The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Subsidy: before another barren debate

    For once, perhaps in eons, a Nigerian leader has not traded off his humanity for political power.  That about captures President Muhammadu Buhari’s take on fuel subsidy.

    “I have received many literature on the need to remove subsidies, but much of it has no depth,” President Buhari declared.  “When you touch the price of petroleum products: that has the effect of triggering price rises on transportation, food and rents.  That is for those who earn salaries, but there are many who are jobless and will be affected by it.”

    A sitting president, worried about subsidy removal affecting transportation, food and rents — when the state has provided his free! — as well as the jobless?  That is rare presidential humanism around here!

    Still, for the anti-fuel subsidy orchestra, with their infallible neo-liberal doctrine, Buhari’s take is pure heresy: crass populism, symbolising nothing but ancient thinking.

    That has been the regnant temper since 1999, when pioneer 4th Republic President, Olusegun Obasanjo, laid down the rules — though, in truth, the ill-fated Umaru Yar’Adua (Allah bless his soul!) did a somewhat heretic foxtrot, reversing the 51% sale of Kaduna and new Port Harcourt refineries to Blue Star, an Aliko Dangote-led group of investors.  But his ill health put paid to any further heretic rascality.

    President Goodluck Jonathan would appear far too dazzled by the Breton-Woods tantrums of her economy empress, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, with her persistent hollering: “save, save, save for the rainy day”!  A crucial part of those “savings” was the imperative to remove “subsidy”.  Well, the rainy day is here, and there appears pretty little savings!

    Even formal subsidy removal “savings”, epitomised by SURE-P, in some states like Lagos, have proved nothing but lethal chop-pey (easy loot) — a partisan-powered slush fund, to kill and maim opposing partisans, in an abortive bid to “capture Lagos”!

    Gen. Obasanjo, on his part, was an apostle of state-driven economies, during his first coming as military head of state (1976-1979).  But at his second coming, he played the classical neophyte, with vigour, pushing his new neo-liberal conversion, selling off about everything he had insisted the state must own — or run — before he saw the light; perhaps on his way to economic Damascus!

    The apogee of that frenetic privatisation was his fuel liberalisation-by-importation policy, en route to selling off the local refineries  — which organised Labour nevertheless resisted.

    So, that single energy policy — liberalisation-by-importation — is the issue.  The so-called fuel subsidy, alleged host to oil-marketing subsidy parasites, is only a symptom.

    Now, how can a country solve a problem by, with a frenzy, attacking the symptom, while blissfully forgetting the root disease?  That is the long-and-short of the subsidy removal hysteria.

    But the mother philosophy remains unchanged.  President Obasanjo, in opting for his flawed policy, declared his government powerless against petty rats, that fed fat on turn-around maintenance (TAM) contracts; which crippled Nigeria’s local refineries.  So, for the abject failure to kill those big rats, subsidy must go; even if that was grave collateral damage to the law-abiding majority.

    The latest strain of that philosophy: because subsidy thieves cannot be checkmated, subsidy must go!  Then the clinching moan: subsidy does not get to the poor, anyway!

    Now, that explosive mix of fact and emotion has registered a rather shrill presence in the long-running subsidy conundrum.

    In the impassioned exchanges of January 2012’s Occupy Nigeria protests, embattled President Jonathan alleged that the pushers of the strike were over-fed Lagos denizens, whose monster cars guzzled fuel, monster lungs gulped choice victuals and brutal lips swilled bottled water, the tri-luxuries his poor Otuoke folk would never dare imagine, despite their state’s status as crude producer.

    Bayelsa senator, Ben Murray-Bruce, has returned to that regional hysterics, in his latest road show against fuel subsidy.  While the Lagos poor had access to cheap fuel, he rued, his Bayelsa poor (and for geographical balance, the Boko Haram-harassed North East poor!) had never benefited from it.

    But to his credit, in a piece he wrote for This Day newspaper, “Tame fuel subsidy or it will tame Nigeria” (July 24) he erected a scaffolding of initiatives, of how to pay “transport subsidy” to transport owners and managers, after stopping fuel subsidy as we know it now; and getting rid of the fat fuel-importing rats.  But his complex idea of fuel stumps, administered by designated fuel stations, portends an even more soulless racketeering!

    The numbers ensemble have also weighed in, in the subsidy removal debate.  To this clinical class, if imported fuel costs x at the global pump price, why should Nigerians buy it at a lower pump price of y — the subsidy price — simply because Nigeria produces crude?  And the scarecrow clincher: crude, that is even progressively losing its market niche?  Such is the numbers ensemble’s infallibility!

    But wait a minute: what if local refineries processed the crude, and you didn’t have to import refined products — would those numbers still add up, infallibility and all?

    That leads to the real contention.  If crude were locally refined, to feed Nigeria and to export the excess — if any — the debate might just automatically change.  If fuel importation stops, fuel importing parasites would vanish with their hosts, wouldn’t they?

    So, if President Obasanjo had strategically invested in more refineries — despite the ready excuse that private investors that got licences did not build — would there still be the raging passionate debate over subsidy’s oil marketer “thieves”?

    Obasanjo’s fitful flight from duty (on local refining), on Breton-Woods doctrinal fancies, has come back to haunt the polity!  Even then, to many local neo-liberal ideologues, the solution is more Breton-Woods, and not a wise change of policy direction.  That explains all the renewed “remove subsidy” passion.

    That is why President Buhari should shun another round of a barren oil subsidy debate.  He should rather — and fast — explore building more local refineries; and ensuring the existing ones, though ageing, work to their maximum present capacities.

    As Ripples always notes, the government can build refineries and hand them over to private sector agents who can profitably run them — if such chores are beyond Nigerian public servants!

    Even if after attaining local refining, and petrol still sells for N300 a litre — which however is unlikely — all the petro-chemical spin-offs from petroleum downstream would still have been beneficial to the local economy.

    That cannot be said of the present net-loss of exporting crude cheap, but, at a premium, importing refined products.

    That, not the so-called fuel subsidy, is the real tragedy of the extant energy policy.

    ‘How can a country solve a problem by attacking the symptom, while blissfully forgetting the root disease?  That is the long-and-short of the subsidy removal hysteria’

     

  • EFCC: So much bark, so little bite

    EFCC: So much bark, so little bite

    Two high-profile arrests by the EFCC in the past two weeks followed a script that has become wearisomely familiar.

    I have in mind the arrest, first, of former Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido and two of his sons on money–laundering charges involving billions of Naira, and later of Stephen Oronsaye, former head of Service of the Federation in the investigation of fraud on an identical scale.

    First, the news media are briefed comprehensively by persons familiar with the case but who cannot be identified because they were not authorised to make the damning disclosures that go on to resonate on the front pages and in the headlines for subsequent weeks, while providing coarse entertainment in the so-called social media.

    Even in summary, the charge sheet is a litany of crimes and misdemeanours on a scale almost beyond belief – almost, because Nigerians have come to expect nothing less than the worst from their officials. In fact, if there is one thing that unites vast segments of the Nigerian public, it is the belief, indeed the expectation, that their officials will always gravitate toward all that is ignoble and not of good report.

    Then comes the arrest a few days later, staged with critical solemnity for the news media, especially television, which measures news salience by the extent to which an event translated into dramatic pictures for the television cameras. The suspects, looking grim and woebegone, usually are serenaded into the precincts of the EFCC by officials wearing vests marked with its logo.

    Another layer of officials, suitably armed, keeps the rear, apparently to deter those who might be thinking of sabotaging the proceedings. Yet more officials take positions to the left and the right of the suspects, boxing them in.

    The officials look sober for the most part. There is no swagger in them, no hint of the triumphalism you would expect to perfuse such a setting. It is almost as if they are labouring under a painful necessity.

    But make no mistake about it:  This is serious business. The EFCC officials are respectful. But you cannot overawe them with any claim to bigmanism. As if to make that point emphatically, they may often keep the suspects in custody, pending formal arraignment where an unabridged list of the crimes and misdemeanours is read.

    The charges go to confirm what many Nigerians have always believed of their officials, namely, that they are grasping, self-absorbed, larcenous to the point of obscenity and insanely acquisitive.  Even among those usually inclined to keep an open mind or show cool indifference, one could sense quiet outrage.

    “Have the suspects no shame?” you could almost hear them say with pained resignation.  “What ill they do with all that pillage?  Just how much do they need to feel contented?

    After the usual courtroom skirmishes, the trial finally starts.  Soon enough, it begins to appear that what had seemed an open-and-shut case is nothing of the sort. The suspect has in his corner some of the finest legal minds that money can buy, no pun intended.  The prosecution, on the other hand, is typically led by attorneys of lesser specific gravity.

    And in an encounter in which seniority counts for much and opposing junior counsel as well as the presiding judge often feel obliged to defer to senior counsel, the EFCC finds itself at disadvantage, and not just in psychological terms.

    As the trial gets underway, it is usually the prosecution that is seeking adjournment after adjournment, evidence that the case had been rushed to court, without the painstaking marshalling of probative evidence required for successful prosecution.

    More evidence of a rush to court surfaces when the prosecution requests leave of court to withdraw the charges so as to and amend them and re-file new material later. Such requests unduly prolong the court process, resulting in justice delayed.

    The case wends its way through the system, and judgment day finally arrives. But it is thrown out because it was filed in the wrong court – a court that has no business entertaining it.

    This verdict has been delivered so many times that it raises some troubling questions.  It may well be that the officials filing the cases could not figure out the right court the first time, and still cannot do so after losing their cases on the matter of jurisdiction, hardly one of the most recondite issues in legal practice.

    But that would raise the far more troubling issue of whether the cases were filed deliberately in courts with no jurisdiction, with officials subverting, for any number of reasons, the very cause they were employed to champion.

    When corruption cases are not dismissed for want of jurisdiction, they are often set aside because the prosecution failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, usually another indication of a rush to court, or of a deficit in prosecutorial skills.

    Halfway through the case, the prosecutor may settle for a bargain whereby the public official on trial pleads guilty to a lesser charge that may not involve jail term but allow him keep much of the ill-gotten wealth that lay at the heart of the prosecution.

    This is not the way to fight official corruption.

    Until the authorities can assemble, train and retain formidable prosecutors who can hold their own against the smartest defence attorneys, and until they can support them professionally equipped with the latest investigative tools in accounting, auditing and computing, the fight against official corruption will not be won.

    Assembling such a team cannot be done overnight, to be sure.  But the time to start is now, with our law schools as the recruiting ground.

    The finest products of these institutions – those graduating with First Class or Second Class Upper—will constitute the pioneer corps of some 200 federal prosecutors. After selection through a highly competitive process, they and the professionals who will work with them will be sent abroad for further training, including a year’s attachment to some of the finest prosecutors who have brought organised crime elements to heel in Italy, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, India, Brazil Argentina, the United States, Mexico, Australia and South Africa.

    On their return they should be placed on special salaries that take into account the risks that flow from job, and insulated them from the political pressure of any kind.  They should enjoy security of tenure until age 70, subject only to good conduct and a record of successful prosecutions.

    Until prosecutors have at least the same skills and a scheme of compensation comparable to that of attorneys in private practice, until they are equipped with the resources for carrying out their work, the Nigerian state will never gain the upper hand in the waron official corruption.

  • PMB: The road not taken?

    Early last month, the international news agency, Reuters, reported on what it called “shadowy build up of oil in the Atlantic Basin”. A somewhat riveting account of the hordes of “homeless cargoes of crude turning into unintentional floating storage” in the absence of ready buyers, the report offers an interesting perspective to the raging fuel subsidy debate, the future of the hydrocarbon industry, as indeed, the overall economy itself.

    Of particular interest to yours truly was the report that six million barrels of Nigeria’s sweet crude from its May programme was stranded – some already loaded onto vessels – looking for buyers; the medium reported another 65 million barrels left of the June/July programme as doomed to the same fate, seeking salvation in some far-flung refineries!

    Trust Nigeria’s legendary immunity from shocks, we have since carried on as if the development – despite our near total dependence on oil – amounted to pretty little! And this at a time when, the treasuries of most states across the federation, laid waste by corruption and poor policies choices of their administrators, continue to shrink with workers and pensioners in several arrears of salaries and wages. Of course, we know that the federal government is exempt only to the extent that it has more money – far more access to slush funds – to play with than it can wisely and productively use.

    It is certainly no overstatement to say that the future is grim. With manufacturing and the real sector remaining comatose as the infrastructure remains essentially at Stone Age, it’s hard to see the end to the current steady descent into the abyss.  Today, the naira is on a slippery path with no respite in sight. Last week for instance, it traded for N241 to the United States dollars in the parallel market. Barely seven months ago, the same naira traded for N160 to the dollar. Now, picture this is a nation where just about every commodity – ranging from raw materials to finished goods – is imported and where the local manufacturer that could have stepped in to bridge the gap has been under a sentence of death from a whole gamut of inclement policies for as long as anyone can remember.

    I don’t think that Nigerians, as yet appreciate the enormity of the challenges let alone the extremely limited choices facing them at this rather difficult time. But then, I am not entirely surprised that not a few Nigerians still believe that we can continue on the current path while expecting a different set of outcomes. Yes, we can talk and hopefully deal with the different manifestations of corruption in our public institutions; there would still be the issue of what to do with some of the myths which under-gird policies.

    Today, one of the undying myths is that a bankrupted country can, simply because it is generously endowed with crude, retain the differential between the real cost and pump price of petrol and kerosene at humongous costs to the treasury, and also at a difficult time such as the nation is currently going through. A simple arithmetic will obviously tell the story better: At a net differential of N44.86 on every litre of petrol sold, we are talking of N1.794 billion daily reimbursements to a club of rentier marketers at the current estimated consumption level of 40 million litres of petrol only!

    Honestly, I had thought that by now, the era of an external body fixing a price for a product it does not produce would have been history. That was what I thought – at least until recently when President Muhammadu Buhari finally spoke on the subsidy issue. And what did the President say?

    Very little – and yet so much!

    First, the President said that he will handle the issue of subsidies on petroleum products with care. To quote the President: “I have received [a lot of] literature on the need to remove subsidies, but much of it has no depth. When you touch the price of petroleum products, that has the effect of triggering price rises on transportation, food and rents…That is for those who earn salaries, but there are many who are jobless and will be affected by it.”

    Then his submission: lack of security, sabotage, vandalism, corruption and mismanagement are the most serious problems of Nigeria’s oil sector, not subsidies! Finally, he directed the NNPC to review existing agreements for the swapping of crude oil for refined products. In so doing, the President did not fail to romanticise the past: “We have to go back to the good old days of transparency and accountability”!

    The issue of security, sabotage, vandalism, corruption and mismanagement is no doubt a living reality which the government must confront. However, I’ll say that overall the president’s message belongs to a different era. In the first place, while I may agree broadly with the President on the need to provide social safety for the poor and the underprivileged, I guess the myth has endured for far too long that cheap fuel – whether kerosene or petrol – comes close to being the most effective social safety net that our poor really need! Where is the evidence that the poor actually benefits from the daily spend of N1.794 billion on the petrol subsidy alone? Has anyone considered the option of direct cash handouts as substitute – since it is all about proving our love for the hoi polloi?

    Even more ludicrous is the presidential directive to the NNPC to review existing agreements for the swapping of crude oil for refined products.

    Here is an institution we are all agreed is a bastion of fraud; whose corpse we all wished interred; the same institution is being unwittingly given a fresh breadth of life – to do exactly what it has always done – with expectation of different results! Haba!

    Why not simply dismantle the infrastructure that has proven to be so amenable to fraud? Where are thebeautyful Nigerians that would do the job? Will the President bring them from the moon? And where is the big picture – a return to the ancien regime in which the national oil corporation plays the godfather and the bureaucrats’ god? And where will the funds come from – the same empty treasury that has been a source of lamentation?

    And where does private investment fit in all of these? Are you going to ask them to bring in their money under the hazy circumstances? Think of this as the hard choice that the Buhari administration is called to make. It’s not easy – if you ask me; the choice, to put it mildly is limited! Will he? Can he?

  • Baba’s latest thunder

    Why did Goodluck Jonathan lose the presidency?

    Because, on all objective accounts, he didn’t perform well?  Yes.  But which of his two predecessors boasted stellar performances — Olusegun Obasanjo or the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua?  Besides, when did often sentimental Nigerians start voting out bad leaders, particularly at the federal level?

    Being from a minority bloc, he didn’t have the electoral numbers.  Besides, the North and the South West “conspired” to oust him.

    Maybe.  But why didn’t these conspiratorial sentiments apply in 2011, when Jonathan achieved a somewhat pan-Nigeria mandate?  “Somewhat” because, even back then, as this column pointed out, it was more of an electoral conspiracy — that word again! — between the South and the Middle Belt, against the far North, to press a rabid anti-North hysteria, over the zoning controversy.

    Even then, Jonathan’s was a mandate that made many wax poetic on the eventual arrival of the pan-Nigerian voter, blind to ethnic, regional and religious cleavages.  And to think the man was from the minority of minorities, his clan among the most minute minorities of the Ijaw nation; and despite a row over zoning that made a segment of the core North hopping mad!

    So, what happened in four short years that the Jonathan pan-Nigeria electoral alliance of 2011 pitiably collapsed, so much so that only his native South-South and its “catchment area” (to use JAMB-speak) of South East stood by the former president — even then, many would insist, on hot sentiments, rather than cold reason?

    Such was the near-total collapse of everything that hallmarked the Jonathan Presidency!

    The truth: Indeed, the voter might have got more sophisticated; and Jonathan, only the electoral scapegoat of previous bad rulers.  He could also have been a victim of a geo-political gang-up of ethnic majorities.  His loss could also be a result of many variables, aside from the two already mentioned.

    Still, the most valid variable may well be this: Jonathan performed so porly, and so comprehensively so on all fronts, that the Nigerian ruling class — “the owners of Nigeria” as a fiery  facebook friend rather cynically dubs them — simply panicked; and decided to junk Jonathan before his pathetic government sank them all!

    That ironically echoes how the Biblical Jonah, thrown overboard by panicky co-passengers, ended in the belly of the whale!  As it was with Jonah, so it is now with Jonathan?

    Indeed, in President Jonathan’s last days, Nigeria had grinded to a near-halt.  The Federal Government had got reckless with the common purse, paying whatever it wished to states from the Federation Account.  All over, it was equal-opportunity looting, with the Jonathan court cowing before the all-mighty rogues.  On the bunkering front, it was crude-stealing on an industrial scale, with the president just waffling and tweaking his fingers.  And with the people, the millions that felt cheated, disinherited and angry, it was a season of anomie, which dark clouds portended nothing but a terrible pour of anarchy.

    That was the grim point at which Jonathan’s co-”owners of Nigeria” pulled the plug.  If ever they had the slimmest of hopes that the gravy, secure and sweet, would continue under Jonathan, they perhaps would have come to an electoral compromise — grumbling masses be damned! — that would have returned Jonathan to Aso Rock.

    But they realised — and wisely too — that one additional second under Jonathan would torpedo their golden boat; and feed them to hungry sharks in Nigeria’s vast boiling and rumbling ocean of anger.

    That is why the latest thunder from the stable of former President Obasanjo is rather curious — how could a person who, by his patently bad choice of successors, initiate the progressive crash that Jonathan so tragically epitomised, and yet sounds so sanguine that he flatly refuses to take  even vicarious responsibility?

    Obasanjo first distanced himself from Yar’Adua’s ill-fated tenure.  Yar’Adua was a goodly man undone by his frail health, which neither Obasanjo nor even many Nigerians were not unaware of.  The late president was guilty of one thing, if any — opportunism: a trait, with provincialism, he shared with Jonathan, another Obasanjo-handpicked choice for Yar’Adua as vice president.

    Yar’Adua should have been more forthright with himself on his health.  As Katsina governor, he struggled with his health throughout his eight-year tenure.  Taking the Nigeria job simply proved a killer.

    But on his dying bed, it was the same Obasanjo that gave Yar’Adua a cruel shove.  If he got Yar’Adua a job, he had thundered, and Yar’Adua found that job too hard for him, the honourable thing was to resign!  That, to a man on his death bed!

    Meanwhile, Baba fled from Yar’Adua’s camp to champion Jonathan’s ascendancy — and no, not to counter the vile power tactics of the so-called Katsina cabal, that did everything to stonewall then Vice President Jonathan’s ascendance to power; but to falsely declaim political zoning, in Jonathan’s favour, when Jonathan decided to run for his own first full term.

    But now, after Jonathan had proved an unmitigated disaster, Obasanjo would wish no one remembered his vital role in his emergence.  He rather gratuitously told a lecture audience at Benin, Edo State, that Jonathan’s below-par performance would haunt the South-South for a long time to come.

    True it will.  But a more robust, if not outright honest, testimony should have mentioned Obasanjo’s role in the Jonathan debacle, instead of the virtual cruel kicking of the man from Otuoke — who was already down — and his South-South denizens.

    Yes, on Obasanjo’s part, that would have amounted to self-indictment.  But that instinct to protect self should have told Obasanjo to stay out of his gratuitous and sanctimonious preachment.

    Of course, perhaps troubled by the mess he has helped to make of Nigeria, the former president probably perpetually wrestles with his troubled conscience.

    Yes, he probably meant well — if indeed, an apologia is needed.  But the result — President Shehu Shagari in the Second Republic, Yar’Adua and Jonathan, in the present dispensation, Obasanjo’s successors all — have been nothing but fiasco.

    The old man probably hurts, and cannot bear anyone saying it — as it is.  So, he goes on the attack, pinning the rap on his successors; and hoping, against hope, that nobody would remember his role in the whole mess.  Some forlorn hope!

    Former President Obasanjo should be fair to himself on the Nigerian mess.  But that cannot be, with his perennial attempt to paint his successors pit-black, while putting on the toga of whiter-than- snow.

    Such foray into self-delusion cannot be supported by basic reason — or even common sense.

  • As they emerge, dis-emerge and re-emerge

    As they emerge, dis-emerge and re-emerge

    Not many foreigners who read Nigerian newspapers regularly or visitors to these shores can have failed to conclude that the natives, especially those of them in the political class, must rank among the most self-disregarding persons on the planet.

    They do not get appointed or named or promoted or deployed to a position.  They simply “emerge” on the scene, literally from nowhere.  Some of them will dis-emerge only to re-emerge again.

    From “emerge,” it is but two keystrokes to “re-emerge, three keystrokes to “emergence,” and two more keystrokes to “re-emergence.”  Day after day, the front pages and the headlines dutifully report on the latest officials to have “emerged,” and what their “emergence” or “dis-emergence” portends for the polity.

    Samples:

    Saraki  and Ekweremadu emerge as Senate leaders.

    Maurice Iwu may re-emerge as INEC chair.

    NuhuRibadu may emerge PDP chair.

    Group hails emergence of Dogara as Speaker.

    Oliseh set to emerge as national football coach

    500 emerge with First Class at Roadside University

    It is almost as those who have emerged or are emerging or are set to emerge have been hiding, and not in a particularly congenial or healthy place, and certainly not out of modesty.

    I take that back insofar as it concerns Senate President Bukola Saraki.

    We now know that, just before his emergence, he was hiding in his car for four hours, following a tip-off that his adversaries had sent a gang of ruthless kidnappers to abduct him in a diabolical bid to sabotage his election bid.

    The strategy for his emergence, perfected at a meeting with a rump of his fellow APC rebels and PDP senators still reeling from the electoral sandbagging their party had suffered in the recent general election, was about to unravel.

    If he was not on the floor – like the 51 senators who were in another venue waiting for a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari — he would not be nominated for the post.  And if he was not nominated, he stood little chance of being elected even in this land “anything goes” and nothing is impossible.

    I don’t know the kind of car Saraki rides, but it will have to be commodious enough to conceal his imposing frame and luxurious enough to provide the opulence to which he feels so entitled.  He could therefore not have been hiding in an unseemly place, unlike all many of the others  whose emergence dominates the front pages and the headlines.

    In whatever case, he emerged from his hideout with nary a tell-tale signs of his ordeal and moments later emerged Senate president with the minimum of fuss or ceremony, and with only one-half of the membership present and voting.

    Lesson:  To emerge, you have to prepare for your emergence and indeed for all emergencies.  Where there are no emergencies, contrive them.

    But I digress.

    As I was saying, the foreigner or visitor reading stories in the Nigerian news media about who has emerged or is emerging or is set to emerge must be wondering:  What are they hiding from, and why?  Where are they emerging from?  Why does it take apolitical appointment to make them “emerge,” to bring them out of hiding?

    I cannot state with confidence the point at which that term entered into the vocabulary of political discourse in Nigeria.  But my interest in its use, misuse and abuse dates back to the time of the loathsome dictator, Sani Abacha, and his desperation to bury the June 12, 1993 presidential election that his duplicitous military predecessor, General Ibrahim Babangida, had annulled.

    One of the schemes Abacha devised to that end was a Constitutional Conference packed with handpicked candidates, the usual retainers, and delegates chosen by less than 25 per cent of registered votes where the poll was not boycotted entirely.

    Concerned that the Confab – as it was called – was slow in starting, one newspaper beholden to the regime wondered why this should be the case, given that so many “credible delegates” had “emerged.”  Many of the “credible delegates” would later work assiduously to ensure Sani Abacha’s emergence as the presidential candidate of the five political parties he had licensed.

    That newspaper, to no one’s grief, has since gone into insolvency.  In a country where some sections of the news media are notorious for not meeting their payroll, it holds the dubious record   for indebtedness to staffers — 19 months in unpaid salaries.

    Another newspaper that basks in false affluence under a mountain of debt started paying salary arrears going back nine months only when industry unions shut it down.

    And a broadcast station that threw decency and professionalism and ethics overbroad to vilify opponents of the defenestrated and unlamented Goodluck Jonathan, it turns out, has not paid its staffers for 17 months.

    Where did all the billions it received for the odious assignment go?

    Though not wholly peculiar to Nigeria, this journalistic model seems to have come to stay here. You’ve been given a weekly column or some news hole or air time to fill as you please, no questions asked. What do you need a salary for?

    Call it the Mobutu Principle.

    In Zaire, as the Democratic Republic of Congo was then known, word reached President Mobutu Sese Seko that enlisted soldiers who could not recall when they last received their salaries had mutinied.

    He summoned the mutineers from one military to his palace.  “ I hear you are complaining that you have not been paid,” he said.

    The mutineers murmured in confirmation.

    Pointing at one of them, Mobutu asked,”What is that you are holding?

    “A rifle, Sir,” the subaltern replied.

    Mobutu pointed at another solider and put the same question to him.

    The same response:  A rifle.

    “I have given you each an assault rifle and you are complaining about unpaid salaries,” Mobutu intoned with stunned incredulity.  “What salary can be more assured than the rifle in your hand?

    The message was clear: Use what you have to get whatever you need.

    I will not be surprised if media people who have not been paid for months on end finally yielded to the temptation into which their employers had led them and used their columns and news holes and air time to fend for themselves, as indeed some of those selfsame employers had indeed urged them to do, I gather.

    Again, I digress, for the last time.

    If anything can be said with certainty about Nigerian politics, it is that the tide of emergence is not about to subside.

    It is now being bruited that, as an additional measure to guarantee the independence of the legislature, the Saraki group has embarked on strategy that will make Tony “The Fixer” Anenih emerge as vice chairman of the APC’s Board of Trustees, and the emergence of Ayo Fayose, the all-conquering governor of Ekiti, as associate chair of the APC Governors Forum.

  • Buhari, NA and race against time

    To the conscientious analyst, neither Tambuwal nor Ekweremadu holds any appeal.

    Tambuwalisation,  which romped Aminu Tambuwal to the speakership, despite the ire of his ruling party, suited fine the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), during the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) hegemony.

    Yet, it has come back, in the new order, to plague the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC); with the loss of the Senate deputy presidency to the opposition PDP.

    Many would, of course, enter the softener: the Tambuwal-led House of Representatives proved much more people-centred; than the reactionary House expected under Mulikat Adeola-Akande, the PDP choice for Speaker.

    Yes — and the polity would appear not ungrateful.  But even that noble accident hardly vitiates the vile principle of rebellion against party.

    Now to Ekweremadu-isation, which has fired PDP’s Ike Ekweremadu to retain the senate deputy presidency, despite his PDP losing power.

    Indeed, it’s a real laugh seeing Godswill Akpabio, former Akwa Ibom governor and now a senator, wax lyrical on cant.  He claimed Ekweremadu was a product of some gobbledygook bi-partisan entente, involving public-spirited APC and PDP senators.  Nice attempt at deodorisation of a clear and brazen parliamentary coup — with even Akpabio hardly convincing himself!

    Of course, it was nothing of the sort.

    Rather, it was two blocs of colluding legislators — a minority, from the APC side, for strictly personal gains, stabbing their own party in the back; and a majority, from the PDP, attempting an obstructionist vanguard, to stall a clear mandate for change, hoping therefrom, to reap some future group political salvation.

    But as everything karma-like, and not unlike the eye-for-an-eye Mosaic law that soon leaves everybody blind, the Ekweremadu phase of this bad politics is even worse than the Tambuwal original.

    For all his rebellion, Speaker Tambuwal conceded the House Leader to Ms Adeola-Akande, his party’s original Speaker-designate.  But Ekweremadu is living example that Bukola Saraki, senate president, will make no such concession!  If he did, the deal would be off.  If Ekweremadu is in peril, the deal would be in danger.  That puts Saraki too in peril!

    Again, while the Tambuwal concession did not nullify the original rebellion, the Saraki intransigence portends a worse parliamentary plague next time.

    So long for a political class that thrives on expediency, and hardly on principle!

    But ethical or ruthless, life goes on.  President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB) demanded and got a mandate for change.  So, he is condemned to delivering on that mandate.

    The snag, though, is: even if his party has a healthy parliamentary majority, the Saraki-brewed Ekweremadu-isation tends to have vaporised all that.

    Right now the National Assembly appears fractured into three camps: the majority APC, who appear loyal to their party and the PMB agenda; the minority PDP, poised to play the opposition, by hook or by crook; and the penumbra of two minorities: the bulk PDP and APC rebel elements that cooked Saraki’s senate presidency, which could band together to eclipse the PMB plan, particularly if the group perceives it a threat to its own agenda — and political survival.

    Yet, fast-tracking such initiatives appears the badly needed redemption for a fast decaying polity.

    But bad news for PMB: when the chips are down, these two minorities could forge an illicit majority, filibustering against, if not terminally blocking legislative support for popular initiatives.  That simply means PMB may face more difficulties than anticipated, to garner legislative support for his programmes.

    That, indeed, would be very bad news for everyone.  This is because to put things right for Nigeria is a desperate race against time, where even a second’s delay could be serious, if not outright fatal.

    From the 2015 election, the partisan winners were from the North (North East, North Central and North West) and South West, where APC swept the polls.  The losers were from the South East and South-South, where PDP won.

    So, virtual partisan political warfare, at least in the next four years, would be between the North/South West (to further press their electoral hegemony) and the South-East/South-South (to defend their turf).

    But overall, all of the geo-political zones were losers on the developmental turf, according to findings from a new poverty study on Nigeria from Oxford University (mentioned on this page last week), known as the Oxford poverty and human development initiative (OPHI), and formally cited as OPHI 2015, with the latest stats from as late as June 2015.

    OPHI does not measure poverty as just “no money”; but more rigorously as conditions precedent: either to reinforce poverty; or break that yoke to deliver development.

    So, by its 10-point indicators, broken down into three major planks, a state might be flush with cash, yet work to deepen poverty by its low infrastructure (social and physical); or be low on cash, but high on infrastructure, to dislodge poverty.

    Trite: presidential mandates are national.  But if all politics is local, PMB has extra motivation to push pro-people, anti-poverty initiatives, needing urgent legislative support.

    From the OPHI data, the 10 poorest states, with corresponding destitution, are from the president’s home region: Yobe, Zamfara, Jigawa, Bauchi, Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina, Taraba, Gombe and Kano — in that order.

    On this list is Katsina, PMB’s home state, Kano, the North’s commercial dynamo and Sokoto, the North West’s spiritual headquarters.  So, if he desires his presidency to be impactful, PMB must, against poverty, race against time.

    The top 10 states least affected by poverty and destitution are a mishmash: Lagos, Osun, Anambra, Ekiti, Edo, Imo, Abia, Rivers, Kwara and Akwa Ibom — in that order.

    Still, that four states, Lagos, Osun, Ekiti and Edo, dominate the top five tends to underscore the development bent of the states ruled, or once ruled, by the defunct ACN.  It also appears in the presidential camp, in the intra-APC parliamentary showdown.  More: the group should be zealous PMB partners, in a fierce anti-poverty war  — lest their areas slip back into the poverty mash, in this period of national economic angst.

    South East did far better than the South-South on the OPHI scale, despite SS’s relative bigger share of the central cake. On the other hand, Kwara, at spot 9, sits at the apex of all the northern states.

    Given the balance of the power in the National Assembly, and balance of fortune on the OPHI scale, could Saraki’s rebel APC legislators then team up with PDP-dominated SE and SS to block PMB and legislatively frustrate his initiatives?

    Sans bad politics, there is no sense in that, since no state or geo-political zone is immune from poverty.  But bad politics makes it a possibility, especially if collective good threatens to turn individual ruin.

    That is why, to succeed, PMB must marshal a strong coalition in parliament — with enough grassroots developmental carrots as drivers, to build a bi-partisan progressive vanguard.

    But if this commonsense viewpoint falters?  Then, he must build a media-people coalition outside parliament to enforce parliamentary common sense that, in Jeremy Bentham-speak, pushes the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

    That is the only way the change mandate of March 28 won’t end yet another grand betrayal.

    ‘If he desires his presidency to be impactful, PMB must, against poverty, race against time’

  • NLNG: Opening the Pandora’s Box

    From the look of things, the controversies generated by last week’s payment of $2.1 billion cash by the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas into the federation account seems unlikely to go away anytime soon.  While there is a throng out there who couldn’t’ be bothered about the nomenclature ascribed to the “intervention” so long as funds are made available to bail out the cash strapped states, I also understand the feeling of those who insist that the payment be seen as nothing more than what it is – a timely but nonetheless routine rendition of accruals into the federation account.

    To be honest, I must confess to having a bit of difficulty accepting the idea of the NLNG cash haul as “bailout’”. To be sure, not only in the most expansive definition of the word can a measure which merely underlies the resolve of the Buhari administration to be more open and accountable to the different tiers of government can be so generously described. The confusion, in the circumstance, is perhaps best explained in the context of the lingering perception of the federal government as “Big Daddy”, and of course pervading atmosphere of despondency being experienced across the affected states.

    The issue at the moment of course goes beyond the mundane issues of semantics or nomenclature of what bailout is or what it is not. Here, we are talking about the riddles behind our perennial insolvency; the familiar story of how a vastly endowed nation, is held permanently hostage by special interests; how the economy is being bled left, right and centre by those charged with managing her affairs.

    Now, in the NLNG affair, the nation may well have opened the Pandora’s Box by that simple exercise of fiscal rectitude. Little wonder tongues are wagging; debates animated from all sides. I guess we are on to something here.

    To imagine that it all started with the mercy droplets of $2.1 billion by the NLNG. Whereas the federal government does not believe it has done anything extraordinary aside pushing its mantra of change by doing what is right by the law; the opposition PDP has been sulking that the federal government is playing the opportunism card.

    Let’s look at the claims and counter-claims by the parties. To the Federal Government, the money represents the taxes and dividends that have only fallen due for which the states are justly entitled. The opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), says the money is merely a fraction of the $5.6 billion held in some saving account somewhere ostensibly for the Buhari administration.

    Here is what the party’s National Publicity Secretary Olisah Metuh was on record to have said: “in actual fact, the LNG dividend stood at $5.6 billion even before the handover date of May 29 and would have been shared but for the insistence of former President Goodluck Jonathan that it be left for the incoming administration.” (My emphasis).

    He would add that “the issuance of the bailout with funds from the LNG proceeds and the Excess Crude Account (ECA) has exposed the fact that the PDP administration actually left behind huge sums of money, contrary to the impression earlier given to Nigerians and the international community that the new administration met a virtually empty treasury.”

    The ruling APC disagrees. Yes, there is a $5.6 billion somewhere, but it is nowhere captured in the books. According to its spokesman, Lai Mohammed, “We can tell Nigerians that apart from the said $1.6bn NLNG payment for 2015, NLNG also paid $1.4bn as Income Tax/Education Tax in May 2014, paid $0.3bn as Education Tax to the FG in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and $1.2bn in VAT and Withholding Tax to the Federal Government  since 2009….In addition, dividend payments totalling $4,728,136,946 was paid to the Federal Government between 2004 and 2009, out of which only $127,851,348.19 was credited to the Federal Government’s Independent Account with JP Morgan, leaving a balance of over $4bn. The questions to ask, therefore, are why were all the past taxes and dividends neither fully paid into the Federation Account nor shared by the three tiers of government and what happened to the funds?”

    Let’s look at the issues a bit more closely.  Let’s even assume that the opposition PDP’s claim of saving the $5.6 billion is true. If so, it seems to me as curious that the party would find nothing wrong with the Federal Government locking up such a whopping sum in some foreign account at a time most states couldn’t pay their wages. And more so at a time when its own finances are in bad shape!

    So, where is the money kept? And why was it not reflected in the handover notes to the Buhari administration? Of course, we know the truth; the money is nowhere in any bank vault – local or foreign – but are rather domiciled in some private vaults! That is a tragedy of a nation led by men with neither a shred of morality nor conscience.

    The issues here are two fold. First is whether the federal government actually believes that the money in question belongs to it in which case it could do with it as it pleased behind the states and without the knowledge of the National Assembly. The second, more ominous is the kind of rules under which the chieftains of the federal government could assume the power to stack away the funds which neither belongs to it and over which it has no powers of appropriation. One considers the latter important not only because of their constitutional import but also because they touch at the heart of the warped fiscal practices foisted on the nation by modern-day Robin Hoods purportedly sworn to defend the constitution of the republic.

    And to imagine that this is what PDP’s Olisa Metuh has striven to defend; that the money is some savings held in trust somewhere even without as much as showing the law or the authority which permit the impunity and brazen arbitrariness!

    The issues involved are certainly grave enough as it is. However, the way forward is hardly as muddy as would seem. The matter goes to the heart of the question – a fundamental one at that – of what to do with the hordes of federal leviathans, egged on by powerful interests, to operate in strict defiance of the nation’s laws.

    The APC in my view has helped frame the issue correctly: the nation surely deserves to know not just the accounts into which the NLNG taxes and dividends were paid but how these funds were utilised. The party will do well to draw up the list of similar agencies that have acted wilfully in defiance of our laws. If it amounts to opening the Pandora’s Box, or even time for retribution, so be it. The knowledge will make the nation better for it; it would also signpost the dawn of the new beginning for which Nigerians have long signalled their embrace.

    ‘The APC in my view has helped frame the issue correctly: the nation surely deserves to know not just the accounts into which the NLNG taxes and dividends were paid but how these funds were utilised’

  • Osun’s politics of the belly

    It had got to be the limit — Bayelsa senator, Ben Murray-Bruce’s attempt at wannabe activism.  He had “donated” his anticipated wardrobe allowance to feed hungry Osun workers — and a few Bayelsa widows.

    Hare-brained activism never made a more hare-brained start!

    Homeboy, Iyiola Omisore, also made a quiet rumble: doing his little bit to feed the hungry Osun multitude.  However, had he wanted to cause a stir, he would have parked trailer load of grains at the Osun Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) secretariat in Osogbo; and invited the starving plebs of Abere, the state government’s secretariat, to come have their fill!

    In Mr. Omisore’s world, charity and politics co-mingle for devastating effects!

    Why, the controversial Buruji Kashamu, Omisore’s deep ideological soul mate in democratic feudalism, also sent in his own words of hope: trailers, creaking under loads and loads of victuals and myriad provisions, were snailing and snaking into Osun!

    Has the SOS caravan arrived?

    O, the media also weighed in; in the Osun wage hysteria.  Abimbola Adelakun (The Punch, June 11) intervened with a piece that betrayed structural split-personality. The headline, “Ogbeni Aregbesola, pay your workers” was a cynical taunt, in the classical Yoruba traditional sense.  But it ended with basic reason and admission that Osun’s problem stems from a national systemic failure. In-between were emotive and neo-liberal snarling against “populist” policies.

    Ms Adelakun’s newspaper would later pour cold water on efforts, at the end of June, to start paying the salary arrears, suggesting, by its cynical angling of the news, that the efforts were too little, too late.  Of course, between The Punch and Aregbesola’s government, there appears no love lost.

    Still, the very limit would come with a crusading jurist, ensconced in the Osun judiciary, inflicting great violence on judicial reticence and the separation of power doctrine.

    Justice Oloyede Folahanmi, an Osun high court judge, wrote a petition calling on the Osun legislature to impeach Governor Aregbesola, over the salary arrears.  Her tone suggested the governor wilfully held salaries back to punish and intimidate workers.  But logically, why might he do that?

    A few have defended Justice Folahanmi’s unprecedented conduct, insisting she wrote in her personal capacity; and not as a judge.  Still, the notorious fact (as her constituency would say) is that she is a sitting judge, sworn to some service ethos and etiquette!

    Besides, if that apologia held, then the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), writing as a citizen, could  well gift himself the liberty to write the National Assembly for the president’s impeachment, should the Federal Government falter on salaries!  You see how misguided judicial activism could easily court anarchy?

    But something should be clear.  Between friendly and hostile camps to the Osun governor’s salary odyssey, there is no high moral ground.  Both are driven by the logic of public policy analysis, a media activity critical to democratic deepening.

    So, what is Ripples’ angst at the stand of Justice Folahanmi and co?  Good question; but before an answer, another caveat: other things being equal, salary delays are degrading and indefensible.  Their ripple effects can make a family really, really miserable; and it is a path no self-respecting adult wants to tread.  Besides, even a month’s delay is bad enough.  For months’ delay, one can imagine the anguish on the affected families.

    So, what is wrong with telling it as it is — as Aregbesola’s media critics have done — and reading out the riot act to the governor: pay or quit?

    The approach.  While compassion is noble, emotion-milking is vile, wilful and cruel.  It can only create two victims: the governor as demon, useless and uncaring; and hurting workers, fed on the daily diet of gubernatorial loathing.  Both can only work up emotions; but hardly solve the problem.

    Besides, the skewed attention on Osun, when more than a half of the 36 states are involved in the salary meltdown, suggests a media roasting most bizarre, with the media becoming part of the problem, instead of navigating the polity towards a solution.

    Of course, such unconscionable muddying of waters suits nicely Aregbesola’s political traducers.  That is where Omisore and co belong; and to the amoral political class, all is fair in war.

    But the media, becoming ready and merry tools to fight these unholy wars, is tantamount to the media becoming smashed mirrors, from which only skewed images of society can emerge.

    And for a serving judicial officer to unthinkingly barge in, is the judicial equivalent of dancing naked.

    But the most tragic consequence of this politics-of-the-belly approach to a serious crunch, which calls for radical financial restructuring, is deliberate misdiagnosis, which has nothing to offer but mischief.

    In the heat of the crusading passion, Aregbesola became the irredeemable Satan, not Goodluck Jonathan; under whose presidency the national purse became a sieve, putting most states in the present bind.

    For instance, the Jonathan presidency declared daily stolen 400, 000 barrels, from the 2.6 million produced each day.  Though that should have translated into some 15 per cent reduction, states suffered a 40 per cent drop from Federation Account (FA) takings — without any cogent reason.

    Then, the global oil price crash.  The cumulative effect of Jonathan’s leaking purse and the price dip, crashed Osun’s revenue by some 55 per cent.  Now, Aregbesola’s only blame here appears his huge appetite for developmental projects, financed with sundry loans and bonds,  invested in social and physical infrastructure.  That tenuous balance left the state heavily leveraged.  The shock, from this sudden financial storm, smashed Osun’s monthly FA taking below the N3.6 billion monthly civil servants’ wage bill.  That explains the salary default.

    Even then, Osun’s internally generated revenue (IGR) for 2014, from National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) figures, was N8.5 billion, placing 11th out of 25 states.  Compared with Akwa Ibom’s N15.6 billion (seventh placed, though Nigeria’s highest FA drawer), it would appear Osun is using its meagre resources to deepen its local economy, while Akwa Ibom, flush with oil derivation cash, seems largely content with its FA takings.

    Besides, a global multidimensional poverty index (MPI) survey of Nigeria, with 100 other developing countries, has introduced a fresh perspective to Osun and poverty.

    The MPI is based on a 10-point indicator, based on three broad poverty criteria: education (years of schooling and school attendance), health (child mortality and nutrition) — both gauging the meeting of a child’s social infrastructure needs  — and a six-point indicator under “standard of living”: assets, cooking fuel, floor, water, sanitation and electricity.

    Under MPI, quoted from an Oxford University document called Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (2015), Osun placed second, only to Lagos, among Nigerian states least affected by poverty, via a pile chart tagged  ”Headcount of the ratios of MPI poor and destitute”.

    That means that despite all the salary hoopla, Osun has somehow devised ways to improve its poverty level.

    Still, many newspaper commentators thunder, from their Olympian heights of raw passion, that Aregbesola should scrap his high impact developmental programmes, because of the salary hoopla.

    The Ogbeni, to his peril, would listen to such Mephistophelean counsel; though he should try his best possible to clear the salary arrears.

    ‘Many newspaper commentators thunder Aregbesola should scrap his high impact developmental programmes. The Ogbeni, to his peril, would listen to such Mephistophelean counsel’

  • Slaying the beast

    “No matter what anybody says, we have a complete fiscal system breakdown; we can’t pay salaries; we can’t pay wages; we can’t pay our debt. And we don’t even know how much we owe, and how much deficit we have…I have said it before and I have heard people say with some authority, that when we started, deficit was about N1.3 trillion; by the time we finished people were talking about N7 trillion”.

    Those were the words of elder statesman Ahmed Joda in a recent interview with Thisday published June 28. Those statements were made shortly after the handover over the report of his transition committee to President Muhammadu Buhari. Now, if you thought that the old man was given to exaggeration by his sweeping allusion to the collapse of the fiscal system, you will need to read newspaper accounts of the inaugural meeting of the National Economic Council (NEC) which although focused on the financial crisis facing the three tiers of government, was an opportunity for the council to beam its searchlight on the criminal mismanagement that has been the lot of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

    While the saying may be true that there is nothing new under the sun, this time around, Nigerians would hopefully get to see the monstrosity of their national oil corporation in its truest element – a government within a government, an octopus that is neither encumbered by the niceties of financial regulation, nor bound by the strictures of parliamentary control – in short, an outlaw corporation.

    You think yours truly is hasty to have drawn such harsh conclusions? Let’s go back a bit in time. Once upon a time, we had a Funsho Kupolokun in charge of the leviathan. Those were the days when the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) could not be said to be short in activism. Against the grain of conventional wisdom, the then Engr. Hamman A. Tukur-led body insisted that the entire proceeds from oil sales be paid first into the federation account before any withdrawal is made.  The argument then was simple: the NNPC as the collecting agency on behalf of the three tiers of government can only draw its sustenance from the pool after the entire rendition is made. In this, the revenue body merely drew strength from the 1999 Constitution which made it clear that all revenues accruing to the three tiers of government be paid first into the federation account. Paragraph 32, Part I (a), of the Third Schedule in fact specifically empowers the RMAFC to “monitor the accruals to and disbursement of revenue from the Federation Account”.

    Like now, the puzzle then was – how do you guarantee fair accruals without a sound basis for establishing what is taken as costs? Ordinarily, the answer would seem as simple as getting NNPC to prepare a budget.  It never did. More than a decade and half after, no one can be sure that the NNPC ever did anything near preparing that financial instrument!

    I recall Engr Kupolokun’s ready-made answer to the raging controversy: “You cannot talk about revenue without mentioning costs…” In other words, there could be no issues as to what constitute the cost elements – it is what the NNPC says it is!

    Several years on, the nation unfortunately would seem far from resolving the puzzle. The result is that we are still effectively at the mercies of the principalities and powers at the NNPC; the only difference this time around is the hope that the correct questions are finally being asked with the governors not surprisingly picking the gauntlet.

    I need to make myself clear here. I am not writing about the $2.1 billion said to have been withdrawn by the Goodluck Jonathan administration from the Excess Crude Account (ECA) which NEC stumbled upon at their inaugural meeting last week. Given the highwire politics surrounding the operations of the ECA, I guess the governors are perfectly entitled to make all the noise about the wierd incomprehensible accounting practices the stuff of which can only be found in the NNPC Towers.

    That is not the subject today. I am rather interested in the ‘undeclared’ revenue – the differential of N3.8 trillion retained – or if you like withheld – by NNPC over the 2012 – 2015 period as alleged by NEC last week.

    Nigerians are of course familiar with the image of the corporation as a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for executing all manners of schemes under the sun – except its principal rationale as a state oil corporation. Now, the marvel is that the earn-and-spend image is being presented in such living colours by the governors! While there will be a lot of drama in the coming days as the actual probe kicks off,  Nigerians will do well to take seriously the import of their latest ‘discovery’. Just imagine; NNPC, a collecting agency for the federation account which also doubles as an agency of the federal government setting aside a whopping 47 percent of the entire oil earnings only because it lies in its power to do so! You think that is outrageous? Think about a corporation permanently awash with cash yet suffers the perenial inability to meet up with Joint Venture (JV) obligations; a corporation that can’t or wont fix its ageing pipelines, an outfit that does better collecting rents than go after new oil finds.  That is NNPC for you!

    It seems to me that we may have focused too much on the owners of the distributive pool, the throng made to assemble monthly at the conclave to share a remnant of 53 percent; a group which suffers the strictures of appropriation, as against the outlaw corporation which insists on living only by its own rules. It is about time we paid serious attention to what the corporation does with our money and the process through which it is expropriated.

    If you ask me, I will just say that the governors, like Pa Ahmed Joda in the referenced interview in Thisday, have helped to raise the right questions. Yes, the nation has a fair idea of what has accrused into the federation account. After all, isn’t that what the Abuja monthly conclave for sharing all about? We also know that the ritual of appropriation – no matter how farcical – still goes on accross the different tiers of government if only to fulfil all righteousness. The same however cannot be said of the NNPC which insists on puting the lids on funds illegally retained. For once, Nigerians truly want to know if truly the NNPC has what it can refer to as working budget. How is it appropriated? They deserve to know the quantum of value delivered with the three-point something trillion naira spent. Surely, that can’t be asking for too much? The same would apply to its kiths –Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) as indeed others whose running costs not only exceed those of states but which more often than not, escape parliamentary appropriation. This is after all, the season of change.

    ‘We may have focused too much on the owners of the distributive pool, the throng made to assemble monthly at the conclave to share a remnant of 53 percent; a group which suffers the strictures of appropriation, as against the outlaw corporation which insists on living only by its own rules.

  • Banking and Mrs Warren’s Principle

    Banking and Mrs Warren’s Principle

    “Looking for work,” I wrote on this page some six years ago, “has become one of the most dangerous occupations in Nigeria – a risky venture that is likely to cause harm or injury, even death.”

    In that piece (August 19, 2008), I had employed the term “occupation” not in a flippant or cynical sense, but to reflect what had become the painful reality for millions of our young men and women for whom looking for a job had become a full-time occupation in itself

    As they pounded the streets and scoured the corporate offices and factories and farms and construction sites in search of work, I remarked, they were more likely to be swindled, mugged, kidnapped, sexually assaulted or exploited and abused in every conceivable manner by persons masquerading as prospective employers.

    I was reacting to reports in the July 14, 2008, editions of the national newspapers that dozens had died the preceding weekend at various centres across Nigeria in recruitment exercises conducted by the Immigration Service and the Prisons Department.

    For 43 of the 195, 000 applicants jostling for 3,000 vacancies, the race proved a fatal regimen, a journey of no return.  A good many of them were trampled underfoot in the frenzied rush to gain a vantage position at the start; others died from sheer exhaustion.  Hundreds sought hospital treatment for the injuries they suffered from the race.

    This grisly scenario, slightly modified, was reenacted in March 2014 at various locations across where the same agency was scheduled to administer written tests to some 520, 000 applicants chasing  4, 556 openings…

    The 2008 fitness test of a 2.5 km run was replaced with an obstacle race requiring thousands of applicants who had converged on various locations several hours ahead of schedule to bulldoze, squeeze, elbow, claw, fight or otherwise find their way to the event through a single entrance.

    At least 19 persons, four of them pregnant women, were killed in the resulting stampedes.  Hundreds suffered injuries.

    In a sane society, the responsible political official would have handed in his resignation even if the fiasco had not been compounded by so wanton a grim harvest. Elementary decency demands nothing less.

    But Abba Moro, the Minister of the Interior, who supervised this carnage, kept his job right up to the end of the Jonathan Administration, and would doubtless have continued to serve in the cabinet if Dr Jonathan had not lost his re-election bid.  And Dr Jonathan roused himself to sympathise with the relations of the victims long after the carnage, handing them token compensation only as part of his cynical election strategy.

    The dangers to which job seekers are exposed are not always physical, however.  Women job seekers in particular, are constantly exposed to moral danger, and sexual abuse, particularly in the banking industry.  But that is nothing new.

    It goes back to the time of former military president Ibrahim Babangida, who was barely three years into his misbegotten rule when his palace intellectuals declared that Nigeria’s history would have to be divided into two neat periods: the era before Babangida (BB), when all was darkness, and the era that began with him (AB) when everything magically turned into sweetness and light.

    The more desperate revisionists among them even insisted that Nigeria’s history actually began with Babangida’s coming.   Before then, according to them, Nigeria had nothing worth calling a history.

    As evidence, they pointed to the wonders that structural adjustment had wrought all over the land –cocoa farmers fling to their plantations in their personal helicopters, entrepreneurs, freed from the shackles of de-regulation, establishing flourishing businesses that created more jobs than there were people to fill, and banking institutions sprouting up in every neighbourhood like mushrooms after the first rains, glittering symbols of the boom.

    It was an ensnaring boom. You made a substantial deposit for a fixed period and collected     your interest upfront, sometimes to the tune of 20 per cent.  But this conservative approach was employed only by banks that operated from known addresses.  The “wonder” banks that operated from one-room shacks, with bundles of bank notes piled from floor to ceiling  and where records, if any, were kept in notebooks or even loose sheets, offered much higher returns.

    Many indeed were the patrons who rushed in, usually with other people’s money to cash in on what looked like a sure path to wealth and the good life it can buy.  I recall a paymaster for the army who deposited the funds for the salary of soldiers in one of the wonder banks in the hope of turning it around within the month with a quick kill under his belt

    He never got his deposit back.  Neither did most of those who had rushed to cash in on the scheme.

    That was when the banks that operated from licensed premises and apparently in compliance with industry regulations hit upon the idea of hiring attractive young women for the most part. Entry salaries were so attractive that a job in the banks became the dream of most of our young school leavers.

    Their remit: to canvass for deposits.  It was not explicitly stated, but the underlying assumption,  to put the matter delicately, that the women among them will not hesitate to use what they have to get the deposits they need just to keep their jobs.   This is the ideology of Mrs Warren’s profession in George Bernard Shaw’s play of the same title writ small.

    The targets were impossibly high.  Just how high is indicted in a letter I have before me at this writing:

    “Dear Ms X:

    “You will recall that upon assumption of duty, your commitment to drive a liability target of N180,000,000 (not a misprint) and a risk asset target of N63,000,000 (again not a misprint) within a period of six months.”

    Even if she had a private mint, she would have found it hard to meet these targets, due to the scarcity of processing material, not forgetting the epileptic power supply  After six months, she had achieved only 2 per cent of her risk asset target of N63 million.

    “Management is extremely displeased with this abysmal level of performance and absolute destruction of value,” the letter under reference states in severe reproach.   “Please note that you have up to 31st January, 2015 to achieve significant improvement (60%) growth; otherwise your employment with the bank will be reviewed.”

    The new target is no more attainable than the earlier one, but there you have it.

    I have heard of canvassers offering would-be depositors a higher return than the going rate at the bank and making up the difference from their own earnings – in other words, subsidising their employers just so that they keep their jobs.

    There has always been a seamy side to banking. Putting young women in the way of moral harm and sexual exploitation, placing them in a position where they feel obliged to follow Mrs Warren’s footsteps to keep their jobs, makes it seamier still.