The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • Abuja lords and devolution

    Just when Nigerians were looking in the direction of the National Assembly to push – no matter how superficial or plain symbolic – for the rebalancing of the federation into a more productive one, the body –against reason and good judgment and in a most inexplicable misreading of the public mood – chose to abdicate that historic duty and by so doing postponed the evil day.  The body also made clear to all that while they may have been of us; they are, finally, no longer for us!

    It happened on July 26 in the Upper House – when the Senate shot down the bill which sought to alter the Second Schedule, Part I & II to move certain items to the Concurrent Legislative List to give more legislative powers to states. The very next day –the Lower House, as if by some unwritten agreement to put in abeyance what initially promised to be a realistic, sensible and pragmatic compromise on the factitious debate on restructuring – gave concurrence.

    And now for consolation, a country caught in the vortex of centrifugal eruptions is now forced to rely on the assurances of Senate President Bukola Saraki and House of Representatives Speaker Yakubu Dogara for the chambers under them to revisit the matter at the time of their choosing and possibly, convenience!

    As far as I can see, what the National Assembly did on the rejection of the proposal on devolution of power to the states amounts to an unpardonable abdication of leadership more so at a time of a dire national emergency. It is a reflection of the psychology and hence the character of a parliament which, aside losing touch with the people they claim to represent, have virtually scant understanding of the imperatives of the moment. If, as it has been said in some quarters that our parliamentarians’ problem is with the semantics of ‘restructuring’ – which admittedly have come to mean just about anything depending on who is making the case for it and the time the case is being made – this seems to me, precisely the challenge for the leadership – to beam the light on the fog for proper understanding.

    Or is someone saying that parliamentary representation precludes the duty of breaking down such concepts for the understanding of mere mortals? Of course, with most of lawmakers permanently ensconced in Abuja – far away from the daily grind that living has become the lot of the rest of us – expecting our so-called representatives to convoke town hall meetings to take concepts apart while harvesting proper feedbacks would appear an outlandish proposition. Not when there are “oversight duties” and constituency projects that could be undertaken to harvest cash. In any event, why would anyone trouble our Abuja exports with visits to constituencies on roads pockmarked with craters?

    It is of course the portents of their decision that we must worry about. First, only our lawmakers can pretend that the status quo can go on forever. That they will continue to have the pleasure of doing as they please with the annual N7 trillion appropriation – a fifth of which is borrowed money. That the country would somehow magically exit from the grave emergency that have, over the course of the last 26 months, reduced the states to beggarly status – a situation so bad that some 27 plus states have had to rely on some dubious federal financial accommodation to pay salaries and pensions.

    Need one say more?  That they can pretend to be oblivious of the collapse of the economy; to ignore the portents of the perennially shrinking piggy bank in the face of unprecedented infrastructure gap. What about the collapse of our institutions as indeed our national infrastructure currently threatening to take the nation back to pre-industrial age? Or the virtual collapse of the national security architecture that has left the country hostage to all manners of atavistic forces?

    They can – for all the cares in the world – pretend that things can go on like this without an attempt at rebalancing the current structure; moving the country as it were, from the distributive to productive federalism; from the centrist, dysfunctional and patently unresponsive police to a multi-level, more manageable one; from a stifling federal apparatus – one driven by sharing mentality to a competitive, purpose-driven one; from a swathe of prostrate entities that are federation only in name to functional federal entities? And for how long?

    I understand that the process of draining the Abuja swamp (to borrow the Trumpian lingo) will be a most difficult one indeed. For a political class and no less the parliament that is steeped in the base traditions of conspicuous consumption, that would amount to class suicide. Imagine a House of Representatives that has – recession or not –  just shelled out N17 million apiece on choice automobiles (comes to a whopping N6.1 billion for the 360 units) earmarked for ‘utility services’ being required to give up the costs that go with keeping them running on the very highways that they traded off for their constituency projects! Why would a parliament which insists on executing state and local government roads under the nebulous cover of constituency projects be expected to cede more of the power to the states?

    Yet, the folly of the route that the lawmakers would rather not take seems so self-evident. First, current assumptions – or wishes – that things will somehow get better is plain illusory. Second, thoughts that the voices behind the current agitations will somehow peter out is sheer folly – with it the possibility that the country would be permanently in war mode. Third, while it seems unimaginable that the states can continue to remain in their dependency mode, it seems only a matter of time before something gives.

    Let me restate a point that has become so worn that it is now a cliché. It is bad enough that the federal government insists on having a whopping 54 percent from the federation pool; more satanic however is that the people’s representatives will find nothing wrong with federal government sitting on the resources found in the states under the dubious principle of exclusivity. If ever there is something that can be described as grand larceny – that would be it. That our lawmakers cannot recognize it as being at the source of the crisis facing the states, something that needs to be broken if the states would ever find their verve, must be the greatest tragedy of all time.

    I close with a proverb popularized by the late MKO Abiola: There comes a time when even the blind needs no telling that the market is over! Trust me – we are nearly there!

     

  • Paris Club blues and other matters

    From being one of the most rewarding jobs a few years back, the office of the governor in Nigeria has suddenly become the most vilified if not the most hazardous job, possibly in the universe. Across the federation, the story, with only few exceptions, is a familiar one: state executives being openly derided for lack of imagination in the face of the problems currently plaguing the states under them; others have all manners of expletives hurled at them almost on daily basis for sundry – even if unproven – crimes of heist. There cannot be a worse time to be a governor.

    If the announcement last week of release of the sum of N243.79bn second tranche of the Paris Club was designed to calm troubled waters, it has merely ushered in a new wave of restiveness.  In some states, workers and pensioners, many of them owed several months of salaries and pensions have since declared war on their governors whom they accuse of embezzlement even when the funds were yet to hit the accounts!  Whereas the rumblings fit into the pattern of the general disenchantment in which the governors continue to present as soft targets, what the latest development has done is open a new chapter in which legion of angry, frustrated civil servants have moved beyond dinghy prayer rooms to taking their cases to the streets.

    As they say, we have moved full circle. From the fruitless supplications of the past years, the angry horde, now pressed to the barricades, seems poised to challenge the gubernatorial fiefdoms of our excellences over the fiscal direction, if not discretion of their states. Deploying an adroit combination of misinformation, propaganda, blackmail and crude intimidation as weapons of choice, there is, for now, no stopping the agitators in their new found power. Clearly, if the unfolding developments are any measure of the anger and discontent in the land – a rage which although is driven largely by the failure of most states to meet up with their wages and pensions obligations, is actually a reflection of the rising frustrations over the general state of the economy – the portents must be deemed as frightening as they come.

    Talk of a new day and season – a period ruled by rage and unreason. If it comes to our Excellencies as the dawn of a new, albeit rude awakening, it seems increasingly clear that cold rational arguments matched by unassailable facts and figures would hardly suffice to calm the nerves of the angry throng. As many governors are sooner finding out, the current season brooks no such luxury. Not even the publication of the amount due to each state in the latest bailout expected to temper the expectations of the citizens across the states has done the trick; instead, it has merely caused a fresh burst of unrestrained adrenalin.  How could anyone have imagined the governors so terribly boxed in between the rage of the rabble and the feigned righteousness of their emergency, latter day saviours – standing any chance? That is how serious things have become.

    No one cares – or appears to be – about the fiscal anomaly of the so-called Paris Club ‘overpayment’ in a supposedly constitutional environment; or even the criminally flawed book-keeping and fiscal practices that brought the funds about. Or where the piggy bank has been all these while and who held charge. It is sufficient that the billions, warehoused in some opaque, possibly dormant account now pressed into service, are working magic in what is deemed as heroic act. Permanently foreclosed is the debate about the refunds whose provenance best emblematizes the egregious absurdity in our public finance!

    We can, for the moment, forgo the hard discussions on the future of the economy; the structural distortions under which some 30 out of 36 states have practically turned leeches; the question of how the leviathan comes to take a disproportionate chunk of the pie which it neither needs nor could wisely gobble down. As to worries about the sustainability of a political economy hung on bailouts, all of these would come later. It is simply taken that a share of the magic potion, no matter how small, would be just fine, if not in the treatment but at least in the management of the endemic, structural disease!

    But then, as we would be finding out – sooner than later – that whereas an obsession with placebo might have some therapeutic value, it means pretty little if the ailment is not attacked at the roots. For no matter how much we laud the Santa Claus federal government for coming to the aid of the states in their hour of distress, an early relapse of the ailment, as it seems inevitable in this matter, will in the final count leave everything undone.

    Secondly, the governors might be guilty as hell of the charges against them and so deserving of the scorn being daily heaped on them by the angry folks; they are as much the rest of us victims of the warped structure which allows the central government to draw 52 percent of the pie leaving the crumbs for the 36 states to share. A picture of how unwieldly the federal government has become is the report only last week of how some unnamed agencies managed to withhold $793,200,000 (about N249.7 billion) of public funds in clear breach of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) policy. We are here talking about a fund that is a little more than the payout on the second tranche of the Paris Club refunds being allegedly shuffled around by unscrupulous bankers in collusion with corrupt government officials!

    Let’s face it: the country is in for a long dark night. This is where I hate to disappoint the angry throng. For pray as they might, the possibility of oil prices hitting the roof sometimes soon seems for now, far-fetched; not even the modest pace of recovery can be guaranteed in the context of the tenuous peace pervading in the Niger Delta. So they had better brace up for life after Paris Club.  The prospect of a life tempered by realism must be somewhat frightening from the look of things. But even worse is the alternative – a life of unrealizable expectations. It is a tough one that is.

    But then, who says all hopes are lost? Is the saying no longer true that labour creates the wealth? How about getting on with the job?

  • Yam and a minister’s dated quest

    Yam and a minister’s dated quest

    If there is one minister who can’t be accused of nursing a tall dream among the Buhari team, that fellow will be Audu Ogbe, the man currently heading the agriculture ministry. In a team of disparate players so utterly lacking in the fire for the kind of emergency that the nation has found itself – his’ is probably one of the more pragmatic voices seen to be striving to pull the country from the doldrums in the Buhari lacklustre cabinet. Never mind what his army of critics say of his initiative on grass importation – which he contends, seeks to replace the archaic practice of nomadism and roaming of animals with intensive and better organised system of keeping animals in paddocks and feedlot; or his equally controversial push to have Moroccan fertilizer (?) delivered at the price he thinks the Nigerian farmer can afford, there is a lot to be said of the minister’s crusading zeal as providing a boost to the nation’s effort to reduce its food import bill.

    It is however his initiative on yam that takes the cake. On June 29, the minister finally flagged of his long advertised pet programme on yam export under which 72 tonnes of yam were crated to the United Kingdom. Some two weeks earlier, a batch had, according to reports arrived New York. Of course, if you picture the tonnes of cash already poured into the agricultural sector by Godwin Emefiele’s apex bank – the scale of which should ordinarily have drowned the sorrows of a sector that has long turned to be the nation’s Achilles heels – it should not be difficult to understand the basis of the minister’s tall dreams – the latest of which seeks to make the local yam the next best forex earner – with an initial target of princely US$8 billion earnings annually.

    As an agricultural practitioner of note, the minister no doubt understands the economics of the yam trade than many of his critics would give him credit for. Three kilogrammes of yam, he says, cost 15 dollars in the United States, which is equivalent to about N5, 000. “In London, a carton of yam, this contains three tubers, costs 30 pounds, bringing the average cost per tuber to 10 pounds. “At that price, it is more sensible to export to earn more money for our economy”.

    How about that?

    The minister would also have his critics know that Nigeria accounts for 61 per cent of the world output of yam; that we have 60 varieties of yam of which 30 percent get rotten because we don’t have facilities to preserve them. And, in apparent answer to his hordes of critics who insist that Nigeria feed its army of hungry first before venturing into foreign shores, he says – “There has never been shortage of yam in the country. Prices might be high toward the end of the season, but new yam is already in the market”.

    So what could be wrong with carting a huge chunk of our local yam to Europe and the Americas to boost the nation’s piggy bank?

    The answer is simple and straightforward – nothing – except the attempt by the minister to put the cart before the proverbial horse!

    To start with, it is not a question of being doable or not. Fact is that yam export is already a thriving business. In case anyone is in doubt as to whether or not the Nigerian entrepreneur is already light years ahead of the latest brainwave by the agriculture ministry, yours truly can avail a directory of where to purchase ‘fresh’ tubers of yam in Durban and Cape Town – both in South Africa; in Raleigh, North Carolina and New York in the United States; and Winnipeg in Canada – to anyone desirous of a visit to those locations –for a modest fee!

    The problem, as it appears, is that the minister may actually be barking  up a wrong tree. Truth is – the pressure which drives the craze for forex at a time the nation’s capacity to finance its exports is severely constrained, though understandable, would seem utterly misplaced. Talking of export, to whose benefit? The hapless farmer in Oturkpo whose primary concern is to get his product to the market at a price he has absolutely no control over or the middleman trader who enjoys the dual advantage of setting the price and raking forex? The same farmer forced to put up with 30 percent post-harvest losses just because the government is yet to come up with initiatives to address his problems becoming government’s overnight bride all for the love of forex? And this in a nation with a supposedly world-class research institute – the 47 year-old National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI) Umudike, Abia State?

    Will the yam export initiative also address the infrastructure challenge without which the farmer is perennially left at the mercy of the elements?

    In any case, what makes the yam export business – an initiative better handled by the chambers of commerce in liaison with state governments – the federal government’s business? Why not the federal government limit its role to providing policy and institutional support given that it owns no single plot of agricultural land?  How about reviving and strengthening a number of its moribund agencies – chief of which is the Federal Produce Inspection Service (FPIS), an important agency of the Federal Ministry of Trade and Commerce to address issues of grading of agricultural products? Should that be the business of Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) as the minister appears to suggest?

    It is possible that Nigeria produces 61 per cent of the global output of yam; however, the suggestion that the world is waiting for our Dioscorea spp. can only be part of the Nigerian fantasy. The world knows us better than to wait for any phantom promise.

    I close. Consider a summary of findings by The Punch in January on the status of the country’s other export products. The newspaper, quoting a data from the European Commission Rapid Alert System, reported that 42 Nigerian food imports were refused entry into EU countries in 2015 and another 25 in 2016. The rejected food items include brown and white beans, melon seeds, palm oil, mushrooms, bitter leaf, ugu leaves, shelled groundnut, smoked catfish and crayfish. Others are live snails, prawns, ginger, melon seeds, sesame seeds, peanut chips, dried meat and fish. The problem: the products did not meet the prescribed regulations and quality standards specified by the receiving countries. In fact, in June 2015, the EU banned all Nigerian dry bean imports due to the presence of high levels of pesticide considered dangerous to human health in them.

    We are talking here of something as basic as packaging our exports. If our country had aeons to apply itself to the rigid requirements of Uncle Sam’s Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and yet failed the muster, the lesson must be one of a nation lacking the most rudimentary knowledge of what it means to engage in the fiercely competitive international trade.

    So, what will be different this time?  Pretty little, I dare say. In other words – as it was in the beginning, so shall it be…

  • See what they have done to our children?

    Nigeria is said to be a nation of multiple pathologies. Yet, the story of the 12-year-old boy expelled from one of Lagos’ highbrow schools for putting acid in a female classmate’s water bottle stands apart among the more malignant mutations of its many degenerative diseases.

    I guess you have read the story. If you haven’t, it is the story of a poor lad, who in apparent bid to rid himself from the ignominy of being routed for the third time having been beaten to second position during the first and second term examinations by her 11-year old female classmate, opted for a desperate measure: He headed for the school laboratory from where he took a vial of sulphuric acid and ethanol, mixed them together and put them in the young girls’ water bottle. Unknown to him, two male students saw him commit the act, and so promptly alerted the girl and the school authorities before she could come to harm.

    If anyone was still in doubts about our children catching up with our mindless quest for success without scruples, the incident obviously leaves no shred of doubts about the arrival of the digital generation on the blocks. Our children may have finally arrived – if I may paraphrase the words of a book with similar title by the revered Eze (Prof) Vincent Ike; having long played the coy mistress, they may have come into their own in deviousness. It is the dawn of a new reality!

    A week hence, just about everyone with data on their digital device have been casting the proverbial first stone. The school authorities have shown the young fellow the red card. Parents, elders and minders who would ordinarily be expected to be more restrained have literally been hurling stones at the minor whose sin would appear to be one of acting out his heroes either in the wee-hour television series or in the ever boisterous but decadent political space!  The government, unable to grasp the essence of the budding pathology has been typically mum.

    At the moment, only a negligible few, if at all, imagine that the young fellow may well be a victim of the forces unleashed by the same society hypocritically seeking to hang him dry! And so while it does not appear that the anger of many would be assuaged anytime soon, particularly those of the vocal tribe of netizens who obviously think that the minor deserves a fate worse than ostracism, many have in fact stopped short of labelling him a budding ‘terrorist’ who should be locked away and the key thrown away into the Atlantic!

    It seems one of those moments in the blinkered moral universe of many that they would choose not to behold the mirror staring right in from of them as revealing of one of the same kind!

    Let’s be clear on this: Those who view the Wednesday event as an isolated one are entitled to their denial.  As an adult who has been in the business of parenting for a little over two decades, I can confirm that while the so-called outrage merely exposes our collective hypocrisy – part of the orgy of creative denial which the country has become infamous – it is the way our educational system is currently wired! It is like a journey through the nine circles of Dante’s Hell.

    I love to cite an example which I was a participant-observer. I had taken my ward for the common entrance examinations into the so-called unity schools only to be greeted by a sea of heads as one would see at a football match venue. If I was shocked on approach to the exam venue that the number of parents and minders actually outnumbered the pupils meant to take the examinations, no words could capture the resort to brazen criminal delinquency by these minders with their insistence on sitting with their wards in the examination rooms! The officials, clearly overwhelmed at some point had to bring in the security agencies, who no sooner than the exam started, quickly organized their own version of the racket to subvert the same process! We are here talking of an entrance examination into Junior Secondary Schools! That was some 15 years ago. Yet, it would not be far-fetched to imagine a member of the class among those currently daring to cast the stone at Boy Anonymous.

    What we do know is that things have gotten much worse in the organised chaos that education at all levels has become and in the free-fall regression suffered by the larger society.  Today, the story is routinely told of parents seeking to live out their childhood fantasises in their children often at great psychological costs to them; of parents going to unimaginable lengths to secure places for their children in higher institutions of learning; and of children that are light years ahead when it comes to beating the system. Today, the correlates are to be found in the school system which emphasises fierce competitiveness in lieu of learning, proper education and character; of homes where superficiality and ephemeral achievements are celebrated over and above hard work and due diligence; and in the rabid, putrefying theology which harps on the primacy of product (ends) as against process (means).

    As the cyber lingo goes – what you see is what you get.  Denying that the rich diet of delinquency of which Boy Anonymous is only its latest symptom as anything but inevitable in the circumstance would seem to me like challenging the law of gravity.  Now, why would a 12-year contemplate what could in fact pass for an attempted murder were the same act to be committed by an adult? The position being pushed is that the boy did it to save face having been beaten by the girl to second position.  In other words, the boy is supposed to love the glamour of success minus the rigour of hard and competitive labour; that such is the craving for outward acceptance that no means is too foul to contemplate to achieve this! By the way, did anyone ever tell him that about the dreary place called the jailhouse? For a seventh (or is it eighth) grader, the word penitentiary shouldn’t be too big for his young, active mind to comprehend.

    Does anybody recognise the mortal danger when they see one?  These are supposed to be children, our future. And to imagine that these are the kind of monstrosities routinely churned out by our ever under pressure society?

    I close. The boy, like the school that expelled him needs help. For the lad, a shrink wouldn’t exactly be a bad idea. The educational system which promotes such fierce competitiveness could do with total overhaul – in fact a salvage job – like taking it apart, brick by brick as one would a run down edifice.

    As for the society, can we just leave that in God’s hands?

     

  • What they won’t tell you

    What they won’t tell you

    The current ruckus between the executive and the National Assembly over Budget 2017 reminds me of a Yoruba allegory of a spat between husband and wife. While each would swear that the other is the more sinning than sinned against, expecting one side to spill the bean is akin to asking (s)he to reveal what went wrong in between the sheets! That is why – safe for the costly distraction and the potential stasis that it forebodes for an economy already down and under – we might just as well enjoy the luxury of a ring-side seat while the drama lasts.

    I am here referring to the increasingly rancorous debate in the aftermath of the signing of the budget into law. If we had expected the so-called truce said to have been brokered to resolve the grey areas between the executive and the National Assembly on the budget to hold, it has since turned out as misplaced. In fact, the bubble actually burst days after with acting President not only shredding its elements but openly thumbing down the National Assembly in the process.

    Here’s what Osinbajo said days after appending his signature to the budget:  “Now, there are these two broad issues about who can do what. The first report is about who can do what. When you present a budget to the National Assembly, it is presented as a bill, an appropriation bill… do not introduce entirely new projects and all of that or modify projects. This is something that we experienced last year and this year again. It now leaves the question about who is supposed to do what?”

    As if that didn’t sufficiently capture the mood of the presidency, Power, Works and Housing Minister, Babatunde Fashola would lend his telling opinion – “It is unfair to Nigerians after public hearings were conducted with taxpayers’ money and consultations with the lawmakers only for the budget to be altered, cut or padded”. He would equally note that apart from the 200 uncompleted roads he inherited from the previous administration, the lawmakers added100 new roads: “These roads are not federal roads and some of them do not have designs, how do we award roads that were not designed irrespective of the power you have?

    “It is unconstitutional for the National Assembly to legislate on state roads”, he had declared.

    Trust the National Assembly to rejoin in kind. First, from Senate President Bukola Saraki we heard: “I want to say that there are times we have a number of consultations and I want to make it clear that these consultations we do with the executive will not at any time mean that we will give up the powers we have in line with the constitution… As we bend backwards, I don’t think that should be misrepresented that powers given to us in the constitution do not exist”.

    By this of course he means the power to alter, reshape or if you like, tinker with the budget.

    The senator from Kebbi State, Bala Ibn Na’Allah would be far less restrained in his reaction: “I know that the Acting President who is a Professor of Law is sufficiently trained in law to know that the National Assembly has powers to tinker with the budget. I am not making a case for him and I do not want to believe that he said what has been alleged that he said”.

    To House of Representatives Speaker Yakubu Dogara, “it was erroneous for any individual to think that the legislature could not add, remove or reduce items in budget estimates”. As to the interpretation of the provisions of the 1999 Constitution, which vests the powers of appropriation on the legislature, he says that “a declaration as to which of the arms has the power and rights, in as much as it is related to the interpretation of the law, is the function of the judiciary and not of the executive.”

    And finally, weekend’s riposte from Abdulrazak Namdas, chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Media and Public Affairs to Fashola. Quoting Justice G. O. Kolawole in FEMI FALANA V the President FRN & 3 Others, Suit No: FHC/ABJ/CS/259/2014 delivered on March 9, 2016 he says “the Constitution did not design the National Assembly as a “rubber stamp”.

    It is, quite frankly, an old tiff. While I understand that the annual bickering has become an inextricable element in our fiscal processes, what this latest one has done is rekindle fires that will be hard to put out anytime soon given the on-going joust for vantage position as 2019 nears.  What is great interest to yours truly however is the claim by each party to have the law on its side. As far as the presidency is concerned, the process brooks no insertion of strange elements beyond the authorization or withholding of proposals made by the executive. The lawmakers on their part claim the absolute power to refashion the budget in their very own image and likeness!

    Is the issue strictly of law? I do not think so. The position of the law is certainly clear enough – the power of appropriation resides – unquestionably – with the legislature. The power as far as I know, is however not in contention. What I understand to be in contention is whether the National Assembly can cause to be laid before itself, a spending bill, outside the one contemplated by the constitution! I say this because the whole gamut of process – of formulation, design and costing and all of that, of the budget – is supposed to have originated at the level of the executive and the bureaucracy.  The problem comes when the National Assembly insists on short-circuiting the phase on the erroneous grounds of having the power to alter the votes! Would that not be tantamount to promoting the notion of power without responsibility – an abuse that the constitution could not have envisaged?  And to imagine that the executive branch – so deliberately blindsided, being called to implement the strange insertions at the pain of sanctions! It’s akin to forcing a specialist in anesthesia to do tooth extraction! Surely, that would be absurd.

    Except we want to pretend, we know that the brouhaha is essentially about pork –artfully packaged as constituency projects; the line element in the book designed to assuage the greed of a few; an extension of the elite squabble to secure privileges and earmarks. By the way, have not our 109-odd senators and 307 Representatives made clear that the elements are their way to spread the gravy round? Of course, while I will not agree that it is an entirely bad thing, their attempt to conflate the power of appropriation with hare-brained subversion of process as in the current case when what should ordinarily be a passable quest is being pushed through the back door is not only cynical but utterly self-serving.

    Nigerians sure know what these projects are about. Conceived in the cynical imagination of our lawmakers with nary a utilitarian value beyond lining the pockets of their promoters, we have seen their results in the swathe of ‘stranded’ projects without provision for maintenance; projects that could only have been hastily conceived with anyone but the supposed beneficiaries in mind, and which no sooner than their commissioning end up as white elephants.

    How about that as the reason for the ego trip?

  • Of baby and bathwater

    Sensing the mood of the citizens, the Senate on Thursday June 8, stepped down the proposal on the National Roads Funds Bill 2017 – in its words “to enable other relevant committees to go through its content”. Senator Kabiru Gaya and his co-promoters of the “Act to Establish the National Roads Fund for the purpose of financing the Maintenance and Rehabilitation of National Roads and for other Matters connected therewith, 2017(S.B 218)”, from the look of things, will have to wait for another day to push their initiative through. However, if the outrage which greeted what is supposed to be a vital legislation designed to take the funding of the critical infrastructure out of the strictures of the paralysing bureaucracy and to secure more sustainable framework for road development finance is anything to go by, the entire idea does seem at the moment – dead on arrival.

    To be sure, it was expected that opposition to the proposed road fund would be swift and unequivocal. Apart from being the nature of taxes anywhere, that this tax is linked to the highly combustible product –physically and metaphorically – makes it worse. For while furtive glances in the direction of oil prices each time each time the government needs to grow its revenue is nothing new; coming from an administration that got away almost unchallenged when it hiked petrol price moments after coming into office, the proposal would seem like stretching things to its limits. However, while it comes as no surprise that the traditional bastions of opposition have been up in arms, of greater interest are the same wearisome arguments being canvased on both sides – arguments which in the final count generates more heat than light.

    Of course, we need roads; good roads. And good roads cost quite a lot. At the same time, it is fairly common knowledge that the entire 2017 Budget comes to mere spittle when put side by side with what is required to change the face of that important enabler. So, we need funds; plenty – public and private. How to ensure that funds continue to flow to match the pace of needs. You can bet; someone’s got to pay!

    I need to be clear though; any talk of additional fuel price hike would be intolerable at this time. At a time of recession, it would amount to plain bad economics to push such measures that would inevitably translate to further shrinking citizens’ disposable incomes. Moreover, in a country where elected officials not only vote humongous amounts for their wardrobes but also have their fleet of official vehicles fuelled at taxpayers’ expense, any talk of additional punishing tax would be satanic.

    My understanding however is that the situation, as dire as it is, should not foreclose the debate on the way forward, not just because of the unprecedented infrastructure gaps but also in the face of increasingly limited revenues available to deliver on the infrastructure imperative. For much as Nigerians are wont to live in denial of its gravity, it seems to me that one burden that the current leadership must carry is charting the way out of the infrastructure crisis. I would in the circumstance argue that Nigerians should not be in a hurry to throw away the road fund baby with the bathwater!

    Now let look at the general outlines of the proposed bill. It seeks a fund with high levels of independence under the jurisdiction of the Federal Ministry of Finance ring-fenced– for the purposes of routine and periodic maintenance works on roads and the administration of the road network, including research and development. A major plank of the proposal is that “Roads agencies that will receive disbursement from the National Roads Fund must be established by law as independent agencies with dedicated accounts to receive disbursements from the National Roads Fund. “The National Roads Funds should be excluded from the Consolidated Revenue Fund and Treasury Single Account relying on Section 80 (1) of the 1999 constitution (as amended)”. And as if an answer to worries about the envisaged road bureaucracy dog wagging the operational tail, the bill offered a ready answer when it specifies “an amount not exceeding three per cent of the total monies accruing to it in the preceding year as administrative fund”.

    It is doubtful that anyone would still argue for the retention of current practices under which routine road maintenance would wait endlessly for the tardy process called appropriation. But even worse is the assumption that the country’s 193,200 kilometres crater-infested roads will somehow receive the kiss of life without a completely new framework for their funding, maintenance and administration. This, we know will not happen.

    This is where the road fund idea comes in. Will it solve the problem? Maybe; maybe not. However, while it may well be one long shot in the dark, one thing that is sure is that it would be a major step towards addressing the funding challenges.

    Will it come without some sacrifices? Most certainly not. Even at that, we have a fair idea of what is coming: axle load charges, toll fees, international vehicle transit charges, road funds surcharge of 0.5 percent taxed on the assessed value of any vehicle imported into the country; inter-state mass transit charge of 0.5 percent deductible from the fare paid by passengers to commercial mass transit operators on inter-state roads, etc. All of these would of course be borne by Nigerians most likely without a whimper. Only it doesn’t seem that Nigerians would agree that it should apply to the N5 levy on (or out?) of the existing template of N145 per litre of fuel.

    As for the idea that the levy will automatically translate to higher fuel price, this sounds somewhat like jumping the gun. For a proposal that is at best a work-in-progress, methinks it is still early in the day to talk of hike in fuel price. Far from taking the words of the leadership of the Senate Committee that there would be no resultant fuel price as gospel, the real problem, as it appears, is the continuing failure by the stakeholders to interrogate the disparate elements in the current template foisted by the Petroleum Products Prices Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) with a view to eliminating those elements that have become, quite frankly, anachronistic. That however can only happen whenever Nigerians decide to have an open mind.

    So much for our collective outrage on behalf of the owners of the 11,387,185-odd vehicles on our roads; isn’t it about time we looked at the angle of equity in the situation that this class only gets to enjoy the so-called bounties of nature? And, if we agree that the wasting product belongs to us as indeed the coming generations, what could be wrong with exploring the option of consumption tax on the wasting asset? Wouldn’t that be a sure way to cure our collective fixations on a product that, on the whole, has been more of a curse than blessing?

  • Hate and Biafra’s utopia

    Hate and Biafra’s utopia

    If you haven’t watched the latest Nnamdi Kanu video trending in the social media, you must be one of the lucky few whose firewalls have held firmly against hate-filled garbage daily spewed out of the social media. Even then, for the hordes of Nigerian netizens familiar with his video-casts particularly his unflattering characterization of the country as a zoo and fellow citizens as baboons, it must come as a new one that the infantile, hate-filled rant of the individual who was at best an unknown quantity, or, if you like, a gadfly – until the Buhari administration unintentionally thrust him into the centre of the firestorm of nationalist agitations –recognise no boundaries between the sacred and the profane. Clearly, if the video is any window into the mind of the individual who obviously thinks the best way to the heart of his people is to denigrate every other group in the Nigerian federation, the greater tragedy must be the delusion it feeds his hordes of followers on his Biafra project.

    The undated video is classic IPOB leader –unhinged. It proclaims: “…If you are attending a Yoruba Church, you should be ashamed of yourself, anybody attending a Pentecostal Church with a Yoruba Pastor is an idiot, a complete fool, a slowpoke…They are worse than BOKO HARAM, they are very very FOOLISH, if your Pastor is Yoruba, you are NOT FIT to be a human being…”

    In a country where ethnocentrism is the way we live and have our being, the putative leader of the secessionist agitation would ordinarily seem to have said nothing new that has not been said by different groups making up the federation. Let no one remind yours truly about the infamous allegory about the ‘dogs and baboons’ being soaked in blood’ credited to then then General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, in the aftermath of the massively rigged 2011 elections; or even the royal threat to herd the Igbos into the Lagoon in the heat of electioneering – both of which I insist are as dissimilar as far as context would go – there is something particularly noxious about this supremacist mind-set of the emergency rabbi that demands close scrutiny.

    Fine, it is just as well that the IPOB Supremo is riding the crest of popularity at the moment. After all, he literally shut down the economy of the South-east on May 30. If there is any doubt about his extensive his hold on his followers, just imagine how his little-known Isiama Afara community in Umuahia, Abia State has transformed to a Mecca of sorts since he was admitted to bail. Add to that the fawning adulation by his hordes of courtiers, the high profile visitations and the orchestrated photo-ops with the high and the mighty in the South-east, the man is unmistakably having ball.  Earlier on, I have talked about his empty bombast; the treasonable activities and not least, his ethnic baiting. Welcome to the new Igbo exceptionalism – all of these thanks to the budding Eze Gburugburu!

    Beyond the raw anger, in vain have yours truly sought for any coherence in thought about his idea or his vision for his dream republic. So badly does he want his Biafra Republic that dissent or civility is deemed treasonable. It is either his Biafra or death (?).

    The other day, I watched one of his celebrated videos on You Tube. A group of Igbos in United States had gathered to interrogate him on the feasibility of his pet project amidst his grandiose claims about his stock of weaponry and other logistics only to be subjected to a brutal putdown all because they dared to ask hard, probing questions on a project which requires all to come on board! If I came away with the impression that the man either suffers from what psychologists call delusion of grandeur or is an outright fraud, his worst form of uncivility would be reserved for groups outside his Igbo kith and kin – groups that his Biafra had built strong relationships many of which predated the colonial contact, right up to the contraption now deemed loathsome. As far as Kanu and company were concerned, they were at best expendables or worse, mere fodders in his dream project of Biafra.  Ever heard of exceptionable xenophobia? It’s a brand new world of delinquency!

    Where do we go from here? If I may again borrow the Biblical expression – our fathers may have eaten the sour grapes; it is we, the children’s teeth that are set on the edge. Today, the wages of poor leadership are in full bloom, the country seems set to reap the wages of abdication in full. From the Biafrexit sing-song of the South-easterners, a new chant from the North proclaiming Biafra-must-go has since taken over. Not to be outdone in the secessionist quest, a brand new group in the South-west has since proclaimed its own Oduduwa Republic. Next is perhaps the Niger Delta republic. There is no telling where the next secessionist group will come from.  From resource control, to restructuring and now to free-for-all secession; the Nigerian disease would appear to have fully metastasised. Where will the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) quest end?

    I ask: how will the labelling of groups advance the Biafra quest?

    The scripture is no doubt right: Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child, and your princes feast in the morning? It is sadly the case that our elders are left to mumble in their bedchambers while infants – proclaiming themselves as leaders – strut the land. Why should a Nnamdi Kanu not take the centre-stage in the absence of the restraining voices of the elders of the region? I am not talking of elders like Ango Abdullahi, who would instinctively jump behind some misguided northern youths seeking to expel other Nigerians from their abodes; or others like Ben Nwabueze who would struggle, valiantly, to find accommodation for the objectionable methods of Kanu and co.

    I have nothing against the Biafran agitation. Like I said last week, I am all for it provided it is about redressing all the imbalances and the in-built injustices that have hobbled all attempts to create a just and equitable federation. Call it restructuring or fiscal federalism or whatever; so long as it is about good governance, optimal delivery of services and more transparent utilisation of national resources, the nomenclature would matter only a little. What I find detestable is the clanging babel of secessionist voices claiming to speak for the rest of us; their crude and opportunistic appropriation of the peoples’ desire for justice and equity for narcissistic ends.

     

  • Biafrans all…

    Biafrans all…

    Although the target was the unworkable Nigerian federation, last week clearly brought it more forcefully home, the vast disconnect between the masses of the South-east and their political leaders. Not only did the sit-at- home decreed by Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) an unqualified success (some accounts put the compliance at 80 percent), the spirited efforts mounted by the governors as indeed some religious leaders to abort the ‘decree’ fell flat. In the end, it exposed the regions mealy-mouthed leaders as being out of tune with the aspirations of the people. Thanks to a certain Nnamdi Kanu – the IPOB leader, a new locus of power has since emerged – so potent that local political players can only ignore to their peril – either now, in 2019 or beyond.

    I would of course agree that a new momentum has been added to the struggle by the South-east to redress perceived injustices inflicted by them. However, considering how similar histrionics by MASSOB ended, it would seem too soon to canonize Kanu and company, who just like the former, was wise enough to tap into the anger and bitter frustrations of the people. What remains to be seen – beyond the bombasts and derring-do – is how he plans to go about the task of opening of the invidious gate of the Nigerian zoo to let the animals walk their separate ways – even when, ironically, the geography of his famed Biafra keeps extending by the day!

    By the way, the last time I checked, Nnamdi Kanu’s Biafra boundary has, in addition to the traditional boundaries –the minorities of the Niger Delta – has since extended to my backyard – the Igalas of the North-central state of Kogi!

    We are all Biafrans after all!

    This is certainly not to wish either the symbolism of May 30 or the burning anger of the South-east away. To do that is to do violence to a peoples’ history. To be sure, this year’s is particularly epochal – being the 50th anniversary of the start of the war. In the context of the on-going discourse on the national question, nothing perhaps better demonstrates the recognition of this than the conference convoked by the Yar’Adua Memorial Centre, the Ford foundation and the Open Society initiative West Africa held on May 25. If only for the window it afforded Nigerians to further interrogate and engage on the national question – it would seem rather unfortunate that the ‘mock shows’ appeared to have overshadowed the event.

    The question of what to do with the “geographical expression’ would obviously remain a ‘live’ one for a lone time to come. However, like a big elephant, it is a case of what you see depending on what side you choose to sit. A colleague – Imam Imam – would remind us of this ancient wisdom with a post on his Facebook page on May 31 – if only to illustrate that the issue is not always a one-way affair as often assumed.

    It goes thus: May 30 – Biafra sit-in; June 12 – Yoruba sit-in; January 15 – Arewa sit-in… We are all victims of each other’s past misdeeds”.

    In other words, all are more sinners than sinned against.

    Of course, most of us – in some form or the other – somewhat agree that Nigeria, in its present form, is not only a political, but also an administrative, nightmare. That whereas Frederick Lugard and company may have designed it to secure maximum benefits for the colonial authorities, the structure has neither served to integrate the people nor fostered development; and that while the in-built dissonance is itself potentially fraught with challenges, our situation has been exacerbated by the crisis of governance that has dogged her since independence.

    This is where the contending groups appear to have taken their point of departure. Simply put; there are those who see the restructuring as the shortest route to that Eldorado that they badly crave just as there exists out there, the throng for whom a one-way fare out of the “suffocating contraption” is non-negotiable! Such of course is the depth of frustration with the unworkable structure currently in operation.

    Where do we go?

    First, we must be wary of the current champions of unbridled ethnic nationalism. I would of course agree that a new architecture of governance is desirable if only to remove the states in particular from the suffocating grip of the centre. However, to the extent that the crisis is what has cascaded to the local councils where the governors sit like the Lord of the Manor on council funds, the absence of civic consciousness on the part of the citizenry would ensure that any gains from restructuring would not last. Regionalism is of course a no-no. Aside taking us back several decades, it would not only reopen but deepen old wounds. For the minorities, it would unleash a new round of agitations that might be difficult, if not impossible to manage.

    As for the promoters of secession, that again is a simplistic solution to the crisis of governance. It seems to me that the whole quest has been more noise than reason!  The whole idea, as presented that is, seems more like seeking to escape from the clutches of some imaginary ‘taskmaster’ as against exercising the option of sitting at the table as equal partners to iron out perceived differences.

    Why no one has yet seen the injury being inflicted on the people’s psyche by the underlying persecution complex beats my imagination.

    Now, I do not seek to understate the realities that Igbos sometimes contend with; and while I would equally agree that history and our experience of governance – military and civilian – has not served our brothers in the South-east well, the same can be said of other parts of the country perhaps to a different degree. The issue is whether this justifies the call for the fiercely proud, industrious, highly competitive people to seek to walk out of a joint heritage.

    Nigeria is no doubt sick. The issue is whether the sickness can be cured by a band of accidental or opportunistic leaders of either the IPOB wing or their co-travellers in the Oduduwa Republic quest!

    Let me close with the following words from acting President Yemi Osinbajo at the Yar’Adua Centre outing: “The truth is that many, if not most nations of the world are made up of different peoples and cultures and beliefs and religions, who find themselves thrown together by circumstance. Nations are indeed made up of many nations. The most successful of the nations of the world are those who do not fall into the lure of secession, but who through thick and thin forge unity in diversity”.

    Did anyone listen? Is anyone listening?

     

     

     

     

  • Obaseki: Six months on

    Obaseki: Six months on

    At a reception organized by reporters in his honour in November 2016, the then Edo’s fresh-mint governor, Godwin Obaseki was quoted as telling politicians and family members not to come to the Government House without proper appointment as he needed time to settle down to work. He also reportedly told his aides to avoid having what he called “unnecessary visitors”. If that presented a window into the mind of the new helmsman on the subject of the pervasive abuse of executive time among public officers – elected and appointed, the hardly endearing statement comes close to a ‘Satanic Verse’ in a clime where most government houses operate more or less like exchanges for trading influences.

    Satanic verses or not, it is safe to say that a new spirit rules in the state. On a visit  two weeks ago, the mood, though somewhat subdued, spoke of great expectation from the Obaseki administration. After the fiery reign of Adams Oshiomhole, the archetypal activist not known to take prisoners, Obaseki, seems to be finally be coming to his own as reflective, deliberative yet no less decisive leader. (Witness his last week’s closure of Edo Line, the state transport company ran aground by its management).  Whereas the momentum may appear slow and different from those of his immediate predecessor, the shared template of strong progressive governance is certainly hard to miss; the same with the determination to leapfrog a state only recently laid waste by the rampaging PDP buccaneers.

    The team of visiting editors from Lagos took on some hierarchs of the administration on a number of issues facing the new administration.

    Is the administration “slow”? Without a cabinet six months after, many would of course be tempted to think so. However, to many a hierarch in the administration, that charge would be contestable. Indeed, many actually insisted that the charge of lull or inertia would amount to an unpardonable denial not just of all that is going on in the backrooms of government but in the vast public spaces across the state.

    Osarodion Ogie, the Secretary to the State Government (SSG), obviously number among those as reels out the accomplishments already in the kitty. Ditto, Dennis Oloriegbe, Edo’s traffic czar, head-hunted from Lagos State Traffic Management Agency (LASTMA) to head the new Edo State Traffic Management Authority (EDSTMA) – a man whose readiness to rewrite the Edo traffic story bordered on the infectious.

    Ogie in particular will insist that the administration has done quite a lot. Listed among the achievements in the last six months are the promulgation of the Community Development Association (CDA) law which outlawed the activities of community development chairmen (land speculators) known to harass people over their property; the abolition of the collection of government revenue by non-government officials; the take-off of the state’s agripreneur programme under which the state government undertakes to clear the farmland for interested members of the public has taken off. According to the SSG, the state government has cleared over 500 hectares of land in Sobe, Akoko-Edo for those interested in farming. Aside providing seedlings for the farmers, he told the visiting team that the state government has substantially de-risked the venture to the extent that off-takers to buy off the produce are standing by. The state government, he said, is already set to move to the second phase of clearing additional hectares of land for farmers.

    Not all, he also informed his visitors that the state has developed a data base of unemployed youths – an initiative under which 150 thousand youths have been registered with their vital details and bank verification number for possible placement in government programmes. Some 150 of the lot were said to have been pencilled for absorption at the traffic agency at the time of the visit.

    Joseph Eboigbe, the Executive Director and coordinator of the state and strategic team (who incidentally was Obaseki’s deputy at the Economic and Strategic Team in the last administration) spoke on what the administration has done preparatory to the take- off of the cabinet. He spoke of a strategic dialogue held in December 2016, which set the tone for Governor Obaseki first term, the outcome of which was distributed into quick wins, immediate and medium terms initiatives. The quick wins, he said, were incorporated into the 2017 budget and are being implemented. Part of the next steps included convening sectorial workshops to further drive down the high level strategic outlook held in December. The outcomes of this sectorial workshop, according to him, will feed into key performance indicators that will be handed over to heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) that will form the cabinet. As soon as they come in, relevant orientation programmes will be delivered and it will be very clear what they are expected to deliver on quarterly basis, all this will feed into the objective of the governor as articulated in his medium term plan for this his first term in office.

    He also spoke of the administration’s industrialisation plans; its plans to make the state very conducive for large scale industrialists to locate especially those that are interested in agriculture and entities using gas as raw materials particularly as the state has one of the highest reserves in gas. He spoke of the first private sector led NIPP – the Azura power plant currently being developed, other expressions of interest in gas power plants and one or two expressions of interest to set up fertilizer plant using gas as raw material, the industrial parks and the development of Gelegele Port, the historic port in the southern part of the state.

    It is however Anselm Ojezua, Edo APC chairman and Prof. Julius Ihonvbere, the state’s former SSG that supplies the emerging template of the synergy between the ruling party in the state and Obaseki government – something that the ruling party at the centre can borrow from. For appointments, the party at the grass root level is availed the opportunity to nominate people at all levels to a screening committee at the state level. Thorough screening at the local level, party level, is to be followed up by another committee chaired by Prof Dennis Agbonlahor for further screening. The idea is to ensure that those coming on board are, according to him, “persons who are morally up right, intellectually solid, ICT-compliant to a large extent, who have experience and who have some legitimate bearing, so that when they are put in position, they will hit the ground running and not trying to learn how government works”.

    Related to this is the plan to restructure the entire civil and public service. Here, the plan is to reduce the number of ministries, abolition of moribund committees that have been overtaken by time, and whose continuous existence constitute impediment to the flow of policy initiation and implementation; restructuring some of the ministry to make them more efficient, stronger to deliver services to the people,  training for the public, civil servants in particular to increase efficiency, capacity building to enable them work effectively in the 21 century and to key into the developmental objective of the government.

    While it seems early in the day to pass definitive judgment, the overall impression is one of an administration roaring to go.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • A mid-term reflection

    A mid-term reflection

    The Nigerian economy is gradually coming out of its worst recession in years… we are beginning to see the signs and we will come out to become stronger”. That was Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, at an Abuja Town Hall meeting penultimate week. The federal government, she also added, is working to block wastages, increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and embark on single window project execution.

    Less than a week to Buhari administration’s mid-term in office, the signs are as upbeat as they are unmistakable: things are beginning to look up; at last, the legendary Nigerian good fortune appears to be holding out.

    Oil, the main driver of the economy is back – on a rebound. Production is being gradually ramped up – thanks to the return of calm to the troubled Niger Delta. The naira that has been on a free-fall in the last one year has begun a steady climb to respectability, selling at the so-called parallel market for N380 to the greenback last week. If that would not suffice to assuage Godwin Emefiele’s army of critics to hold their fire, they can take solace in the fact that inflation which only a short while ago stood at above 18 percent has been on a climb-down to 17 percent.

    For an economy that has been stuttering, the administration would seem to have found some basis – although limited – to stake a claim at progress particularly in the non-oil sector. The restriction on rice importation as indeed other choice grains has had some salutary effects on local production.  The CBN Anchor Borrowers rice programme, for instance, has provided a big boost to local production efforts just as the news across the rice producing states somewhat suggest farmers’ embrace of the initiative with enthusiasm. Here, the federal government’s target on self-sufficiency in rice production in 2018 would seem firmly on course. The same with other grains; federal government’s restrictions seems to be paying off.

    Here – as in all cases with the value chain – the challenge is how to strengthen the linkages between the farms, storage, transport, processing and marketing.  That obviously requires massive and sustained investment in infrastructure – the huge gap of which the administration has been rather too timid to confront.

    The other challenge is how to evolve a system of price guarantees without which the farmers would be subject to cyclic fluctuations in farm-gate prices – something that can prove catastrophic to the current efforts. While there can be no better time than now for government to look at the issues, addressing them obviously holds the key to the future. For now, we continue to wait and see.

    The same with manufacturing sector. Currently, the sector is best described as anemic. If the power situation has constituted its main albatross, the huge dependence on forex for raw materials and spares would appear to be its major undoing. Beset by multifarious operational and environmental challenges, the sector, despite the best efforts of the federal government, has remained not only uncompetitive, but quite frankly, a non-starter.

    Here is my worry: Is there something in the Nigerian environment that has made the goal of backward integration unworkable despite its acclaimed merits? Why is it not possible for a company that has been operating in the local environment for decades to be able to source its raw materials locally or in the alternative sell a part of its products abroad to cover its forex needs? Imagine the local margarine producer using imported palm oil in local manufacture of the product. How low can a people go? Is there something wrong with us?

    The situation obviously calls for deep thinking.  There has to be a way out.

    A word for the states. The story across the board is no less upbeat. Two bailouts plus – including a Paris Club debt refund; not only is life beginning to return to the states, their finances have experienced considerable restoration. There are now claims that a sizeable chunk of salary arrears have either been paid or are in the process of being paid. If you ignore the increasingly troubling whispers about alleged diversion of slices of the Paris Club refund by some governors and their confederates, or the unending tales of agony by pensioners, the situation today is admittedly, a far cry from the fiscal cliff-hanger which most had perched precariously in nearly the whole of the last two years. Here, the exception would perhaps be Yahaya Bello’s Kogi State whose endless workers verification has become something of a rod of affliction; whose tertiary institutions,  in spite the serial bailouts,  have remained on lockdown for months over issues of finance.

    What has changed? Pretty little – as far as one can see. At least, nothing that the governors have done. Lagos is of course an exception. As against their promises to do so, not much appears to have been done on the restructuring of their bureaucracies let alone priming them to deliver improved services or even to grow their internally generated revenues.

    Are our governors waiting for the fire next time – which will surely come except a deliberate effort is made to restructure the political economy?

    By the way, aside sharing bailout or Paris Club refunds, what do our governors discuss at their National Economic Council meetings? Imagine; if they could pay billions of naira to ‘consultants’ to reconcile their Paris Club refund claims, what stops them from getting a battery of attorneys to prepare briefs for a possible push on some of the more troubling aspects of our fiscal federalism particularly those hobbling their capacities to survive as economic entities?

    For the Buhari administration, it must have been a tough job cleaning the mess inherited from the immediate past administration. While scale of corruption and its allied subversion of fiscal process are still being revealed, there can be no overstating the fiscal crisis brought by the collapse of oil prices on the one hand and the impact of the strangulating hold on oil production by aggrieved Niger Delta militants. While there are those out there who, understandably, would swear that the problems inherited were overstated, what is debatable is that any administration could have done better in the short term, in dealing with problems that are profoundly structural in nature.

    What has the administration done in this direction in two years? The so-called Economic Growth and Recovery Plan document – a patchwork of the same fancy ideas which although beautiful, never gets to leave the paper on which they are written?

    How far will the current stability hold? A lot depends on what the administration chooses to do in the coming months. Power of course key. Here, we must attest to Power, Works and Housing Minister, Babatunde Fashola’s frustrations and lately, impatience with the operators particularly the distribution companies. Again, like I noted last week, I am yet to see how the anger will get the job done. What would deliver is a plan of action matched by a strict regime of implementation.

    It’s certainly not late in the day for our administrations at the federal and states to get cracking.