The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • GEJ: Not in blaze of glory

    With barely three days left to depart from office, not a few Nigerians, it appears, would rather see the back of the Jonathan administration today. With fuel queues springing up in every corner of the federation, coupled with the regression in the power situation that has since assumed a frenetic pace, the Jonathan administration would appear to have become one rod of affliction too many for the long-suffering Nigerians. Today, an administration which only weeks ago could have managed a decent exit has since sunk to such depths of ignominy in the eyes of the populace that the single factor of its redemption is the knowledge that it has hours left in office!

    Exactly two weeks ago on this page, I wrote of the Jonathan administration as having gone on AWOL. The situation, I believe has since gone from bad to worse. No thanks to the contrived fuel crisis, the entire nation is in virtual lockdown. Businesses cannot run because there is no energy to power their operations; many industries – particularly those that depend on alternative power wholesale – have joined other Nigerians in the fruitless chase for fuel for the most part of three weeks. With the naira dancing yoyo against major international currencies particularly the dollar of which it now trades at N222 to the USD, and with interest rates hovering between 22-25 percent, one does not require advance lessons in economics to appreciate why our industries have remained endangered species.  All of this happening in the twilight of a regime that only few weeks back sought a renewal of its mandate based on claims of stellar achievements.

    Suddenly, Nigerians are asking – what happened to those superlative claims of economic growth – the textbook stuff macro-economic fundamentals said to be so strong and impregnable to withstand any shocks? The claims of achievement in the power sector said to have berthed in power stabilisation – in what is supposedly the turning point in that long dark tunnel. The unprecedented reforms said to have delivered the magic in the fuel distribution chain (minus the refineries of course) – the song of which the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) regaled us with a little less than two months ago? Is it a case of sabotage or were Nigerians sold a dummy?

    With the events of the past few weeks, Nigerians ought to, by now, have a better appreciation of the Jonathan legacy.  The lies have been laid bare but then, only because the evidences of serial failures have long passed deniability. Before now, it was sufficient for the administration to throw figures in our faces as evidence that the country was working. Now we know why: while oil price remained stable, and growth rate said to have averaged seven percent guaranteed, all seemed fine – except the missing factor of unemployment – particularly youth unemployment – which actually hit the roofs at over 50 percent under Jonathan! Nothing has changed. What the oil price crash has done is lay waste the dressed up statistics – showing the economy for what it truly is – despite the administration’s claims to the contrary.

    I recall when we complained about the administration’s humongous appetite for foreign credit at a time of bumper earnings; then we were told that the country –still doing fine with crude oil exports – was under-borrowed. Lost to the profligate administration were the bitter lessons of the Paris and London clubs debt peonage which the country exited in 2005 after shelling a whopping $12 billion from the treasury.

    Today, the chicks have since come to roost earlier than one could have imagined. And while it seems a long way from the crisis of the 80s when the country plumbed into severe balance of payment crisis as a result of oil price collapse, our country, to all intents and purposes, aside being practically bankrupt would appear set on that same course. Evidence: More than 24 states are said to be in arrears in wages and salaries; not even the federal government is exempt with several parastatals and agencies said to owe their workers.  Trust the administration ever so ready to deflect responsibility from itself, it has has passed off the challenges to the single factor of oil price slump rather than own up to its culpability in foisting the free-for-all climate under which the theft of Nigeria’s crude festered, its terrible legacy of public accounting, and the mindless looting of the commonwealth!

    Is one being uncharitable to the departing administration? The facts tell the story better. In 1999, former President Olusegun Obasanjo inherited $30 billion foreign debts. At the time of his exit in 2007, the amount outstanding was $3,348.22bn after the administration paid off the London and Paris Clubs debts. Under late President Yar’Adua, the external debts grew marginally from $3,348.22 billion to $3.94 billion. This climbed steadily under President Jonathan to $9.3 billion – nearly a triple. By Friday, the administration will be leaving a whopping $60 in debts – domestic and external with nothing on ground as proof of where the funds went.

    As for the foreign reserves, it is also worth recalling that President Obasanjo at his exit in 2007 left $45.0 billion.  Although the reserves grew to $63 billion in September 2008 under Yar’Adua, it slipped to $47. 7 billion when Jonathan took over in 2009. Today, it is hovering around the $30 billion mark despite the Jonathan administration’s record earnings.

    The power sector is perhaps where the administration’s non-legacy would appear better pronounced. President Obasanjo it was who prepared the institutional basis for an enduring reform via the Power Sector Reform Act 2005; indeed, the National Integrated Power Projects (NIPP) were initiated by him. President Jonathan, no doubt, could claim credit for the Power Sector Roadmap; the same could be said of the completion of the privatisation exercise. However, if the results are anything to go by, the exercise would appear to have been bungled. In place of the centralised chaos of the past, what we have now is a sector of disparate players with no clue on how to proceed, a sector that has delivered more units of excuses than electric energy.  While the nation is in virtual darkness, the administration does not even pretend to have a clue on how to get the nation out of the mess. From 4,000Mw advertised few months ago, the administration is barely leaving 1,000MW after pouring billions of dollars into the sector.

    If merely by the anger in the street corners, it would seem that not many Nigerians would have kind words for their departing President; at least not at this time. However, he can take solace in Nigerians legendary capacity for forgiveness.  Trust Nigerians, they will sooner pass off everything to distant memory in due time.

  • Subsidy: Time to let go

    The fuel queues are back – as if you didn’t know that already. The tragedy isn’t just that OPEC’s one-time sixth largest exporter of crude has again suffered another crushing relapse of the familiar plague of dry pumps – no thanks to the feud between fuel importers and the finance ministry – it’s like the nation has come under a spell of some ancestral curses!

    Trust Nigerians for their inventiveness, guess they have since moved on; while we are back to the same old wearisome arguments about whether or not the subsidy exists, our go-go nature appears to have gotten the better of us. Majority – call it the silent ones if you like – it would appear, could no longer be bothered with either the economics or even the semantics of fuel subsidies, they have since swallowed the full pill of deregulation – this time through the back door. Scarcity or not, I know for a fact that you could purchase fuel in some stations in Lagos without as much as breaking a sweat – so long as you are willing to part with N140 for a litre in the deregulated market downtown! Seems one moment when Nigerians wouldn’t mind to cut their noses – even if temporarily – to get going!

    Truly, the subject of fuel subsidy never ceases to fascinate. As in the round leather game of football, it is one subject that every Kasali, Chinedu and Usman would claim, with some air of certainty, some degree of knowledge if not expertise. You know why? Everybody is involved – from the jerry-can clutching vulcanizer to the barber next door; what about the welder or even the ubiquitous taxi driver all of whom the liquid gold has come to mean the difference between life and death?

    Yes, everyone is involved.

    Agreed, subsidy is a touchy subject. I have seen otherwise brilliant minds relapse into some wild, witless garbage when the subject is fuel subsidy. Many would rather be politically correct rather than risk ruffling feathers. And so argument persists that simply because oil is of nature’s finest gift to us, we can continue to dispense with the niceties of economics!

    To be sure, I have looked at the contending arguments; it seems to me that the difference between the most vociferous proponents of fuel subsidy removal and their opponents is actually more shadow than real substance! Forget what the marketers and their hordes of middlemen say; the truth is that they want the subsidy regime to continue; it is their surest route to unearned wealth. What about the bureaucrats, the men and women wielding awesome powers over our lives? It is their surest guarantee of raw, invisible power – without control. As one would imagine, the politicians want it for a different purpose; for them, it is a fascinating subject for politricking any day.

    Did I hear the “ogas at the top” describe the subsidy regime as “unsustainable”? What their lucre-addicted lordships meant to say is that they could do with more of freshly minted wads in the piggy bank to do as they please.

    The irony of course is that a section of the hoi polloi actually believes the lie that the petrol and kerosene subsidy – together with its impregnable infrastructure of graft that services it – actually comes close to their share of the proverbial national cake! That for me is the most tragic part of the raging debate.

    Is there really a subsidy? I have heard the question over and over again. To the question I say – we wouldn’t be who we are if we are not found debating whether or not the weekend May 14 Platts reference price of $718.49 per metric tonne (that is N105.55 per litre) is real! Note that this is not yet reflective of distribution costs as well as the marketers’ margins!  With petrol price officially pegged at N87 per litre, the above should ordinarily solve the arithmetic.

    Next question – why can’t the federal government build new refineries? Or its variant – why can’t the government compel the International Companies (IOCs) to build refineries in the country? Or still, get the private sector to build new refineries? Good question – all of them!

    Let me proceed from the known to the unknown. Again, as if we don’t know, the reality is that OPEC’s leading crude oil exporter refines only a miniscule fraction of its domestic fuel needs. Daily requirement for petrol is said to range from 40-45 million litres daily of which the four refineries combined is said to deliver a miserable 10-15 percent. To bridge the gap, we rely on imports at deleterious costs to our foreign reserves and the larger national economy. From an ordinarily hefty subsidy bill of barely N250 billion in 2011; the nation has since the literally broken the banks – spending close to a trillion on kerosene and petrol alone annually!

    So why can’t the government build new refineries? Guess the answer is obvious: the same reason the government is unable to bring back the national carrier; it’s the same argument about government’s inability to fix the multiplicity of our roads; the reason the power sector is considered as jinxed! I daresay here that the old cliché about the government not being good at business is true only to the extent that our government lacks both the means and the discipline to run a modern enterprise! The tiny Island country of Singapore is a living exception to that rule!

    As for getting the IOCs to build new refineries, it seems rather too easy to overlook the terrible effects of government’s meddlesomeness on the downstream sector. Does anyone still remember that the first refinery in the country was actually built not by government but by Shell? It seems aeons ago when the motorist in Lagos bought fuel at a different price from his compatriot in Maiduguri! That was when market ruled – long before our leaders pronounced that money was not our problem but how to spend it!

    I am of course reminded that above everything else that the business of refinery is an investment decision – pure and simple. Those clamouring for the legislation to compel IOCs to build refineries only need to imagine going into a business where product price is fixed before production costs are known!

    To my main point. There comes a time in the life of a nation when citizens just have to make hard choices. The current season would appear such a time. The simple truth is that the nation cannot afford, even if it wants, to sustain the current regime of price support called subsidy. Something simply has to give. Moreover, I have stated elsewhere that the subsidy regime is unfair to the extent that the burden is regressive. In short, it is time to let go! Agreed, it is not the end; it’s one sure step on the path to dismantling the infrastructure of fraud currently sapping the nation’s vital juices. That done, with supporting policies, the goal of local refining might actually be closer than many would dare to imagine. I rise!

  • A government on AWOL

    Considering that it took its well articulated terms of reference to awaken the somnolent Presidency to the reality that it still ran the show, there might yet be something that the incoming All Progressives Congress administration can still do to help halt the pervasive meltdown under which vital institutions of state have gone prostrate.

    As it is, the story is virtually the same of governance in full flight – if you like, retreat. Not the lame duck stuff as one might expect of a government winding down. Indeed, for a country ordinarily under-governed, what is increasingly palpable is a Jonathan administration practically missing on all fronts – what the military call AWOL; the only exception being the rash of opportunistic appointments designed to rile the incoming government.

    In the electricity sector, the story is all too familiar of alibis manufactured, traded and recycled the same way financial sector smart alecs continue hawk their sweet poison of derivatives to the hapless public in Jonathan-nurtured laissez-faire environment. Once upon a time, the sector was comatose; today, it is as good as dead. The minister in charge, a world-class scientific mind now adorns the garb of prayer warrior in chase of industry demons. The electricity sector regulator – the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission – has since relapsed into the ‘sleep’ mode in the absence of an industry to regulate; meanwhile, the club of disparate players inelegantly called DISCOs or distribution companies –more aptly rent collectors- are apparently lost in the park after discovering something bigger than the magical pot of fortune promised them post-privatisation – they just couldn’t figure out what to do! Between them, the nation is presently locked in a bind.

    Isn’t it said that what you see is what you get? Should anyone still be in wonder as to why the nation is in darkness?

    As it is in the power sector, so it is in the petroleum sector. Here the administration’s benumbing incompetence, long laid bare before the world, ordinarily ought not to deserve any attempt at exhumation. Clearly, if the current paralysis of the nation’s socio-economic life occasioned by the dry pumps across the land is any living proof of the astounding lack of imagination of those running the downstream sector, that is only when one fails to reckon with the state-abetted criminality in the upstream sector – the industrial scale theft under which 20 percent of the nation’s crude is said to disappear to some invisible Mafiosi, daily. And this is aside the invisible operations of the prospecting arm of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation – the Nigerian Petroleum Development Corporation – known of course only to the shadowy players and their patron saints in the oily business – thanks to the PWC fellows!

    How about that for a legacy?

    You ask: what happened to the Jonathan magic that was celebrated ‘live’ and in ‘colour’ by the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) in the heady days of electioneering? I mean the outlandish claims of achievement in power stabilisation, railway modernisation and road building – that left one wondering if they were talking about another country but Nigeria?

    With recriminations going back and forth between the Finance Ministry and the cartel of fuel importers over the bureaucracy-induced crisis, it seems now so easy to imagine that the so-called called ‘Jona’ magic was nothing more than the relentless inflow into the piggy bank. With oil price in the dive and with it the sluggish demand for Nigeria’s sweet crude, the nation would appear wiser to the administration’s claims to superlative performance.

    It is however the security sector that stands the administration apart in corporate dereliction.  This is a sector in which the concept of the state as holding the monopoly in the use of force has undergone the most comprehensive redefinition by the outgoing presidency. Today, under Jonathan’s new-fangled paradigm, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest navy now finds itself playing second fiddle to yesterday’s pirates on the nation’s exclusive economic zone. In the same vein, nearly a quarter of the nation’s security work is outsourced to a rag-tag army of ill-clad, ill-equipped and certainly ill-trained volunteers called Civilian Joint Task Force in the North-east. Again, under that strange blend of Public-Private-Partnership security model, another quarter has also been outsourced to yesterday’s brigands in the free-for-all bazaar of pipelines protection – and this in a nation with a long heritage of disciplined, cohesive and well-structured military.

    Do I exaggerate? Please recall the various accounts of the death of Oluwadimilola Adebimpe Fajana – the 26-year-old lady caught up in the cross-fire between the vandals and the OPC hired by the administration to do the job of policing the pipelines. Today, the much that is known is that she was felled by the guns of operatives of Jona-licensed militia at Arepo– one of the many popular theatres of pipeline vandalism along the Ogun State corridor.

    Pity the grieving father, Ojo Babafemi Andrews; he could only moan helplessly to wit that “by the reason of his patronage of people who have no basic training in arms and weaponry in the business of pipeline protection, which is a very dangerous security enterprise which is supposed to fall under the purview of the trained Nigerian security agencies… President Goodluck Jonathan is culpable in the death of Damilola Fajana and that of others by the virtue of his morbid desperation for political power which led him to awarding such senseless contract to OPC in return for political support in Lagos State”.

    Case closed.

    Now, I have actually heard one or two people wonder whether the current potion of affliction being administered by President Jonathan isn’t proving too much of a price to pay for the slaying of the PDP bear on March 28. To them I can only offer a word of consolation: forbear. Having long given up on my search for the distinction between a lame duck administration and a vengeful, mischief-driven one, I have since accepted the Yoruba philosophical expression – Suru lojo – which roughly means, patience has an end point.

    Finally: what’s the idea behind the ostentatious pity-party staged by the President at the weekend? I refer to his Thanksgiving homily where he stated that he, his ministers, advisers and other appointees will be persecuted when they leave office and that they should be ready for that? The problem, I guess, isn’t so much the President’s artful play on the word ‘persecution’ in place of prosecution to describe the fate awaiting his men – which is nonetheless opportunistic, if you ask me; it is his less-than elegant attempt to launder an ignoble legacy. The question is – could anything be wrong with being called to account for one’s stewardship? Why should anyone be afraid?

    ‘I have actually heard one or two people wonder whether the current potion of affliction being administered by President Jonathan isn’t proving too much of a price to pay for the slaying of the PDP bear on March 28. To them I can only offer a word of consolation: forbear’

  • Haba; Madam honorary adviser!

    Haba; Madam honorary adviser!

    Yours sincerely was on vacation when Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, President Jonathan’s minister of finance and Coordinator of the Economy took on the self-assigned role of honourary, albeit unofficial adviser to the incoming APC-administration of General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd). I refer to the widely reported media event tagged “A conversation with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala” staged by the second deity in the presidential godhead (apologies to Azu) in faraway Washington. The outing was as one might expect: magisterial, unabashedly prescriptive –with just enough tips for the incoming Buhari administration to either follow or risk a flounder! Stripped of self-promotion and plain hubris, I actually wondered what purpose of the media event sought to achieve coming so soon after the Nigerian electorate had decided that ‘change’ was it.

    At first reading, my instinctive reaction was to observe that the reality of that electoral loss may have taken far too long to wear off for the hierarchs of the expiring administration to appreciate that power has indeed changed hands. Or was I expecting too much to imagine that her ilk would fade like a thief into the night as part of the necessary rites to bring our 16-year nightmare under their watch to a closure? After a deeper reflection, it became clear to me the extent to which many, yours truly inclusive, has underestimated the resistance to the promise of change!

    Of course, the problems wasn’t just that the same cocktail of measures which, though neither original nor particularly new, but which successive PDP administrations including two of which she was a frontline actor either lacked the nerves or the discipline to push through were being recycled as something novel. Or even the attempt to present the current crisis which took the whole of a decade and half to berth, as one that chanced upon us, as if we didn’t have the crisis of the 80s to instruct us.

    Rather, it was her disingenuous way of papering over, if not entirely deflect, Pontius Pilate-like, her direct culpability in the making of the crisis via emergency management fantasies – something that have since become her stock in trade. At once, she would have us pretend that we didn’t know where the rains started to beat us; more than that, she would wish that the contributions of her cast and crew of undertakers particularly their free-wheeling policies simply recede from memory!

    Of course, I daresay that only in that foreground could Madam Okonjo-Iweala’s gratuitous offer of advice to the incoming government after nearly 10 years of sojourn in the corridors of power, as honourary adviser, finance minister, foreign minister and finally as finance minister and coordinator of the economy could pass for barely ‘credible’!

    Guess most Nigerians – outside of the innermost circle of its unrepentant courtiers, that is – know more than the hierarchs of the departing administration would care to admit about its legacy of broken public finance and unparalleled corruption and profligacy than to take any of their prescriptions seriously. Today, Nigerians must marvel at how our globally acclaimed technocrat, an individual headhunted from the Breton Woods institution to clean up our public finance has only one software of a payroll system to show as evidence of how much work has gone into the clean up, 10 years after! Suddenly, in the twilight of the administration, we are hearing about the hire of a foreign tax consultant said to have delivered additional $500million into the national kitty; now she gleefully recommends this to the in-coming government with a fatuous claim that they could to fetch $3billion over the medium-term!

    And now, for crying out loud, our reform-minded minister cannot even pay creditors – you guessed right, fuel importers – without taking to the airwaves to lecture those owed about the virtue of patriotism! Truly, our redeemer liveth! Will somebody get serious?

    Talking about the finger-pointing game, isn’t it amazing that our lady is ever too eager to cast the proverbial first stone? For the ‘crime’ of insisting on the sharing the proceeds of the piggy bank – the so-called Excess Crude Account – which the law deems ‘extra-legal’, the governors are adjudged guilty of squandermania before the court of that lone functionary with the double-barrelled office of minister of finance and coordinator of the economy!

    Now the question: Which official went on a borrowing spree at a time of unprecedented oil earnings and at such costs that defy logic? Which official insisted that an infrastructure-challenged economy maintain an off-shore savings at a measly two percent while hankering after foreign funds at between 5-10 percent interest?

    Should I go on?

    What of the free-for-all bonanza of fuel import subsidies under which payments quadrupled in a space of one year? Have we forgotten so soon how the N240 billion budgeted for fuel subsidy under the 2011 Appropriation Act ballooned to N1.2 trillion under the watch of the same pretentious patriot-minders of the treasury?

    I haven’t yet settled on the other ‘stain’ that comes close to undoing everything – the unresolved riddle of import duty waivers that top officials of the finance ministry would prefer buried. It started with the claim by Minister Okonjo-Iweala that her ministry approved only N170.73 billion worth of duty waivers and exemptions in three years.  The Customs as the implementing agency would later show that value of waivers processed for the same period was N1.4 trillion!

    As against the minister’s claim of N55.96 billion for 2011, N55.34 billion for 2012 and N59.42 billion for 2013, the Customs posted N480 billion for 2011, N480 billion for 2012 and N603 billion for 2013! Imagine, we are talking of a figure that is more than a third of one year’s federal budget lost to the fancies of some top bureaucrats! Years on, while Nigerians waiting for the outcome of the reconciliation and, possibly the justification for the inclusion of such items as aircraft, helicopter, “motor spare parts” furniture, “building materials and cabinet parts for kitchen door drawers”- and wait for it – kolanut in a country battling with high unemployment – our pious minister has long front-loaded a ready defence: ‘Yes, in the past, it wasn’t good but now we have been running a different system for two years.’ Case closed!

    It is possible that Madam Okonjo-Iweala served her principals well. However, for change to have its true meaning, it must go beyond the seductions to more-of-the-same preachments of a discredited member of an ancien regime. Nigerians didn’t vote for change for some pretenders to serve them old wines in some refurbished skins.  Good grief if they cannot read the signs that the market is over. It’s the broom revolution, and as they say – of what use is the broom if it cannot sweep clean?

    The days ahead promises to be interesting.

    Glad to be back!

  • Hand of Esau…

    Hand of Esau…

    Two famous lines immediately came to mind on hearing ruling of the Federal High Court Abuja ordering the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to register Young Democratic Party (YDP). The first is that of George Santayana that – ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. The other well known verse is attributed to the American statesman Henry Kissinger: “It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.

    Shortly after the ruling filtered in, most Nigerians, like yours truly, would imagine the YDP to be a reincarnation of the Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) – the genie sprung on the political space by the maverick Arthur Nzeribe in 1993 to ambush the nation’s democracy. Though hardly an improved version of the old as one might expect after more than two decades of mutation, YDP seems the perfect PDP Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) with all the essential features of the old complete with subterfuge and political toxicity.

    It was perhaps just as it was designed to be: on the one hand, the ruling by Justice Ahmed Mohammed has sent the nation’s adrenalin soaring; on the other, such has been the jubilation in the camps of the YDP and the PDP that one imagined that they already have a big trophy in their hands. I have struggled to make sense of what is supposed to be its substance over which political vagrants have been dancing naked. My puzzle, to be sure, is one of understanding the basis of their morbid dance. Is it a case of the upstarts seeing what the rest of us cannot see? Or simply one of those situations in which media reportage, aside muddling up issues, may have done grave injury to the renditions of the learned judge?

    Either way, it must be troubling enough that some political delinquents would seek to abort what seems to be a well laid out democratic pathway.

    What do we know of the YDP? I watched their officials – five or six of them – on TV during their press conference the other day. They seemed youthful alright (which by the way is sheer tragedy given what they represent); with the exception of the chairman who looked a bit serious, their media outing in all conveyed a picture of school children coerced to make an appearance!

    As to their middle appellation – Democratic – I confess to having a bit of difficulty reconciling what is supposed to be a legitimate quest to get a party formally registered with the stated resolve to achieve same through the back door and at the pain of bringing the roof of the house down on everyone!

    On their claim to be a party – I leave the judgement of whether or not the motley assembly of the odd fellows qualify to be labelled a “party” to Nigerians given the infinitely elastic interpretation of their rights to form just about any association. After all, I have countless times wondered about the farce under which some deluded fellows would hold the system down only because they have just enough money to rent shops in 36 state capitals all in the name of party formation.

    But I digress. I do not pretend that I have read the judgment of the Federal High Court Abuja. It seems doubtful that anyone has come across let alone read the full text. Like many Nigerians, I am limited to the snippets as reported in the media which unfortunately comes to pretty little. Which is of course unfortunate given what is supposed to be its import on the orderly process of the 2015 election. Merely by what the inferences and interpretations suggest, a judicial mine is supposed to have been laid in the way of the process.

    Nothing of course can be fundamentally wrong with the specific order on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to immediately register YDP as a political party. The judge’s finding that the party is deemed to have been registered when INEC failed to inform it of its decision not to register it as a political party within 30 days of receiving its application, is said to find strength in Section 78 (4) of the Electoral Act, 2010ý. On that, I have no quarrel.

    The part I consider troubling is the varied interpretations of the ruling particularly as touching on the elections barely three weeks away. Here, the issue is whether the court actually ordered INEC to put the name of the YDP candidates on the ballot for the March 28 and April 11 elections? Did it? Could it – or should it have – given the implications?

    And which candidates are we talking about here – those that emerged with or without INEC-supervised primaries? Could the litigants have been automatically availed of that right without inviting grievous assault to public policy? Assuming one concedes that the party is truly deemed to have been registered by May according to the law, where should the pendulum of public policy ordinarily tilt given that the printing and logistics for the elections ought to have been concluded before now?  Still wondering why Nigerians are apprehensive of the imminence of a judelex coup? Judelex  – yes – judiciary-electoral-executive coup!  Look at it this way: The ruling PDP has by words and deeds, shown that it would rather not have the elections. The dithering PDP administration not only gifted itself six weeks to sort out a security mess that it had nearly the whole of eternity to clean up but chose not to, it has in the last three weeks found a ready song in the deployment in card readers which it claimed would disenfranchise voters. It is hard to imagine a worse case of electoral avoidance –I once described it as electoral allergy – by a party in government in a democratic setting!

    Now, YDP, its minion wants the names of its so-called candidates on the ballot; knowing how impractical the demand is. It offers INEC a gratuitous option of postponing the elections which it knows is unlikely to happen! In the meantime, it purports to procure a judgment, which for all practical purposes, makes it a supremo with the power of discretion over electoral validity? Yes, that is where some have taken us!

    So, where is the difference between the party with acute electoral allergy and another which insists on not caring a hoot if the entire structure is brought down so it can have its way? Aren’t we again at a point where a band of certified delinquents, aided by the piper, would brazenly suborn the judiciary to their devious schemes? How short some people’s memory can be! See you after the polls.

     

    • This column goes on a five-week vacation. God willing, we meet again at the other side of the polls.

  • Taming the behemoth

    We must thank the House Public Accounts Committee for finally waking up to the duty of reminding us of one terrible absurdity that is less talked about – and yet inextricably linked to the nation’s crisis of public finance and by extension, governance.  I refer here to its latest finding that the combined financial expenditures of some powerful “statutory and extra-ministerial departments” actually outstrip the federal budget by a ratio of one to four.

    Much as I would love that the issue be elevated, being an inescapable aspect of the discourse of the nation’s future, I suspect that the issues may have come too late in the day. For not only does the charged atmosphere of electioneering makes it an unlikely subject of interest at this point in time, (which is tragic really considering the mess that the current administration has made of the finances), it seems even more unlikely that our politicians would have the stomach for serious debate when the atmosphere is suffused with issues of stomach infrastructure.

    To say that the federal behemoth is awash with cash is hardly saying anything new. We have heard it over and over again from its hierarchs that the federal government is not broke. We know what they mean – the huge pool available to service all manners of purposes under the sun – excepting everything that matters to the ordinary Nigerian. The good thing is that we are finally getting around to determining the size of the fiscal operation of that parallel arm of the federal government not known to be subject to the strictures of parliamentary budgetary process.

    Having said that, I must confess that I have quite a bit of a problem in the attempt by the committee– after nearly 15 successive cycles of budget – to present it as serendipity finding. To the extent that this is the way the business of government has been run over the years, someone surely must be kidding to imagine that the subject will suddenly excite Nigerians only because the federal purse is shrinking!

    Does that take anything from its legitimacy as a subject of interest? Hardly. Look at it this way: this year – no thanks to the slump in oil prices – the entire federal budget is projected at N4.3 trillion. Even with two months of its 12-month cycle already gone, that budget is still at the mill – undergoing processing at the two chambers of the National Assembly – a picture of what the process entails. Merely from what is indicated in the dry figures, the signs are that 2015 will be a very difficult year for everyone. For instance, we know for a fact that there will be little left for you and me for capital projects after removing the wages and salaries of bureaucrats and political actors – including the vote for their choice toys. If I may decompose the figures for the 2015 budget for better comprehension: Imagine that for every N91 the federal government earmarks for its operations, it plans to leave a left-over of nine naira to deliver on projects for the rest of us – themselves inclusive! Picture the same federal behemoth, now with a vastly shrunk budget –having a parallel one – four times as big, superintended by select appointees or nominees of the federal executive. Could there be a better infrastructure for the silent killer of corruption? Does anyone still wonder where all the cash moving around for all manners of purposes under the sun – including the slush for political activities are coming from?

    Perhaps the House PAC has been deaf and mute to the cries by stakeholders about the sheer outlawry of agencies such as the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) which prefers operate in defiance of the laws of the republic in the last 16 years. Had the House done its duty in those years, that monstrosity would have been long curbed. This is where, if you ask me, the committee’s finding – if it is any finding at all, is a decade and half late.

    I say this because, Section 162 (1) of the Constitution is explicit: “The Federation shall maintain a special account to be called “the federation account” into which shall be paid all revenues collected by the government of the federation, except the proceeds from the personal income tax of the personnel of the armed forces of the federation, the Nigeria Police Force, the ministry or department of government charged with the responsibility for foreign affairs and the residents of the Federal capital territory, Abuja”. Section 162 (3) also makes clear that; “Any amount standing to the credit of the Federation account shall be distributed among the federal and state governments and the local government councils in each state on such terms and in such manner as may be prescribed by the National Assembly”.

    Of particular interest here is Section 162 (10). It says “For the purposes of subsection (1) of this section, “revenue” means any income or return accruing to or derived by the government of the federation from any source and includes–

    (a)        Any receipt, however described, arising from the operation of any law;

    (b)        Any return, however described, arising from or in respect of any property held by the government of the federation;

    (c)        Any return by way of interest on loans and dividends in respect of shares or interest held by the government of the federation in any company or statutory body.”

    Let me be clear at this point: as it is in the federal behemoth, so it is in the 36 states of the federation. Across the board, the tradition is to treat the operating surpluses of revenue-earning agencies as piggy-banks – exclusive fiefdoms of the executive arm!

    Do I hear that somebody is still thinking of where to find the money to fund the 2015 budget? A good way is to bring the operating surpluses of Nigerian Ports Authority, the Nigerian Maritime and Safety Administration and those of the scores of agencies into the pool to start with. It seems to me a surer, more productive way to fund the budget than the endless chase for loans that ends up shackling future generations. As important as that is however, it comes nowhere the business of taming the monster known to bleed the treasury of billions annually.

  • Now, it’s GEJ versus Soludo!

    Now, it’s GEJ versus Soludo!

    Just as I predicted, the dust raised by former Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Chukwuma Soludo on Nigeria’s missing trillions, seems unlikely to settle anytime soon. Once I had thought the matter settled – disappointingly – after Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala contemptuously dismissed the weighty issues raised by Soludo as “outright nonsense and self-seeking aggrandizement that need not be dignified with a response”. With last week’s response by President Goodluck Jonathan as reported by Premium Times (the latter quoting Thisday), the season of indifference is not only over; the matter – mercifully – has become live again!

    Permit yours truly, dear reader to bring you up to date on a controversy that the administration would rather sweep under the carpet. In January, Soludo had observed in a letter to the Finance Minister and Coordinator of the economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala that “the basket of our national treasury is leaking profusely from all sides”. He cited examples. First is the issue of oil theft which he noted averaged 400,000 per day which came to about $60bn ‘stolen’ in just four years. He put the cost in naira to about N12.6tn.

    The second was the issue of foreign reserves. Soludo had claimed that minimum forex reserves should have been at least $90bn instead of the current level of $30bn. To him, the gross mismanagement of the reserves has denied the country some $60bn or another N12.6tn.

    Expectedly, he brought up the issue of ‘missing’ $20bn from the NNPC (N4tn); the fuel subsidy racket and the import duty waivers bazaar. He asked: “How many trillions of naira were paid for oil subsidy (unappropriated?)? How many trillions (in actual fact) have been ‘lost’ through customs duty waivers over the last four years? How many trillions of naira self- financing government agencies earn and spend?”

    His conclusion was that “probably more than N30tn has either been stolen, or lost, or unaccounted for, or simply mismanaged under your watchful eyes in the past four years. Since you claimed to be in charge, Nigerians are right to ask you to account. Think about what this amount could mean for the 112 million poor Nigerians, or for our schools, hospitals, roads, etc.”

    And what did the super-minister, the lone official in the eye of the storm have to say to the matters that are not only legitimate but of immense public interest? A rude and haughty riposte delivered through an aide, Paul C Nwabuikwu. Dismissing Soludo’s charges off-hand as “littered with abusive and unbecoming language” she stated that the comments “shows how an embittered loser in the Nigerian political space can get so derailed that they commit intellectual harakiri by deliberately misquoting economic facts and maliciously turning statistics on their head to justify a hatchet job…We hope all the intellectuals in the international circles in which Professor Soludo has told us he flies around in will read what a Professor of Economics has chosen to do with his intellect”!

    Mercifully, yours truly is not alone in finding the language offensive; I recall that the descent to vulgar abuse actually prompted Obiageli Ezekwesili to write on her Twitter handle shortly after – the “nation and people seem to be on an accelerated race to the bottom. So sad! Why would a statement from (the) government read like that? Gosh!”

    Did the President finally clear the fog? Let’s hear the President speak through Thisday as reportedby Premium Times:  “Not too long ago I read in one of the papers, I think Vanguard, that former chief economic adviser to President Obasanjo who also went to become a CBN governor… Soludo is a professor and first class material. Yes, making a first class in economics, he is a brilliant person. His secondary school records are fantastic. So by all standards he is a brilliant person… he accused Ngozi; that N30 trillion was stolen under the watch of Ngozi in four years.”

    He went on: “Ngozi became a finance minister, let’s say from 2011 till date. From that time till now, our annual budget is between N4.3 trillion and N4.9 trillion. So even if you put all together, it is about 18 plus trillion naira, and not 30 trillion. The budget for these four years is less than N20 trillion, but Soludo said that under Ngozi’s watch they stole N30 trillion. This is in the papers, social media, stored in the clouds and will continue to be there. And when you type it in it will come out that during President Jonathan’s time they stole N30 trillion.”

    You think the President deliberately muddled up the issues? Then wait for this assault on the professional integrity of Soludo:  “We asked Ngozi how her colleagues in the World Bank saw the accusation and she said they were laughing and couldn’t believe it. There are certain things that you just cannot believe and if that is coming from somebody considered to be cerebral like Professor Soludo, then of course you know what the ordinary person would say. It is all political.”

    Interesting isn’t it? Soludo ignorant, doing mischief – or simply playing politics? Ignorant? That seems extremely doubtful. Mischief? Even more unlikely. Playing politics? The President should know – after all, he’s been doing a lot of shuttles of late, doing rounds to revamp his beleaguered presidency. So what’s wrong with Soludo taking a sip from the giddy brew?

    Expect Soludo to thunder again – if only to defend his honour being rubbished by the President and his appointees. It would be most tragic should Soludo be forced into an arrangee silence so as not to further ruffle feathers.

    Now to the substance. I am alarmed that a matter as serious as those raised by Soludo – on which several other Nigerians have also voiced alarm – would be reduced to a trivia by a President obviously in awe of his appointee! If you ask me, I’ll say that the President needed not have reminded us that his super-appointee to whom he outsourced his economic management has his roots in the World Bank – where all knees must bow when it comes to economic wisdom! As if we didn’t know that already. After all, where else, except in Jonathan’s Nigeria would an appointee secure appointment on such terms as to negate the federalist principles, and in such undisguised affront to the constitution of the republic? Or is the president saying that a sojourn at the World Bank automatically translates to immunity from questions over an individual’s stewardship?

    By the way – I am unaware of the resolution of the import duty waiver bazaar – in which our untouchable minister would swear that her ministry granted waivers and exemptions worth N55.96 billion in 2011, N55.34 billion in 2012 and N59.42 billion in 2013 – totalling N171 billion while the implementing agency, the Nigeria Customs Service, would show that a whopping N1.4 trillion waivers were granted during the same period.

    So much for the Jonathanians and their white-washed sepulchres.

  • Who cares?

    While the military-induced shift in the elections by six weeks is increasingly looking like a minor part of a long but complex play, one aspect that seems to have escaped attention is the economic, human and institutional dimensions of the unfolding plot. Six weeks, ordinarily is supposed to be nothing in the life of a nation. Indeed, merely by the assurances of the military’s top brass to whom the nation’s chief steward has outsourced his primary function as commander-in-chief, the nation is being offered a dubious respite from the insurgency in the North-east.

    Win or lose the war in the North-east, the truth is that the end to our nightmares is nowhere yet in sight. Once the country was described as under-governed, what we have in place at the moment is total abdication. I once described the Jonathan presidency as outsourced only because I was short of words to describe the flight by the Team Leader; today, we neither have a team nor anyone in charge. However, while it seems convenient for our steward of state to abandon state duties to the exigency of tenure renewal, the systematic co-optation of state institutions into the electoral project under his direct supervision would come to the greatest irony of all time. I will return to this issue shortly.

    Talking about the poll shift, I guess it is no accident that the support for the measure has been loudest among the beleaguered parasitic throng infesting the presidency. The motivations of the legion that have long mastered the art of making wealth without breaking a sweat should not be hard to understand; the perfidious club would rather keep the flush funds flowing under the regime of unearned wealth, till kingdom come.

    Of course, you can hardly say the same of, for instance, a Dangote, whose wealth under the floundering administration continues to dissipate. Only recently, Forbes reported Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, as losing more than $7.8 billion of his fortune in the wake of the latest plunge in the nation’s capital market. His net worth as at November 7, 2014 was put at $21.6 billion. His entire fortune is currently said to be around $17.2 billion! Whereas Forbes puts the negative trend to: “a general uncertainty regarding the 2015 general elections, Central Bank regulatory headwinds, and weak earnings from large cap companies”, I put it to state-induced uncertainty designed to generate a mad scramble for Abuja’s crumbs!

    And that is supposed to be one individual’s loss. Can one possibly compute the cost of the postponement to millions of families across the federation? I write here of programmes forced to be put off; meetings that have to rescheduled and the countless other opportunities scuttled – all because Jonathan and his PDP are suddenly allergic to elections?  Does anyone care? What about President Jonathan; does he care – at least not when, in his own words, all his campaign expenses are underwritten by the nation’s treasury?

    In spite of the dark ominous clouds, I see Divine hands at work. How? I will explain.

    Doubtless, the nation is already as fractured as can be along the traditional fault-lines of religion and ethnicity. All across the land – no thanks to the PDP’s mantra of the-end-justify-the-meanness – so palpable has been the curtain of mutual distrust across religious and ethnic lines that everyone now seems to appreciate that it would require an ultra-nationalist to heal the deep wounds inflicted by Jonathan and his men.

    You ask me of the good in this? I say it is in the recognition that the nation currently has a big task of retrieving its destiny from the band of opportunistic wayfarers! I consider that as a significant step forward. On those issues, it seems inevitable that the party would burn itself out sooner than later. Having succeeded up to a point in their play of the opportunistic card of religion and ethnicity, the signs from the wearied citizens would seem to suggest that their days of reckoning is here at last!

    This is even more so in the economic sphere. Today, the dip in oil prices has since become an alibi for the incompetent administration to explain its glaring failures across the board. Never mind that the plunge in oil prices is barely two months old; how does one explain an economy once deemed as resilient and impregnable like the Titanic succumbing only few weeks after the oil price plunge?

    Presently, virtually all the indices on which the administration has hinged its claims to superlative performance have continued to unravel right before our very eyes: not only is the naira doing yoyo, down the road, the industrial and manufacturing sectors are already under intense strains – not from the traditional sources of inclement operating environment, but from the ill-effects of unmanaged or unmanageable exchange rate fluctuations. And just as one would expect that that high exchange rate would drive up costs; the threat of possible cut-back in industrial/manufacturing capacity has since become one that we must worry even in the near term. That threat has become so real and with it the grim likelihood of factory closures and massive lay-offs that the nation can ignore it at great costs.

    Trust the administration to choose the difficult time to go AWOL – thereby giving the band of speculators full reign! Guess it’s time to ask – who are those forces fuelling foreign exchange demand? In other words, who are the demanders of forex and to what purpose? A clear answer to the above would obviously reveal a lot that the administration would rather not let Nigerians into. However, it suffices to say that the answer would, at least in part, explain the laissez-faire activities that has left the economy floundering. It is just as well that the administration has suddenly become subdued or less exuberant in its claims of achievement. Guess it’s a measure of the extent to which its inelegantly constructed castle has gone up like the smoke!

    Back to the issue of the President’s cooptation of state institutions to his electoral project. By now, Nigerians must be sufficiently embarrassed by the revelations emerging from the farce that the Ekiti gubernatorial election has turned out to be. Of course, we have since heard that the Ekiti template was also deployed in Osun – although with limited success. Today, an Assistant General of Police, Joseph Mbu has been telling all who cared to listen that he is neither answerable to the constitution nor the laws of the country but his taskmasters in Abuja. That for me is the limit of state regression – an supossedly organised society in free fall.

  • Inching to the abyss?

    It did not come as a surprise that the late Saturday night announcement by INEC chairman, Prof Attahiru Jega of the shift in the polls from the initial February 14 date to March 28 has again torn Nigeria and Nigerians right through the middle. It was, as one might expect of a well-crafted assault designed to confuse, confound and ultimately provoke different sets of actors in an already polarised polity. Unfortunately, it would appear one instance in which the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan would overplay the opportunistic card while pretending to be above the fray.

    Today, Nigerians know the story – either in part or in whole – of a plot that has gone through long incubation. Saturday announcement was merely the maturation of a plot which actually preceded the Chatham House kite flown by Jonathan’s National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki on January 22. Of course, it was convinient as it was well-timed: barely 50 percent of the permanent voters cards had been distributed; in the increasing unlikelihhood that that the balance would be able to collect their PVCs at the end of the initial target date, the NSA had argued that a shift in the elections by three months – within the limits allowed by the Electoral Act – would be a good idea.

    Apparently, INEC’s assurances that the distribution would be completed in time for the polls made no sense to him; he would still insist on allowing more time for a successful election. “It costs you nothing, it’s still within the law”, he had stated at the Chatham House parley.

    Of course, Nigerians knew that he merely spoke the mind of his principal, President Goodluck Jonathan. What was not known at the time was that the whole business of PVCs was merely a decoy, a ploy sort of, to halt the momentum of the President’s main rival, General Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress. Indeed, as the following days would reveal, INEC was merely being suborned to play the unwilling fall-guy in the dangerous scheming by an administration desperate to keep its hold in power.

    As Nigerians would later witness, what followed was a game of wits: a stubborn INEC would refuse to play the game strictly their way leaving the out-of-depth administration to shop for plausible alibis to convince Nigerians on the inevitability of the shift. To make good, the office of the NSA would write to INEC highlighting the issues of security in the North-east. If the letter, a sort of insurance, was meant to secure the co-operation of INEC, it apparently failed; which was why the federal government turned to the National Council State where the NSA’s letter would again come up for discussion. Of course, the body saw through the charade and threw the matter back to INEC, the body charged with organising the elections to conclude upon. Indeed, most members, according to reports, saw no sense in halting the elections – insurgency or not – given that their activities was limited to 14 local governments out of the 774 in the country.

    This was perhaps the point that things got desperate. With limited options left for manouvre, the federal government again turned the pressure on INEC. This time, it found a willing ally in the brass-hats in the military to whom it appeared to have outsourced the dirty job. Trust the no-nonsense fellows, they dared INEC to proceed with the elections and risk the dire consequences! With the nation’s dog at this point wagging the military’s tail, and given the unfathomable situation in which the office of the commander-in-chief, the bastion of state authority, had been  cynically surrendered to a group of functionaries within the military establishment, the capitulation of INEC was more than assured!

    That obviously sets new limits for the outsourced presidency of Dr Jonathan.

    And who won?

    Merely by the gloating in the camps of the federal government and the ruling PDP, the instance of capitulation by INEC is supposed to be a strategic victory of sorts. Without any doubt, it guarantees the party just enough time to revamp its flailing campaigns, and perhaps just enough time to unleash more sinister plots from its inexhaustible bag of tricks. Whether or not the development would confer the much sought-after electoral advantage for the president and his party is of course a different matter.

    Now, let’s look at who lost. The most promiment victims are the key institution of the Nigerian state daily undermined by the PDP-led federal government. Top on the list is the military whose institutional integrity is being violated on a daily basis; no doubt, the development has since brought back its characterisation by one of its leading lights as an institution of anything-goes.

    I must confess that I found a contribution by Karen Attiah in the  Washington Post on the issue irresistible:  “… after years of Boko Haram’s carnage, what will the army do in six weeks that they couldn’t do in five years and with a $5 billion security budget? Where was this urgency hiding for the past six years? And why escalate tensions and anger Nigerians who have been eagerly waiting to cast ballots by making this announcement with only a week to go before the polls?” Like a hunter’s dog sworn to be lost in the woods, it seems unliekly that anyone is listening.

    The next victim is INEC. Expecting INEC to proceed with the elections in those impossible circumstances would obviously amount to stretching legalism to surrealism. It would amount to inviting chaos. In the circumstance, that postponement would seem pragmatic. But then, the real danger will come six weeks down the line; in other words, what happens should service exigencies, as defined by the military high command, compel further extension? What would INEC do? Defy the brass-hats, or what? Would it be time again to invoke the overused doctrine of necessity? And what happens to the constitutional order?

    That is the bind that the nation has found itself. Clearly, the prognosis are anything but good. In all of these, what must pass as lamentable is that an administration that came into office via the ballot box has become so terribly allergic of the democratic process as to now seek to undermine it. How the current development plays out is anyone’s guess. I would however wager that neither the PDP or the federal government would have the last laugh – except they do what is right by the law and the constitution. In this case, it seems the only thing to do is to ensure that nothing – no matter how remote – is allowed to abort the May 29, handover date.

  • LASAA/FG tango: When might is right

    With the hustings at the feverish pitch, it is expected that politicians would exploit all the tricks in the book to tilt everything to their advantage. Perhaps, nowhere is the battle so fierce as the contest over our minds and souls. To describe the media space in the last few months as oversaturated would therefore be an understatement. Whether it is in the traditional media of print and broadcast or the virtual jungle of the World Wide Web (www) where rules are not known let alone respected, it is the season for Nigerians to say something about just anything under the sun. Boom time no doubt for those in advertising business.

    But then, so also is creeping anomie into what is ordinarily a regulated and highly creative sector. Although, the symptoms have been with us for a long time, we have ignored the tell-tale signs of the budding malaise to the extent that the metastasis now threatens collective health. Whereas in the PDP’s war manual, the end is supposed to justify the meanness, the free-for-environment of public communication would seem one of the more stark derivatives of the current anomie.  For while it would seem ordinarily troubling enough that an Ayo Fayose, a certified political delinquent who currently runs the administration in the enlightened state of Ekiti, would dare to put out an advertisement wishing the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress party, General Muhammadu Buhari dead, it would have been utterly unimaginable that the mediums would have carried an advertisement that is not only insensitive but clearly affront public morality as the piece in question in years past.

    Talk of the signs of the troubling times.

    As if also in the same spirit, there is currently an on-going tango in the outdoor advertising sector between the Lagos State government and the PDP-federal government, described as “poster wars”.

    The particulars are as one might expect in a politically-charged season. Lagos PDP had accused the Lagos State Signage & Advertisement Agency (LASAA) of orchestrating the removal of its campaign posters from public places. Ever so assured of the federal might behind it, the party would dare to issue a dire warning: “Henceforth, anywhere our posters and outdoor campaign materials are removed by LASAA, we will do the same to materials belonging to the ruling APC government in Lagos State in a bigger magnitude. We will no longer condone this reckless abuse of public institutions for the selfish interests of those who want to perpetuate themselves in power at all costs.”

    Days after, Kayode Aderanti, the Lagos State top cop would threaten a clampdown on officials of LASAA. His office, he told Lagosians, was inundated with series of complaints from candidates of other political parties alleging mass pulling down of their posters and billboards by officials of LASAA. Taking cover under Section 100(2) of the 2010 Electoral Act as amended which states that “State apparatus including the media shall not be employed to the advantage or disadvantage of any political party or candidates at any election”, he threatened to arrest anybody or group – excluding staff of the regulatory agency, LASAA – caught in the act!

    With the battle so joined, last week, the Federal Government went for broke; the Federal Ministry of Works wrote to the President of the Outdoor Advertising Association of Nigeria (OAAN) terminating the existing approvals for outdoor sites previously given to members of the body in Lagos State specifically for locations on federal government roads/setbacks. Earlier, the PDP had reportedly mounted its adverts on street poles in violation of existing contracts with Globacom and Huawei leading to an alleged loss of  N350 million.

    It seems aeons ago that outdoor advertising in Greater Lagos city space was defined by the rule of disorder – with every manner of advertisers with just about anything to sell –contesting for space to grab the attention of their patrons. Today, were Lagosians to be asked about one area where their city has truly lived to its billings as centre of excellence, it must be in the area of sanitising the outdoor advertising arena through effective regulation. Gone – and it seems forever already – are the days when public buildings were defaced with all manners of materials purporting to sell their messages. The same goes for the ubiquitous billboards once indiscriminately mounted in the city landscape; a new discernable order is in place as one would expect in a modern, 21st Century city –a tribute to the efforts of LASAA.

    The problem isn’t just that the structure carefully put in place is being threatened by the noxious politics being promoted by the state PDP, if we expected that the law – and not the police – would be the arbiter in cases where such disputes arise, the reality on ground must be deeply troubling indeed.

    To begin with, yours truly is of the view that CP Aderanti’s statement threatening to clamp down on LASAA officials though unfortunate underlies a more sinister script. Shouldn’t the police commissioner have known that the agency is creation of statute, hence its operations are governed by strict provisions of its statute?

    How about simply directing the aggrieved Lagos PDP members to seek redress in court rather their naked resort to issuing threats? That apparently would not have played to the script – the same way that his invocation of the provisions of the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended) to justify his threat to clamp down on an agency created by law while feigning ignorance about the provisions of the fourth schedule of the Constitution of the Federal Republic Of Nigeria 1999 (as amended) which vests the authority over outdoor advertsing in local governments!

    Still wondering where the narow alley that the PDP recourse to self-help leads? Let’s go back little. Sometime in July last year, the federal government reportedly granted approval to the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) and Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA) to set up a task force ostensibly to maintain traffic on the federal roads in Lagos State. National Coordinator of the agency, Alhaji Abdulrazak Rafiu Otto would later warn that “any attempt by the Lagos State government or its officials to interfere in the management of traffic on the federal roads would be resisted” as according to him, “the Act setting up SURE-P/FERMA empowers it to carry out such civic responsibility on federal roads”.

    See the catch: the SURE-P Task Force schedule of duties as outlined on their billboard on the old toll-gate along the Lagos-Ibadan expressway says something about the management of traffic on federal highways, control of set-backs and other nonsense stuff that a gung-ho federal behemoth would dare to dream! And that regulation is supposed to override the one validly made by the Lagos House of Assembly!

    Still wondering about the confidence of Lagos PDP? With a  trained SURE-P militia already trained to administer their jungle municipal services in Lagos State, the lawless Jonathan administration would seem one step away from capturing their dream prize – Lagos.

    LASAA and the Lagos State government should sue the hell out of them.