The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Nigeria never forgets (2)

    • (Tragicomedy of Ngozi-Okonjo Iweala and her voodoo economics)

    Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy was speciously misjudged as a supreme intellectual. She is a dismal headliner and fame junkie no doubt; but if indeed, she possesses at least, a smidgen of economic genius, as she purportedly does, her very presence in President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet makes it crucial to admit that by accepting to serve with the incumbent presidency, she successfully neutered herself – a theory bolstered by her depressing economics. By accepting the job, Okonjo-Iweala had also attained immense power, which cuts both ways: if she became dissatisfied with her role or the administration’s policies, she could implode like a time-bomb within the presidency.

    Pity she chose not to implode; today, Okonjo-Iweala betrays no such awareness or grit. In fact, as the incumbent administration fumbles on, it has become clear that the former World Bank senior executive is unaware of the magnitude of her office and the true responsibilities before her. Perhaps Okonjo-Iweala is doing exactly what she is expected to do by her former employers, the World Bank – she is aggressively remodeling the Nigerian economy to suit the global money lender’s “third world” ridiculous economic therapy.

    Okonjo-Iweala would need more than her impressive résumé and touted savvy as a global economic strategist, which has so far revealed her need for more than a few lessons in Nigerian economics and sterling citizenship. Perhaps, if like Lula of Brazil, she had come into Nigerians lives from a paradigm of shared tragedies and values, she would probably sound off as more humane and in tune with the country’s most gruesome realities however far-removed she is from them.

    Bet not a few Nigerians thought she only had to report in office, wave her magic wand and thus stimulate a landmark turnaround of the Nigerian economy. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala possesses no magic wand. No matter her touted genius or intimidating stature she flaunts, Nigeria’s incumbent finance minister is simply another farceur in the country’s annals of administrative misadventures.

    The finance minister’s economics brazenly perpetuates an unjustifiable god-complex in the face of dehumanizing realities. She attempts to overcome this by throwing lots of smart mathematics at her irrationality, in desperation to make her fantasy seem more scientific and realistic. Her economics creates an illusion of precision where none exists; consequently, unquestionable belief in her touted panaceas has led to all manner of mischief and economic failures.

    Okonjo-Iweala has got the presidency and her fans locked onto an economic theory that inherently makes them tone deaf to arguments of the other side, even when those arguments are quite valid. Okonjo-Iweala and company in effect, have become soldiers for doubtful causes which are hardly predicated on careful observation and empirical findings.

    “We will focus on those sectors that affect the common man. That is why government is focusing on the development of power…Whatever government is going to do with the economy would be geared towards pro-jobs growth,” she stressed at the beginning of her misadventure, adding that the country’s total debt stock stands at $39.7 billion (about 20 percent of GDP), out of which $34 billion or about 17.5 percent of GDP is accounted for by domestic debts. This translates to about N5.2 trillion and $5.3 billion in external debts.

    Consequently, the government would be paying closer attention to the country’s debt profile, with a view to reducing borrowing from local sources. To this end, Okonjo-Iweala favours accumulation of more foreign debt thus her recent facilitation of a $550 million loan from her former employer, the World Bank among other gaffes.

    That Okonjo-Iweala was instrumental to the country’s freedom from the Paris Club debt in 2006 isn’t contestable; what is contestable however was Nigeria’s payment of a whopping $12.6 billion to realize an $18 billion debt write-off. Today, Okonjo-Iweala’s brilliant economics recommends that Nigeria could incur more foreign debt.

    Her ceaseless misadventures with State fund predictably, escalate this year with spurious allocations in the 2015 budget. Unscathed by austerity, the National Assembly was allocated N150bn yet again in 2015; up from N49.89bn in 2005. The National Judicial Council (NJC) gets N73bn while the Universal Basic Education Fund is getting N76.3bn, up from N70.47bn in 2014.

    According to BudgIT analysis, “A quick peep into the books of the Federal Ministry of Works seems to beg questions. Capital allocation is slashed by 89.4 percent from N106.3bn in 2014 to N11.23bn in 2015; the ministry’s overhead is up from N19.77bn to N20.7bn. Given that the Ministry of Works has fewer projects to oversee, why is its overhead costs rising? Why is a ministry, whose output is expected to be N11.23bn (as Capital Allocation) with N28.35bn (made up of Personnel costs of N7.64bn and Overheads worth N20.7bn) given that amount as overhead? Many will question why the Presidency is spending N174.19m to purchase canteen and kitchen equipment, yet the Akure-Ilesha Road gets a lesser N125m for its construction.

    “The Nigerian Army is taking a cut in its overhead cost from the 2014 level of N10.7bn to N7.85bn. Also, the Nigerian Police Formations and Command overhead cost is down from N8.49bn in 2014 to N5.895bn today. Interestingly enough, the Nigeria Police Formations and Command has a capital budget of N17bn (If the 2015 budget is anything to go by) while the Nigerian Army will run with a Capital budget of N5.22bn,” notes BudgIT.

    Why is the Presidency planning to spend N1.92bn on travels and N56.58m on the procurement of crested crockery (plates and spoons) in an austere clime? Why spend N61.03m on household and catering equipment and make available N387.11bn for Capital Expenditure, which is 9% of the entire expenditure? Can’t the N826.69m the presidency is spending to upgrade the villa’s facilities wait till next year?

    The budget is markedly more austere on the working poor and have-nots. More worrisomely, Nigeria is already running short of revenue targets as the oil price at $46 per barrel is already well below the benchmark price. The Excess Crude Account, in 2007, was $24 billion; today, it has been depleted to about $2 billion on her watch even as speculations abound particularly among the state governors that the account is empty. In 2007 without an economic coordinator, we had zero % foreign debts; at present we have over $9 billion debt and we continue to borrow. Thus, what exactly has she coordinated?

    Yet Okonjo-Iweala is quick to point out that Nigeria’s economy is growing at 7% rate; she excitedly claims that Nigeria is experiencing economic growth even as she is conveniently silent on the fact that her coordinating machinery perpetually generates severe poverty and inequality.

    Providence is the nemesis of pretenders, and hubris is the bane of all demagogues. Enabled by a bumbling president, Okonjo-Iweala Was been re-invented into a swash-buckling Czarina enhanced with messianic frills and compromises of all sorts. Alas! It was garbage in, garbage out; she couldn’t give what she never had. Her bearing clearly depicts the politician in Nikita Khrushchev’s parable of the politician. Going by the quality of her stewardship and former CBN Governor, Prof. Charles Soludo’s recent exposé and clinical retort to her juvenile rants, Okonjo-Iweala is no genius; she is undeniably bland. That has to be sad; it is.

  • Jobs for the season

    Jobs for the season

    THERE seems to be a kind of bond between a reporter and his audience. A routine visit to a pepper soup joint down the road becomes a referendum on the newspaper he works for. Even a doctor’s appointment turns a session for reviewing his work.

    “I read your editorial; good, but I disagree with your conclusion.” “That was a good one, but you guys are partisan.” “How sure are you of this your story?” Such comments flow quite often from our bosses, the readers.

    The taxi-cab driver expects the reporter to know the ABC of politics. Who is likely to do what, when and where? He is invested with some omniscience that is seldom proven, a big responsibility that belies the weight and colour of his bank balance.

    Oh! The life of a reporter. But, I confess, that is just by the way; we are not in for an ode to reporting. No. Nor am I thinking of a farewell to the trade, despite its troubles.

    But, what would I have loved to do now, if I wasn’t a journalist? Gone are the days when doctors were revered, like some local deity, when teachers were deified, when engineers were adored and the mere sight of a soldier in his crisp, starched khaki and gleaming boots got kids marching and singing: Awa soja kekere…(We young soldiers). Those days when a lawyer was ako niwaju adajo,”the bold one before the  judge” and pilots were angels. Not anymore.

    All these, no doubt, still have their various attractions, but there are some exciting vocations, especially in this season of politics. Lawyers reap bountifully from their legalistic exertions. Those well grounded in election disputes are, particularly, quite busy as losers seek the big ones, the ones called SANs, to help them revert their fate after claiming that they have been robbed. The lawyer needs no sleepless nights. The complaints are the same – over voting, violence, false signature, non display of the register and all that. So, he deploys a one-size-fits-all template and awaits the judges’ verdict. The bill? A fortune, like a bag of cement dropped from the balcony of a two-storey building. Gbam!

    Statisticians also have their hands full now. It is the season of figures and data. Facts no longer matter;  it is all figures. Just check out the campaigns going on in town as President Goodluck Jonathan fights the battle of his life to retain his job. All of a sudden, we now know that there are “130m active phone subscribers under Jonathan as against 81,000 in 2010”.  “Under Goodluck, 20,000 km of new roads have been built.” “Did you know25,000km? The length of federal roads made motor able by President Jonathan, compared to less than 5km in 2010.” “Did you know 53%? Percentage reduction in national poverty since 2010; 70% of Nigerians were rated poor then, compared to 33% today.” Oh! The power of figures.

    The way politicians are using and abusing figures, you will think there are no saner ways of wooing the electorate. Many are asking: Are these figures really from the Federal Bureau of Statistics? Who is sure of Nigeria’s population?

    Former Central Bank Governor Prof Charles Soludo has just accused Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of cooking up some figures to give the impression that the economy is in fine fettle. He lashed her for incompetence, saying she was crying like a baby whose lollipop has been snatched by an inconsiderate adult when former President Olusegun Obasanjo removed her from Finance. Being one who is not afraid of a fight, Mrs Okonjo-Iweala, I am sure, will not turn the other cheek, not after the world has been told that N30trillion was either missing or misappropriated under her watch. She may soon order a forensic examination of Soludo’s tenure at the CBN. The cost? I leave that to your imagination.

    Since lying is not one of my talents, I do not wish to be a political statistician, despite the fortune such experts are hauling to the bank now.

    You may have noticed some guys standing behind politicians on the podium, gesticulating frantically as they use their fingers and faces to communicate. They are sign language experts who facilitate dialogue with the deaf and dumb. I admire their skills, but I often wonder how many of them are genuine? Besides, that they are now regular at rallies shows that our politicians have suddenly realised that our deaf and dumb compatriots are, after all, as important as every other person. Despite its seeming simplicity – I guess it pays too –  I won’t jump at sign language. What happens if I am discovered to be confusing my audience? Remember that chap who was accused of faking it all at Nelson Mandela’s funeral after collecting his pay?

    Can I be a conflict resolution expert? President Goodluck Jonathan was in N’Djamena the other day to see President Idris Deby, who reportedly facilitated ceasefire talks between the Federal Government and some Boko Haram commanders, who turned out to be scammers. It was based on the expected success of the deal that the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, announced excitedly that the days of Boko Haram’s madness were set to end. It all turned out to be a big scam, after so much cash had gone down the drain.

    Before then, Austrian hostage negotiator Dr Stephen Davis had failed to crack the nut. He accused some prominent Nigerians of being the godfathers of Boko Haram, setting off a big legal battle with one of those he so branded. Being a hostage negotiator in a hostile environment like ours is fraught with so much danger, despite the huge financial gains. I won’t venture into that.

    So, of all the exciting jobs of this season, which one would I have loved to grab if I had the skill?

    The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is applying every means –fair and foul – to stop General Muhammadu Buhari from running. The more the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate tries to extricate himself from the web of intrigues and lies, the more inventive the PDP and its town criers get.

    The other day in Abuja, the spokesman for the Jonathan Campaign, Femi Fani-Kayode, took some time off the legal battle to free his neck from charges of laundering a hefty sum of money – the charge, I must stress, was not stealing, which is also not to be misconstrued as corruption –  when he was Aviation minister, to allege that Gen. Buhari had no secondary school certificate. The army was distracted from fighting Boko Haram to organise an elaborate press conference where it proclaimed Buhari’s certificate missing.

    When eventually Gen. Buhari got his former school to release his results, Fani- Kayode was enraged. He pointed out many things that, in his view – I am told he is a lawyer – invalidated the paper. He said the picture attached to the paper shouldn’t have been a recent one. He had a problem, also, with the signature and the letter head.  Fani-Kayode vowed to call in a forensic expert.

    I agree. A forensic expert would have pointed out that the result sheet did not contain Gen. Buhari’s height; how tall he was when he took the exam? What was the colour of his eyes? Did he have a gap tooth then as he now does? Of what complexion was he as at the time of writing the exam? What was his shoe size? Should the report have been written on a white paper? What is the difference between Mohammed and Muhammadu?

    Just before he became the Emir of  Kano, former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi alleged that $20billion oil money was unremitted to the treasury. Mrs Okonjo-Iweala moved in to say, after some investigation, that $10b was not accounted for and that a forensic examination was coming. We are yet to hear what the forensic examination discovered. Perhaps more than $20b was unaccounted for. Perhaps not a farthing was missing. Perhaps.

    To date, nobody has an answer to how N469b police pension funds – by the way, where is Maina? – disappeared. We need a forensic expert to tell us what happened.

    In July, last year, President Jonathan secured the National Assembly’s nod to borrow $1b to fight Boko Haram. How has the money been spent? Do our soldiers have weapons now? New arms and ammunition and not some old stuff good enough for village squabbles? Are they well fed? Only a forensic expert will find out – at a handsome price, of course.

    Some of those guys who creamed off a substantial portion of what was voted for fuel subsidy over the years are no longer busy in the courts; they have joined the Transformation Ambassadors’ rallies. We may never know how much went down the drain in this dubious venture until we call in a forensic expert, whose bill may be about 5% of whatever figure is discovered to have been carted away by these guys.

    Does anybody know where forensic experts are trained? I’m signing up right away.

    Yobbish Yobo

    FOR those who have been wondering where former Super Eagles captain Joseph Yobo has been, an answer has come. There he was last week on the podium as President Goodluck Jonathan campaigned in Port Harcourt.
    And what a fitting appearance, especially now that yobbery has replaced wit in politics. Yobo, a ball in hand, was screaming: “APC we no go gree! APC, we no go gree!”, like an overfed ex-Niger Delta militant. Not a word on Jonathan’s achievements in sports. The last time he played for Nigeria, Yobo scored an own goal. And so he did for his former club, Everton. His adventure into politics seems an own goal. So, a big welcome to the “own goal specialist”.

  • Witness to elections in Nigeria

    The first election I witnessed as a small boy in  this country was in 1956. I was in form one in Christ School in Ado-Ekiti . Ordinarily I should not have been interested but for the fact that Chief Joseph Oduola Osuntokun, my brother was running for the House of Assembly in Ibadan . He had been a member of the House since  1951 and in 1955 he was appointed Minister of Works in the old Western Region which stretched from Lagos to present Delta and parts of Bayelsa states. To be a minister of such a huge region that was almost autonomous of the centre in those days was not a  small job. I also had special interest in the election because after the death of our father, Chief Osuntokun as Dawodu stepped into the shoes of our father and that included paying my school fees. I was not quite conscious of the Election in 1951 which sent him to the Western House in the first instance. What he later told me as an enquiring academic was that it was not based on universal adult suffrage but  on divisional electoral colleges throughout the region. The political parties were organizationally inchoate. What our people did was to choose three or four graduates or professional people all over the regions. This is why the first crop of politicians were top class educated people in full employment while politics was  seen as vocations.  A reading of the Hansard of the period either in the regions or at the centre will confirm the quality of their minds. My brother became Minister of Finance in 1956 at the age of 32. Subsequent elections in 1959 to the federal parliament and in 1960 to the Western House were fought on highly debated and well articulated manifestos. The elections were well fought and well run and conducted. We usually sat by the radio throughout the night as election results trickled in. Western regional elections were usually keenly fought between the Action Group, the ruling party and the NCNC, the party in opposition. Even the much more keenly fought 1959 federal election provided a lot of drama with Chief Obafemi Awolowo taking on the forces of the NPC (jamiyar mutanen arewa) or Northern People’s Congress and those of its coalition partner the NCNC.  These two parties were led respectively by the aristocratic Sir Ahmadu Bello, scion of the Usman dan Fodiye dynasty in Sokoto and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe,  a cosmopolitan Igbo republican.

    Elections to a reasonable extent were conducted with finesse and solid planning. Awolowo’s party represented the best face of serious planning and perhaps because of this and the rather more prosperous condition of his region, the other two leaders treated him with suspicion. In spite of official British partisanship, elections even on the eve of independence still continued to be a civilized operation.

    It was not until the Action Group crisis of 1961-1962 that things changed for the worst simply because the coalition government at the centre used the opportunity to fish in troubled waters. Instead of responding to minority demands all over the country for creation of states, the Western Region was singled out for the purpose of weakening it when the Mid-West region was created out of it in 1963. The much louder demands in the North for a Middle-Belt state and Calabar/Ogoja/Rivers state were ignored. Through meddling in the affairs of the West, the Action Group party was manoeuvred out of power. This was the prelude to the Western election of 1965 which was flagrantly rigged by the Akintola’s government. The federal elections of a year earlier had suffered the same fate. The Western election of 1965 was therefore seen as a do or die affair by the two rival alliances of UPGA (United People’s Grand Alliance) and the NNA (Nigerian National Alliance) formed respectively around the NCNC and the NPC with the old two factions of the now destroyed Action Group lining behind their major partners. Attempt to resolve the national question centring on the division of spoils of office by the election failed. Following campaigns of incendiary nature in Tiv-land in the North and farmers revolt in the West, young army officers who had been watching the events and whose members were being increasingly used to put down rebellion decided to intervene and change the government. The coup d’état of 1966 did not quite succeed but it decapitated the leadership of the NNA leaving the leadership of the other party unscathed. The much internationally respected Prime Minister Sir Abubakar was brutally killed. Worst still, the top hierarchy of the officer corps from the West and the North was eliminated. Reaction swiftly followed six months later. These events eventually led to a fratricidal civil war the aftermath of which is still with us till today.

    After years of military rule we transited to democratic rule and surprisingly enough, it was like we did not learn any lesson from our history. The parties of the First Republic came back with different names with their leadership intact and unchanged except for the northern leadership which had had to make an adjustment following the loss of Sir Ahmadu Bello and Sir Abubakar

    This Second Republic collapsed under the weight of corruption of the ruling party the NPN. The military rode back on the wave of public disenchantment and brought draconian decrees to teach the ruling class one or two things about the need for discipline. Muhammadu Buhari was the popular face of the new junta which was supported by the vast majority of Nigeria’s suffering masses. The regime promptly said it was a continuation of the Obasanjo/Muhammad popular regime of the 1970s. If there had been a referendum the regime would have won by landslide. This writer dislikes non-democratic forms of government but my observation is a record of history. The government made things difficult for all politicians without discrimination. It even made Nigerians proud when it tried to bring home in a crate from London, the boastful and garrulous Umaru Dikko who publicly challenged the government.  The regime deliberately stepped on many toes without looking inwards for fifth columnists among its hierarchy. When the free sealing and free dealing Badamasi Babangida  struck in 1985, it was good bye to discipline and Nigerians went back to their pastime  of cutting corners and general and generalized irresponsibility  which the new regime allowed to fester in order to remain in power for as long as possible. The regime began a costly transition regime that was programmed to fail. It however tried to create two political parties, one a little to the right and another a little to the left! But when these two parties took on character and life of their own and produced a winner in Moshood Abiola in the best election in independent Nigeria, Babangida moved to truncate the process. We finally ended with the thieving regime of Sani Abacha who confused outright looting of the national treasury with governance. The damage this man did to Nigeria remains to be assessed.

    Since 1999 we as a country have soldiered on as best as we can holding elections that were adjudged fraudulent and lacking in integrity  not only by the international community but by Umaru Yar’Adua one of the beneficiaries.

    We are now on the eve of an election that may decide the future of Nigeria. In spite of the negative campaigns, I believe we can hold a reasonably credible election if we can trust INEC and allow it to conduct a free and fair election. If the election is openly fair and transparent, everyone will abide by the result. I am not pessimistic at all about what will happen after the results are in on February 15. There is so much to lose that I believe politicians who are leading us to the edge of a precipice will make a round about turn at the last moment

  • One more letter to candidate Buhari

    Dear, Gen. Buhari, I feel duty-bound to write this one more letter to you before the presidential election which is due in only two weeks. My hopes and fears for Nigeria compel me.

    You and I can remember that our Nigeria at independence was taking strong steps towards success, prosperity and greatness in the world. Since then, it has slumped and relentlessly declined. And now that we are senior citizens, our country has reached an absolute bottom – with fears that it can implode and disappear. Because I see that your chances of winning this election are good, I believe I have a duty to speak to you.

    Honestly, I must say that, ordinarily, I should not be speaking like this to a Nigerian leader from the North. By the time I came into Nigeria’s politics in the 1970s, I had studied and taught African and Nigerian history in universities for years, I had travelled extensively in Africa, and I was well informed about the reasons why Nigeria was declining. Of the man-made factors in those reasons, the most potent was the deliberate design of our northern controllers of federal power at independence to use all and every means to make their own nationality dominant over Nigeria so as to rule Nigeria forever. By the mid-1970s, that design had produced an agenda for using federal public money to corrupt, emasculate and subdue the elites from all parts of Nigeria. I served in the leadership group of the UPN and in the Senate during the Shagari presidency, and I watched this agenda as it virulently weakened other political parties in the National Assembly, fomented division and discord in many state governments, and ultimately destabilized many state governments. I watched it as it inculcated unbridled greed and corruption into our country’s politics and public service – and as it gradually destroyed the moral foundations of our country.

    But, in spite of all this, I must, in duty, talk to you. All things about you considered, I believe that you are different in a way that is good for our country; I believe that, in spite of your origin, ethnicity and religion, you are very able to envision, independently, a clear picture of what you believe to be right for our country, and you are exceptionally able to follow what you believe to be right. Very few human beings, coming from your background in 1983, would have dared to take the steps which you took on December 31 of that year – namely, to shut down the Shagari presidency, and to tell the world that you had done it in order to save the ordinary citizens of Nigeria from a boundless corruption that was bringing poverty, suffering and sadness into their lives. Of course, when you hounded into prison folks like me, Chief Ajasin, Chief Fasoranti, Alhaji Jakande, Chief Bola Ige and others who had been fighting the corruption in our own ways before you came, I thought you were confused and I despised you.  But even in prison, I could not help wondering that a leading Fulani person had dared to pull down the system of government by corruption which his own people had very adroitly choreographed.  I could not help admiring your guts.

    Out of prison some months later, and back to my task of studying the affairs of my country, I was not surprised that many among the northern elite (your own people) regarded you as a traitor and an enemy. Many of such persons still regard you as a traitor, rebel, and enemy today – and Nigeria has been hearing trenchantly from some of them in recent weeks. But, happily, in the same vein, the masses of the common people of the North see you as a friend who can revamp their country, and who can give them a chance to share in the prosperity that you can usher in for Nigeria. The pauperized masses of the South share the same enthusiasm for you, and the same hope in you. It is therefore on behalf of these poor masses of Nigerians in all regions of Nigeria that I hereby offer you the following thoughts.

    First, I know you will fight corruption. Be assured that you will enjoy very strong support as you do it. But, please be aware that subduing corruption per se would be no more than only a Pyrrhic victory. After you leave the presidency, if the presidency still controls all the limitless powers it controls today, with the limitless financial resources, and the limitless freedom to access the finances, your successor can simply revive the corruption. Remember that after Babangida replaced you in 1985, he simply revived and enhanced corruption – and even constructed corruption into an avowed system of governance.

    Secondly, therefore, you must lead our country towards appropriately restructuring our federation. I am aware that some of your most eminent Arewa kinsmen want the federation to remain in its present form, with the federal government controlling all powers and resources, with states too impotent to achieve meaningful development, with the federal government able to barge disruptively  and obstructively  into any state, with the states operating as clients of the federal overlord, and with controllers of federal power presuming that it is their right to decide election results all over Nigeria and to enthrone persons of their choice in all states. Essentially, what we now have is not federalism at all. Restructuring it should have three objectives – to affirm respect for, and promote harmony among, our indigenous nationalities; to establish strong and development-capable states; and to ensure a federal government competently managing the commanding heights of our country’s economy, defending our country, and managing our country’s relations in the world. I believe that even against your own kinsmen’s objection, you have the strength of character to do this. That strength of character, I repeat, is what is now endearing you to very many Nigerians.

    Thirdly, you must lead us to redirect and enrich our economy – by developing dependable infrastructures; and by investing in our common people to build a strong modern economy (through expansion and improvement of education, modern job-related skills, entrepreneurial, small-business, and modern farming development progammes, and promotion of export orientation). As I have written before in this column, we can learn a lot from a small country like Singapore. This expanding economy will nurture a strong modern labour force, create businesses, expand employment, de-emphasize our people’s dependence on politics as a means of livelihood, rapidly increase efficiency, decrease poverty, and systematically help to banish public corruption.

    Fourthly, you must lead us to review our governmental system. Our present presidential system, with presidents and governors seeing themselves as dictators, has been a disaster. It is one of the reasons why impunity and corruption have grown so strong in our country. We need to return to the parliamentary system with its principle of shared responsibilities at the top of government. We need to infuse discipline and respect for laws into our politics and governance. And we need to infuse integrity into every department and position in our governments.

    In summary, the masses of our people are saying that they hope you can recreate Nigeria for them (and downsize the political barons and kleptocrats). Will you fulfil their hopes?

  • The fear of Buhari…

    Their wish was that he would not emerge as his party’s candidate in the February 14 presidential election. But when the All Progressives Congress (APC) picked Gen Muhammadu Buhari as its standard bearer, the bottom fell off the plan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its supporters. Since Buhari picked his party’s ticket in a keenly contested primary in Lagos last December 10, they have been running from pillar to post to run him down.

    Rather than the trouble envisaged by PDP, APC has been waxing stronger and stronger since the primary. The image of its candidate has also been soaring.

    What is the magic that has made Buhari a phenomenon all over the country today? Where two or more are gathered the topic is usually the forthcoming election. And the discussions normally end with this poser: ‘’who will you vote for?’’. Even though Buhari and PDP’s President Goodluck Jonathan are not the only ones contesting the February 14 election, Nigerians have reduced it to a contest between the duo. Surely, to all intents and purposes, it is going to be a two-man race.

    So, when people ask: ‘’who will you vote for?’’ they accompany the question with: ‘’Buhari or Jonathan?’’ In most instances, you find people answering: ‘’Buhari”. The APC candidate has become larger than life. Even little children, who are not eligible to vote, have joined in asking eligible voters to ‘’vote for Buhari’’.

    What do you make of the frontpage photograph in the Sun of Tuesday, where Osun State Governor Rauf Aregbesola carried a small boy to his bosom for shouting ‘’APC, Sai Buhari’’ during a rally in the town of Apomu? Such little boys can be seen in rallies across the country, whether held by APC or PDP, singing the praise of Buhari. If children, men and women are this crazy about Buhari doesn’t that say something about the presidential election, holding nine days from today?

    I have heard some people say unequivocally that Buhari will win, if the election is free and fair. Our people are afraid that their votes may not count, that is why they add the caveat, if the election is free and fair. They believe that the government is desperate to remain in power and would do anything to win the forthcoming elections, beginning with that of the president on February 14. Though the president has given us his word that the elections will be free and fair, many do not believe him. To them, it is dangerous to take the president’s statement at face value; so, they are asking Nigerians to remain vigilant so that their votes will count at the end of the day.

    If the elections are going to be free and fair, they posit, this must be seen in the way the president’s supporters are going about campaigning for him. You do not drum support for your candidate by beating the drums of war. You do not root for your candidate by maligning his arch opponent. You do not campaign for your candidate by tearing down some of the institutions of state as the PDP Presidential Campaign Organisation tried to do over Buhari’s School Certificate result. Of course, back then,  Buhari could not have joined the army in 1961 without the prerequisite qualification, which is the school certificate.

    The army admitted that Buhari had the certificate, but added rather shamefully  that it could not be traced in its records.  Does that mean that Buhari’s school certificate which he tendered along with other documents on joining the army is missing? According to former Director of Army Public Relations Brig Gen Olajide Laleye, ‘’records available indicate that Major General Muhammadu Buhari applied to join the military as a Form Six student of the Provincial Secondary School, Katsina, on October 18, 1961…the entry made on NA Form 199A at the point of documentation after commission as an officer indicated that the former Head of State obtained the West African School Certificate in 1961 with credits in relevant subjects.’’

    If this entry was made in Buhari’s form, it follows that he must have submitted his school certificate to authenticate his claim. Moreover, the Selection Board would  have asked for the original, at least, for what we today call ‘’sighting’’ and copies kept in his file. Those copies are what the army is today telling us are missing. We do not want to join issues with the military over this matter, especially regarding the aspect of  its record keeping, which has given some people in PDP the munition with which to attack Buhari, its former Commander-in-Chief.

    These PDP soldiers went haywire in their bid to paint Buhari black. They claimed that  Buhari is not qualified to stand for election because the army could not produce his result. How could the army produce his result when it was not the examining body?  From the outset, these henchmen made it known that they won’t spare Buhari even when their principal, the president, had promised issues-based campaign.

    Unfortunately, the presi
    dent’s agents are not inter
    ested in issues; they are more interested in disparaging Buhari. But the more they do that the more they draw support for the general from the mass of the people. Certificate or not, they say, it is ‘Sai Buhari’. This is what the president’s men want to stop at all cost. Yet, the harder they try, the harder they fall. The controversy over Buhari’s certificate has been laid to rest with the release of his result by his alma mater some two weeks ago. Yet, the PDP is  not satisfied.

    In a saner society, the certificate issue would have been dead and buried by now. But we are dealing with people with no moral scruples. Rather than bury their heads in shame and apologise to Buhari, they have resolved to feast on a dead issue. To them, the certificate saga remains a live issue; that is why they have the audacity to say it was forged. With its bogus claim, PDP is  not calling to question Buhari’s reputation, but is challenging the integrity of the Katsina school and Cambridge University.

    PDP and its men do not know the meaning of the word, integrity. This is why they are going about telling barefaced lies. To give their lies a veneer of truth, they tampered with the certificate to meet their ulterior motive.  If they could do this, what will they not do to win the election?

    They claimed that Buhari forged his certificate. Who is a forger in this case? What do you call those who tampered with a document sent from a school? Artful forgers? Should we still be talking of this certificate or their plans for the country, if they have any? Since they have nothing to offer, they have found it difficult to talk about issues.

  • No time to sit on the fence

    As February 14, the day of reckoning for President Jonathan and PDP draws nearer after 16 years of bare-faced stealing by indicted PDP stalwarts, periodic rigging of elections and PDP stranglehold over our people through exploitation of their secret fears and human frailties, there is palpable panic and desperation in PDP family. This is why for the sake of millions of our unemployed youths, the memory of over 12,000 victims of Boko Haram’s mindless killings, hundreds of helpless women and children brutally murdered in their sleep in the Middle Belt region by those the government is yet to identify, in solidarity with thousands who have been turned to refugees in their own country, in protest against the theft of about $20 billion according to Lamido Sanusi and the mismanagement of our economy to the tune of N30 trillion according to Chukwuma Soludo, patriotic Nigerians who care about the future of our children cannot afford to sit on the fence.  Nigerians must join hands to end their 16 years nightmare and six years of national disgrace.

    President Jonathan who publicly declared he wanted to be a one-term president now wants another term of four years after six years in office. He has been moving around the country selling his achievements which include the introduction of cassava bread, available only in Aso Villa seat of government, local rice at four times the cost of imported one when available, increase in federal roads from 5,000 to 25,000 even when those roads critical to our economy like Apapa Tin can Island Port road, Murtala Muhammed International Airport road, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Lokoja-Abuja Expressway, Enugu-Port Harcourt  Expressway, some of which have remained ‘work in progress 10 years after they were flagged off by ex-President Obasanjo; power generation, even when by the account of the minister of power, just about 20% of Nigerians have access to power and less  than 4500MW is generated  after an injection of over $50 billion into the sector. His administration, he claims, has fought insurgency into a standstill even with 20% of the territory he inherited as president in 2011 is now under the control of Boko Haram. He wants our impressionable children to hail him for his railway transformation, a rail system slower than what we had 60 years ago and a cover up for the derailment of Obasanjo rail modernization scheme for which multi-billion contracts were awarded to Chinese firms on two different occasions with huge mobilisations paid without result.

    In 2011, Nigerians were able to make a distinction between PDP that had nothing to sell to Nigerians beyond mindless stealing and confiscation of our national patrimony and the shoeless boy from Otuoke that identified with the plight of most Nigerians. They gave him a landslide victory even without any coherent agenda as to how to address the multi-faceted problems confronting the nation. Today, Nigerians know Jonathan loves no one but himself and his PDP. This is why if he must survive the February 14 hurricane, he must first lay to rest the ghosts of some demons that have haunted his administration in the last six years viz: his character,  Boko Haram,  the elusive Fulani herdsmen and corruption.

    In 2011, with little help from ex-President Obasanjo, President Jonathan undermined the PDP constitution.   Obasanjo who aided and abetted the infamous act saw it as a patriotic undertaking to give the minority a chance so as to end the myth that Nigeria belongs only to the dominant ethnic groups, their parties and their political leaders. He has also claimed publicly that that part of the bargain which was sold to northern governors was that Jonathan will serve one term of four years in addition to two years of Yar’Adua. With the clips of his public acknowledgement that his presidency ends in 2015 now in the public domain, he owes Nigerians an explanation for reneging on an agreement. Calling Obasanjo a motor park tout is not a substitute for his moral obligation to Nigerians.

    Of course, President Jonathan is also haunted by the ghost of Boko Haram. Only last Thursday, the lot fell on neighboring Chad to help us liberate a Nigerian border town earlier taken over by Boko Haram insurgents. Chad’s victory was considered an embarrassment to mighty Nigeria whose once invisible military has been hobbled by politics and corruption. The following day, Saturday January 31, Samil Chergui of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council, announced the agreement of African leaders to send 7,500 troops to fight the Boko Haram insurgency in north-east Nigeria. This is coming under a Jonathan administration that had the luxury of deploying 12,000 security personnel led by Musliu Obanikoro, then junior minister of defence, and Adesiyan, the police Affairs minister, both of whom had never visited Borno either to motivate our outgunned soldiers or identify with the plight of the parents of the abducted 276 Chibok girls, to intimidate and arrest opposition leaders during Osun State governorship election last year. The besieged north-east controlled by the opposition has little to offer the President in terms of electoral fortune. But all the same, the President has just about 10 days to tell Nigerians what he would do differently to change our fortune on the battle front beyond his soap-box rhetoric of “they did not buy anything, they did not buy attack helicopters” even after presiding over N3.1 trillion defence security budget in four years in addition to a $1 billion foreign loan he took last year.

    Nigerians are also waiting for the President’s explanation as to why, with awesome apparatus of coercive power of the state at his disposal, he has not been able to identify those behind brutal murder of women and children in the Middle Belt in the last three years. We all understand conflicts and clashes between Fulani herdsmen and farmers in the region predate President Jonathan. These conflicts according to MIYETTI Allah, Muhammad Bello, the Secretary General of an Association of the Herdsmen, have always been about resource use: Pasture and water, which PDP politicians have exploited using religion and ethnicity factors as well as Nigeria’s inability to regulate influx of foreign herdsmen. President Jonathan had six years to make a difference. If there is the political will, he did not need the National Assembly to create massive grazing zones in all the troubled areas in view of the existence of Land Use Act. Unfortunately for the president, his appointment of the immediate past Inspector General of Police who was indicted by a probe into the Jos crisis and the president’s lack of political will to implement the recommendations of the government probe, it is seen by many that the divisive politics of religion and ethnicity in the Middle Belt between the Fulani settlers and their host communities work to the advantage of the president whose only block support outside his South-south and South-east is the troubled Middle Belt for whom the fear of the Fulani and Muslim is the beginning of wisdom.

    Surrounded mostly by indicted corrupt men, the president is known to be weak in the war against corruption. While still being haunted by the non successful prosecution of his party leaders accused by EFCC of stealing N1.7 trillion under the fuel subsidy regime, while Nigerian anxiously awaits the publication of the forensic investigation to the disappearance of $20b ($10b by government admission) from the NNPC account, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, a former CBN Governor has now also accused Jonathan administration of mismanaging the economy to the tune of N30 trillion.

    As the clock tickles towards the day of reckoning, it does not appear that President Jonathan and PDP are interested in addressing these weighty issues. As  defeats stares those who say the only thing they know how to do is ‘win election’ in the face, desperate PDP family members seem to searching for ways to truncate the electoral process either through sponsored protest to shift the date for the election or create instability by using the judiciary to disqualify the leading opposition presidential candidate. These are indeed desperate times for the PDP. And for those who care for our nation, this is not the time to sit on the fence.

  • Nigeria never forgets (1)

    • (Tragicomedy of Ngozi-Okonjo Iweala and her voodoo economics)

    It wouldn’t be fair to say that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has a patriot’s heart and the soul of the Nigerian ruling class. Whatever that translates to, this is not to trash Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Finance Minister but to mourn the flightiness of genius within the footholds of power.

    Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was supposed to be that unsullied force of hope that would endow Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s presidency with the elusive humanity it still lacks. The alumnus of Harvard University and M.I.T (U.S.A) was supposed to appreciate in stature and candour until she becomes one of Nigeria’s near perfect choices for leadership.

    Her current charge as Nigeria’s finance minister is to represent every faction of the socio-economic divide but whatever decision she’s making even as you read, Okonjo-Iweala isn’t coasting along Nigeria’s stormy clime, she is cruising outside it.

    She is gutsy though. Quite brash too. And Okonjo-Iweala never sells herself short. While her peers treaded predictable and dishonorable paths into the presidential cabinet, Iweala meandered along two parallel tracks: one befitting a celebrity and the other, designed for a messiah. It is often hard to tell where one stops and the other begins yet nothing was as lucid as the bulky Minister of Finance’s self-assuredness.

    That towering bust of over-confidence however, becomes her Achilles heel. Okonjo-Iweala believes she is a realist even as she sounds off as the most unrealistic of fantasists. Inifinitely enabled by the President, Okonjo-Iweala brims with mystifying narcissism that’s at once dictatorial, dull-witted and condescending; consider for instance, her participation in the fuel subsidy removal. In the wake of the exercise, Okonjo-Iweala assured that Nigerians would derive clear and quantifiable benefits from the measure.

    Some of the benefits she promised Nigerians included construction, completion and rehabilitation of refineries, rails, federal highways, ICT and water projects. She promised that the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P), an offshoot of the subsidy removal scheme would provide for an efficient and more effective mass transit network, artisanship training scheme for youths, improved public works and social services, health care etc. She said government would provide 1,600 buses to cushion the effects of fuel subsidy removal and in the face of 70% unemployment and 70% poverty rate, Okonjo-Iweala brazenly claimed, recently, that the government created 1.6m jobs in 2013. Really?

    In the face of contradictory realities, Okonjo-Iweala stubbornly maintained that the country’s economy was in good shape. She substantiated her claims using the country’s recently rebased Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of about $432 billion compared to that of South Africa which stood at $370 billion at the end of 2013 thus touting Nigeria as the biggest economy in Africa.

    Now that the economy has collapsed with the fall in oil prices, can it be correctly inferred that Okonjo-Iweala is a liar? Nigeria’s economy has declined from bad to worse and the country’s currency suffers continual devaluation. In desperation, the finance minister announced recently, her measures to halt Nigeria’s economic decline; these include reduction in budget benchmark, special tax on luxury goods, a $2bn withdrawal from ECA, etc.

    Okonjo-Iweala promises to diversify the economy and stabilize the currency but how can she achieve these without a functional conscience, mechanized agriculture, cutting-edge technology and viable industrialization? Recently, the 2015 budget was presented to the National Assembly and in its wake, BudgIT, a financial intelligence services group and Premium Times’ contributor, maintains that the 2015 budget projections appear overly optimistic. “Technically, it costs $21.06 to produce a barrel of Crude Oil in 2014 under the JVC agreement (Joint Venture Corporation), up from $11.31 per barrel in 2009 – while the average operating cost of getting a barrel of Crude oil from the ground, which was previously at $6.38 in 2009, is now $9.94. Nigeria appears to be gradually out-pricing itself from the Crude oil market and urgently needs to review its petroleum laws. Nigeria has also not been able to optimise revenue from the oil and gas industry because its pricing model is outdated and without the PIB, bold reforms have not been adopted.”

    According to the October 2011 Central Bank Monetary Policy Committee Document , “A substantial part of oil production (about 40 per cent) is currently in deep offshore wells. Based on the terms agreed in the 1990s when oil price was under US$30, royalty from oil wells deeper than 1,000 metres is zero per cent and the nation is paid only 20 per cent of the profit by oil companies after deducting their expenses. As a result, the country has had limited benefits from high oil prices and increasing output, with most of the gains going to multinational oil companies under an inequitable fiscal arrangement.”

    Recent estimates, stresses BudgIT, showed that Nigeria produced an average of 1.902million barrels per day in December 2014 with over 35m cargoes still unsold. The Economist magazine puts the operating cost of extracting shale oil at $10-$20 per barrel for large fields. If the price war is anything to go by, the conventional oil producer will be looking at keeping oil below $50 per barrel and hoping the Shale oil lobby in the USA does not have its way with subsidies. As it is, the Crude oil price is already trading below the budget estimates through fiscal year 2015, pegged at $65 per barrel.

    Current realities establish that the fundamental deficiencies that plague our economy can’t be corrected through Okonjo-Iweala’s entrenchment of IMF prescriptions of structural adjustment, with one eye on fictitious growth projections that have no relevance to the lives of the citizenry. Okonjo-Iweala’s penchant for ignoring a people-centred development agenda in favour of shallow, simplistic prescriptions founded on cutting spending (spending to cut spending is what she does actually); removing support for social services – education, health, etc. while increasing cost of basics such as power, fuel and piling up more debts for the country is akin to motion without movement; a recipe for disaster.

    Yet, the illogicalities of fuel subsidy removal are incalculable and Okonjo-Iweala and company can still offer no convincing explanation – statistical or otherwise – to show that Nigerians had always enjoyed fuel subsidy while it lasted or its removal. They forced upon Nigerians such harsh irrationality even in the absence of more sensible and humane options like revivifying our refineries, checking monumental corruption within the NNPC, PPRA and the government in general.

    Funny how Okonjo-Iweala wouldn’t advise or ‘order’ Mr. President to slash the outrageous salaries and expenses of Nigeria’s serving state officers – the two of them inclusive. Funny how she awed him to submission and acceptance of the dangerous illusion that once subsidy is removed or the downstream sector is deregulated, the Nigerian economy would begin to thrive. In her extraordinary and World Bank-informed economics, the effects of the subsidy removal would be proactively cushioned by instantaneous palliatives or safety-nets spread over the long term.

    Today, Okonjo-Iweala’s genius and patriotism is in doubt; the eerie coincidence and vicious intensity of the government’s desperation to remove fuel subsidy which festered in cahoots with the World Bank’s fabled position on issues of subsidy resonates quite worrisomely even as you read. Yet Mr. President is unperturbed even as her presumed genius, crippled by untenable economics and hubristic yearnings is unleashed over 160 million Nigerians.

    • To be continued…
  • Eliminating mass poverty, unemployment in developing countries (I)

    Eliminating mass poverty, unemployment in developing countries (I)

    The following lecture by me on mass poverty and unemployment was, incredibly, delivered in Benin, in 1984, 30 years ago, at the Annual Conference of the Association for Consulting Engineering in Nigeria (ACEN).

        I was reminded of the lecture recently when a copy of it was sent to me by the current President of the association, Dr. Temi Kehinde. Amazingly, on reading and reflecting on the lecture, it confirmed my general impression that very little has really changed by way of our really tackling the problems of mass poverty and unemployment in our country. Only a few people could have imagined in 1984 that 30 years later, Nigeria would still be in the same spot, still mired in mass poverty and unemployment. The dire situation places in bold relief the failure of our economic strategies and policies in reducing mass poverty and unemployment over the years. Most of Asia has been largely successful in addressing the twin problems, but not Africa, including Nigeria

     In the case of Nigeria, in the period of 30 years since the paper was publicly presented, both the military and the civilians (PDP federal governments) have been in power for exactly 15 years each. But neither has been successful in tackling the grave social and economic problems outlined in my lecture. Nothing much has changed. The lecture, which I have not amended, is offered here again as a guide to the electorate and the two principal contenders for the presidency in the forthcoming presidential election.

      The Nature of the Problem

    Mass poverty and unemployment continue to be the dominant features of many developing countries, particularly in Africa, Nigeria included. In virtually all of these countries, mass poverty and unemployment of all categories of workers, including university graduates, are now assuming alarming proportions. Though many developing countries achieved high rates of economic growth in the 70s, very few of them have escaped the twin challenges of mass poverty and unemployment. In many cases in Africa, the economic situation has deteriorated in recent years, and the prospects for the rest of the century do not appear to be too good. In the case of Nigeria, despite the impressive economic gains of the 70s, largely through the ‘oil boom’, and better terms of trade, the overall economic situation today, remains very grim, with a stagnating agricultural sector, and rather low and steadily declining productivity in the industrial sector. The continuing rural-urban migration of our people in search of better work and wages has further aggravated the existing socio-economic problem by spreading slums and shanty towns, and exacerbating the misery of poverty. High unemployment rates among the youth and the educated have generated a situation of acute social unrest.

    No doubt these challenges reflect the underdevelopment of our economy and its structural imbalance, both of which constrain economic development. A high population growth rate has not been matched by increasing agricultural output, which has steadily declined since 1971. By 1960 agriculture represented 63 per cent of our GDP. By 1980, it was down to only 18 per cent and only 23 per cent of non-oil GDP. Another factor contributing to the growing unemployment in Nigeria and other underdeveloped economies in Africa has been the labour-saving bias of certain kinds of technological change associated with development. We have tended to show a preference for capital intensive, rather than labour-intensive industries, resulting in the under-utilisation of our abundant human resources. At the same time, we have in our country today extreme and persisting cases of glaring inequalities that reflect certain institutional rigidities in our society. Poverty levels and mass unemployment can only be reduced by a full mobilisation of our abundant human resources with the aim of bridging the existing income inequalities and promoting economic growth.

     For a successful drive against mass poverty, it is essential that the governments of the federation should start with a clear idea of what they would regard as the minimum level of living consistent with human dignity. Sections of the population whose consumption standards do not meet this minimum should be identified, and made the focus of planning. Formulating developing programmes and policies in terms of average per capita income, or of the rate at which these averages might be increased, is not adequate for focusing attention on the points at which attacks on acute poverty are most needed. Once the dimensions of poverty are quantified, it should be possible to determine how far the problem can be tackled during a defined period, by general measures for accelerating economic growth, and how far such measures need to be complemented by specific measures to increase the income of those below the poverty line. In this respect, special attention should be paid to employment programmes as a means both for accelerating economic growth, and for redistribution of income and consumption. The vast extent of under-used labour in Nigeria today, at all levels, indicates the scope for promoting economic growth through its more productive use. The broad aim should be to link up mobilisation of existing idle labour as far as possible with measures for increasing production.

    Through appropriate technological, economic and political measures, it should be possible to strengthen complementarities in the development process, and thereby promote both economic growth and employment. It is logical that a development strategy designed specifically to reduce mass poverty should aim at altering the product composition of the national output, as well as the techniques of production. For certain products, capital-intensive techniques of production may be more efficient over a wide range of factor costs: but for other products there is a wider choice of processes and techniques that would fully utilise the vast reservoir of manpower. Programmes aimed at reducing mass poverty and unemployment through increased productivity should be conceived at the outset as essential components of the over-all process of economic and sound planning, which calls for a substantial modification in Nigeria of the present approaches to planning. In the first place, the present approach does not adequately cater for the interests of all major sections of the country, particularly the economically most disadvantaged, at the relevant stages of the planning process. It is imperative that both the federal and state governments should seek persistently to establish the appropriate machinery and procedures for consultation on matters relating to income distribution.

  • How PDP ruined Nigeria

    For 16 years, PDP, a congregation of men and women with little faith in our nation has raped and ravaged the land with impunity. For six years, President Jonathan has assaulted our sensibilities by celebrating and decorating some of those responsible for our tragedy. Unfortunately for the president, many of his critics now openly talk of “show me your friend, I will tell you who you are” without necessarily trying to be spiteful. After all, except President Jonathan who remains unconvinced, many concerned Nigerians and friends of Nigeria have identified corruption as the bane of our society. The immediate past president of Nigerian Bar Association, Okey Wali not too long ago announced to the hearing of the president that “corruption is the number one problem of the country, whether by embezzlement of public funds, appointments in public and private sector or by selective justice”. Sanusi Lamido, the former CBN governor in a BBC programme long before he was finally sacked over his allegation of missing $20 billion from the NNPC account, had accused the government of President Jonathan of lacking the political will to fight corruption claiming that “of the 164 fraud cases arising from his own war against banking sector frauds, only one was successfully prosecuted”.

    Walter Carrington, the American former ambassador to Nigeria also recently reminded us that “corruption is the most terrible monster that confronts Nigeria, and that “virtually all the problems associated with governance would be removed if we can summon the courage to tackle corruption and banish it from our activities.”

    The current mindless stealing and sharing of our national patrimony started at the onset of the Fourth Republic. Cash-strapped PDP elected politicians who publicly admitted selling personal properties to fight the 1999 election and their fronts created artificial scarcity in the supply chain of fuel. This led to long queues at filling stations. The new Obasanjo administration responded by awarding contracts for the refurbishments of our four refineries to PDP members as against those who built the refineries. The PDP beneficiaries bungled the exercise after collecting payments. Obasanjo, a captive of those who had sponsored his election could not sanction those involved in the rip-off.  He then went on set up the Petroleum Products Pricing Committee (PPPRA) with a mandate to “liberalise the downstream sector of the petroleum industry, privatise the refineries, deregulate and liberalise the imports of petroleum products and, generally, make the products available at reasonable prices”. The Bill for the establishment of PPPRA was debated and signed into law without delay because PDP members had vested interest.

    As against making our refineries work, PPPRA became fixated with importation of refined petroleum products.  In place of existing NNPC storage facilities, PPPRA opted for the use of storage facilities of members of Depot Petroleum Products Marketers Association (DAPPMA). With the coming of President Jonathan who does not believe stealing is corruption, it was done with impunity. With Ahmadu Alli, former PDP chairman as PPPRA chairman and Diezani Alison-Madueke as minister for petroleum, a reckless decision to increase the number of approved importers from about a dozen to over 128 as a form of party patronage was taken. A subsequent House probe of the fuel subsidy regime revealed a theft of about N1.7 trillion. The probe also led to the pruning down of the number of fuel importers from unwieldy 128 in 2011, to 39 in 2012 and reduction from 60.25 million litres  which PPPRA fraudulently claimed Nigerians consumed daily in 2011 to 39.66million  litres in 2012.  Some of those indicted by the probe are not only walking around freely, they move around with police escorts while others openly mobilize for the president’s re-election.

    No less scandalous was PDP’s handling of the power sector. The Obasanjo administration inherited about 2800MW in 1999. By 2002, Olusegun Agagu the then minister for power claimed the government had achieved a peak of 4200MW. The projection as at the time Obasanjo left in 2007 was 20,000MW by 2015. Again cash-strapped PDP men after the 2007 election frustrated the Obasanjo scheme. It was not until two years later, following the sharing of the N5.2 billion rural electrification contract by leading members of the Lower House that Jonathan was able to return to the derailed Obasanjo’s plan. To date close to $50 billion has been sunk into the power sector.

    But last week, Chinedu Nebo, the minister for power who had back in 2013 lamented  that “the situation where only 25 percent of Nigerians have access to electricity is a nightmare caused by human beings used by evil forces”, disclosed during a Channels Television programme that with the completion of Mambila and Zungeru  projects and the employment of over 1000 engineers, the sector hit 4500MW in December 2014 which unfortunately could not be sustained because of what he attributed to gas line attack.

    Rice importation has been another source of drain on our foreign reserve by PDP. With the emergence of PDP government in 1999, government officials fronting for politicians in collusion with foreign importers turned Nigeria to world biggest importer of rice spending according to the minister of agriculture, “N1billion naira a day or N366 billion  a year”. The President assured Nigerians his transformation agenda would put an end to rice importation by 2015. During the recent AgriFest 2015 Celebration of Nigeria Agriculture held at Eagles Square Abuja, he sold to Nigerians his minister of agriculture’s propaganda when he said “High quality Nigerian rice is now competing favourably with imported rice in the markets. I eat Nigerian rice and I can tell you, it is better than imported rice”. The truth is that like the cassava bread, the president and his men are probably the only people who have access to the Nigerian rice. A government that talks of self-sufficiency in 2015 also approved waivers to favoured importers like Dangote, Vaswani, Stallion, some churches as well as some churches and hotels. Dikko Abdulahi, Comptroller General of Customs claimed that in the first eight months of 2013, of the N603 billion lost to waivers, rice accounted for N105 billion.

    PDP has failed the nation. PPPRA, with staff strength of 249, and an unwieldy 22-man strong board, earning scandalously whopping salaries and allowances of N57.9 billion per annum cannot manage our refineries. It cannot import fuel. It cannot manage storage facilities. We remain the only OPEC member that imports fuel for domestic consumption.  After 16 years of PDP, we depend on rice from India and Thailand to feed ourselves.  On the inherited national patrimony such as properties in highbrow areas of Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Port Harcourt and Abuja which belong to our children, PDP and the government it runs in their wisdom decided to share them among themselves in the name of monetization. How can a transient government monetize what does not belong to it?

    Besides the baleful legacies of those who say they are not fighting corruption because they don’t want to do what Buhari did 31 years ago as a head of a military junta, or men without character haranguing him over his secondary school certificate or wishing him dead before winning the election, they are haunted by their past . Whereas Buhari as an effective 20 months leader of our nation insisted Nigeria will not eat grain until they produced their own grains and in one year, our problem became how to store our locally produced grains. We did not spend billions paying crooks in the name of phantom subsidy; we sold refined petroleum from our refineries and earned foreign exchange. Our exchange rate was about N1 to $2.

    My PVC battle

    So far, I have spent three days for the elusive PVC. From my LG headquarters which is some journey from my house, I was directed back to a school near the University of Lagos estate.  INEC workers had closed by the time I got there. I took my position early on the queue the following morning. When it was my turn, I was directed back to where I registered four years ago for the code number of the registration centre. I drove back to the open field and discovered there were no INEC signs or directives.   I went to my estate chairman who provided the code since we registered and voted in the same place in 2011. Relieved, I went to join the queue. Again when it was my turn, the young lady showed me my name and picture on the EVR form but announced my PVC was one of those yet to be brought back from Abuja.  She gave me a week. I reported dutifully there Tuesday. We wrote our names. I was number 182. As I took my leave at 10 ‘O’clock to send this piece to my editor, there was no sign of any INEC official. Prof Attahiru Jega recently spoke only of outstanding PVC for newly registered voters; he should please take note of the plight of old voters.

  • Let’s stop talking and planning violence

    Many Nigerian politicians these days are talking and planning, not elections, but violence. Some are threatening war by their own particular nationalities against all other nationalities of Nigeria. Some are issuing threats of religious wars, though in veiled phrases. Altogether, it seems as if, come mid-February, the real event in Nigeria is not going to be elections but horrific conflicts and pogroms.

    As the rest of the world absorbs these fearsome vibrations from Nigeria, worldwide apprehension about Nigeria has risen to fever pitch. What one would describe as the peak came early this week when the American  Secretary of State, John Kerry, hurried to Nigeria to appeal to Nigerian rulers and leaders to stop planning for violence and start planning for free, fair and peaceful elections. If the government of America feels compelled to take that kind of action, then the situation must be a lot worse than most of us, ordinary Nigerians, know.

    It is therefore critically important for us all to warn our politicians. Tempers are such in Nigeria these days that if violence starts as is being threatened and planned, it is very likely to develop to extents beyond the wildest imaginations of any Nigerian and any Nigerian political leader. In country after country in Black Africa, political violence usually starts small, but by igniting pent-up angers, fears and hostilities, it then sets up horrendous conflagrations that seem to go on forever – often consuming and destroying lives and properties indiscriminately. Nigeria is more combustible today than most Nigerian politicians seem to know or care to know. They are wrong in thinking that another Nigerian civil war will proceed and end neatly, or be spatially limited, like our first civil war.

    It will help if our politicians watch videos on the civil wars that have wracked the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) off and on since 1960. The political storm started as a small incident a few days after the celebration of independence. Then it rolled forward and ballooned out until it engulfed most of the country, led to the assassination of its first Prime Minister, generated a viciously corrupt military dictatorship, and then concatenated in an even larger second civil war. This second war became so massive that it involved all the countries of Central Africa and became known as “Africa’s World War”. An estimated 5.4 million people have died in this war – the largest human casualties of any one war since the Second World War of 1939-45. Today, in spite of United Nations and African Union peace-keeping efforts, rebel forces are still alive in parts of this country.

    I have academic colleagues who saw some parts of the Rwanda genocide of 1994. As they tell it, there was not much of a sign of impending trouble in the days before. But once the mass killings started, it was as if everybody had long been preparing to kill their neighbours. Within days, virtually everybody in sight was a machete-wielding desperado and killer. A journalist on the spot reported, “There are no devils left in hell; all of them are on duty in Rwanda”. Within 90 days, over 750,000 people had been killed, and over two million had been forced to flee from their homes.

    Virtually every country of Black Africa is prone to these political wild fires. Last week, I told the story of the mass killings now in progress among the 40 different nationalities of South Sudan where, in only two years of independence, between 50,000 and 100,000 people have been slaughtered. Somalia slowly slid into confusion in 1991, and it continues to live in that disorder till today. A few days ago, the United Nations and the African Union agreed to increase the number of international peace-keeping forces in Somalia. The political hurricane goes on and on all over Black Africa, generating horrific destruction, loss of lives, and blood-curdling human deprivation and suffering.

    The truth behind these patterns of madness is that our Black African countries are very fragile. The disorientation started when our various peoples were forced into countries that were not their own choosing; and it has become very profound in our time. Our peoples feel trapped and deprived, and are therefore often on edge. Little conflicts have a tendency to blow up into mammoth disasters. Therefore, it is a serious crime to start violence in any of our countries – because it is impossible to tell how far and wide it will go.

    As I have said in various ways in this column, the disorientation of our many peoples in Nigeria has been compounded by the folly of concentrating power and resource-control in the so-called “federal government”. We have called into being a demon that we can never, on our own, peacefully send away. No Nigerian who enters into the limitless powers of the presidency and the limitless ocean of money under the president’s control can ever choose to do the right thing and return Nigeria to a sane federation. The disorientation, sense of loss, anger, bitterness and mutual animosity among our various peoples have risen very high and are escalating fearfully at this point. It is therefore a very wrong time for our politicians to play with any idea of conflict.

    Whatever else they may choose to do with our country, our political leaders must seriously commit themselves to the avoidance of violent conflicts. The candidates in the coming presidential election have agreed to conduct their election campaigns, and run the election itself, in peace, and to prevail on their supporters and activists to do the same. We do not see the effects of that agreement in the conduct of the campaigns yet. Threats of violence are still being hurled from virtually all sides, and politically motivated conflicts are still being reported in various places. The informed world still continues to worry. Governments and international agencies are considering how to help Nigeria to prevent violent conflicts generated by election.

    But whatever help the international community may offer, it is we Nigerians that must bear the ultimate responsibility for the destiny of Nigeria. In the context of our senseless accumulation of power and resource-control into the federal centre, we have evolved a political culture that conceives of elections as do-or-die wars. If we really intend to sort out the future of this country in a peaceful manner, we must get rid of this essentially criminal approach to elections.

    For our 2007 elections, many countries and international agencies sent pre-election observers, and then sent countless observer teams at election time. Yet, we made that election one of the most criminally rigged elections in our history. I fear that we are going to do exactly like that with our February election – and that if we do, we will almost certainly have the violent conflicts that the world fears. And judging from the moods of these times, I fear that the violence of 2015 may be our final folly together. Those thinking of rigging elections, and those thinking of responding with violence – both are, in the atmosphere of today, planning to ride on a tiger’s back, and they are taking the risk of ending up in the tiger’s belly.