The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • Soludo and the Jonathan scorecard

    Expect a fatwa from the intellectual goons of the Jonathan administration on former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Chukwuma Soludo for his blistering critique of the policies of their principal as published by this newspaper yesterday. A refreshing detour from the tonnes of staid and sterile stuff spewed by the henchmen of a rattled regime, it does more than a needle-prick on the exaggerated self-score by the regime hacks.

    Exactly three weeks ago on this page, yours truly had predicted that the administration’s claims of achievement would, sooner than later, be tested literally and figuratively with fire. That prediction appears to have come to pass at the weekend. The only thing I could not have foreseen was that the roasting would come from a man who would ordinarily qualify as an insider, who only a while ago served as the number one banker to the same PDP federal government.

    I have read the 6,232 word critique by Soludo with the rather suggestive headline Federal Government’s economic team weak, selfish. Irrespective of what anyone may say about its timingor the motives behind it, particularly his unflattering characterisation of the administration as ineffectual and self-centred, Soludo is hardly a man you can put away as a nincompoop as far as issue of the nation’s economic management is concerned. His words, conveyed with the profound insight of an insider are not just weighty but authoritative. While I do not here pretend that his views represent any final judgement any more than his critics are also entitled to their own verdicts on the performance of the Jonathan administration, the views, set in the context of the administration’s outlandish claims of achievement, is helpful and illuminating.

    To be sure, it isn’t exactly that Soludo has presented any new facts or stumbled on a serendipity over which Nigerians should be excitable. Yes, he has helped articulate in his own way, some of the economic issues that many Nigerians have at one point or the other expressed their views about. Like a disciplined academic that he is, what he has done is to distil the issues to help in the understanding of the subject which the administration insists on muddling up for reasons that are self-serving.

    The point is that other actors in the preceding PDP administrations have done no less. Nigerians would remember Oby Ezekwesili, who, about this time last year similarly accused the administrations of late President Umaru Yar’Adua and the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan of squandering’ $67 billion (about N11 trillion) oil money left in two separate accounts by Obasanjo. The same charge would be repeated early in the year by the former President much to the discomfiture of the Jonathan administration. As it appears, the issues would simply not go away.

    I consider the Soludo interjection important for a variety of reasons. That the nation’s one-time banker would re-echo the same charges earlier made operatives of the former administration would seem a measure of their dissatisfaction with the explanations rendered by the hierarchs of the administration. More embarrassing is that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, minister of finance actually served in that administration whose top actors are the ones accusing the current one of squander-mania!  It couldn’t get any messier that the lone functionary to whom the management of economy was outsourced to could not even persuade his erstwhile colleagues that nothing is amiss!

    Now, for an administration that has done nothing else than serve Nigerians its endless cocktails of distractions in the last few weeks, it must be said that Soludo has helped in no small measure to change the course of the debate from the banality of muck-raking and character assassination to one driven by issues. Having helped to frame the issues, it is left for the rest of the civil society to pick up the gauntlet.

    Having said that, I must say that the coming days would seem easy enough to predict. With the regime hounds already off the leash, those expecting a healthy contest of ideas on the issues raised by Soludo had better prepared for disappointment! Knowing how the mind of this administration is programmed, I know it won’t happen; rather expect a choreographed demolition job on the messenger. Trust me; if the administration’s legion of netizen warriors have not already set out on the demolition job, it’s probably because they are still reeling in the after-shock of the Soludo put down. For sure, every activity of the CBN under Soludo would come under intense scrutiny. If you ever served in government, you know what I mean: every book under the sun will be opened in the bid to roast their latest enemy in the sun. Contracts signed and sealed several years ago will suddenly become matters of interest. Nigerians should expect some revealing files to suddenly pop up somewhere showing how people who claim to be “Mr Clean” are actually white-washed sepulchres! Remember the unfinished business of Securency International Pty Ltd – the polymer currency people?  Expect findings of ‘great interest’. That is the way of the desperate administration, an administration for whom no boundaries are inviolate.

    Continuity or change? That is the million dollar choice Nigerians are being called to make at this time. A government fittingly described by Soludo as “dominated by self-interested and self-conflicted group of traders and businessmen, and so-called economic team meetings have been nothing but showbiz time”. A government in which “the very people government exists to regulate have seized the levers of government as policymakers and most government institutions have largely been “privatised” to them”? An economy “on auto pilot, with confusion as to who is in charge and government largely as a constraint…where “there are no big ideas, and it is difficult to see where economic policy is headed to”? That is the terrible choice foisted on the nation by the PDP. And now some have told us that the devil you know is better than the saints you don’t know!

    After nearly 16 years of motion without locomotion, if you ask me, I would take a gamble on a different course.

  • Jona’s Greek Gift

    Expect the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) to take to the airways to celebrate the benevolence of the Jonathan administration in bringing down the price of petrol from N97 per litre to N87. Greek gift or not, it seems doubtful that transformers actually appreciate the import of what their principal has done to the spending power of the fuel consumer by that N10 slice off the price of petrol. For if we adopt the lower mark in an economy which consumes anything between 33-40 litres of petrol daily, we are talking of a princely N330 million daily addition to the consumers’ spending power. Multiply that by the average of 30 days in a month; or if you like, 365 days a year and the scale of “achievement”, like their rebasing magic, comes stark clear!

    I leave our economists to find the multiplier and the countless other derivatives for the Nigerian economy; and this from a simple gesture of hiving N10 off petrol price courtesy of our loving President. Our legion of transformers ought to see themselves in my debt for helping them to figure out one of the less obvious achievements of their principal!

    It is of course an issue of what to make of the gesture. What is undeniable is that the price of oil has tumbled by more than 50 percent over the last six months. From a little over $100 a barrel in June last year, Nigeria’s Brent crude currently struggles to hit the $50 a barrel mark.  Of course, the argument goes that if it petrol sold for N97 when oil sold for $100, Nigerians should consider themselves entitled to a generous discount.

    Sunday night’s announcement by the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke was therefore supposed to be the answer to Nigerians’ quest for some equity at least in product pricing. It is doubtful that Nigerians bargained for the tokenism of N10 as announced by the minister. Now, the question is being raised whether the N10 cut –a discount of approximately 10 percent on petrol only – is the best the administration can do. There is also the issue of whether the administration is not being clever by half in creating the impression that the oil price slump only affects premium motor spirit.

    Let’s look at the issue a bit more closely. We know for a fact that the price of diesel has long been deregulated. In other words, we are supposed to see the efficacy of the market forces at work. But what do we have? A depot price of N97, excluding trucking expenses and the marketers’ margin hence the pump price between N140 to N150 a litre. If we expected the retail price of the product to reflect the dynamics of the movement in oil prices given the dive of more than 50 percent on the price, what we have seen is more of the same old story of distortion in which prices, once they go up never truly go down. Of course, that in itself would be understandable enough in an economy where every operation is powered by diesel; and where in the absence of reliable power, makes the perfect price inelasticity of diesel more than guaranteed.

    As for kerosene which is said to be under a regulated regime of N50 per litre, the reality is that the household product has never been sold for anything less than N120 per litre at the retail end. Again, the reason is not difficult to understand: the so-called poor, for whom the product is said to be meant, have long given up in the quest to make the product either accessible or affordable. Rather, they have simply yielded the space to marketers’ forces – perhaps waiting for Jonathan’s wonder cooking stoves to bail them out!

    By way of contrast, only the buyer of premium motor spirit, with an ‘artificial’ cap in price, pretends that product prices are set by anything but the rule of the thumb. Even at that, it depends on where the buyer is doing so from!

    That is the state of the nation’s downstream sector today. It is a big jungle where marketers rule – a market of unequal actors – disparate fuel consumers versus unscrupulous marketers, the latter aided by the government through the regulator – the Petroleum Products Prices Regulatory Agency (PPPRA). By the way, I invite you, my dear reader to check out the website of the PPPRA, which until Sunday’s announcement was alive and well. All through yesterday, my efforts to find at least some basis for the Greek gift on their website yielded nothing: that website is for now temporarily out of service – perhaps until the agency’s mathematicians fine-tune their magical template!

    Still want to know what the ‘gesture’ is meant to achieve? With general elections barely six weeks away, it is in the character of the Jonathan administration to cynically exploit just about any issue for political advantage – which of course is not a crime. What is unacceptable in this instance is that the course neither offers the nation a pathway out of the mess nor the long-sought opportunity to overhaul its energy policy.

    And you know where this leads? Sure enough, we’ll be back to debate the “subsidy” or lack thereof; the fuel price template and the mechanisms of determining appropriate marketers margins –  all the jargons and everything except the future of our endangered downstream sector. And while the motion goes on, the administration can claim a potent alibi in the inchoate Petroleum Industry Bill! Such has been the legacy of the transformers!

     

    …And now Ayodele Fayose

    Until yesterday, I honestly considered some boundaries inviolate even to our band of delinquent political actors. After seeing the front page advertisements in The Punch and Daily Sun signed by Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose, my simple conclusion was that some of our elected officials should be herded to the shrink. The advert was not just downright offensive, it was in bad taste. Mercifully, I am not alone in feeling this way. All of those I have spoken to on the advert agree that Fayose went beyond the boundaries of decency.

    Here is what a reader C. Olumide, from Ajah Lekki sent to me on the issue. I take my reader’s liberty for granted in publishing the short piece:

    “Governor Ayo Fayose’s advert for Jonathan on the Friont Page of today’s The Punch is sickening and in very bad taste. Haba! It should be condemned by all right-thinking Nigerians. Is that PDP’s issue-based campaign? For a sitting governor of a PDP state to descend to that level is the height of depravity and impunity – a deadly combination that exist only in Nigeria. (or can you cite a similar example anywhere else in the world?)

    We should therefore let the whole world know through our writings and radio and TV discussions that majority of Nigerians condemn this crude, meaningless, repulsive and indecent advert which mocks the memory of our heroes and can trigger North-South violence and thereby negate the undertaking signed by both Jonathan and Buhari. The newspaper should have exercised better judgement by rejecting such stupid but volatile advert in the first place”.

    What more can I add? These are interesting times no doubt.

  • The President is angry!

    Nigerians describing the President’s outbursts at the PDP presidential rally at the Tafawa Balewa Square in Lagos last week as a moment of revelation are only partially right. As far as revelations go, that outing neither added anything new nor did it reveal any new trait in a president ever too eager to fly off the handle at the slightest irritation. Aside the familiar effusions of a public figure pretending to be inured to criticism, what emerged was the ultra-defensiveness of a cornered man; a statement made out of a keen sense awareness of the dire implications of performing an elementary public duty.

    Just when one would imagine that the President would take on an issue that many of his “enemies” would rather have him hung on the guillotine in broad daylight, what we saw was a President, who in a fit of indignation, opted to trivialise a malaise that has grown to cancerous proportions. To him, corruption was not just an overblown non-issue; it required no extra-ordinary measures to tame.

    Here is how he puts it:  “If somebody tells you that the best way to fight corruption is to come and arrest your mother and father and show them on television, will that stop corruption? In fact, it will even encourage corruption. We are shooting armed robbers but is that stopping them? So, arresting people and showing them on television sets will do nothing. We must set up institutions and strengthen them in order to prevent people from stealing public money. That is what we are working on and we are succeeding.”

    Seems perfectly in the character of a President, who once, in a fit of indignation over demands that he publicly declare his assets would retort: “The issue of public asset declaration is a matter of personal principle. That is the way I see it, and I don’t give a damn about it, even if you criticise me from heaven. When I was the Vice President, that matter came up, and I told the former President (late Umaru Yar’Adua) let’s not start something that would make us play into the hands of people and create an anomalous situation in the country”.

    That statement, unknown to most Nigerians at the time, would later set not just the moral tone, but the directing principle of the laissez-faire administration.

    The charge of course was that the President was not just soft on corruption, but that the administration which he heads is more than any before it, corruption-compliant. In what appeared as a well-timed testimonial, the President’s “adopted father”, Ibrahim Babangida had, only days before, declared his administration’s no less sordid record as child play compared to brazen looting going on under his godson. Here is how he compared the two eras: “Maybe I have to accept that but anybody with a sense of fairness has no option but to call us saints. I give you an example, in a year; I was making less than $7 billion in oil revenue but in the same period there were governments that were making between $200 billion and $300 billion…With $7 billion, I did the best I could but with $200 billion there is still a lot to be achieved. I don’t have all the facts but if what I read in the papers is what is currently happening, then I think we were saints.”

    Remember that his arch-nemesis, Olusegun Obasanjo had earlier on written off the administration as spendthrift citing what he called the administration’s gross mismanagement of both the excess crude account and the foreign reserve.

    If we expected the president to mount a robust defence of his “record”, it was his moment to sift, select and serve Nigerians a brew of convenient “facts”, a veritable platform to rationalise the all-round paralysis that dogged his so-called fight against corruption. His administration, he would insist, had curbed corruption in the civil service and the agricultural sector. The former via the adoption of IPIS, a payroll system designed to eliminate theft; the other through the Electronic Wallet designed by local IT gurus!

    No pronouncment on the riddle of the “missing” $20 billion and on the inquiry ordered by the President himself. Not even a passing acknowledgement of the pension scam under which some select few, made away with hundreds of billions of naira belonging to Nigeria’s senior citizens. Today, one of the chief culprits, Abdul Rasheed Maina, is reported to be living large somewhere in the Middle East, with free passage generously supplied by the administration under Jonathan’s due process waiver!

    What of the subsidygate under which a supposedly democratic administration would ratchet a bill of $17 billion (approximately N2.7 trillion) on fuel subsidies as against the $8bn (N1.2 trillion) appropriated? Or the quantum jump in the number of fuel importers from six in 2006 to a record 140 in 2011? Now we know why those fictional ships, which reportedly fleeced the nation to the tune of N422, 542,937,668.59 would never be brought to book. In Jonathan’s book, due process trumps all!

    What do we know about the waiver-gate supervised by Jonathan’s finance minister and coordinator of the economy Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala?  It couldn’t get worse that a self-acclaimed business-friendly administration would be seen as encouraging indiscriminate issuance of waivers. But then, it emerged that the administration could not resist helping its partners with the lucrative waivers. Today, we now know, and it is public record, that the administration actually gave out waivers to the tune of N1.4 trillion in the three years between January 2011 and September 2013, as against Minister Okonjo-Iweala’s claim of N171 billion. If we insist on not flogging an already dead issue – the matter of Stella Oduah’s purchase of two bullet-proof vehicles for the princely sum of N225 million, what about the extortion by Abba Moro of N1,000 from applicants seeking the Nigeria Immigration Service job at the end which 19 of them lost their lives? Isn’t minister still sitting pretty as minister in Jonathan’s morally-challenged cabinet?

    The President no doubt has a right to be angry. His anger is understandable. This is an election season. He probably assumed that a day like this would never come. As things are fast turning out, he couldn’t be more wrong. The issue however is that his anger is misdirected. I believe that the target of the President’s anger ought to be the laissez-faire type of leadership which he provided and which his uninspiring team exploited to the hilt. As things stand, he would do a better job of directing his ministers and legion of courtiers to get down to the business of rendering the accounts. Should that be too much to ask after six years of stewardship?

  • Are you better than you were four years ago?

    In the intervening days before Christmas and the New Year, a friend posted on his Facebook page what he called the wonder of the Jonathan revolution for which he believes the rest of us should consider ourselves in debt.  His abode, somewhere in Otta, Ogun State had until that morning, according to him, not experienced outage in electricity supply for eight days running. Like most Jonathan die-hards, he saw this as a signal not just to a new dawn in the power sector but of the infinite possibilities in the coming years should Nigerians be persuaded to gift their lucky President with another term!

    My friend is lucky; he has a job. Asides, he got his December check early enough to make his preparations for the yuletide unlike most Nigerians who had to endure dry fast!

    Days after, I would be a guest on a breakfast television programme in which two other invited guests would sing the praise of the Jonathan administration to high heavens for what they considered as the laudable foundations being laid across all facets of the nation’s life. They spoke about the administration’s efforts to get the economy moving on an even keel. One even talked about our new found freedom under the man with the Goodluck charm. Copious references were made to the ‘revolution’ in the agricultural sector that has seen Thai rice exit family menus – replaced by Abakaliki Rice. Petrol, once elusive, they reminded, is now available. Gone are the days when spent days on queues in search of the essential commodity, they chorused. The refurbished Lugardian contraption –the Jona’ wonders on the rail are not only back, so also is an ambitious 25-year programme to transform them to world class railways. This is aside the massive road rehabilitation programme that has transformed the highways to a beautiful driving experience. And for those who cared to know, they were also too eager to point at the administration’s record in Foreign Direction Investment!

    Ever heard of Transformers’ Nigeria?

    For once, I thought we are finally getting around the main issues around which the February elections ought to be woven. This is obviously a far cry from the exertions of the legion of cyber rodents – if you like cyber assassins – on the payroll of the administration who have done pretty little else than put down anyone who dared to hold up the administration’s record for public scrutiny. To the extent that the issues are finally emerging on the front burner, and given that we have barely six weeks from the Presidential elections, we can at least claim to be making progress just as we do well to remind ourselves of the promises given against what the administration claims to have delivered.

    To be sure, this administration can hardly be accused of rigour of policy let alone of execution. In essence, it is not about holding it to any lofty standards in global best practices but simply to invoke its avowed standards as benchmark for measuring how well it has done in a little more than four years of being in charge.  For this, yours truly’s gratitude – as indeed that of every Nigerian –go to Premium Times for reminding us of the “Goodluck Transform Nigeria” document. As it appears, a good number of Jonathan supporters may not have had the benefit of sighting let alone reading the 28-page document prepared by the transformers.

    Today, I serve some samplers from the document. Prominent on the bill, as one would expect, is the electricity generation target of 16,000 MW to be achieved by 2013. Well, this is 2015! Has the President achieved? You be the judge!

    Next is the promise to rehabilitate all existing power generation, distribution and transmission assets to give a minimum of 6,000 MW of electricity. In this, the National Integrated Power Projects, (NIPP), were to be completed to inject another 4,000 MW to the grid by 2012.  Twenty-four months after, it is still a case of transformation-in-the-works! So also are the promises to harness alternative sources of energy such as coal, wind and solar with another 13, 000 MW target. Gone with the wind. Lest I forget, once upon a time, the administration celebrated the achievement of its attainment of peak generation of 4, 322 MW, which it claimed was “the highest ever attained.” That was in December 2011. By September 2014, it was again time to celebrate a two-year high of 4,044 megawatts (MW) in what was supposed to be progress!

    In the President’s transformation booklet, he had assured among other things to achieve balanced national economic development, with specific focus on increasing oil production and refining capacity. According to the document, the President’s goal was to “stimulate local value-addition and strategically position the nation to meet the domestic demand for the refined products and take advantage of a new market niche-export of refined products”.

    So what happened three years on? The answer is – aplenty. Instead of a boost in oil production, what we have is massive plunder of the oil resources, an industrial scale theft under which the nation is bled to the tune of billions of dollars annually. Don’t ask me what the administration has done to stamp out the menace. The last thing we heard was that the government had farmed out the pipeline-protection contracts to former militants – a case of using the thief to catch another!   As for the prospects of enhanced local refining, the only visible ‘transformation’ is perhaps the spectacular Turn Around of the fortunes of the regime contractors – minus the real TAM – Turn Around Maintenance – of the refineries.

    And what about the gas sector which the President promised would be “developed with special focus on meeting the domestic and individual demands of gas within the country, especially with the anticipated increased demand due to the Visions 20:2020 intent of rejuvenating the manufacturing sector”? If what the administration has been saying is to be taken with a pinch of salt, the nation is still running deficit in gas supply to power plants ordered by former President Olusegun Obasanjo as far back as 2006/7!  What about the world-scale petrochemical and fertilizer companies which the administration promised? Isn’t it the same old story of apathy, neglect and indifference?  I can go on and on! Today, instead of creating a durable framework for road construction, maintenance and rehabilitation, the administration celebrates as achievement, the award of contracts for building and rehabilitation of roads!

    It seems about time the administration’s record is tested with fire. Time to confront the singular question: are you better off today than you were four years ago?

    I invite you, dear reader, to join the debate.

  • Okonjo-Iweala and the missing $30 billion

    From the look of things, the controversies over the missing $30 billion from the Excess Crude Account (ECA), as alleged by Comrade Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, have only just begun. If anything, we expect more of the fireworks in the coming days as both sides present different versions of the same account before the Nigerian public. Expect an administration that has been only too eager to pass off the mess it has made of the nations finances to the latest cycle of dip in global oil prices mounting the offensive as the lid is finally  lifted from its pretences that the nation’s current fiscal challenges are anything but largely internal.

    To say that a day like this would come is actually putting things rather mildly. Put in the context of the General Elections barely two months from now and rather the gloomy economic outlook foisted by the slump in global oil prices that has left the finances of most states on the brink, the current demand on the federal government to render accounts of its stewardship could not have been anything but compelling. Which is unfortunate really because the demands are not just elements of modern governance, they are supposed to be the critical pillars on which our federal practice is erected.

    So it was that Governor Oshiomhole would stir the proverbial hornets nest when he opted to task the federal government to come clean on its record keeping. In this, the governor neither said anything different or new from what his brother governors have expressed at one point or the other about the curious arithmetic in which higher differentials between the budget benchmark and actual sales price of crude have come to mean less and less in the piggy bank!

    With perhaps the exception of the federal government, the scenario which the governor had sought to paint was all too familiar: how come that a nation which has in the last three years assumed a budget benchmark of between $77 to $78 dollars but sold at the average price of $108 a barrel cannot resolve this basic arithmetic?  Put in another context: At a surplus of $30 a barrel and using a projected 2.3 million barrels crude production, how come the ECA is a paltry $3 billion when we should be talking of a figure close to $30 billion?

    Ordinarily, one would assume that the issue is so simple and straight-forward as not to lend to any obfuscation.  It comes to the simple arithmetic of how much crude the nation pumped for the period and the applicable price – minus the operational and marketing expenses.

    The difference of course is that the Comrade Governor thinks there is a gaping hole that demands thorough investigation. Most Nigerians would tend to side with him.  On her part, the nation’s finance chief thinks the governor is playing mischief; she insists that the complex econometric formulae used for the federation account is beyond the ken of simple minded Nigerians and that no dime is missing! Left to the minister, the irrepressible governor ought to be in the dock for “going public with a sweeping, political allegation based on casual, back of envelop calculations!”

    Let’s look at the minister’s defence against the weighty issues raised by the governor more closely. First, she says that the allegations are as “totally untrue”. To the extent that her version of “truth” is at least unknown to the governors or even anyone else for that matter, one assumes that it is one dark secret known only to her and her principal!

    Secondly, she charges that “the comments reflect once again, the unfortunate tendency of some political players to politicise the management of the economy on the basis of half-truths and sundry distortions”. The familiar word again – politicisation! And what’s the correct picture? Here, her self-righteous rage is supposed to be taken as sufficient defence!

    And then of course her reference to the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee meetings – something I consider even more amusing: “Anyone who is familiar with the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee process knows that this is simply not true. The meetings are held every month and commissioners of finance and other officials represent their states and agreements are reached on issues, including sharing of proceeds from the account”!

    I assume that the minister could not be referring here to the Fuji House of Commotion described as monthly FAAC meetings. Had the minister bothered to check on the proceedings in the last three years, she would have found that the picture is nowhere near her portraiture!

    However, beyond the pathetic attempt to muddle things up, what must stand as particularly galling is the insufferable arrogance underlying the minister’s so-called response. In her barely disguised irritation, she may well have said that state governments – as joint-owners of the federation pool – are ignorant, or that they have no business knowing how the accruals into the account are determined!  That’s how bad things can get – the very situation responsible for the current morass in which the nation is said to lose 20 percent of its oil revenue to a cartel of oil thieves!

    Beyond all of these however, it seems that the nation may finally be coming to terms with one profound character flaw in one of the more foremost players in the federal executive – her penchant to trade in cheap blackmail. I have not even here added one proven case of duplicity against her person such as when, contrary to verifiable records from the Nigerian Customs Service at the height of the controversies over the abuse of duty waivers, her ministry actually granted import duty waivers to the tune of N1.4 trillion in three years as against her claim of N171 billion!

    And by the way, only the minister pretends that the latest charges from the governor are anything new. She would admit that much when she observed that Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi has in November 2013 similarly alleged sharp practices in the management of the federation account to the tune of $5 billion. May I remind her that the issue has actually provoked nearly a dozen editorials without the government nearly succeeding in laying out its case?

    The expectation this time would be for the minister, along-side her counterpart in the petroleum ministry, to open the books to Nigerians for scrutiny. After all, she knows enough to affirm that federal government which she represents is right – and the rest of us – wrong. Opening the books to the public would certainly achieve far more than what the current low road of sophistry would ever do.

    Here is wishing you, dear readers, a happy new year!

  • Nigeria’s most dangerous road!

    Nigeria’s most dangerous road!

    Much as everyone would claim to know the extent of the regression in our national lives, the truth is that you never know really how bad things have gone until you experience an avoidable tragedy. That is when one comes to appreciate how bad things have become. Sometime last month, I got this terrible call from a family member that a younger cousin of mine based in Abuja had been shot between Eruku and Obbo-Ile, two communities at the Kwara State end of the Ilorin-Kabba-Lokoja highway.

    A group of armed ‘Fulani herdsmen’ (!), I would find out later, had blocked his car at one of the many notorious failed portions on the highway. They ordered him and his young family out of the car after which they thoroughly ransacked it. Their mission partly accomplished, they turned on the occupants, dispossessing them of cash and other valuables. As the now distraught family was being herded back into their car, a bullet from one of the more trigger-happy members of the gang was said to have hit the young man.

    Of course, he did not die – at least not immediately. The wife who could have taken him to the nearest hospital, unfortunately, could not drive. And as has become increasingly familiar in such circumstances, help from fellow motorists who saw him in the pool of his blood would not be forthcoming. Knowing how dangerous the entire 255 kilometres stretch had become, the unwillingness by the hapless motorists to act the Good Samaritan was perhaps understandable. In the circumstance, the best they could do was to wish the traumatised wife and children luck after which they abandoned them to their fates! With time ticking on and with no signs of help coming their way, the poor chap reportedly took to the wheels obviously believing that he could make it to the nearest infirmary. Well, he never did.

    So, you can understand my reluctance to venture on that road and the anxiety of other family members when only days after the terrible experience, my father, as we say in Christendom, would join the saints triumphant. My still grieving mum of course insisted that the journey was needless at this point in time – more out of hyper-sensitivity to that particular tragedy than anything else. Few of my friends on the other hand would regale me with gory tales of near misses on the same road. In the end, much as I regarded some of the fears as overstated having driven on the road at least twice this year, I needed no convincing that I would require than the normal dose of prayers and fasting before venturing on that road with Yuletide approaching!

    Between the penultimate week, when I finally did, and now, I can now testify that the Ilorin-Kabba-Lokoja road is not just one of the most dangerous routes to ply at this time, the stretch from the Kwara State end of the road right up to Kabba, headquarters of Okunland would number among the most ungoverned swathes on the Nigerian territory! I do not exaggerate. And I say this with all sense of responsibility. Today, there is nothing that needs to be said about terrible state of the road that has not been said.

    I need to be clear: nothing – except of course the countless craters dotting the stretch – has been added to the road constructed in the early 70s when yours truly was barely entering secondary school. The result is that a journey of less than 300 kilometres currently takes a whole day to make – and that for those lucky to make it alive. Of course, I have not even talked of the palpable sense of general insecurity reinforced by the displacement of the regular police by an army of ill-clad vigilantes now spreading along the highways – a window into the state capacity in full retreat. Coincidentally, whereas the vigilantes I encountered tended to be polite, less obtrusive, and in fact more business-like in their approach, the men of the Nigeria Police appears far more interested in checking vehicle particulars most especially tinted glass permits!

    Now, give it to the Kwara State government, they are at least doing something at their end of the road. In the course of the trip, I saw FERMA, the federal road fixing agency at work. I saw heaps of bitumen on the Ilorin-Idofian stretch of the road, evidence of something being done to ameliorate the terrible situation on the road.

    Now, what about my home state of Kogi? The absentee government in Lokoja under Captain Idris Wada is apparently too far gone in its Rip Van Winkle sleep to bother about road and security matters! Although I haven’t visited of late, I am reliably told that the Lokoja- Obajana-Kabba road is worse than hell! Lokoja-Okene-Kabba is no better. The spate of robberies on the two highways, I am told, is perhaps surpassed only by the daily orgy of blood-letting from the Boko Haram! All across the state, there is a sense of siege with neither acknowledgement nor help coming from any quarters – including an administration that claims to govern in their name. That is how bad things have become in my dear state of Kogi!

    Yes, I am aware that leading politicians from the area have done their very best to get federal government attention. I know for a fact that my very good friend, Senator Smart Adeyemi, has been on the neck of Works Minister Mike Onolememen pleading with him to do something. For his efforts, the federal government awarded the contract for the road – GEJ-style – without the needed cash backing! See why our nightmares will endure?

    Finally, let me comment on the siege on the two communities of Egbe and Odo-Ere by armed robbers last week. Of course, the attack on two old generation banks in the two separate communities which left three people dead was, to say the least, predictable given reports that the dare-devil robbers had long served notice! Many thanks to the power of the social media, particularly the Facebook, I actually monitored the siege as it took place. Odo-ere by the way is the capital of Yagba West Local Government where yours truly comes from; I say this lest anyone dares to accuse me of writing fiction. The question I couldn’t resist at the end of the siege was – where was the police? What did the absentee government, which had the experience of the last few years to guide, do while the siege lasted?

    No doubt, some Nigerians are truly endangered.

  • Jona’s wonder stoves

    Jona’s wonder stoves

    Given the current tempo of politics, it is understandable that most Nigerians would have either missed out or could not be bothered with one of the more curious outcomes of the Federal Executive Council meeting of last week. I refer here to the approval by the council for the procurement of 750,000 units of clean cooking stoves and 18,000 ‘wonder bags’ under the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves initiative at a princely cost of N9.2 billion to the treasury. The contract, with a completion period of 12 weeks, is said to have been awarded to Messrs Integra Renewable Energy Services Limited, a South African firm. The stoves and wonder bags are said to be meant for women in the rural areas, to be distributed under the National Clean Cooking Scheme.

    A fortnight ago on this page, I had argued in the context of our current economic travails that the problems facing the nation, is essentially a thinking one. I sought to push the point that our problems have merely been exacerbated by the current, though predictable, cycle of sliding oil prices. That interjection was supposed to be one long shot effort to draw attention to the lack of depth ruling at the highest echelon of our government on the one hand, and the atrocious choices being foisted on the citizens by the unfeeling, greedy and rapacious governing elite on the other.

    In the light of the latest matter of stoves, I find it necesary to pursue the matter further, given what is now an emerging pattern of cynical conversion of the misery of the people in furtherance of less than altruistic goals. If the leadership has lost the capacity to suffer shame, Nigerians ought to be embarrassed that their government has gone shopping for something as ordinary as cooking stoves in the guise of appearing to be doing something about a global problem. That it is just one of those brain-waves to enrich some powerful and connected fellows makes it terrible.

    Without any doubt, it seems to me one other instance when a well intended project has been hijacked by powerful forces. As a matter of fact, I discovered that the initiative actually belongs to the Federal Ministry of Environment under its  Renewable Energy Programme. The programme is said to be in fulfilment of the country’s obligation to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and as part of African strategy on voluntary emission reduction. The big idea behind it, again I am further told, is to get citizens to move from extant practices of tree-felling for firewood and the use of other fossil fuels known to contribute to greenhouses gases in favour of cleaner and more efficient energy – laudable initiative  by any standards. In the hand of a contracto-crazy government, it has since been reduced to a grotesque scheme to fleece the treasury and/or to perpetrate capital flight!

    Part of the debauchery that governance has been reduced under the Jonathan administration is the current situation in which the weekly meetings of the Federal Executive Council have been reduced to mere clearing house for contracts. I recall Obiageli Ezekwesili, former education minister warning of the trend not too long ago when she noted: “The leaders of other nations spend their times thinking about vision, strategy and policy, the others spend their time haggling over contracts. It is time for FEC to let go of spending its time on mundane things.” If it seems any unflatering that our own FEC does pretty little else than dispense contracts these days, it is even worse than the matter is about a local household item that our local metal workers have long mastered the art of their production!

    I couldn’t agree more with the chairperson of Edo State Market Women Association, Blackie Omoregie as reported by the online medium, Premium Times, when she described the plan as a misplaced priority. Her words:  “what we need now most is uninterrupted electricity to ensure that women selling pure water, grinding pepper and others, using electricity are not forced into incurring extra expenses of purchasing fuel before they can transact their businesses, not cooking stove…I will also want to remind the Federal Government to stop importing what we can produce in Nigeria here, such as this cooking stove they are talking of. We can produce cooking stove in Nigeria, we don’t need to import it and N9.2 billion is a lot of money that can create jobs for our local manufacturers. So, if the Federal Government is bent on giving cooking stove to the rural women because election is coming, let it be produced here in Nigeria”.

    I have deliberately quote the Edo market women leader in great length if only to highlight the simple but elementary economics often lost on the leaders in their decision-making process.

    To get back to my earlier point about what makes the business stink. If it seems convinient for our government to go shopping abroad for solutions that can be found locally, we must constantly remind them that nothing in the global drive for clean cooking remotely suggests that home-grown solutions cannot be found. So, what’s PRODA and other research and development agencies doing if they cannot develop simple, affordable but wholly home-grown technologies for our rural folks? Of course, the choice of a foreign firm to execute the contract would appear deliberate; whoever thinks it is not does not understand how the minds of our officials work. That’s the way things are; precisely the way they are designed to work in our clime!

    By the way, where lies the urgency?  Surely, the debate about global warming did not start yesterday. It certainly would not end tomorrow – or in the next 12 weeks during which the contract is supposed to have been delivered. As if we do not know that the only thing urgent in the messy business is the elections barely 10 weeks away!

     

  • Transformers at work

    Transformers at work

    Just as one would imagine, Nigerians have since taken to the overdrive in the wake of the crisis of falling oil prices. For a crisis that took nearly a decade to berth, it is a revelation of how pretty little has changed that the debate has dwelt largely on short-term, mitigating measures. We saw this in the knee-jerk response by the federal government when it announced a rash of barely well-thought out measures to usher in a season of austerity penultimate week. The Central Bank of Nigeria has since complemented these with equal but no less lethal dose of measures: devaluation and a hike in interest rates, both of which have the overriding effects of further shrinking an economy in dire need of muscle to lift it. Now, the expectation is that the measures would somehow help douse the fires stoked by falling crude oil prices. Such an illusion!

    Of course, it’s merely a return to the ancien regime of unworkable therapies; solutions tailor-made to deliver to maximum pain all in the guise of treating an ancient ailment. It’s the old pathway – of adjustment, belt-tightening and austerity – which speaks to nothing else than the need to balance government’s consumptive books.

    The question of whether any lessons have been learnt from previous experience would seem entirely superfluous, at least at this time. The nation, after all, is supposed to be in crisis of such a nature that could be rightly termed global, forces over which the managers of Nigeria’s economy have little or no control. However, for an economy that’s probably the most dissected in the entire universe, the missed opportunities of the past decade and the criminal mismanagement which attenuated it should ordinarily provide enough to chew upon at least to the extent these have berthed in the current so-called crisis.

    As it is, there is really no use crying over split milk. One thing that is clear however that there can be no running away from the gross misunderstanding, if not the wrong assumptions that underlie the current therapies as proposed by the government and its banker.

    In this regard, I found myself reflecting on a statement made by the Country Director of the World Bank in Nigeria, Omo Ruhl, some years ago. According to the World Bank chief, “Nigeria is not a mono-product economy, it is a mono-revenue economy and a mono-export economy because in the other sectors there are no exports, very low fiscal revenues, that is where your challenge is but oil is only 17 per cent of your GDP, 83 per cent is everything else taken together”.

    To the above, he would add:  “Oil is actually the fourth largest sector of the Nigerian economy, the largest sector is agriculture, the second largest sector is wholesale and retail and services is the third largest. So what Nigeria should do is focus on propelling these other sectors forward so that they can also export, so that you are less dependent on oil and finding ways of generating revenues for the government for legitimate investment in infrastructure, health and education”.

    That statement would seem no less true in Nigeria’s post-rebased economy as it was three years ago when it was made.  My quick check actually revealed that the share of the oil economy to the GDP shrank to 14.40 percent in 2013 although petroleum exports revenue still accounts for over 90 per cent of total exports revenue.

    The implication of the above should not be lost. The contribution of the non-oil segment of the economy has been grossly understated. Here, we are talking of a sector that accounts for more than 85 percent of the GDP. Even at normal times, one would have expected that the segment would constitute the pivot around which the economy is expected to spin. Under an emergency, that segment naturally assumes the status of the proverbial golden hen deserving of extraordinary protection from the fiscal and monetary authorities.

    But what do we get? Policies so surreal, so utterly skewed towards speculation that they may have been conceived in the virtual Island of Ashtabula!

    Let me be clear here: some of the measures such as the cleaning up of government finances as proposed by Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala have some merit. The problem is that we have been on that road for more than 10 years with little to show for it in practical terms. Have we not lived with the pension scam, the subsidy-gate and all manners of industrial scale thefts that have reduced the science of public finance to a sham? What about the menace of ghost workers known to rob the treasury of billions annually? A case of one being less toxic than the other?

    So much about the so-called luxury tax; what’s the big deal about the tax on goods consumed by Nigeria’s idle rich when a single waiver by a highly connected individual can actually fetch the equivalent of 10 years luxury tax bill? And how come nobody has ever thought about the line of revenue before now despite the deficit holes in successive cycle of budgets?

    I must admit that the option of devaluation, the hike in Monetary Policy Rate and the raise in Cash Reserve Ratio for private sector funds is the textbook stuff. Devaluation isn’t only a way to conserve foreign exchange; it has the dual advantage of boosting exports. Classic textbook stuff! Yes, it all makes sense: oil has run into troubled times in the global marketplace hence the need to curb the pressure on the foreign reserve. Time to encourage local producers to take to export to earn more foreign exchange. A win-win? Bad news. Nothing aside crude oil and raw cassava, to export. Both share the same fate of declining global prices!

    Left however to the CBN, the real source of headache is the activities of the band of speculators swarming on the foreign reserves. Now that is supposed to be news in an economy where just about any soldier of fortune who calls himself foreign investor can make a run on our reserves! Of course, the question of tracking the shadowy group whose activities constitute, in the reasoning of the apex bank, economic sabotage would seem academic in the circumstance.

    So what to do? Let everyone bite the bullet. Devalue the currency; get everyone in a non-discriminatory way to pay more for their forex requirements. It does not matter whether you are bringing in industrial inputs, finished goods or doing capital flight.  Second, raise the lending rates to deter borrowing and hence reduce so-called liquidity even at the risk of sounding the death knell for the real sector already starved of its vital juice. With more money available to the federal and state governments to spend, and with money to be made from arbitrage, everyone, except the odd segment producing the 85 percent of the GDP, should be happy.

    How about that as transformation; their transformation.

     

  • Our thinking problem!

    Our thinking problem!

    If you needed evidence of how utterly unimaginative those in charge of the management of the nation’s economy are, one needed to look no further than the placebo rolled out by finance minister and coordinating minister of the economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala last week in response to the latest cycle of falling oil prices. Having the nation live under the throes of “industrial scale theft” under which more than 20 percent of projected earnings from oil are either stolen or unrealisable from month to month, the denial of the emergency could not have come as a surprise to anyone.

    Little wonder the assurance by our internationalist finance minister, that the ill-winds winds will soon blow over; hence her cocktail of measures more astounding by their sheer ordinariness. As panacea, the 2015 Budget oil price benchmark is pegged at $73 per barrel as against $78 earlier proposed; now foreign travels by civil servants are axed unless for those deemed as absolutely necessary; the same goes for foreign training programmes except those with foreign sponsorship. To complement the measures is a renewed push to significantly increasing non-oil revenue via an aggressive tax administration under which owners of private jets, yachts and lovers of Champagne and other luxury goods pay more tax.

    Nigerians obviously know where all of these are going. Already, the word is out: Nigerians should be prepared to further tighten their belts. For sure, a number of projects with potentials to renew the economy will be put on hold in the next fiscal year. Already, the crunch has created the first victim in the naira. Last weekend, the national currency hit the nadir at N180 to the United States dollars in the parallel market. By the way, with our Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) taking to the hyper-hustling to sell their man, there would be enough time to explain the sudden appetite for the greenback; suffice to say however that the development can only be anything but good news in a nation which relies wholesale on imports all manners of manufacturers.

    And just in case anyone is tempted to imagine that the falling oil prices would bring some respite to motorists currently living under the threat of subsidy removal, the truth is that there can be no such thing: whatever differentials that might have existed by the fact of the falling prices have been gobbled in the event of the free fall of the naira! That shouldn’t be hard to understand: it is an in-built logic of Nigeria’s macro-economy.

    To go back to the basic point, if Nigerians are any troubled at the remedy proposed, it must be not only from the lack of sensitivity to the issues which informed the belt-tightening in the first place, notably, the wave of exogenous forces which have seen oil fortunes plummet in the global market place. One refers here to the shale oil revolution and the improved fuel-efficiency standards particularly in the United States which have eventuated in the cutback, or as it seems increasingly likely, raises the prospects of elimination of demand by the country for Nigeria’s oil. Add that to the global oversupply by nearly 10 percent of current demands; the picture that emerges is one of a long dark night for oil producers.

    This is where the astounding lack of creativity in the design of what is supposed to be the therapy comes as troubling. For while it was sufficient for the authors and finishers of the transformation agenda to mount the high road of cant in their familiar therapy of kicking problems down the road, it was also an instance in which the typically bored but overpaid policy wonks would show their true colours in seeking to present the problem as a fiscal or better still- a budget problem as against what is fundamentally a thinking problem.

    No doubt, the slump in the price of oil presents enormous challenges particularly at this time. Never mind that the nation has had to endure the more destabilising phenomenon of oil theft now acclaimed to have attained industrial scale for more than three years running – something an administration less prone to abdication could have brought under control. The assumption here is that the administration sees the former as a greater threat than the former. I guess it is entitled to its delusions.

    Howbeit, the choice at this time, is neither one between crying over split milk nor one of endless lamentation over what could have been. To be sure, the choice facing the country over the potential losses from falling oil prices, which at the moment comes to some 20 percent, is hardly one that demands that citizens put on sackcloth and ashes. For sure, the forces can be mitigated by clear-headed policies. The problem here is that those in charge, as yet, do not appear to have any profound understanding of the looming emergency let alone the talk of fashioning an appropriate robust, strategic response. For much as there can be no understating the opportunity cost of the decade of missed opportunities, which the Jonathan administration must see itself as no less complicit, the mundane thinking going on at the highest levels of government, something that The Nation’s perceptive columnist Idowu Akinlotan once described as extravagant lack of ambition, can only further compound the nation’s development dilemma.

    Where do we go? Most certainly, the choice cannot be any clearer today than it was a decade or two ago. A thousand austerity measures, to be sure, offers no guarantee of future prosperity; if anything, it might even compound the problems. The challenge therefore seems as simple as finding the formula to unleash the nation’s potentials in manufacturing, in services and in all sectors. It is all about building the capacity of the economy – boosting the skills pool and investment in vital infrastructure. An economic orthodoxy which seeks to lock away the nation’s wealth in foreign shores in the guise of saving for the rainy day seems hardly the best bet in the circumstance.

  • An enforcer on rampage?

    An enforcer on rampage?

    It was expected that the purveyors of the morality of the specious kind would seek to muddle the issues involved in the defection of House of Representatives Speaker, the Rt. Hon Aminu Tambuwal in their bid to exact brutal assault of the constitution of the republic. From the look of things, the bizarre act, by the acting Inspector General of Police, Suleiman Abba, of stripping the Speaker of his security details merely presents a foretaste of more brazen acts of impunity by an increasingly out-of-control administration.

    Let me at once state that of all the arguments that have been made on the defection of the Number 4 citizen, the most seductive one has been the one which goes that the Speaker ought to have vacated his seat the very moment he announced his defection from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC) that Tuesday October 28 – on moral grounds!

    Morality? Who is talking morality? The matadors of power for whom everything is game?

    I digress.

    The issue here is the status Rt. Hon Tambuwal. To be clear, the argument of the partisans, including our hordes of netizens that the Speaker ought to have done the ‘needful’ the very moment he opted to part ways with the party that sponsored him into parliament is neither here nor there. To the extent that he has done nothing of their expected “needful” – on moral or immoral grounds – he remains Speaker of the House of Representatives!

    I have heard, and I find it ingenious as well as amusing, the argument that section 68 (1) (g) is self-actuating! That the provision deems the Speaker to have vacated his seat as a member of the House and by extension his position as speaker the very moment he defected from his former party! I daresay that the position is a new one –an unfathomable constitutional absurdity as we shall see presently.

    Now, let’s proceed from the known. We start with Section 68(1) (g). It says: “A member of the Senate or of the House of Representatives shall vacate his seat in the House of which he is a member if;

    (g) being a person whose election to the House was sponsored by a political party, he becomes a member of another political party before the expiration of the period for which that House was elected; Provided that his membership of the latter political party is not as a result of a division in the political party of which he was previously a member or of a merger of two or more political parties or factions by one of which he was previously sponsored”.

    So what to do in the case of a breach of that provision? Here is what the constitution says in Section 68(2): “The President of the Senate or the Speaker of the House of Representatives, as the case may be, shall give effect to the provisions of subsection (1) of this section, so however that the President of the Senate or the Speaker of the House of Representatives or a member shall first present evidence satisfactory to the House concerned that any of the provisions of that subsection has become applicable in respect of that member”.

    Not being a lawyer, my understanding of the foregoing is that the constitution leaves no room for the rule of arbitrariness under which an extraneous party would hide to foist the rule of mischief. Not only is the section clear about the authority to declare any seat vacant, it establishes the rule of the process to be followed. That process obviously begins and terminates in the House while disputes and controversies arising there from are expected to be settled at the courts!

    Which is what makes the directive of Jonathan’s enforcer, Suleiman Abba, inexplicable.  My humble view is that Nigerians should do a textual analysis of the IG’s statement. For the records, here is what it text said: “In view of the recent defection by the Right Honourable Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC)” and, “Having regard to the clear provision of section 68(1) (g) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended, the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) has redeployed its personnel attached to his office”.

    Whose office? The office of Tambuwal or the Office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives? This is where I detect a plot more sinister than what most people presently understand it to be. For if it seems barely understandable that Tambuwal would be summarily tried, convicted and sentenced in the court of IG Abba to please his PDP taskmasters, that the entire institution of the House that would be put in abeyance under the authority of the IG would pass for less than tolerable!

    Now, we know what the law says. For emphasis, the process of declaring a seat vacant begins with a member first presenting evidence that is satisfactory to the House. The same rule presumes that members would deliberate on the evidence after which it would then pronounce a verdict. That is the law. As for the position of the Speaker, the rule of the House is no less clear: the members require two-third majority to remove the Speaker. And if I may add, the business of removing Tambuwal or declaring his seat vacant lies between the House and the courts! The fact that neither Abba nor his PDP sponsors belong to either makes their desperation despicable. Worse is that an officer sworn to uphold the law has shown such a degree of bias that borders on impunity.

    If you ask me, I will urge that the Senate make the IGP’s cup to pass over Suleiman Abba. He seems better cut out for Wadata Plaza – the abode of intrigues, headquarters and home of Impunity Incorporated.  To confirm him as chief of police at these difficult times is to grant an open licence to impunity!  Nigeria deserves a better top cop.