major milestone, apart from introduction of free education in the 1950s, the government ought to study existing practices in the country and other parts of the world to see what may work best for the Nigerian context, without confusing the Buhari/APC philosophy of inevitability of a citizen-centred polity with problems of process/delivery of free meals in school in a country noticeably hobbled by transportation challenges.

    The experience of Osun and Kaduna states come to mind as models to improve upon by those charged with implementation of a national free school meals policy. As governors Aregbesola and El Rufai have said, the free school meals scheme is a win-win policy. It encourages children to come to school; encourages farmers and others in the food chain to stay in business; and provides jobs for caterers, mostly women at a time that gender parity in the country is starkly behind that of many countries in the West African region.

    This is a policy that requires involvement of professional home economists and nutritionists at all times. For example, the experience of Kaduna State regarding school children disappearing immediately after their meals, thus subverting the goal of the programme as a conditional social assistance to improve and increase literacy must be avoided. Schools must provide drinking water with meals, rather than expecting parents to send water to school with their children. Apart from relying on local food items, children must be made to see the programme as an opportunity to make them appreciate principles and practice of good nutrition and healthy eating. This programme offers a good opportunity for children to drink more local juice and milk and eat more local vegetables than starch and sugared soft drinks for healthy physical growth and mental development.

    By choosing to start social assistance for the young and unemployed at a time that the nation’s economy is not buoyant, President Buhari has made a courageous effort to end the culture of excuses that made leaders in the past dismiss pressure from citizens for social assistance initiative on the ground that the country lacked resources, even in the years of oil boom. Starting this programme at a time that the country is being forced to move from parasitism to productivity is a very courageous thing to do, to reduce excruciating poverty in the land. It is also remarkable that the presidency has chosen to make the policy of cash payment to the unemployed conditional: tying cash transfers to participation in agricultural skills acquisition for young beneficiaries. This policy option, which many advanced countries are still struggling to adopt, will send the right signal to citizens that the country has no plan to nurture citizens who lack  achievement orientation or sense of personal responsibility for their lives.

    For the programme of cash payment to the most vulnerable citizens, it is important that adequate preparation is made to ensure that potential beneficiaries are properly screened. There is no better time than now for the government to establish a fool-proof national identification system. Eligibility criteria ought to include provision of verifiable residential address for each applicant, family income profile, and registration with agricultural skills centres in their state of residence. Both federal and state governments must be committed to providing up-to-date population count and full integration of data systems, to avoid double or triple dipping.

    It is reassuring that President Buhari decided that the central government will collaborate with states in the provision of free school meals and conditional social security payment to citizens. The experience of matching funds under the Universal Basic Education Scheme should tell us what to avoid in the new scheme. Since the federal government receives a larger share than other levels of governments, it should carry up to 75% of the budget for both programmes. But no state should be allowed to avoid requesting for federal funds on the ground that it is unable to provide its counterpart funding, as it happened several times under Jonathan. Local governments should be involved in the implementation of this policy, especially in the area of means testing of candidates. Leaving decision of who is eligible for cash payment solely to bureaucrats in Abuja is fraught with more danger than involving subnational units to screen individuals at the grassroots level. In addition, the federal government must deploy auditors regularly to see that the money provided to states for free school meals is being spent according to the wishes of the government. Our country already has a bad reputation for giving pension payments to ghosts.

    Almost at the risk of sounding hyperbolic about a programme in its infancy, beginning a nation-wide free school meals and monthly social assistance payment to very poor unemployed citizens represents an effort by the APC federal government to move the country from a plutocracy fuelled by elite kleptocracy to a pro-equality and anti-poverty democratic state. This policy is not one that should be left as executive action; it needs to become a constitutional matter, if it is to be a part of the country’s political culture beyond the present administration.

    Furthermore, Buhari’s social assistance scheme is similar in many ways to the National Health Service in the United Kingdom and the Social Security Administration in the United States of America. Nigeria’s experiment should not be left in the hands of the traditional civil service. This service ought to be housed in an agency that is saddled with no function other than promoting, protecting, and delivering a service that sets out to initiate a citizen-centred government in a political system that has been known for relishing giving excuses to discourage citizens to get any benefit from the government. An agency devoted to managing social assistance programmes in a country of about 200 million people should be driven by data powered by cutting-edge Information Technology infrastructure, and driven by IT-savvy public servants, rather than in the hands of technophobic or technology-averse bureaucrats.

  • Nasir el Rufai and secularity of the Nigerian-State

    Nasir el Rufai and secularity of the Nigerian-State

    El Rufai needs to be supported for plucking the courage to strengthen the principle of democratic citizenship in a multi-religious society, without sacrificing citizens’ right to promote the metaphysics that brings meaning to their private lives.

    The principle of separation of Church/Mosque which springs from the supposed secularity of the Nigerian constitution would be severely battered if this bill is pursued in the way it is.—Caritas International in Nigeria.

    Nasir el Rufai’s Executive Bill toward a law to replace the Kaduna State Religious Preaching Decree of 1984 is already raising tension in Kaduna State, but the noise that birthed the tension is more against rights of citizens in a republic than it is in favour of itinerant evangelisers of Islamic and Christian scriptures who want total freedom to bombard incessantly believers and non-believers with high unbearable noise volume.

    Of all the many progressive policies of el Rufai since he became governor: policy on free and compulsory primary education; unconditional release of allocations to local governments from joint state/local government account to enable local governments perform their statutory duties; and introduction of free meals in over 4,000 primary schools for over 1 million pupils, none has given him so much negative publicity as his proposed bill to regulate practice of religion in public space. In his bill to replace a 1984 military decree with a democratically enacted law, the governor seems to have attracted more criticism than his good intentions for the security, peace, and stability of Kaduna State in particular and by extension of the country in general deserves.

    Ironically, both spokespersons for Islam and Christianity in the state have been calling el Rufai names that include emperor and aspiring dictator, for making attempt to provide a non-threatening and safe public space for all citizens, a duty that is given to him and other governors and the president by the 1999 Constitution. In political parlance, there are two major types of states in the world: theocratic and secular. In a theocracy, there is a clear integration of political and religious organisation of life in the state. Two examples are The Vatican and Saudi Arabia. Secularism refers to a state in which the country’s political culture is neutral to political preferences of individual citizens. Examples can be found in the United States of America and Turkey. All other systems are variants of one or the other. Nigeria’s concept of multi-religious society is one of such hybrids. But existence of multiple faiths in a country does not automatically make it a theocracy.

    To all intents and purposes, Nigeria is viewed by the 1999 Constitution as a secular republic even though it may be a multi-religious society. In chapter IV of the constitution on Fundamental Human Rights, Sec38 (1) says: “Every person shall be entitled to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom (either alone or in community with others, and in public or in private) to manifest and propagate his religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance. But Sec45(1) of the same chapter says: “Nothing in sections 37, 38, 39 40 and 41 of this Constitution shall invalidate any law that is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society in the interest of defence, public safety, public order, public morality or public health or for the purpose of protecting the rights and freedom of other persons.”

    While Sec 38(1) of the constitution recognizes the importance of religion in the Nigerian society, the Sec 45(1) recognises the right of the state to make laws to protect public space for citizens to thrive, regardless of their religious affiliation. The current constitution has, with combination of these two sections, avoided much of what some religious leaders call tension, that is fostered by elRufai’s bill. Like the United States of America, Nigeria starts all its formal state and official functions with the anthem, rather than with reciting the Bible or the Koran, in order to proclaim symbolically the separation of Church/Mosque and the State. Even where states have Sharia law, the country’s constitution remains superior to customary and religious law.

    Instead of praising el Rufai for his courage to promote order in Kaduna’s public space, the governor is being chastised by both Christians and Muslims for attempting to carry out his constitutional duty to make public space safe for all citizens regardless of the God they worship or how they worship him or her. The thrust of the criticism is not to improve the content of the bill but to push for its withdrawal. More specifically, el Rufai’s bill intends to achieve the following: restrict the playing of loud religious messages to the following places: inside one’s house; inside entrance porch; inside the Church; inside the Mosque; and any other designated place of worship and playing of loud messages that project beyond designated places beyond 8 p.m. It also requires that preachers be registered along with their churches or mosques and assigns statutory functions to an Inter-faith committee.

    Admittedly, requiring that preachers register after the organisations they work have been registered is superfluous. Faith institutions should have the freedom to appoint their functionaries without having to be slowed down by red tapes. Similarly, it does not make sense to have a cut-off of 8 p.m. for loud messages without indicating when such messages can start, knowing that they often start at 4 a.m. in many places across the state. In addition, the bill’s establishment of an Inter-faith committee instead of a Charity Commission that can regulate practice of faith in the public domain leaves too much of an important decision in the hands of a non-statutory body. It is better to assign such functions to a government agency that is guided by democratic rules in the performance of its functions, rather than by religious precepts and protocols. Apart from these, nothing else in this bill should make Muslims and Christians unhappy. The bill contains nothing that inhibits the practice of any of the so-called two major religions. On the contrary, it is subscribers to other religions in a multi-religious society, such as believers in traditional African religions, believers in Hindu, Buddha, Shinto, Orunmila, etc., that should cry foul about a legislation that has ignored or marginalised them.

    Decision making about public order in a non-theocratic state is starkly different from what obtains in private decision making. It is illogical to make laws about public space in a multi-religious society as if public space is synonymous with private space. Citizenship of a multi-religious country is what makes all persons in such society co-owners of public space. In a polity, as distinct from private spaces within it, public domain does not belong to any individual or group of individuals. It is a space that belongs to people of all religious views including atheists and agnostics, and there are many of such people in Kaduna State.

    While pastors are the professionals that manage private lives of citizens, it is politicians in a democracy that are mandated to manage the public conduct of citizens of all religious persuasions. In a country that has been destabilised for years by terrorism at the hands of religious extremists, it makes sense for courageous governors to make laws to prevent any form of blatant indoctrination and psychological terrorism or harassment of people of other religions that can arise from the conflation of the private space of religion and the public space of citizenship. By allowing religions to invade public space with their messages at will, as is being canvassed by critics of el Rufai, such policy disrespects the human rights of non-religious citizens in the same country, just as any government’s failure to recognise the right of men and women to express their religious belief in designated spaces for specific religions is a violation of their rights.

    The Kaduna governor’s bill is one that should be appreciated for the courage and vision it shows about the need to protect human rights of citizens in a country that simultaneously needs to allow religions to thrive and the political space that makes living in the society possible to be safe for all citizens regardless of their religious orientations. El Rufai needs to be supported for plucking the courage to strengthen the principle of democratic citizenship in a multi-religious society, without sacrificing citizens’ right to promote the metaphysics that brings meaning to their private lives.

  • Emir of Kano on ‘Awuff’ political economy and re-structuring

    Emir of Kano on ‘Awuff’ political economy and re-structuring

    But contrary to quick interpretations of Emir Sanusi’s call for structural reform, there is nothing in his statement at Olabisi Onabanjo University to suggest that the emir is by this statement recommending the kind of restructuring that can lead to re-federalisation of the country

    Two key concepts in today’s title are ‘Awuff’ or Awuufu in the Yorubanised version of this Pidgin concept and political economy. Political economy in this context is to be understood in its simplest form as how a country is managed or governed, taking into consideration political and economic factors that serve as dominant drivers of the country’s economy and by extension its polity. Awuff, a word recently given additional conceptual energy by Prof. Akin Mabogunje, is akin to ‘Manna’ in biblical terms. It refers to the power of a free good (that arises not from the sweat of a people but as a good bestowed on the people by nature or any generous agency), but which in its plenitude drives economic, political, and even social behaviour of the people with such endowment. The interest of this page today is to amplify the thoughts of Prof. Mabogunje and the Emir of Kano on concepts that seem to have driven the political organisation of this country for about half a century.

    It is remarkable that two of Nigeria’s seminal professionals: Professor  Mabogunje, one of the world’s most cited development experts and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the emir of Nigeria’s most metropolitan and cosmopolitan emirate and former governor of the country’s central bank chose to discuss the country’s major motivation in the country’s journey to modern governance, particularly in the current context of what looks like a gradual evaporation of  petroleum, the principal driver over the years of the country’s Awuff political economy. Even though Professor Mabogunje’s use of the concept focused on how easy flow of petrodollars fostered corruption, indolence and wastage at the institutional and personal level, the description of the character of Nigeria’s political economy by the Emir makes direct connection between a Manna economy and the 36 state structure that many Nigerians including modern and traditional cultural leaders as inevitable to the country’s unity.

    Given the professional pedigree of Prof. Mabogunje and the Emir of Kano and their knowledge of the country’s political economy, it is instructive that both of them have chosen to call for a review of the pivotal role of petroleum in the country’s political economy and culture. The intellectual intervention of the two leaders in their respective professional domains has called for an end to the decades of denial that had characterised political discourse in the country. Most of the time, especially in the decades of military government, the emphasis has been on the need to use the country’s resources to promote military dictators’ understanding of unity in a plural society.

    In the decades of military rule, no effort was spared to create a political structure that was driven by manna from petroleum. The four regions in 1966 grew by leaps and bounds to 36 states in 1996, all at the instance of military dictators. Each state was created to make use of the awuff from petroleum. The Emir has been unequivocal about the huge influence of petroleum revenue on the political construction of the country: “If you really reflect on the problems of this country, it seems to turn common sense on its head….You sometimes wonder if anyone needs to tell any group of people that if you are a poor country, you do not need 36 governors, 36 deputy governors, with members of house of assembly, commissioners and advisers, special assistants, a president, a vice president, 36 ministers, special advisers, federal legislature and so on….Simple arithmetic will tell you that if you have that structure, you are first of all doomed to spending 80 or 90 per cent of everything you earn maintaining public officers. It is really common sense but it seems to be a problem for us to understand it….If you don’t free up the resources and put them up for capital projects, you are laying the foundation of what we are seeing today. We need to have structural reform.” (My emphasis)

    Though not totally new in the country’s Unity discourse, the Emir’s analysis of the creation of 36 fragmented states and 774 local governments as receptacles of monthly revenue allocations to over 100 subnational units seems materialist and superior to idealist thoughts that the more you create structures that take governance to small unviable units, the more united Nigeria’s unity would be guaranteed.  But contrary to quick interpretations of Emir Sanusi’s call for structural reform, there is nothing in his statement at Olabisi Onabanjo University to suggest that the emir is by this statement recommending the kind of restructuring that can lead to re-federalisation of the country. Structural reform of the country to prevent waste can also mean asking for further unitarisation of the country in a manner reminiscent of Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi’s decree that attempted to end the federal system upon which the country obtained independence from Great Britain. Admittedly, the emir did not have to spell out the details of his idea of restructuring or reform in just one speech at the Ago-Iwoye event.

    While it may be reassuring to advocates of federalism in the country that the Emir of Kano, the second largest state in the country according to the last census, has called for restructuring, it may be an over interpretation for his call for reform to be seen as the emir’s enrolment in the registrar of advocates for re-federalisation. But the brave call by one of the occupants of the top echelon of traditional political and cultural power in the country should not be missed by incurable federalists like the writer of this column. Nigeria’s future beyond petroleum is not just about sustaining 36 largely unviable states, it also includes re-thinking the funding of 774 local governments, all under the guise of promoting a third tier of governance. Nigeria is the only country of its size on the globe with almost 800 local governments that are funded separately from the states or provinces that contain them. There is no doubt that Awuff-guzzling third tier of government, like its 36 second tier level, would not have arisen if it was not for huge rents collected from petroleum exploitation, put at the disposal of unelected engineers of the Nigerian state during the military era.

    Efforts by the Buhari government to embark on shuttle diplomacy to increase the price of oil through reduction of supply is understandable as a short-term solution to the sudden drop in government revenue arising from collapse of oil price in the international market. But it is better for the country’s rulers to think like Professor Mabogunje and Emir Sanusi: that the end of the ethos of fossil energy may have begun and may stay with us on and off for decades to come, if not on account of temporary glut but also as a result of a new creative destruction from innovators of environmentally sustainable development scientists and ideologues, particularly in the West with the possibility of similar innovators emerging from China and India.

    The kind of restructuring that Nigeria needs, as it gets ready to create a new economy that is driven by agriculture and manufacturing, is one that reconceptualises how to sustain national unity, not through centralisation of power and functions in Abuja or fragmentation of states fuelled by funds from centrally collected revenue from solid or liquid minerals but through commitment to fiscal federalism. It is not likely that without the usual flow of revenue from oil the country will be able to sustain 36 state bureaucracies and 774 administrative centres designed to consume whatever is allocated without the power to generate enough revenue internally to pay for administrative agencies that leave little impact on the welfare of citizens in most of the states and local governments. Instead of hoping that oil will rebound and bring its easy funds that had driven Awuff political economy at the institutional and personal level to the extent of making the country a huge cafeteria for mindless consumption and wastage, governors of the states and local governments that are not likely to survive without regular transfer of funds from Awuff federation account should join forces with the Emir and like-minded believers in the imperative of restructuring the country. Most of the governors need to know that talking about increasing IGR is not likely to yield anything substantial, without a new political structure that is similar to the ones that worked before the intervention of military dictators in the design of the country’s architecture of governance. Fortunately, such policy option cannot be against the spirit of President Buhari’s idea of unity, given his manifesto that commits to “initiating action to amend our Constitution with a view to devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal spirit.”

  • Emir of Kano on ‘Awuff’ political economy and re-structuring

    Emir of Kano on ‘Awuff’ political economy and re-structuring

    But contrary to quick interpretations of Emir Sanusi’s call for structural reform, there is nothing in his statement at Olabisi Onabanjo University to suggest that the emir is by this statement recommending the kind of restructuring that can lead to re-federalisation of the country

    Two key concepts in today’s title are ‘Awuff’ or Awuufu in the Yorubanised version of this Pidgin concept and political economy. Political economy in this context is to be understood in its simplest form as how a country is managed or governed, taking into consideration political and economic factors that serve as dominant drivers of the country’s economy and by extension its polity. Awuff, a word recently given additional conceptual energy by Prof. Akin Mabogunje, is akin to ‘Manna’ in biblical terms. It refers to the power of a free good (that arises not from the sweat of a people but as a good bestowed on the people by nature or any generous agency), but which in its plenitude drives economic, political, and even social behaviour of the people with such endowment. The interest of this page today is to amplify the thoughts of Prof. Mabogunje and the Emir of Kano on concepts that seem to have driven the political organisation of this country for about half a century.

    It is remarkable that two of Nigeria’s seminal professionals: Professor  Mabogunje, one of the world’s most cited development experts and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the emir of Nigeria’s most metropolitan and cosmopolitan emirate and former governor of the country’s central bank chose to discuss the country’s major motivation in the country’s journey to modern governance, particularly in the current context of what looks like a gradual evaporation of  petroleum, the principal driver over the years of the country’s Awuff political economy. Even though Professor Mabogunje’s use of the concept focused on how easy flow of petrodollars fostered corruption, indolence and wastage at the institutional and personal level, the description of the character of Nigeria’s political economy by the Emir makes direct connection between a Manna economy and the 36 state structure that many Nigerians including modern and traditional cultural leaders as inevitable to the country’s unity.

    Given the professional pedigree of Prof. Mabogunje and the Emir of Kano and their knowledge of the country’s political economy, it is instructive that both of them have chosen to call for a review of the pivotal role of petroleum in the country’s political economy and culture. The intellectual intervention of the two leaders in their respective professional domains has called for an end to the decades of denial that had characterised political discourse in the country. Most of the time, especially in the decades of military government, the emphasis has been on the need to use the country’s resources to promote military dictators’ understanding of unity in a plural society.

    In the decades of military rule, no effort was spared to create a political structure that was driven by manna from petroleum. The four regions in 1966 grew by leaps and bounds to 36 states in 1996, all at the instance of military dictators. Each state was created to make use of the awuff from petroleum. The Emir has been unequivocal about the huge influence of petroleum revenue on the political construction of the country: “If you really reflect on the problems of this country, it seems to turn common sense on its head….You sometimes wonder if anyone needs to tell any group of people that if you are a poor country, you do not need 36 governors, 36 deputy governors, with members of house of assembly, commissioners and advisers, special assistants, a president, a vice president, 36 ministers, special advisers, federal legislature and so on….Simple arithmetic will tell you that if you have that structure, you are first of all doomed to spending 80 or 90 per cent of everything you earn maintaining public officers. It is really common sense but it seems to be a problem for us to understand it….If you don’t free up the resources and put them up for capital projects, you are laying the foundation of what we are seeing today. We need to have structural reform.” (My emphasis)

    Though not totally new in the country’s Unity discourse, the Emir’s analysis of the creation of 36 fragmented states and 774 local governments as receptacles of monthly revenue allocations to over 100 subnational units seems materialist and superior to idealist thoughts that the more you create structures that take governance to small unviable units, the more united Nigeria’s unity would be guaranteed.  But contrary to quick interpretations of Emir Sanusi’s call for structural reform, there is nothing in his statement at Olabisi Onabanjo University to suggest that the emir is by this statement recommending the kind of restructuring that can lead to re-federalisation of the country. Structural reform of the country to prevent waste can also mean asking for further unitarisation of the country in a manner reminiscent of Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi’s decree that attempted to end the federal system upon which the country obtained independence from Great Britain. Admittedly, the emir did not have to spell out the details of his idea of restructuring or reform in just one speech at the Ago-Iwoye event.

    While it may be reassuring to advocates of federalism in the country that the Emir of Kano, the second largest state in the country according to the last census, has called for restructuring, it may be an over interpretation for his call for reform to be seen as the emir’s enrolment in the registrar of advocates for re-federalisation. But the brave call by one of the occupants of the top echelon of traditional political and cultural power in the country should not be missed by incurable federalists like the writer of this column. Nigeria’s future beyond petroleum is not just about sustaining 36 largely unviable states, it also includes re-thinking the funding of 774 local governments, all under the guise of promoting a third tier of governance. Nigeria is the only country of its size on the globe with almost 800 local governments that are funded separately from the states or provinces that contain them. There is no doubt that Awuff-guzzling third tier of government, like its 36 second tier level, would not have arisen if it was not for huge rents collected from petroleum exploitation, put at the disposal of unelected engineers of the Nigerian state during the military era.

    Efforts by the Buhari government to embark on shuttle diplomacy to increase the price of oil through reduction of supply is understandable as a short-term solution to the sudden drop in government revenue arising from collapse of oil price in the international market. But it is better for the country’s rulers to think like Professor Mabogunje and Emir Sanusi: that the end of the ethos of fossil energy may have begun and may stay with us on and off for decades to come, if not on account of temporary glut but also as a result of a new creative destruction from innovators of environmentally sustainable development scientists and ideologues, particularly in the West with the possibility of similar innovators emerging from China and India.

    The kind of restructuring that Nigeria needs, as it gets ready to create a new economy that is driven by agriculture and manufacturing, is one that reconceptualises how to sustain national unity, not through centralisation of power and functions in Abuja or fragmentation of states fuelled by funds from centrally collected revenue from solid or liquid minerals but through commitment to fiscal federalism. It is not likely that without the usual flow of revenue from oil the country will be able to sustain 36 state bureaucracies and 774 administrative centres designed to consume whatever is allocated without the power to generate enough revenue internally to pay for administrative agencies that leave little impact on the welfare of citizens in most of the states and local governments. Instead of hoping that oil will rebound and bring its easy funds that had driven Awuff political economy at the institutional and personal level to the extent of making the country a huge cafeteria for mindless consumption and wastage, governors of the states and local governments that are not likely to survive without regular transfer of funds from Awuff federation account should join forces with the Emir and like-minded believers in the imperative of restructuring the country. Most of the governors need to know that talking about increasing IGR is not likely to yield anything substantial, without a new political structure that is similar to the ones that worked before the intervention of military dictators in the design of the country’s architecture of governance. Fortunately, such policy option cannot be against the spirit of President Buhari’s idea of unity, given his manifesto that commits to “initiating action to amend our Constitution with a view to devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal spirit.”

  • Is fuel subsidy ideologically inevitable?

     If indeed fuel subsidy assists the low-income and the unemployed, it is not to the extent that it benefits the middle-class

    “What we have simply done is a reorganisation. We have five business entities focus on business: Upstream, Downstream, Refineries, Gas and Power that are there before.
    “There is also Ventures that captures all our little companies that were not having proper stewardship. They are run by individuals who report to the GMD.
    “The NNPC is still a whole. There is nothing new that has happened”.—Minister of State for Petroelum.

    This article had appeared on this page before. It is being republished in view of the new resurgence of labour unions’ interest in the governance of the country at large, all in the name of protecting the interests of workers and the poor. Just last night, the Minister of State for Petroleum had to be seeking semantic refuge in a forced distinction between unbundling and reorganizing of NNPC. Apparently, this linguistic struggle on the part of the Petroleum Minister for State must have been made in order to appeal to striking PENGASSAN union members who were up in arms to stop unbundling of the NNPC. Admittedly, labour unions do in a democracy have the right to protect the interests of their workers, but they do not have the right to prevent those elected to govern the country from doing their job. If there is a serious danger that government’s decisions can threaten the welfare of citizens at large, it should not be just labour leaders and workers in a particular company that should block implementation of such government policies. Such fight should be between citizens who have delegated their power to govern themselves to representatives. Efforts to fight fuel subsidy, increase in electricity tariffs, unbundling of NNPC or any other government agency should not be made by labour unions alone. They need to be inclusive to the extent of calling for a referendum that allows citizens to indicate their preference. And citizens should not be just those who are lucky to have jobs and thus become eligible to belong to unions, but all other categories from farmers to the unemployed. The struggle of PENGASSAN against unbundling of NNPC is reminiscent of the opposition of other labour organisations to fuel subsidy removal a few weeks back, hence the return of this article to this page today.

    Many cases are being made in the traditional press and the social media in support of cancelation of fuel subsidy in the country. Some pundits base their position on evidence of corruption in the handling of the subsidy scheme, citing examples of revelation of irregularities in various reports of committees established to probe the country’s subsidy scheme. Examples of financial irregularity are drawn from Farouk Lawan Committee’s Probe in 2012. This report claims that N232 billion on subsidy was paid to marketers for PMS in 2011 for fuel that was not supplied. The same committee also established that, contrary to the claims of marketers that 60 million litres was imported for each day in 2011, only 31 million litres per day was accounted for.

    Some commentators focus on the Nuhu Ribadu Probe in 2012 to argue for cessation of subsidy on the ground of lack of transparency. They draw attention to the report that NNPC deducted subsidy-related expenses before payment to the Federation Account in 2011. This group argues that NEITI’s audits from 1999 to 2011 also confirmed that NNPC deducted a total of N1.40 trillion for subsidy. Similarly, the Presidential Committee on Verification and Reconciliation of Fuel Subsidy (2012) is cited by anti-subsidy commentators to illustrate that 197 subsidy transactions worth N229 billion were illegitimate and that actual expenditure on subsidy was higher in the same year than appropriated sums for fuel subsidy.

    Economic thinkers of the free market persuasion also argue that natural resources are finite and attract largely time-limited revenues, more so if such resources are sold in the international market where the exporting country has no control over price stability. This group posits that it is not rational for any government to prefer fuel subsidy for citizens across the social spectrum to promoting sustained inclusive economic development through investments that can have multiplier effects on sustainable empowerment schemes for the underprivileged. This group calls for an end to fuel subsidy which its spokespersons believe to be a non-sustainable way of allocating natural resource revenues.

    On the other hand, trade union leaders and self-defined advocates of the poor argue passionately in favour of continuing with fuel subsidy. The trade union’s claim includes the need to view fuel subsidy as a non-negotiable poverty-alleviating policy. This school of thought calls on government to accept the need to make every Nigerian enjoy the fruits of a natural resource that under a unitary system of government is viewed to belong to the entire country, regardless of the damage the exploitation of such natural resource does to the economy and ecology of the communities in which such resources are located.

    Another line of thinking within this group is that underpaid workers, poor, and unemployed citizens need fuel subsidy to mitigate the knock-on effect of their poverty. The same group also argues that it is unfair for the federal government to stop fuel subsidy until the government is able to create the type of transportation infrastructure that exists in more developed countries, where fuel subsidy is discouraged as a policy. They add that the government must repair existing refineries and construct more to bring the price of refined petrol for domestic consumption down to the point of making fuel subsidy unnecessary. The Jonathan government accepted the thinking of labour leaders by creating another bureaucracy, Sure-P, to pacify workers and labour leaders, after agreeing to peg the price of petrol at N97 per litre. Just like the subsidy scheme itself, it did not take a long time for Sure-P to become another trick to occlude financial mismanagement by the country’s venal political elite.

    The position of trade union leaders and believers in social democracy appears unassailable. In a country where there are not many social assistance programmes for citizens at the bottom of the economic ladder, there should be nothing wrong with calls for special assistance to underpaid and unemployed citizens. In terms of fine ideological thinking, trade union leaders and their social democratic supporters are making respectable arguments. But the hard question that needs to be asked and answered by radical social and economic thinkers is whether fuel subsidy is the best way to assist the poor in our country.

    Despite the social democratic credentials of this author for over half a century, I do not believe that there are no better ways to assist the poor than the current fuel subsidy that is as enmeshed in the culture of political and bureaucratic corruption as it can ever be in any human space. In a country in which political parties do not openly embrace any noticeable form of social democracy, just as in countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Norway, where social democracy is a fact of life, there are hundreds of ways to assist the poor without having to attempt to pay some of the cost of fuel for them. In these social democratic systems, the line between the middle-class or middle-income and low-income groups is made clear when policies of social assistance are being crafted. It is not so in the case of Nigeria’s fuel subsidy scheme, which allows upper-middle class professionals to enjoy fuel subsidy that should have been reserved for the underprivileged.

    The argument that fuel subsidy in Nigeria is to protect the poor is spurious. Out of the 145 vehicles per 1,000 citizens in Nigeria, 85 of them are cars belonging to middle-class members of the society. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the car-owning middle-class citizens that benefit largely from fuel subsidy. If indeed fuel subsidy assists the low-income and the unemployed, it is not to the extent that it benefits the middle-class. Definitely, there are better ways to assist the poor and the under-paid than for labour unions to play the role of opposition to government policies, more so when such policies have no direct bearing on the conditions of work and service in their place of work. Unbundling or reorganising NNPC without loss of jobs to existing workers appears not to have any direct bearing on the situation of the country’s downtrodden.

  • Towards our emergency economic conference

    Towards our emergency economic conference

    While there will be need for short-term interventions in the nation’s economic problems at the forthcoming conference, emphasis should be on long-term solutions

    The President should call an emergency economic conference with experts to be invited – consumers, producers, labour unions, university experts, professors, etc. I think we really need an emergency economic conference, a rescue operation, bringing as many heads as possible together to plan the way forward…The economic condition of the nation of the people does not deteriorate overnight, something came before that deterioration. A certain prolonged and unchecked process of attrition which was neglected in the past is now knocking on the door.—Wole Soyinka

    It is remarkable how some minds think alike even when they are so far apart in physical terms. Professor Soyinka’s call during his visit to the Minister of Information and Culture on February 18 for an emergency economic conference is reported to have been preceded by the decision of the 65th National Economic Council meeting of January 28th, according to a senior federal government official. While the FEC version was originally designed to be constituted by government officials from the central and state governments, Soyinka’s version of a national brainstorming session calls for inclusive approach that goes beyond just representatives of federal and state governments. As there is no space for a conference that can include all citizens, today’s piece is a distillation of comments from regular readers of this column, especially those who are not likely to get invited to this important national meeting on policies that can advance citizens’ welfare.

    Our country is not new to national conferences on issues of concern to citizens from time to time. The federal military government of General Ibrahim Babangida declared a national debate on whether the country should take an IMF loan. Judging by the number of newspaper cuttings on the subject, pundits declared that the nation was opposed to any IMF loan with conditionalities, particularly adoption of Structural Adjustment Programme. In the end, the military president agreed to IMF’s conditions for any financial assistance and soon after SAP became a lasting part of the country’s economic culture. It is now too late to assess the rightness of each side of the 1975 national debate.

    President Olusegun Obasanjo also responded during his second term to calls for a national conference on the polity, popularly known then as the call for Sovereign National Conference (SNC). Obasanjo’s National Conference on Political Reforms ‘came and went’ as we say in the vernacular. About nine years after Obasanjo’s conference, President Goodluck Jonathan also convened a national dialogue one year before the election of 2015. The conference also held for months without leaving any trace on the country’s political culture. Some of the delegates to the conference, particularly those from the Yoruba region, have argued forcefully that the conference would have changed the political and economic trajectory of the country were President Jonathan allowed to implement the conference recommendations during his second term, a tenure which majority of citizens deprived him of by voting for General Buhari. Others have countered this argument with the claim that the recommendations of the conference are too perfunctory to make any difference in the fortunes of the country.  Now the Jonathan conference, like the Obasanjo one before it, is an item in the nation’s archive or museum.

    Whether the conference is an all-comers conference or an assembly of top government officials and their favoured economic eggheads and whether it is an emergency conference or the first of periodic conferences on how to salvage the nation’s economy after a precipitous fall in oil revenue, the 2016 economic conference under the presidency of General Buhari must address not only the effects of the fall  in the price of oil and of decades of stealing of public funds by politicians and civil servants; it must also address the cause of noticeable decline in the economy.

    For decades, Nigeria has been governed by short-termist leaders. The dominance of short-termism as guiding principle of government policies has left many traces on the polity and economy. For example, while the flow of petrodollars was assured and abundant, no effort was made to use such funds to create the type of infrastructure that can sustain a post-oil reality. No ruler worried about the danger of petroleum losing its historical charm to international buyers, the possibility that petroleum could lose its cutting-edge status as the driver of modern civilisation, or the possibility that some of the usual customers of Nigeria, such as the United States, could become oil exporters.

    Short-termism was not limited to political leaders and civil servants in a country that spent close to half a century talking about the imperative of diversifying its economy to reduce reliance on petroleum export, without plucking the political courage to do anything to diversify the economy until the sudden drop in petroleum revenue crept on the nation at night. Many of our rulers who had property in the United Arab Emirate, for example, watched that small federation use its oil revenue to build world-class infrastructure and to diversify its economy to the point of becoming the first place of choice for Nigerian elite in search of pleasure, luxury goods, and property. Citizens, especially those in the middle-class, also demonstrate the proclivity for short-term gratification over long-term solutions to problems, by making choices that indicate preference to avoid problems than to search for solutions. When the government failed to provide good secondary and tertiary education or good hospitals, millions struggled to look for solutions by moving to Ghana, Britain, the United States, or United Arab Emirate. When the government failed to provide modern mass transit system, citizens rushed to buy Okada and Keke Maruwa. When the government failed to provide proper policing of the community, groups created militant organisations and vigilante groups to pretend to secure their communities or even regions. When electricity supply could not sustain manufacturing, many manufacturers moved to Ghana. When most state governments refused to provide essential public service in the various regions, their residents saved up money to migrate to Lagos State.

    While there will be need for short-term interventions in the nation’s economic problems at the forthcoming conference, emphasis should be on long-term solutions. Justifiably, conferees are likely to worry about the foreign exchange rate and the value of the naira. Citizens are likely to hear hair-splitting arguments about  boosting the value of the naira in the black market through immediate formal devaluation, conferees must give attention to the fundamental issue of the meaninglessness of focusing on the value of the naira in relation to the dollar if the economy is not diversified to include manufacturing of many items that are imported and which have caused problems of balance of payment for the country since the fall in revenue from petroleum and the vacuuming of the nation’s treasury by rulers and public servants. Conferees from states must also not fail to examine the sustainability of decades-long system of governing states solely with allocations or transfers from the so-called federation account.

    In particular, governors from states and their economic advisers must not focus on lamenting the effects of fall in oil revenue. They need to address the cause(s) of the new reality and join others to think as if the end of the age of petroleum is at hand. There is a need for the economic conference to look at the political dimension of the country’s economic failure, in view of the decline in oil revenue that had sustained 36 states as sites of consumption (rather than centres of production) for decades. Macro and micro economic theorists at the conference should examine the need for a new political philosophy that calls for fiscal federalism that can empower states or clusters of states to justify existence of such levels of government in a country cited in international taxonomy of governments as a federation. No sustainable solution is likely to emerge from panel-beating the effects of the nation’s underdevelopment without coming to terms with causes and without borrowing Achebe’s imagery about not only focusing on ‘drying our bodies but also finding out where the rains started to beat us.’

  • Punishing and preventing corruption

    Punishing and preventing corruption

    The current system that feeds states and local governments with monthly allocations is not only unsustainable; it also promotes corruption, just as keeping so much money with the central government that has very little direct responsibility to citizens and communities encourages corrupt behaviour on the part of morally weak individuals in public service.

    From all appearances since his emergence as president, General Buhari has kept to his promise to fight corruption. It is already part of the nation’s urban folklore that he and the EFCC chairman cried when they first saw mountains of data pointing at corrupt acts in various sectors of the polity. Understandably, President Buhari does not seem to have enough time or space to get corrupt individuals punished, largely on account of the ubiquitous nature of venality in the preceding administration of President Jonathan. It is, therefore, not fair to accuse him of not talking about how to institutionalise ethicality in governance and socialise the population into a culture of honesty in public service.

    Given the frequency and magnitude of corrupt acts unearthed so far, nobody can blame the Buhari administration for not announcing already details of its vision and mission about how to create a governance and public culture that is devoid of venality. Many citizens who thought that Transparency International was being racist or anti-African for ranking Nigeria one of the most corrupt counties in the world for several years must, after hearing of the various types and levels of corrupt acts only in the last six years, now feel ashamed. So must those who criticise masters of ceremonies who spice party talks with tales of corruption in the country have realised that reality can be more unbelievable than fiction. The reality, as reflected in media reports, is that too many of those who get to the corridor of power as political appointees and as administrators in the nation’s public service are morbidly corrupt.

    It will be no exaggeration for anyone to think that it is mainly kleptomaniacs, those who steal compulsively or pathologically, that are more prominent in public service than those who are honest. How else is an average citizen to view the news of heinous crimes of stealing that cut across the public sector, from the executive to the legislature and the judiciary? In other climes, the frequency and magnitude of stealing by political appointees and public servants would have called for intervention of psychiatrists. When an individual in charge of managing an office chooses to steal the funds for managing such office in order to buy outlandish luxury items, as many of those already accused of looting the treasury have done, it should be difficult for non-psychiatrists not to feel that stealing must be in the DNA of such individuals.

    When a former senior civil servant friend of mine remarked with noticeable seriousness in his voice and on his face that should Buhari choose to detect and punish every act of corruption in the public service he would not have time for anything else, most of us within earshot felt depressed about the quality of people who get into public service as politicians and professionals. More importantly, I also believe that President Buhari must not only worry about the corrupt people of today; he must give attention in his initiatives on corruption to preventing the grooming of new thieves of state as politicians or civil servants.

    Pundits have already started showing the way toward grooming a new breed for public service. The government has been asked to pay attention to moral education in the country. President Buhari is being asked by many commentators to overhaul the curriculum with the aim of emphasising moral education than hitherto. What has been left out of suggestions for a new culture of probity in public service is the subscription of many parents and teachers to the culture of corruption and impunity. Parents who are corrupt and also show their children and wards evidence of proceeds of their corrupt acts are not in any good position to raise morally respectable children. Teachers who ask for various forms of bribe from parents of their students or from the students can only be examples of teachers not needed for the new curriculum, until such teachers are re-educated. One thing that is reassuring about ‘Ethical Revolution,’ to borrow a phrase beloved by NPN politicians of old, is that Nigeria has not always been like this. There used to be a time even here in Lagos in the early 1960s when newspaper vendors could leave their newspapers in the open to allow them run after moving cars without any fear that buyers would fail to drop money for the number of papers they took.

    As human beings, children can, more than adults, be re-oriented to know and accept that stealing is not good, regardless of the religious sensibility of such children and their parents. Punishing dishonest adults can also serve as a great deterrent to young people. The president’s men must give more thought to promoting moral values among children in particular and adults in general. It is a sociological fact (that may not be as Hobbesian at it may sound) that rules and punishment for violation of rules keep many people out of crime. According to a Yoruba proverb, “Gbogbo eniyan ni ole bi ile baa da,” meaning human beings are likely to steal if there are no rules and rule enforcers. In other words, an atmosphere of impunity encourages venality. The growth in the culture of impunity in public life in the last sixteen years or more must have induced the recklessness of thieves in public service, to the extent that the most recurrent topic among citizens today is corruption of men and women in power.

    One area of intervention that is not being emphasised in the media is institutional re-engineering. If so much moral decay has been exposed within six months of the Buhari regime and only in relation to the federal government, the national embarrassment would be much more pronounced if EFCC also becomes active about investigating corruption in states and local governments of the country. Apart from Lagos or perhaps Abuja, media presence in the states and local governments, like the presence of anti-corruption agencies, is negligible. There is no reason to believe that the Nigerians in the public service of the states and local governments are morally superior to those in the federal service. Given the fact that over 50% of the nation’s earnings is kept with the federal government, it is likely that more funds may be stolen at this level of government than in others. But should EFCC searchlight be beamed at the subnational levels of government, there is no chance that the embarrassing acts of senseless looting of nation’s resources will be any less than what we read about every day in the media.

    It is, therefore, imperative for the Buhari government to pay special attention to the structure of government in the country. The current system that feeds states and local governments with monthly allocations is not only unsustainable; it also promotes corruption, just as keeping so much money with the central government that has very little direct responsibility to citizens and communities encourages corrupt behaviour on the part of morally weak individuals in public service. The history of a federal system in which the constituent parts live almost solely (except Lagos State) on transfers from the central government is too obvious to be rehashed here. It came into being during the military era when the dominant philosophy of government was over centralisation and subordination of federating units and at a time when those in power believed in the omnipresence and omnipotence of revenue from petroleum. Creating mini/local governments and running them with regular allocations from a central purse limited the imagination or creativity of most governors and LG chairmen. This military policy also directly or indirectly encouraged corruption and lack of accountability at the subnational level, just as it did at the central level. The result of funding governance from rent collection now stares all of us regrettably in the face.

    Returning the culture of self-reliance and accountability to every level of government is one way of discouraging corruption. The current system of sustaining states and local governments with funds from non-renewable minerals– whether liquid or solid– needs to be reviewed as President Buhari gets to his promise to “entrench true federalism and the federalist spirit in the constitution.”

  • Taxation and dis-alienation of citizens (2)

    Taxation and dis-alienation of citizens (2)

    In particular the decision to call on citizens to take charge of funding governance is tantamount to calling on citizens to rescue their country and its economy from collapse in the wake of low revenue from petroleum and decades-long reckless looting of the nation’s resources.

    There is no room for failure over FIRS’s attainment of its 2016 target of N4.97 trillion to the Federal Government. This is not a joke. We need everybody to do his/her beat to ensure that everybody contributes (sic) to the achievement of the target. The nation will depend on FIRS to fund the budget. We need the money to stabilize the economy. –Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, Finance Minister
    Democracy is founded on the principle that the moral authority of government is derived from the consent of the governed. That consent is not very meaningful, however, unless it is informed. When a government makes decisions in secret, opportunity for corruption increases and accountability to the people decreases. That is why government transparency should be a priority. When official meetings are open to citizens and the press, when government finances are open to public scrutiny, and when laws and the procedures for making them are open to discussion, the actions of government enjoy greater legitimacy.-Jerry Brito

    The first section of this article stated that decades of military rule during the period of oil boom and lack of will by civilian rulers to move beyond military notion of governance distanced the citizenry from government. It argued that the decision by rulers-both military and civilian-to use funds from petroleum as they wanted without having to be accountable to citizens created a conducive condition for corruption at the level of governance and created lack of concern for public accountability on the part of the average citizen who saw government as the business of those in whatever form of power was in vogue from time to time in an ethos of easy revenue from non-renewable fossil energy. The piece concluded that now that the chicken seems to have come to roost in respect of the seeming omnipotence and omnipresence of oil revenue, those saddled with a depleted economy after decades of venality in governance have found solace in asking citizens to pay taxes to fund governance and restore the country’s damaged economy. It ended by stating that payment of tax is larger than citizens’ obligations to government; it should strengthen the culture of accountability while enhancing citizens’ ownership of their government.

    Today’s piece will focus on what government at all levels should do, not only to encourage citizens to pay taxes but also to make them see clearly how their taxes are used for the purpose for which they are meant. It will also make suggestions on how citizens can ensure that they are not taken for granted by those they have chosen to use their taxes on their behalf for national security and physical, social and human development. The overarching thesis for today’s concluding piece is that democracy is larger than choosing leaders at elections; it is about nurturing an open government for the purpose of making citizens have and grow confidence in the process by which they are governed by involving citizens to participate fully in their governance.

    The onus of initiating and sustaining Change or the New Politics promised before the 2015 election by General Mohammed Buhari and the All Progressives Congress (APC) is on both the government and the voters. With relation to the government, it is salutary that it has decided to outgrow the laissez-faire approach to government as an opportunity for those in power to spend revenue without any reference to citizens. In particular the decision to call on citizens to take charge of funding governance is tantamount to calling on citizens to rescue their country and its economy from collapse in the wake of low revenue from petroleum and decades-long reckless looting of the nation’s resources. But let nobody be fooled; the best way to encourage citizens to pay their taxes is to let them see in unmistakable terms that the taxes they pay are used to improve the quality of their life. And the most assured way to make this happen is for those in government-executive, legislative, and judiciary-to be accountable in all they do.

    The old culture of spending without explanation and without involving citizens in discussion of budget projects is not acceptable in an ethos in which citizens fund governance through tax. The old habit on the part of military and civilian rulers that oil money belonged to nobody and could be used as rulers feel has been made obsolete by the new reality thrown up by precipitous fall in the price of oil. There is no better time for those in power under the Government of Change to remember the old saying: “He/she who pays the piper calls the tune.”Political office holders need to realise that citizens need evidence of accountability at every stage of spending their tax money. The example of Lagos State in the last sixteen years of Tinubu, Fashola, and now Ambode with making tax money work for those who made it possible is a model that the federal government in particular should borrow and build on, especially the readiness of the Lagos State government to mix provision of elite and mass goods and services.

    As the federal government goes the way of e-governance, it must seize the opportunity of improving access of citizens to information about the activities of government. Such information should include budget details and how funds are used on projects, apart from aspects of governance that have to be classified for the security of the state. Citizens are not likely to (and should not) tolerate the present situation of continued impunity by those in government. For example, despite the directive by President Buhari that the number of police officers being used as personal guards or Maiguards for members of those designated as Big men and women in the country be stopped or curtailed, there are still hundreds of policemen sitting in front of houses beside drivers of former members of legislature and even of the executive. Former legislators are still driving cars with NASS plate tags almost one year after they had ceased to be lawmakers. Citizens who pay tax to fund governance would prefer that the police are used to provide security for all citizens, and not just for a handful of citizens who happened to have been minister or legislator in the past.

    On the part of citizens, agreeing to pay tax to save the polity and economy should be seen as the return of the public, which had been repressed, ignored, or marginalised for over four decades of free flow of revenue from rent collection by the government. Citizens have to insist on not just executive accountability but also on legislative and judicial accountability.  Citizens should be given opportunity in discussion of salaries and allowances to those in governance at all levels. Full disclosures on federal budgeting, state, and local government budgeting should be high on the menu of government-citizen relations. For too long, citizens have been denied benefits of having local governments through failure of states to conduct regular local government elections and the propensity of governors to hamstring local governments by holding on to statutory allocations to the third tier of government under the guise of managing state/local government joint accounts. Both governments and citizens should listen to and learn from Donald Gordon’s admonition on transparent governance: “Openness, accountability, and honesty define government transparency. In a free society, transparency is government’s obligation to share information with citizens. It is at the heart of how citizens hold their public officials accountable. Governments exist to serve the people. Information on how officials conduct the public business and spend taxpayers’ money must be readily available and easily understood.”

    Citizens must not only remain steadfast in their support to fight corruption; they must also be vigilant to the extent that they can prevent corruption by insisting that they are fully consulted before decisions to spend their tax money are made. The power to take decisions about the polity and economy should not rest in the era of modern democracy on only elected representatives. There is no better time to push the tenets of modern democracy and citizen participation than under an administration that has pledged to uphold high moral and ethical standards in governance.

    – Concluded