The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • Not exactly ‘two fighting’

    Not exactly ‘two fighting’

    Less than a week since former president Olusegun Obasanjo released his public statement excoriating President Muhammadu Buhari and the administration that he leads, Nigerians, it would seem, have done little else than reduce it to the street variety tango described as two fighting. Picture here the familiar high street scenario where two sturdy males brawl in the open, in the hot tropical sun, to the accompaniment of a horde of mostly indifferent onlookers, mostly out of pure boredom than for any real entertainment value. It does not matter that the ensuing debasement serves neither party nor the larger community any good.

    What does Obasanjo want –the question goes on and on? Mercifully, Obasanjo is not one to leave anyone with wild guesses. He says it as it is – “The lice of poor performance in government – poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed – if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality – are very much with us today.

    “With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood”.

    Say what you may of the motives of the individual who has had the good fortune of serving first as a military ruler and then a two-term president, a man with such tremendous stature and one with such hefty voice in the nation’s moral universe would ordinarily be expected to speak out in times of grave national emergencies.

    Not when the fellow is Olusegun Obasanjo – as many are wont to suggest.

    Never mind his bona fide as an engaged citizen, foremost patriot and citizen of the world; or arguably his bragging rights to a slew of reforms that have taken governance under this democratic dispensation several notches up. I refer here to the pension reforms which given the mess that has been made of the old defined benefits scheme has become revolutionary, the power sector reform, the creation of anti-corruption institutions – the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission – all of which have given governance a semblance of modernity. And so it goes in the opinion of many that the weighty intervention, coming from an Obasanjo, a man who subverted our institutions as much as he tried to build; who nearly sacrificed the fourth republic on the altar of his megalomania, must be bad news!

    First, I will say that there is nothing in the lengthy treatise that has not been said by Nigerians in different forms and for a including no less than the wife of the president, Aisha Buhari who once took to the international media to complain about the hijack of the husband’s administration by a cabal. Not even the opportunistic call on the president not to run for a second term; or even the proposal for an amorphous yet to be defined ‘Third Force’, which, in any case is not entirely dissimilar from what another group – National Intervention Movement has proposed pretends to make it anything new.

    By the way, how about putting it to Nigerians’ legendary hypocritical ways that they could not see the OBJ hand coming?  A man who took former President Goodluck Jonathan to the cleaners when the latter’s government derailed, with the APC and its then candidate Buhari effusively in praise; should it now come as a surprise that the same man will, with almost equal zeal  go public when he thinks things appear to be going wrong? If it seems any proof that the virus of narcissism in OBJ is alive and well, does it not in equal measure attest to the potency of the bacteria of opportunism in the APC and its leadership?

    I would of course argue that the current reductionism of the statement to OBJ versus PMB – or as some have in the spirit of the times elegantly coined as Herdsman versus Farmer is as distressing as it is unhelpful. That the message actually reflected the broad thinking of a large section of the population obviously explains government’s rather measured – if you like deferential – response to the unguided missile. It is therefore not a case of looking for fire when no smoke exists. The signs of stasis or failure of governance are everywhere. It is not a matter of tossing up sterling but nonetheless sterile indices of performance to convince the citizens that the country is currently doing well. A country with such profound structural problems, one so hobbled by its multifarious challenges that it routinely falls back on providence and other transcendental forces has no business pretending to be going anywhere.

    Yes, we may be doing well in agriculture; what about post-harvest losses that have reduced our agriculture to the most elemental level?  Forty billion dollars foreign reserves (which by the way, is linked to improved fortune of oil) may seem much, in real terms, it comes to no more than our capacity to import everything from bathroom slippers to high-tech machinery and even fuel over the course of a few months? How far have we addressed our industrial competitiveness which is explained as the degree to which we can convert our domestic manufactures to tangible imports in a qualitative and cost effective manner? Ever seen a country that touts plans as achievement, makes a song of the farce called annual budgets while the leadership begs citizens for patience and understanding for its slow motion governance?

    No thanks to the duplicity at the highest levels of government, our president’s track record of integrity is being sorely tested. From Maina-gate to Lawal-gate, the president is being called out almost on daily basis to answer for the indiscretions of his men. A country whose chief law officer would rather go to court to shield an accused on the run from an probe, and feigns ‘public interest’ as justification can only make itself a joke in the eyes of civilized world; a country whose minister of defence would offer heinous rationalization to mass murder deserves more than a hiding.

    As far as I can see, Nigerians have not asked anything outside what the APC federal government promised; the least it can do is deliver on them. Much as I would agree with information minister Lai Muhammed that 2019 is a distraction, I also find the exertions by the administration’s top shots at shooting down the messenger as  fruitless . Nigerians, surely the know OBJ’s capacity for mischief; time for the Buhari administration to reveal itself as a performing one, worthy of our trust. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to have much time left on its hands.

  • Why Nigerians are impatient

    Why Nigerians are impatient

    President Muhammadu Buhari appears to have rested any lingering doubts as to whether or not the cries of Nigerians on the two subjects arguably at the heart of the Nigerian dilemma have finally pierced through the impervious walls of his Aso Villa abode. Here, I refer to the renewed debate about the future of the polity in the face of the increasingly open and direct threat to its corporate existence, and the frustrating slow pace of governance that has foisted a situation of stasis on the polity. In an emphatic pushback to the charges of indifference, or of if you like diffidence on the two key issues, the President would let it be known that Nigerians and their exaggerated expectations, rather than the pace of his administration, are the problem.

    “We Nigerians can be very impatient and want to improve our conditions faster than may be possible considering our resources and capabilities. When all the aggregates of nationwide opinions are considered, my firm view is that our problems are more to do with process than structure.

    “We tried the Parliamentary system: we jettisoned it. Now there are shrill cries for a return to the Parliamentary structure. In older democracies, these systems took centuries to evolve so we cannot expect a copied system to fit neatly our purposes.

    “We must give a long period of trial and improvement before the system we have adopted is anywhere near fit for purpose.”

    That was the President on the occasion of his New Year broadcast.

    To those who argue the president is slow and appallingly self-absorbed, he made clear at the dinner he hosted in honour of chieftains of the All Progressives Congress at the Presidential Villa, Abuja Thursday last week that Nigerians ought to be thankful for his Pauline conversion:

    “I keep telling people that while I was in uniform, quite reckless and young, I got all the ministers and governors, and put them in Kirikiri. I said they were guilty until they could prove their innocence. I was also detained too.

    “I decided to drop the uniform and come back. Eventually, I am here. So really, I have gone through it over and over again.

    “This is why I am not in a hurry virtually to do anything. I will sit and reflect and continue with my clear conscience.”

    Now, the president may have sought to avail the citizens a fresh window to assess him and the administration that he leads. Even at that, it comes as a new thing that the president would seek rationalisation in a rather strange, almost incomprehensible inertia at a time of dire emergency.

    To be sure, it is possible that a sizeable number of Nigerians may not have known just how bad how things were in 2015. However, it suffices that the greater majority of the citizens knew just enough to work assiduously to replace that utterly incompetent administration headed by a man whose trajectory in public service was powered more by chance and good luck than any real preparation, a leader under whose watch governance was reduced to a grand bazaar.

    Nearly three years on, we do have a fair idea of how bad things really were. From the war in the Northeast which although required and still requires hefty resources to prosecute but which officials with their filchy hands rendered nigh impossible, the completely run down infrastructure that bears the ignoble fingerprints of each successive PDP administration since 1999, the deliberate elevation of heist to the directing principle of state policy and with it the desecration of the pillars and institutions of governance across the board, there was very little contention about the humongous work of cleaning and cranking needed to get the Nigerian machine revving back at full throttle.

    As if to pour pepper on the nation’s injury, the above challenges will coincide with yet another cycle of collapse of commodity prices that plunged the nation’s finances to the nadir.

    That was how it was nearly three years ago. If we had thought that the period was sufficient to articulate a cohesive direction of governance, to rev up the pace of governance given the administration’s specific diagnosis of near total collapse of state institutions, to break new grounds and make new friends all in the bid to get all hands on board, we are finally finding out that things are not only what they seem, but also that the perception of emergency is far from shared. Part of which is the current frustration under which the chant Sai Buhari has since yielded to #BringBackCorruption in quarters that would ordinarily have been unthinkable in recent past.

    It is not as if anyone needed reminding that things are not exactly all gloom under President Buhari. The economy is out of recession even if many will insist – nominally. Thanks to improvements in oil prices, the foreign exchange situation has stabilised just as the foreign reserve is on the upward spiral. The capital market has been quite impressive having finally found its verve after the bubble of 2008/9. I know a tribe out there who will swear that confidence has begun to return to the economy even if the only proof they have to show is the so-called 24-step leap in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report for 2018 which puts Nigeria 145th in 2017 as against 169th place in 2016. Many are eager to point to the impressive stride in the agricultural sector, the modest improvements in industrial capacity utilisation and the unprecedented cutbacks in food imports.

    Do all of these therefore excuse the president’s frustration with what he chose to describe as Nigerians’ impatience let alone rationalise his frustratingly slow pace?

    To start with, it is hard to see what could be deemed as “achievement” outside the usual enabler called crude oil. First, with the price of crude at nearly $70 a barrel, it seems only a matter of time before the economy returned to the now familiar trajectory of non-inclusive growth. Godwin Emefiele and company at the apex bank may have done a yeoman’s job of growing the reserve and keeping some 41-odd items at bay; it seems as yet a long shot from any real progress in the absence of robust attention to the infrastructure challenge. Clearly, if you have an economy delivering two percent growth at a time population is doing 2.6 annually, it is tempting to imagine that a luxury, such as the one the president so badly craves, is one that the country can ill-afford.

    Finally, the president thinks that the political architecture matters a little. I agree with him to the extent that the hood does not necessarily make the monk. Moreover, if the word restructuring has become so contentious and disagreeable, how about getting the federal government, in the face of the pervasive insolvency across the states, to shed some of its weight to give them some muscle? Or is that not what governance is all about?

  • And now our Shitholia republic

    And now our Shitholia republic

    I confess upfront that the word Shitholia is not original to yours truly. Guess you know who coined the original word to describe the world’s so-called basket cases whose citizens must be kept far from Uncle Sam’s country. Used in this specific context of this piece, the credit deservedly goes to my prodigiously bright and talented young friend and blogger – Tade Oshaloto, who in his ceaseless blogs about the Nigerian condition first used it – at least to my knowledge – in describing the cesspit that our country has fallen.

    Never mind the rambunctious Donald Trump and his infantile rants, Nigerians were never in doubt that things were bad – really bad. The debate has always been – just how bad particularly with each new day revealing new depths to which our humanity has sunk. In a nation where fixing basic infrastructure that defines modernity has remained a tall order and where routine matters of governance has turned a joke, that human life ordinarily thought of as sacred is now worth far less than the value of a cow can only be explained in the context of a society’s free fall on the human evolutionary ladder!

    Nearly a week after the horrific killings of 73 villagers and farmers at Guma and Logo Local Government Area of Benue State, perhaps the only thing that is not in contention is that Homo sapiens as opposed to Bos Taurus it was that were gruesomely butchered. In a nation that has never been able to properly count itself – that the figure of 73 was returned as body count would pass for no mean achievement except that countless others are still missing and may never be accounted for anytime now or in the future.

    Trust Nigerians for their love for finger-pointing – there have just been as many angles to the dissection of the problems all depending on who is doing so. The same with determining the aggressors as against the victims in the terribly vacuous and morally challenged ethical and legal space; there has equally not been a shortage of contributors. Again, just like everything Nigeriana, much has been the smoke and heat without any sign of the much needed flicker of light at the end of the long dark tunnel.

    Let’s start with the mourner-in-chief, Governor Samuel Ortom who blames everyone but himself. First, he blames, not entirely without basis, the leadership of the Fulani herdsmen – the Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore for constituting itself into an alternative government and for openly threatening to make the state ungovernable should his administration proceed with the implementation of a law duly passed by the state legislature. He blames President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo for failing to respond to his distress letter on getting the intelligence on the imminent attack of the Fulani herdsmen.

    For a man who only few weeks before had rolled out the controversial anti-open grazing law said to threaten the livelihood of a significant section of the people living in the state, what did he do to assuage the concerns of the herdsmen other than talk tough that the law had come to stay? His sin: unlike the Fulani, the governor obviously lacks native intelligence! Could he not have used the judicial system to bind the Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore leadership to good conduct?

    To be sure, VP Osinbajo has denied receiving any communication about “specific budding attacks” but rather on complaints about public utterances of some herdsmen. His spokesman Laolu Akande only yesterday put the statement out that the Vice President actually met with the governor to discuss the matter and the security situation in the state and then ordered law enforcement agencies to be on the alert to prevent any attacks or violence. This was in June 2017!”

    Does that entirely exculpate the presidency considering that the attacks came barely seven months after? What did the police and the intelligence community in particular do with the information sent to the presidency and the subsequent directive considering that the state has, as at that point in time, recorded no less than 46 deadly clashes since 2013?

    Now, to Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore – a body that oftentimes carries on as if it is above the law of the land, utterly impervious to the cries and anguished suffered by Nigerians – West, East, North and South – to the murderous activities of the Fulani herdsmen.  On Sunday, this newspaper reported a member of the Board of Trustees (BoT) of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, Sale Bayari – yes, the same Bayari who in 2016 actually rationalised the gory massacres in Agatu Benue State); this newspaper reported him as not only rejecting the accusation that the Fulani engineered the mayhem but also the law against open grazing.

    Says he: “It is just a misconception that there should be no open grazing in Nigeria. In the entirety of Africa, there is nowhere open grazing is banned…There is no country where there are lots of cows including South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Burundi, Tanzania, there is nowhere you can tell me that there is a  total ban on open grazing.

    “What is normally available is that there should be open grazing for those people who think it is traditional and cultural to do it because that is their only form of exercise, leisure and pleasure because that is their culture; we also have grazing reserves for those who would want to start learning how to settle and then the ranches for those who are wealthy and into livestock only for commercial purposes.”

    The problem here is that he cites no single instance of the herdsmen’s love for open-ended pastoralism being allowed to either extirpate the traditional land tenure system or property rights of the farming population in those countries he mentioned.

    Even more serious is the indication that the massacre may have been fuelled by revenge. Hear Emir of Kano, Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II on the matter: “Some months ago in Mambilla, in one weekend, over 800 Fulani were murdered by Mambilla militias. The papers did not even go there to cover the story. Most of those wiped out were women, infants and the elderly.

    “In one case, a pregnant woman was killed, her stomach was ripped open and the baby was brought out and slaughtered. I personally handed over to the federal government a dossier with the names and pictures of the 800 or so people slaughtered as well as the names and addresses of persons known to have participated in these acts of ethnic cleansing.

    “Nothing has happened. I also ensured that authorities received video and audio evidence of senior politicians in Taraba State, who were involved in this act of genocide. No one has been arrested. Fulanis were also murdered in Kajuru and Numan.

    Does the statement echo similar rationalisation by Bayari in 2016 in the aftermath of the Agatu killings? And to think that we have a government in place? Where does all of these that lead? What happens should every aggrieved community embark on reprisals over every perceived injury?

    In the end, Benue tragedy – as indeed other tragedies that daily rain upon us – would not be so much about the number of lives lost but the fact that every single incident of such nature was preventable and their masterminds not unknown.  It happens because the leadership at every level, have not only abdicated their responsibility to lead, but have long surrendered to society’s basest instincts.

    The bigger tragedy is that it will happen – again.

  • Fuel: It’s market forces, stupid

    Fuel: It’s market forces, stupid

    It must have been exasperating to watch officials of the Nigerian national Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Department of Petroleum resources, DPR and the petroleum resources ministry all speak, as it were, in tongues in the wake of the embarrassing fuel shortage that gripped the nation few days to Christmas. Seems one moment when lies would trump truth-telling; obfuscation, clarity. After a month-long circus in which corporate dereliction accounts for no mean part, we are, as always, pretending to getting around to the bolts and nuts of the vexing issue even if, as in times past, the solutions proposed not only amounts to merely kicking the problem down the road but are merely attempts to recycle worn solutions as new.

    And so we are back to the pre-May 2016. Back to the same wearisome arguments about the co-efficient of fuel-price determination; the import price parity and the troubling mathematics of fuel cost recovery; of subsidies and opportunity costs; of phantom and cooked up figures. And finally, to the ugly, though hard, truth about the economics of a product around which other elements in the polity spins.

    Never mind the posturing by Maikanti Baru, Nigerians know who it was that finally won the day. Never mind the docking of the usual big boys of the fuel import trade – Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association (DAPMAN) and their perennial sparring partner, the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), the latter of which complains to no end about getting fuel to dispense even when the hordes of shadowy players had enough to flood the streets with; in the end, the cold arithmetic of the business or what some choose to call the fundamentalism of the market seems to have finally prevailed. Something, it has finally dawned, must have to give about the current price of the ‘essenco’ called petrol. It is either a review of the current price of N145 per litre for petrol to something around the N180 per litre band, or a return to the full-blown Nigerian nightmare called subsidy!

    Either way can only be bad, terrible news. Whereas a review of the current price would seem beyond contemplation at a time real incomes have witnessed an unprecedented decline under the Buhari administration, a return to the era of subsidy on fuel would be just as toxic for an economy said to be hungry for development funds. However, like every single public policy issue in this clime, it is not that the problems suddenly chanced upon us, or would require some complex algebraic formula to decipher; the problem stems from the game of denial by the NNPC and its principal the federal government. Rather than level with the citizens on the dilemma posed by the rising oil prices and unstable exchange rates considering not just our dependence on fuel imports but the fact that we have absolute no control over the global price of crude, they resort to drawing a veil of secrecy on what is ordinarily a straightforward economic issue.

    The truth is that some newspapers had as far back as October 2017 more than speculated on the return of the subsidy regime. Vanguard actually reported a figure of N586 million daily as fuel subsidy following the rise in crude oil price from $49 to $58 per barrel then. Today, with oil prices closing menacingly on $70 a barrel mark, we should be looking at a much higher figure of the subsidy than the N586 million daily reported for October 2017. And so, the question naturally bears asking – what happens should oil price hit, say $100– a price not exactly inconceivable given the volatility in commodity prices?

    Which is why Nigerians should take the theatrics by Maikanti Baru and company with a pinch of salt. Nor should anyone for that matter be deceived by the effort to conceal the corporate incompetence of the minders of the oil industry.

    By the way, does it strike anyone that the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency, PPPRA, the agency charged with the determination of the fuel-price template thinks it is better to play the ostrich – pull down the template element from their website as if by so doing,  the price movements would be guaranteed frozen!

    What to do? Get the figures out. As far as I can see, only the National Assembly stands in good stead to help lay all the cards on the table. Certainly not the subsidy-denying PPPRA. Much as we are a long way from the era of denying the arithmetic of the differential between the cost of import and price at the pump, the fact remains that the subsidy debate remains largely emotive. Yet, to the extent that there is no other name given under the heaven to describe the under-recovery of costs save subsidy, establishing the quantum of the differential will surely be a good step not just towards stripping the fuel trade of its needless mystique, but removing the veil behind which officials hide to prey on the system! Can anybody think of a better way to psychologically prepare the citizens for the imminent liberalisation say, when Dangote refinery and others, finally come on stream?

     

    Change and its many semantics

    “I have kept a close watch on the on-going debate about “Restructuring”. No human law or edifice is perfect. Whatever structure we develop must periodically be perfected according to changing circumstances and the country’s socio-economic developments. We Nigerians can be very impatient and want to improve our conditions faster than may be possible considering our resources and capabilities. When all the aggregates of nationwide opinions are considered, my firm view is that our problems are more to do with process than structure.

    We tried the Parliamentary system: we jettisoned it. Now there are shrill cries for a return to the Parliamentary structure. In older democracies these systems took centuries to evolve so we cannot expect a copied system to fit neatly our purposes. We must give a long period of trial and improvement before the system we have adopted is anywhere near fit for purpose”.

    That was President Buhari in his New Year broadcast. For those clamouring for ‘restructuring”, it must have been disappointing that the president thinks that the current structure can be salvaged by some process of re-engineering.

    Rather than engage in the endless but increasingly unfruitful debate on the path that the Buhari administration would rather not tread, why don’t we, for a change, focus on interrogating the so-called re-engineering which the president seems enamoured?

    It seems that only then can the citizens begin to meaningfully account for the administration’s scandalous squandering of a national goodwill!

    I rise!

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • This time, last year

    This time, last year

    What a way to end the year! I mean a year which started on a cautious note, then slowly waltzed up in a surprising momentum only to end up in a terrible anti-climax. Having been spared of the experience about this time last year, if we thought that the era of crippling fuel shortages was finally gone with the supposed mother-of-all reviews of the fuel-price template of May 2016, the grand return of that Nigerian nightmare on Christmas has shown how far the handlers of the sector have yet to master the intriguing dynamics of the sector under their watch.

    As it appears, nothing truly has changed: not the pathetic blame game under which the culprit in chief would accuse others of precipitating the crisis when its own dereliction is so obvious to see; the perennial sideshow which comes by way of the routine hounding Depot and Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (DAPMAN), the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN) and the legion of ubiquitous hoarders into Hades; and now top cap it all is the return of that toxic word – subsidy – into the nation’s fuel price template – yes, the old script – which underlies the federal government’s pathetic lack of will to address the economics of fuel importation under which the world’s leading oil producer are routinely subjected to the vagaries of crude oil price movements and foreign exchange fluctuations.

    Forget the NNPC’s needless showmanship; neither the crippling scarcity nor the return of the subsidy is entirely surprising. Nigerians would readily recall that the best argument put forward when the current petrol price template was set was not so much about deregulation but cost recovery. Whereas the regime of cost recovery was understandably designed to foster competition, true deregulation would involve a constant review of the parameters on the fuel price template which in effect means that prices would also change as the dynamics change. That is the dilemma that the current administration has found itself – and which has now cast a dark shadow on its modest achievements.

    It is a cross that the change administration must carry so long as oil prices continues to increase.

    By and large, year 2017 seems to have surpassed expectations. Against all expectations, it exited the recession in the second quarter with a modest GDP growth of 0.55 percent. Inflation is down from 18 percent in 2016 to around 15 percent. The naira has of course gained strength; from N490 to the USD a year ago, it currently trades at N360.  The same with the foreign reserves, it has improved dramatically from $23 billion in October 2016 to $38.2 billion a record 38-month. On the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report for 2018, Nigeria ranks 145th position – 24 positions up from the 169th position in the 2017 report. There is also a fresh commitment to improve on revenue collection going by the unprecedented haul by the Nigerian Customs Service.

    So what do we expect this year?

    Whereas I wrote of a future hung on faith about this time last year, I must say that year 2018 is pregnant with possibilities. A lot depends on the fiscal discipline across the board.  At a time of unprecedented infrastructure gaps, it seems inexplicable that the federal government will for whatever reasons, fail to implement its own budget.

    Secondly, a lot would also depend on the extent on the abilities of revenue collecting agencies like the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and the customs to sustain the current momentum. Thirdly, a lot will also depend on the extent to which the federal government is able to reduce or narrow the crippling infrastructure challenge. It is unfortunate that the Buhari administration appears to have done far less than would ordinarily been expected in the dire situation in which the economy has found itself. A sure proof of that is the perennial failure to implement the capital elements in the budget.

    But even more important is the extent to which the federal government is able to enlist the support of the private sector in getting things done. How to reduce the near total dependence of our manufacturing companies on forex market almost without exception and the associated capital flows which goes on under various guises – all of which flow directly from the failure backward integration remains  a big challenge. Just like the in the outgone year, the situation is expected to continue in 2018 and beyond.

    Finally, I want to talk about two factors that continue to undermine the economy. The first is fuel import said to account for 40 percent of our forex earnings; and the second, the scandalous situation of youth unemployment. On the first, there is at least hope that the country will somehow exit the import cycle when hopefully Dangote refineries comes on stream.

    But then, how do we begin to address the challenge of putting the nearly 50 percent of our idle youths to work? Only recently, the National Bureau of Statistics projected that “the unemployment rate, induced by a recession, typically peaks about 15-18 months after the beginning of a recession or 4-8 months after the end of a recession before it returns to its pre- recession trend”. That the unemployment situation will return to that terrible normal in 2018 can only be bad news for an economy with such a huge idle population. Has anyone thought of something of a Marshall plan to get our youths off the streets even for public works?

    Or do we need a new economics to address this? Happy New Year to you, dear readers.

  • Destination Lampedusa

    As I write this, I can picture a family somewhere still praying and hoping against hope that their ward from whom there has been no word since s/he embarked on the now famed trip of no return to Libya or wherever will somehow emerge at the destination city paved with gold. Never mind the cold reality that the odds of making the trip alive are 1: 100; there is supposed to be a god somewhere who carries a Nigerian middle name available to shepherd the crew to a safe berth. Why then worry when you can pray – or better still, summon the will to ignore the gory pictures daily streamed live as it were in the social media – hoping against hope that by happenstance their own Citizen Anonymous will make it to Lampedusa?

    Today, we are told that some 5000-odd fellows are stranded in Libya. Those of course are the numbers known to the Nigerian authorities. There will, invariably, be countless numbers held by the scores of militia calling the shots in Libya’s vast ungoverned spaces. By now, if one expected the folks of those whose ‘loved ones’ left home for months without contact to have stepped forward to assist the government to generate the numbers of those involved, nothing of the sort has yet happened.  Not even some hastily-staged vigil at the foreign ministry by distraught family members whose wards went by that route even if merely to fulfil some righteousness. They would rather – as some suggested – be found making supplications – not so much for their safe return – but for those luckless wards to somehow beat the nets of the Libyan militia as they press forward to Europe!

    Poor expendables.

    The other day, one of our hordes of our Libyan returnees actually said something about going back at the earliest opportunity; in the eyes of our returnee, the well-meaning arrangement put in place by the state government is beneath her expectation. Surely, Edo State government, she was quoted to have said, can do better than some emergency, ad hoc rehabilitation measures in the name of welcome.

    Not too long ago, I stumbled into a young Nigerian awaiting deportation from Dubai to Lagos. Somehow, we got talking and he told me of his odyssey; his trip, he told me, started via the long Trans-Saharan stretch; somehow he made it to Europe but even the reprieve ended up being temporary. From Europe, one thing led to another and he found himself in Dubai only to fall into the hands of the country’s stern immigration officials.

    That however is not the end of the story. He made clear to me that he didn’t come that far to be ferried like a fowl to Lagos! His family, he said would wish that he would simply vanish without trace than return with no visible accomplishment to show!

    The story of how the young fellow managed to slip from the eagle-eyed immigration officials prior to embarkation would remain the stuff of a movie. The point is – I was somehow relieved that the guy was somehow left behind, particularly after his subtle threat to bring down the giant metal bird rather than make the trip alive!

    That is how bad things have gone in a country where the chance of youths getting a good education is zilch, where the prospects of making a decent living thereafter statistically tends to zero; a country where youths haven long given up hope of ‘making it’ here, would rather embrace the illusory life painted of Europe and America. Never mind the current heart-rending tales of scarification, the accounts of horror and terror, dehumanization and slavery, it is possible that some of our current returnees would need no persuasion to return, were they to be availed a re-entry pass– since home offered no passable alternative.

    At the heart of the issue is the big question of what lures our youths to risk their limbs if not lives in what is aptly described as the new era slavery. That question, to me has not been fully interrogated in all the discussions about the tragedy currently playing out in the Mediterranean.

    The search for the good life? I understand that things are quite bad in the country. I do not think that the point can be sufficiently made that our governments at various levels have failed us – in terms of their failure to expand the opportunities for the youth, to develop of infrastructure and hence upgrade the living standards of the people, to equip the youths as indeed every segment of the population for a meaningful, productive existence. As a result, our young ones troop out in droves to Ghana, Benin, Europe and America in search of quality education; the less advantaged ones among them of course find their ways into unimaginable places on planet earth in search of hustle and in the process court trouble.

    The uncomfortable truth however is that the current madness needs to be appropriately located in the complete collapse of the value system, of the family as an institution. These, however, are nowhere near the tragedy foisted by the grotesque religiosity that has turned the once highly structured moral order upside down; the crisis of the licentious theology that promotes wealth over and above the rigours of work, of product (outcomes) over and above the process and supplants the rigours of thought with ignorance, superstition and cult worship.

    Clearly, if there is any issue that best underlies the pathology, it is – GREED – a lethal affliction that makes no distinction between socio-economic classes. Whether it is the bulging balances from stolen wealth or the most prized toys ever rolled out by factories in Europe and America being shamelessly flaunted by leaders who should know better, the quest to join them even if it means risking dear lives to the bargain is merely a variant of the morphology of the same organic disease.

    Welcome to our world of hedonists; a world of faith mendicants and proselytes of hope, of miracle workers and their hordes of ignorant consumers. Still in wonder as to the nursery beds of our foolish voyagers?

  • And now Paris Club refund 3.0

    And now Paris Club refund 3.0

    If most Nigerians missed the story of the boycott of the monthly conclave described as the Federal Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) penultimate week, it would seem unlikely that anyone would miss the gracious offer of final (?) tranche of the Paris Club refund by President Muhammadu Buhari to the states the following week.  In the week that the Forum of Finance Commissioners were to have met to share what was on offer in the distributable pool, a seething discord over an alleged transparently opaque bookkeeping by the perennially out-of-date national oil corporation would cause an enraged forum chairman Mahmoud Yunusa to tell his colleagues to go back home to await further instructions “until we reconcile the figures in the accounts”.

    “I sincerely apologise for keeping everyone, but this is the position of our principals through the chairman, Nigeria Governors’ Forum, even though the matter was discussed at length during NEC when all the governors were present. So we should all take our leave and wait for the next date which will be announced later”, he reportedly told his anxious colleagues.

    The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), as it appeared, had not been quite forthright on the matter of the whopping N460. 649bilion said to have been illegally withheld from the Federation Account in the period between January 2016 and September this year; this is aside another $172,913,617.30 million said to be outstanding from the NLNG Feedstock sales, Chevron Cheetah Project, Royalty Oil Sales Value lifting by TEPNGA MCA, RDP Price Review and others which, left to the NNPC would take aeons to resolve. Obviously peeved that such huge cash from crude oil sales revenue will be tagged “outstanding” by NNPC since 2010 not to talk of the unending ritual of account reconciliation, the commissioners, acting at the behest of their principals, insisted they could take it no more.

    Yet again, we must pity the club of desperate governors most of whom in the past few months have been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. If the presidency had imagined that Bailout 1.0, 2.0 and Paris Club Tranche 1 and 2 making a dent on the albatross that salaries and allowances of serving personnel and pensioners had come to constitute, the reality has turned to be a far cry from the initial projections.  And now, few weeks to the year’s end and with things looming gloomier by the day, the matter could not have been anything but desperate.  You can then imagine their joy at the gracious offer of the Paris Club balance by the President at time many in the states had looked forward to a bleak Xmas, one filled with tears and gnashing of teeth.

    Now, before we get drenched in the latest rain of Paris Club refund, let’s look at how far we have come if only to appreciate what the future portends. In Bailout 1.0 we had the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) put up a special intervention fund of N300 billion to help the states to defray their backlog of salaries; included in that package was a debt relief programme coupled by the Debt Management Office to help the states restructure their commercial loans put at over N660 billion. Bailout 2.0 would follow under which President Buhari, acting on the recommendation of the 66th meeting of the National Economic Council, NEC ‘graciously approved’ the suspension of the deductions from March 2016 allocation to states. The gesture, a breather of sorts to enable the states grapple with the crisis fostered by dwindling oil revenues was expected to pool some N10.9 billion into the states’ coffers. And then the Paris Club refund of N522.74 billion – of which the first tranche of N388.304 billion was released in December 2016 and the second, totalling N243. 795 billion would follow in July this year. And now, Paris Club 3.0.

    In all of this, Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun never failed to remind of the gratuitous ‘conditionalities’ attached chief of which is “a Fiscal Restructuring Plan to be prepared by each state with clear measurable objectives”.

    Nearly two years on, Nigerians are in the best position to judge whether the twin objectives of clearing the arrears of wages and pensions, and, the restructuring of state bureaucracies have been achieved.  However, that the chants for intervention have grown louder with every passing cycle of the monthly conclave would seem a reflection of how far those objectives are from being achieved. In any case, the fact that majority of the states are still owing their workers and pensioners, while the quest to get the states to restructure their workforce has somewhat reached a dead end would seem to indicate the futility of the therapy.

    Now, I haven’t quite touched upon the corruption and wastes known to be ravaging the states almost without exception. That, no doubt is a topic for another day.

    So, what would the third tranche achieve? Certainly nothing more than the previous interventions have achieved in terms of providing temporary succour to the states in their hours of distress – particularly the workers and perhaps to a lesser extent, the pensioners most of whom directly bear the brunt of states insolvency.  And so while the beleaguered workers can look forward to a merry Christmas, it seems inevitable that the daemon of insolvency would return much sooner than later, that is, barring real changes in the formula for sharing from the pool and renewed drive for internally generated revenue.

    And when will this end? Pretty difficult to tell – I must admit. One however takes a bet that there will always be something from the piggy bank to throw around whenever things get sticky. Remember, we still have the Excess Crude Account to service just about any purpose(s) under the sun? Has anyone yet thought of the ‘ways and means’ – an art long perfected by apex banks all over the world to save the skins of irresponsible governments?

    It is a brand new political economy of bailouts. All are enjoined to enjoy while it lasts.

  • Neither law nor public interest

    Of all the many twists and turns to the Abulrasheed Maina saga, the more intriguing must be the latest spin by the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, SAN on his role in the embarrassing episode.

    Let’s recall that Vanguard newspaper had in October challenged the country’s number one law officer to clear himself of alleged complicity in the backdoor re-instatement of the ex-pension czar – Maina into the public service. Quick to advertise his pedigree as “legal practitioner…always guided by law and public interest and (who) will therefore not do anything that deviates from the law or breaches public interest…” he had then promised a comprehensive response at the appropriate time: “Nigerians are entitled to know the truth in the entire saga and I am ready to speak directly to them when I appear before the Senate since I have been summoned by the legislature, which is investigating the matter…I look forward to addressing anxious Nigerians on the matter when I appear before the senators”.

    Well, the moment came Thursday last week. Not before the Senate as originally planned but the Ad hoc Committee of the House of Representatives investigating the “disappearance, reappearance, reinstatement and promotion of Maina.’’

    Asked whether he actually initiated the controversial memo on the basis of which Maina was surreptitiously recalled, deployed and promoted, he responded, not like an attorney sworn to law and public interest but like one programmed to hatch mischief: “There was correspondence from Maina seeking the intervention of the Office of the Attorney-General of the Federation for his reinstatement into the public service.

    “Maina made available court processes, judgements and orders for the consideration of the Attorney-General of the Federation…Judgement and orders were generally obtained between 2013 and 2014 before I was appointed the Attorney-General and was not appealed”.

    And then, quite significantly, he added: “However, as at October 5, 2017, Maina’s issue which has been confirmed by subsequent correspondence in my file was indeed a work-in-progress. So, the letter giving clear directives could not have genuinely emanated from my office’’.

    Some newspapers actually reported him as claiming that the so-called directive from his office was a ‘forgery’.

    Between the long-awaited but poorly-crafted gobbledygook, a concoction designed to confound and confuse and the other testimony by the Head of Civil Service of the Federation, Winifred Oyo-Ita, restating her earlier testimony that her office did in fact receive a letter from AGF to the Federal Civil Service Commission directing that Maina be reinstated, Nigerians by now, ought to be in good position to judge as which of version of the truth is credible or believable.

    However, because the number one law officer staked the law as his forte and public interest as justification, we must insist on putting his response in the context of what is already public knowledge and against the renewed efforts to pull the wool on the eyes of exasperated citizens.

    What do we know?

    First, that Maina was not only recalled in circumstances that would ordinarily be deemed highly irregular, but that he had been drawing his pay from, presumably, the federal treasury since March. Mind you – if you thought that the fugitive’s ‘rapid dialogue’ with his feet proved nothing about the comeback bid, how about President Muhammadu Buhari’s swift directive to the relevant authorities to terminate the charade?

    Second, we do know also that the Department of State Security allegedly provided him a safe house of sorts. And third, that the EFCC which was practically on AWOL while the processes of his reabsorption into the federal bureaucracy lasted has since launched into the overdrive – marking buildings and renewing expired orders – as if those buildings, suspected to be proceeds of crime, sprouted overnight! And fourth, that the Office of the Head of Service dithered – and this is crucial – in lending its weight to the grand subversion – which explains much of the current hoopla.

    To get back to Malami’s first anchor of defence – the law. It is interesting that AGF Malami talks of ‘court processes, judgments and orders obtained by Maina apparently exculpating him from alleged multiple felonies. In a country where all manners of things happen under the cover of darkness and where the art of fact-checking a nigh impossibility, it seems the least that the chief law officer of the federation could have done was to avail the distinguished lawmakers, if not Nigerians, the particulars of the judgments, if truly they exist and their proper context.

    Could the AGF have had Suit No. FHC/ABJ /CS/65/13 – Abdulrasheed Maina vs the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and eight others in mind –  a fundamental human rights case which came in the wake of an arrest warrant issued by the Senate against him?  Could he have been referring to the voiding of the warrant procured by EFCC on October 27, 2015 by an Abuja Magistrate Court?

    I urge Nigerians to read Jiti Ogunye – Maina: Malami Did Not Act in the Public Interest, published by Premium Times, October 28.

    To be sure, neither of the judgments in respect of the two cases could be deemed as so infinitely elastic as to involve the far reaching consequential orders being pushed under Malami’s watch, which makes the claim about being in defence of the law suspect.

    Or, are there other cases that Nigerians are not aware?

    This naturally throws up the billion dollar question about the author of the memo titled – “Re: Demand for Update on the Reinstatement of Mr. Abdulrasheed Abdullahi Maina as Director in the Federal Civil Service”?

    To quote the relevant portion of the letter:

    “In my said letter, I directed your office to give a consequential effect to the said judgment which voided the warrant of arrest issued by the Police against Dr. Abdulrasheed A. Maina, which warrant of arrest formed the basis for the query referenced MI/30040/1/1, dated the 15th day of February, 2013 and his eventual dismissal from the service of the Federal Government of Nigeria on the 5th day of March 2013…

    I hereby write to reiterate my earlier directive and further direct that you give a consequential effect to the aforesaid judgment by taking necessary steps to ensure immediate reinstatement of Dr. Maina to his duty post as a Director in the Federal Civil Service to enable him continue his service to the Federal Government of Nigeria”.

    The letter speaks for itself. Suffice to say that if, as Malami claimed before the House last week, that he gave no directive to effect Maina’s recall, then somebody somewhere either within or without the bureaucracy must have penned those lines which clearly suggested otherwise. Surely, that would be a case of forgery – actionable under the very law that the AGF is sworn to protect. If however he did authored the letter – as some insist that he did – then we would be talking of grave violations of his oath office and acting against the public interest.

    Either way, there should be serious consequences – if you ask me.

     

  • Still on the trouble with Nigeria

    I don’t know if many Nigerians read the report about the plan by the federal government to outsource the forensic study of its Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) to foreign experts? Until last week, I had actually thought that Nigeria had moved beyond the point where the authors of a supposedly home-grown economic recovery strategy would be pounding the streets of foreign capitals in search of ‘experts’ to assist them in dealing with what is fundamentally a domestic problem.

    Until last week.

    Thanks to Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma, we now know that some Malaysian experts are coming to assist the federal government “conduct a forensic study that will boost the implementation of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP)”.

    Indulge me, dear reader, with the text of the rather long quote from the minister lest I be accused of playing semantic and/or lexical games:  “Today, the Federal Executive Council approved a memorandum that was brought by the Ministry of Budget and National Planning to retain some consultants to help us to conduct some pilot laboratories. This is part of our implementation strategy for the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) and so, we intend to conduct three labs – one in agriculture and transportation, one in power and gas and one in manufacturing and processing.

    “The key objectives of the labs are as follows: one is to identify all relevant key stakeholders from the public and private sectors that are crucial in the delivery and implementation of the ERGP initiative so as to create ownership early in the development process. We will review and re-evaluate the ERGP and sectoral plans against set targets and progress and will include identifying gaps in the current economic system and the key success factors.

    “It will further deliver detailed a three-phase implementation programme line by line. We will identify entry point projects. We will identify key performance indicators, breaking down silos and encouraging key players. Now, the focus of the labs is to mobilise private sector investment to finance specific capital projects as you know public resources are limited. So, these labs will bring in private sector players. We will look at the various areas including: infrastructure, manufacturing and bring them in and mobilise private sector financing and resources for the labs.

    “So, what council has approved today (yesterday) is that we bring in some consultants who did a similar thing in Malaysia (emphasis mine) to try to help us build our own capacity. They will just help us at the beginning and after that, we will take over and do it ourselves,” he said.

    For this, the strained treasury will cough out a less-than-princely N458 million. And all of these for job that spans three months.

    At three hundred and sixty something naira to one United States dollar, that isn’t supposed to be a lot of money by the way – coming to a mere US$1.5 million. Much as we have not been told that the money will be paid in the Malaysian ringgit, the greenback or in the local currency, the indulgence, at a time like this, would ordinarily fly in the face of pretensions about doing everything to keep products and services it can undertake on its own at bay.

    I already see in my minds eye, some smart foreign consultants putting one or two of our local brains to work for peanuts only to hand the federal government the hefty bill with possible variations for a job well done.  Ever heard of the tragedy of a country that imports what it has in abundance while exporting what it lacks?

    I say this based on the common knowledge that tomes of similar reports already exist in the countless bureaux in government offices.  Moreover, I do know of countless number of Nigerians in the Diaspora that would willingly avail their country of the benefit of their expertise at a time like this for a nominal fee. But then, we would not be who we are if we don’t go after just about anything foreign including those things we do not need.

    Let me put things this way: what the consultants purport to seek in Sokoto is already in the nation’s proverbial Sokoto (trouser). Moreover, it is hard to see any new issues that could be thrown up that Nigerians are not already familiar given what has become the over-dissection of the economy. Trust our number-numbed compatriots: they have enough of the game of numbers not to recognise the latest one for what it is: something to get them talking!

    Honestly, I understand the economic management team’s anxiety to deliver. The truth however is that we have been on this path before. Between 1999 and now, we have had the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), the 11-point Agenda, and Transformation Agenda. Each, aside aspiring to the same broad objectives of deepening the nation’s economic base, also claims to be home-grown as well as understanding of the nuances of the Nigerian environment in their making. Although I cannot recall any of the previous strategies outsourcing any aspects of its strategy to a foreign outfit, I do understand that this might sometimes be necessary to bridge knowledge and expertise gaps in a universalist and interconnected world. It seems to me however that the Buhari administration has neither laid out a good case for bringing in the Malaysians to sell its ERGP to the citizens nor has it undertaken any preliminary steps to sell the plan to its own organs on the basis of which it might seek to even proceed with implementation.

    So, what do we know about ERGP? My answer is – pretty little. The problem however is no so much in any ballyhooed strategy but in our lack of attention to little things. Imagine a nation that can’t fix its road infrastructure; a country where the main road linking its major port lies in ruins; a country whose railway development have remained a permanent campaign item; where power sector is still deemed rocket science and where productivity counts for nothing – and yet aspires to the moon.

    Let the Malaysians come. They are welcome to the Nigerian feast.

  • Budget: Myth, reality and the in-between

    Exactly a week after the formal laying of the 2018 Budget before the National Assembly, there has been just enough dissection of the elements to make for treatise on Political Economy 101. It’s like a typical Nigeria football match setting: everyone is a participant, observer and coach – rolled together. From the budget size to sectoral allocations; crude oil benchmark oil price to the revenue profile; capital estimates and recurrent expenditures, debts and cost of service; trust every citizen Joe to have an ‘expert’ opinion. I recall my local vulcanizer telling me the other day that the government policy – particularly the non-faithful implementation of the budget is killing his business!

    Never mind that the economy had been long in trauma before the new-fangled buzzword called‘recession’ crawled into the national lexicon; you’ll be tempted to imagine that the cancer which has reduced the economy to a mere shadow of uitself actually begin and end with the annual ritual called budget and budgeting! Again, never mind the manufacturers long used to drawing fixed, imaginary lines year –in, year –out in the sand as if such a world exist,; it seems an inextricable part of their corporate culture to blame the budget of the government for failures in corporate decisions even when abundant evidence would seem to point to gross derelictions in inventory management. The public sector employee waves it as an alibi when the creditors show up at the door; the same for politicians when the constituents come calling for their share of the commonwealth. It is all part of the myth, being spun around an exercise, a good part of the fixation under which the budget has become a be-it -all.

    Now, don’t get me wrong. The budget is important – very. Aside letting citizens into the mind on what constitutes government priorities, it sets out the limits of what is achievable within certain parameters in any given year. It lays out the revenue profile; ditto the expenditure.  Through the budget for instance, we are able to know how many kilometres of roads are doable in a given year, the number of dams, if any, to be constructed as well as other physical projects and the costs of delivering them. Through it, we get to evaluate the efficacy of government’s previous spend with careful attention to what economists call the multiplier to enable government chart a realistic future.

    Put it to the vast understanding of the place of that instrument of public finance in their development matrix that serious governments and corporations are able to effectively deploy it to catalyse their economies, deliver on key targets and sometimes, and steer their economies in certain direction.

    Unfortunately, things are different in Nigeria. Take the 2017 budget for instance. That was the budget on which the Buhari administration’s Economic Growth and Recovery Strategy – was supposedly anchored.  Presumably, the fancy label could not have been an accident: Five successive negative growths in the preceding year had plunged the economy into recession. Inflation, exchange rate and other macro-economic variables were running riot. Manufacturers, the few that were still in business that is, could not get forex to buy; most states, no thanks to the gloom in the oil sector, could not meet up with their wage obligations. With pretty little economic activities going on, the economy was effectively on ‘hung’ mode. All of these, at a time of unprecedented infrastructure gap. The situation was one of dire emergency, hence the conventional wisdom which suggested a spend-your-way-out-of-recession strategy.

    At least, that was the expectation when the Budget was presented to the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari on December 14, 2016. By Nigeria’s modest standards, the outlay was supposedly large even if, for Africa’s largest economy, it came to a tiny fraction of comparatively ‘smaller’ economies like South Africa and Egypt. It contained all the essential good stuff; roads, railways modernization, power, education, health – with allocations which although barely enough to make a dent, offered at least some hope.

    We know what happened. If we expected that the very instrument which the administration advertised as offering the best chance to take the economy out of the doldrums would receive swift passage, nothing of the sort happened. For the expectant citizenry, it would take six months from presentation to get the budget signed into law.

    Meanwhile, the economy somehow, crawled on. Thanks to the rebound in oil prices, we somehow managed to exit the recession the second quarter. More importantly, we managed in spite of the budget! Proof? How about the release of a paltry N450 billion out of the N2.2 trillion capital spend for the year – six weeks to the end of what is supposedly the terminus of the current budget cycle!

    Let’s look at the other myth that has endured – the myth that a twenty-something billion dollars spend would carry a $1.09 trillion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) load? While the myth endures, the reality of course is that the economy is simply too big for the government to wrap its hands around. And if I may add – it is far too robust for government’s tokenistic policies to make any real difference difference!  A more reasonable imperative is to find a strategy that ensures that the government creatively gets out of the pretensions that it has the answers when in fact it is the major source of the problem.

    In other words, for those looking to the budget for the miracle, the matter seems as simple as saying that the thought of a miracle is nothing but an illusion – It won’t happen. For while it is increasingly obvious that a poorly conceived and abysmally implemented budget will never make a dent on the $3 trillion outlay required to make a difference on the infrastructure situation over the course of the next 30 years, it seems to me the best time ever, to remove the illusions about the current state of our national budget as being anything other than a hollow event.

    Let me emphasise this as I close. The budget remains important. The fact of the matter however is that we are not there yet. Not in substance. Not in process. Not in implementation. And certainly not in terms of the fulfilment of the most basic expectation to the ordinary citizen for the delivery of the public good. While that is the case, the myth endures somewhat that we will get there somehow. That is why the number of white elephants continues to grow, the rite of roll-over of ill-conceived projects and the misplaced expectations that attend the process at every budget cycle.

    Didn’t they say – as it was in the very beginning…