The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • The god of Zimbabwe

    The god of Zimbabwe

    His visage looks eerily cadaverous on the front page of a national newspaper. He has won an election yet again but it seems elections have worn him. It must be deliberate that the editor had pasted that old, wizened mug on his cover so bold and large apparently exhibiting a vicarious, impotent rage on the 5th coming of Robert Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe. The 90-year-old overlord of the impoverished southern African country is declared to have won his country’s presidential election once again by a wide margin last Sunday. He has another 5-year term by which end he would have been 95 years old.

    At an age when most men can hardly stand, how much more stand for an election, Mugabe’s political longevity must have a correlation to his physiological endowments. Those who thought that age and indeed, senility would have mellowed the old fox were nonplussed and even chagrined at the ‘failure’ of Morgan Tsvangirai , his main opponent in the last few years, to send him into retirement. Mugabe who runs under Zanu-PF has led Zimbabwe since independence from Britain since 1980 won by 61 per cent against 34 per cent by Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change, (MDC). Zanu-PF also secured 152 of the 210 seats in parliament availing Mugabe a two-thirds majority to re-write Zimbabwe’s constitution in his own persona and even flowery words. By the time he is through, heavens know Mugabe would transmogrify into a deity and continue to rule Zimbabwe by proxy. A little tinkering of the constitution will make sure of that.

    Having achieved life presidency by hook and crook, now with the instrumentality of the constitution, he would fashion out for his self the title of ETERNAL PRESIDENT. It would be enshrined in the book of course, so that it would be a sacrilege to pronounce that Mugabe died; he will only transmute to a higher realm from whence he would continue to rule his beloved country. On bended knees and with heads perpetually bowed in worship, his people will continue to receive his divine guidance and direction from carefully taped voice-overs. Beware, Mugabe will not disappoint.

    He never disappointed. The classic African big man; a post-colonial contraption in the mold of Idi Amin of Uganda, Hastings Banda of Malawi, Mobutu Sese Seko of Congo to name a few, he outfoxed all his opponents (like Joshua Nkomo) and outlived most of his contemporaries. Having played a key role in winning independence for Zimbabwe from errant British imperialists, power simply shifted from one coloniser to another. He has held his country in thrall for 33 years using all sorts of tricks – from brute force and intimidation to divide and rule; hunger and poverty.

    It is discomfiting that the African Union’s election observers considered Zimbabwe’s election free and fair but it is not in the least surprising if you remember that the leader of the observer team is a certain Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who is not known to be enamoured of free and fair election nor is he a man given naturally to procedural integrity or democratic principles. It is on record that domestic monitors said a large number were unable to vote; the US described the election as a “deeply flawed process”, Australia suggests a fresh poll and a commissioner in the electoral commission resigned in disgust. Of course, Tvangirai has refused to acknowledge defeat, insisting that he would not legitimise a “fraudulent” and “stolen” election.

    Now that Mugabe has done his time, squandered his children’s and is now wasting his grand children’s era, may we all just say, all hail the god of Zimbabwe!

     

  • Finally, the 2013 budget is parsed

    Hurray, Nigeria eventually has an appropriation document to run with as the National Assembly (NASS) finally approves this year’s budget. This is coming in the third quarter of the year when most other countries are fine-tuning their 2014 budget. You may argue that the budget had been running but that must be only on a crutch as the executive and legislative arms of government engaged in a protracted battle of (no) wits. As our governments are wont, no explanations were proffered as to the root of the crisis; as to why the economy had to run at half capacity for the better part of the year. As in most other things, we are only left to our conjectures.

    Even in the best of times when our budgets suffered no high-wire altercations and horse-trading, our fiscal documents virtually amounted to naught; now it seems doomed on delivery. What was at issue? The untold story is that the executive arm would not ‘accommodate’ the NASS, especially as concerns their allocations for constituency projects. The sums proposed by the lawmakers were viciously slashed by the presidency team. In an angry reprisal, NASS reached for a machete and recklessly slashed the Bill almost beyond the recognition of its owners. In some cases, the sharks cut so deep they almost crunched bones. This naturally left the document in tatters leaving the Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy (CME) in pitiful distress.

    The lawmakers couldn’t be bothered, they in fact went ahead to pass the Bill in such miserably inoperable state warning that they would not entertain any supplementary Bill. But this particular one, they let it be known, was subject to adjustment after all concerned have ‘reasoned’ together. This was exactly what happened: some constituency funds not less than N50 billion was released, to be warehoused and disbursed by the Minister of Special Duties. The Ministry of Works and not the legislators would award and execute all the constituency projects accordingly. (Aside: they could tell that to the marines; Nigerians know better than that). The important point to note here, however, is that it was only after this uncanny ‘accommodation’ was reached that the NASS went back to the vomit of a budget they refused to pass and passed it after some rapid sessions.

    If you thought that there were some reasons, principled or not, why the lawmakers held the country to ransom for seven months, there is not a single one. At least that is what came out when they eventually re-passed the Bill on July 25. Both the rejected Bill and the one just passed are estimated at N5 trillion. The difference between the twain is just about N162 million. The NASS simply reinstated the portions of the budget they had chopped off in anger.

    Now you see why our budgets hardly work: they are often not based on sound economic bases; personal interests often override patriotism and reason. Too much viruses are injected into the document that it is diseased and probably dead by the time it reaches implementation stage. Do you see why year-on-year the budget increases yet our infrastructure shrinks and we borrow even more? Can you begin to fathom why our lawmakers are the highest paid in the world by miles? Yet they earn so much for doing no work as a recent report show that about one-third of our senators have not sponsored nary a bill after two year in office. They probably have been absentee lawmakers hardly attending sessions yet their bank alerts would ring frequently like a busy supermarket’s cash register (mind you they don’t use those noisy analogue machines anymore!).

    To think that this matter we toy with is the most important business of our lawmakers. You see why we are in perpetual crises, you see why our youths are unemployed; you see why see why the country is in perpetual retreat? Our leaders mess around with the most important task we have assigned them.

     

  • APC: Of paradigm shift and power shift

    A major political epoch may yet have berthed in Nigeria last week. The registration of the All Progressives Congress, (APC) last Wednesday by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) suggests the beginning of a phenomenon that may change Nigeria’s political equation and calculations in the years ahead. For once in the political history of Nigeria, it can be said that a brave new era peeps from the horizon.

    Take a bow Professor Attahiru Jega and your team at INEC for overcoming the storm of subterfuge apparently raised by the ‘other’ party to torpedo the APC dream. There was no doubt that INEC came under immense pressure to run members of the new party through the hoops if not entirely scuttle their mission to give birth to a new party. No sooner did the merging parties pronounce their name than a flurry of charlatans and scallywags scurried to the INEC office to file registration papers using the same acronyms, APC. Obviously awash with slush fund, the more active of the miscreants were quick to hire both an elaborate office and a handful of crowd to pose as members. Relishing their brazen forage in political muck, the rabble was also noisome and litigious in the way of political touts. When they were not in the press exhibiting their vacuous state of mind, they are in the courts relentlessly bringing their folly to bear on court processes.

    Members of the small ‘apc’ are obviously, hirelings reminiscent of the infamous Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) led by Chief Arthur Nzeribe, which was deployed to scuttle the June 12, 1993 election. But INEC on this score exhibited integrity and stood strictly by its rules. It is not the group that is first to declare interest in a name that owns it but that which meets all the stringent conditions precedent. Hardball salutes INEC for showing that it has the capacity to stand firm and unshaken at the critical junctures of the electoral process. The commission must brace itself for more intense buffeting by anti-progressive forces for they will get desperate as they get their comuppance in the days ahead. The INEC team will only stand and survive by the quality of institution it manages to build and history will return its verdict accordingly.

    Beyond the role of INEC, greater laudation will of course go to the arrowheads of this emerging epoch – the leaders of the merging parties: the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the All Nigeria Peoples Party, (ANPP). Attempt to merge political parties of this magnitude in the past had failed woefully. Not because the proponents were less tenacious but because ruling parties in Nigeria usually brook no opposition. To put opposition parties on the spin and tear them apart is probably one of the easiest political tasks for any ruling party in Nigeria. The arena is full of political whores who would bend very low at the jingle of a few coins.

    Getting registered is the first, albeit important part; now is the time for the real work. APC visioners and leaders must take a few points to heart: one, the opponent will not sleep it will remain hard at work to extirpate the new baby. Two, APC must work hard and indeed go out of its way to rally true progressives from every corner of the country and as an adjunct it must work at being truly national (it’s a bit skewed now). And finally, it must set and define noble agendas that Nigerians can buy into and which must include restructuring the federation, killing corruption and letting the best minds handle the mantle of leadership. APC must be a paradigm shift and not power shift.

  • A septuagenarian and his money are soon parted

    It is said that the curse of mammon is that you never could have enough and indeed, the real tragedy is that the more you have, the more you crave. This encapsulates the story of a 73-year-old man named simply Steven by the press (do they mean Simple Steven?). The sad saga of this Central Bank of Nigeria retiree is that he has lost about N10 million apparently of his pension benefits to phone fraudsters. Why would a septuagenarian gamble away so much money in search of more money? What would a man in the twilight of life want to do with N350 million, which was the jackpot he sought to hit will trading the N10 million he had in hand?

    It is true that nearly every man would want even more money even when he had no need for it, Mr. Steven’s was a pathetic case that we all must reflect upon if only to avoid falling victim. As the story which happened in Lagos, Nigeria goes, Pa Steven received a text message on his mobile phone that he had won N2 million for using up N200.00 airtime in two weeks in an Airtel promo. This was in September 2011. He was given a number, purportedly of an officer in the telecoms company, Airtel.

    The ‘Airtel staff’ of course confirmed Pa Steven’s winning, he took all his particulars, including banking details. This was followed by a request that he would have to pay 4.8 per cent of the winning as “Charge on Turnover, COT”. This amounted to N264, 200 which Pa Steven paid most excitedly, as he recounted. If you thought they would pay him the balance of the N2 million then beware for you are a candidate for a cheap scam too. Of course, it is all a set up to pick the old man clean. Soon enough they told him he had been listed in a mega promo which superseded the peanuts he had ‘won’.

    And pronto, Papa had won N350 million bumper raffle in the Airtel Club 10 promo. He was provided a name and number to contact at the Airtel head office in Lagos for the harvest of his life. The old man was beside himself with joy. What good fortune in the evening of his life he thought. But he was soon asked to pay N2 million ‘functional fee’ and after he made ‘confirmations’ according to him, he was again glad to pay. What is paltry N2 million to 350 big ones? Pa Steven promptly dashed over to GTB and paid up. As he warmed up to begin to draw from his pot of luck, not so fast, they told him: another ‘small’ N3 million is needed; and yet another N4million… his alarm finally went off. What a rusty alarm it must be!

    It was at this K-legged juncture more than one year after he started this voodoo business that it dawned on him that he just might have been suckered. At least Papa still had the presence of mind to approach the police. Operatives of the Special Fraud Unit (SFU), Ikoyi, Lagos, directed Papa to play along with the scammers by paying into one of their accounts in Keystone Bank. As one of the shadowy fellows, a 22-year-old tried to cash the money, he was nabbed. The miscreant had opened the special utility account with forged particulars but he lied that he was merely helping friends to receive. He had also lied that he was an orphan but his mother was soon to show up at the police station.

    Why you may wonder why Pa Steven fell for the cheapest trick in the con book, how do we explain the role of the banks mentioned in this sordid tale? One had some comfort when transactions were carried out through the banks but not anymore. And the moral of this is that a little kobo in your hand is worth more that the big naira you are dreaming about.

  • NEITI: NNPC, Okonjo-Iweala splurging in our crude oil

    Readers of this column would conclude that Hardball has become rather morbidly obsessed with the goings-on in Nigeria’s oil industry and the quick response is: wouldn’t you be if some fellows are draining your life-blood and splurging around in it? This is the picture that has emerged in recent years concerning Nigeria’s rich hydrocarbon assets: we see an image of adults engaged in ceaseless and relentless mud fights without any intention whatsoever to quit messing around and clean up the mess. It is as if they have been in the mud so long that they have become encrusted in it.

    The recent report of the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiatives (NEITI) is yet another ugly signpost. NEITI’s 2009 – 2011 oil and gas physical and process audit report turns out even more damning than the previous ones. The total sum of N273 billion ($8 billion) is at stake having not been remitted to the Federation Account. Between the petroleum ministry, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and sundry subsidiaries, this amount cannot be accounted for. Broken down further, more than 136 million barrels of crude oil estimated at $10.9 billion was lost to theft and sabotage in the period under review. Another highlight is a total payment of N3 trillion (supposedly as subsidy) to importers of refined petroleum products.

    It is always a long woe tale that Nigerians reap from her oil sector: every audit reports, whether from NEITI, National Assembly committee panels, Auditor-General’s office, or independent reports, the results have been the same, confounding sleaze, rampaging corruption, sheer brigandage and inefficiency. Speaking at a presentation ceremony (yes, they celebrate these sordid figures) of the report in Abuja last Monday, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Mr. Andrew Yakubu, only made light of this grave national issue: “I am glad that the chairman (of NEITI), in his remark, clearly stated that there is a remarkable improvement between the past and today. So we will get there,” chimed the NNPC big man.

    No sir, we will never get there; we will get nowhere with you and your ilk splurging in the muck of our oil industry and the reason, Hardball states, is that you are not working and you have no intention to work. When was the last time NNPC issued an annual report of its financials? Just last year, when the influential The Africa Reports was preparing its Top 500 African Companies, it could not get figures from NNPC. Here is the magazine’s damning comment in its February 2013 issue: “…many of the corrupt, inflexibly and badly managed state-owned enterprises are improving their ways. While some remain opaque – notably the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation which would arguably show as one of the largest companies in Africa but does not submit information to our researchers…”

    Because we have opaque leaders running opaque governments, naturally, state-owned firms will operate under a heavy cloud of opaqueness. This is why in a continent in which NNPC operates, Algerian, Angolan, Moroccan and South African oil firms are quoted as leading the charge. SONATRACH, the Algerian oil mogul will spend $80 billion in the next four year to further grow her burgeoning oil estate. This will include four brand new refineries in four years at the cost of $14 billion. SAMIR, the Moroccan giant recently opened a new distillation unit in its existing refinery with a capacity of 4 million tonnes of refined products per year; and South Africa’s petrochemical conglomerate, SASOL is planning to build a pioneering gas-to-liquids plant in the US state of Louisiana to take advantage of the shale gas revolution. Examples of serious people doing serious work even in Africa, abound.

    You see why Hardball says we will never get anywhere with people like Mr. Yakubu and his quick-fingered bosses splurging in our oil? They can’t even give us basic annual accounts of their transactions! What a pity.

  • When ‘Yemoja’ came to Ibadan

    Yemoja’ stopped by in Ibadan last week and Ile Oluyole came to an abrupt stop, almost imploding. It was as if the 1.3 million inhabitants of the ancient city had been looking forward to the coming of that Yoruba deity of motherhood and fecundity. It was a mass of people perhaps starved of some essential maternal succor that thronged to a little house at Isale Asaka, Foko area of Ibadan city, the capital of Oyo State last week. News had raced through the metropolis mid-afternoon of last Tuesday that a ‘mermaid’ had come a-visiting and it required the intervention of the State Police Command to contain the situation.

    As Hardball later discerned, the curio was sooner trampled under the stampeding feet of a rather curious crowd yet nobody sighted the object and none could tell the true story. But the story as it turned out, is simple and straight forward: a fishmonger, Mrs. Ramotalai Adeyemo, had found a strange creature packed among a row of frozen fish as she opened a carton of her ware. Of course, this could not be a fish: this jelly-bodied thing with numerous ‘hands’ must be a portent, a visitation from another world. News of it did not only fly swiftly, legends grew wings and the city was agog in a matter of hours. The first two people who tried to snap shots of the long-dead, frozen creature claimed their mobile phones shattered mysteriously. Thus the first taboo was quickly established: snap it at your (phone’s) peril.

    It was soon pronounced to be omo Yemoja, supposedly a baby mermaid. But Yemoja is not exactly a mermaid; it is the goddess of motherhood in Yoruba traditional religion still worshipped by may devotees in Osun, Osogbo. On the first day, though hardly anyone else saw the creature apart from Ramotalai the fish seller and a few in her compound, yet everyone in town had a description of it. One account was that though it was a small creature initially, it kept growing bigger and had the characteristics of a fish from waist down and that of human in the upper body with mouth, nose, eyes and long hair to boot. It was even said to have spoken to Ramota, urging her not to expose it and promising to reward her financially.

    Then there was the tussle for the custodianship of the creature. A Muslim cleric nearby who Ramota ran to initially had offered prayers and made ablution. An Osun worshipper insisted that the creature was on a mission to uplift Ramota financially if only she would heed the message which had been long in coming. While all this went on and the crowd was getting restive, the traditionalists weighed in and headed to the police seeking permission to lay hold of the creature, threatening cataclysmic flooding of the city if they were denied possession. The police fearing that the city might implode pulled in Ramota.

    Even the ‘area boys’ were not left out, unable to sight the ‘mermaid’ all day and having an inkling that the creature may well be a harbinger of great wealth, they broke into Ramota’s house in the night and ransacked the place obviously in search of omo Yemoja. By the following day, the State Command of the Police eventually got hold of the little creature and it turned out to be an octopus, they announced. But it looks more like a squid because it has more than eight tentacles from the photographs made available.

    Thus ended most anti-climactically, the story of the visit of ‘Yemoja’ to Oluyole, but the lesson not to be missed is that our towns and cities across the country are in ferment; too many unengaged and disoriented people seeking purpose, meaning and direction. It’s a long road to travel yet.

     

  • The Annual General Meeting (AGM) – A fable

    Once upon a time; in fact this fable is set in this present age of corporate governance, due process and shareholder power. This story is of this age in which the shareholder is akin to the voter: but though the shareholder like the voter, has all the power to change boards and governments, that happens only on paper. The company board, like government, is a monster that eats up the mass of people which brought it to power. So power (let’s not delude ourselves) still lies with the wielder and not the voter or the shareholder. The men of power would first violate the vaults and treasuries and fortify themselves so that when they cough the shareholder and voter will catch fever.

    But sorry this is not about business ethics or philosophy, it is a simply fable about a mining conglomerate, let’s call it OPL 1000 Plc. OPL mines and sells a fuel product that is in hot demand across the world; let’s call the product, HOT PROVIDENCE (HP for short). Ordinarily, OPL ought to refine this product to maximise benefits before shipping but out of sheer mental laziness of the board the product is sold in its raw, crude form to other companies and even countries that refine and make about ten times the profits that OPL makes. But not to worry, OPL has the product in stupendous reserve under the ground, enough to last several generations which explains why OPL couldn’t be bothered to begin puttying about with this grimy product. And the base logic is: if a company has a winning product that is in hot inelastic demand, a product in which it could ship out about two million barrels each dawning day, then it can afford to, sit pretty and reap its bounties. Such a product can safely be called providence isn’t it? You now see why they called their product what they call it?

    Now dear readers, there is a small ruckus at OPL. It is worrisome enough that management cannot be bothered with the tacky business of refining in spite of the age-long protestations of the shareholders, now OPL loses thousands of tanker-loads of HP to thieves everyday. How could that be, people have been wondering considering that OPL is as good as a state? OPL is as good as any garrison and it is as powerful as any state. It has access to any force or agency in the land and has the cash and sass to press them to use. How then does it happen that thousands of tankers just fade into the horizon daily in this day of hi-tech metering and GPRS?

    OPL 1000 was at this sorry pass when it had to hold its Annual General Meeting (AGM). The board suspecting it would be an AGM like no other, did their best to circumvent the shareholders: they deliberately mixed up the date, they picked an impossible venue, sent out notices at the last minute and made announcements in near-moribund newspapers. But a crowd of shareholders thronged the venue all the same prompting the managing director to try some filibustering. He spoke for hours on end going from company’s financial algebraic to Afghanistan politics. The people were weary but not out. It took one shareholder to set it off:

    Shareholder: Mr. Chairman, you have told us that our company loses thousands of trucks of our products daily. Why is that so considering that you have all the security personnel you need at your command and what are you doing about it?

    Chairman: We have set up a committee to catch the thieves and we have also asked our neighbouring and foreign companies, even our customers to help us fight the menace.

    As if rehearsed, most uncharacteristically, the crowd of shareholders rose in rowdy protestation. How can trucks grow wings!? Why don’t we get neighbouring companies to run OPL?! Why don’t we get the foreign companies to do your job? Enough is enough!!

    Moral of the fable: Everyday is for thieving board members, one day for the shareholders.

     

  • NFF: An end to harlotry

    It’s thumbs up to NFF (Nigeria Football Federation) for tackling promptly, what for want of another description, Hardball calls harlotry on the open field of play. Consider the image: 22 players, four officials on a football pitch, with state FA (Football Association) officials, club owners and spectators watching. They were watching amorous football, they were watching deleterious football. They were watching a football match that had been sold and bought; a make-believe game being re-enacted by pimps, hoboes and journeymen. It was farcical football raised to power two as somewhere in the same state and on another arena a similar ribald drama was being staged.

    Of course, we speak about the two out-of-the-world promotion playoff matches in Plateau State recently in which Plateau United Feeders drowned Akurba FC 79 goals to nil and Police Machine FC shelled Bubayaro FC by 67 goals to nil. The games, a type never before witnessed in the history of modern football, were an admixture of impunity and knavery. In the 79-goal match, the first half score was 7- 0. Apparently monitoring proceedings in the other match, 72 goals were pumped in by the Police Machine in the second half as if they were rocket propelled grenades (RPGs). But they were not RPGs; what was at play was incestuous football in which the captain of the losing team scored a hat-trick – against his club! This must be world record!

    Faced with such a scandal, the NFF set up a committee whose report it has adopted and implemented with a promptitude that is alien to this clime. It has pronounced a life ban on all the players, the officials of the two teams that produced the 146 – 0 score cracker; their personal details, names and photographs will be published to ensured that they do not circumvent the sanction. NFF vice president, Mike Umeh who announced the sanctions, drilled in the point noting that, “While the winners were desperate to win, the losers were too willing to lose. Although the committee could not establish any exchange of money or material inducement, circumstantial evidence was overwhelmingly high and points to only one conclusion – that of match fixing of unprecedented nature – which has brought global embarrassment to Nigeria Football Federation in particular, and the nation in general,”

    NFF is to be commended for its prompt response to this taint on Nigeria’s football but nothing was said about the owners of the club; is it possible that they were ignorant of the desperate bid for promotion by their clubs? The sanctions need to go all the way; if nothing else let the owners be named. Beyond this episode, football is big business and grows bigger by the day. We cannot continue to pretend that it is still a play thing. Now that big sponsors, like Globacom and Guinness are shelling out direct sponsorship funds, now that there is a League Management Company (LMC) bringing some order to league administration and now that we have a coach we can be proud of, NFF must raise its game too.

    For instance, we need to have an impeccable database of all clubs and players to be updated daily if need be. Every match, no matter the tier, must be properly video-recorded and documented. In short, NFF must begin to benchmark our football along the line of the English FA otherwise, harlotry will only beget harlotry.

  • Treasury raiders

    Nigeria bears the bold stamp of a rogue country because its leaders are unashamedly and bold-facedly roguish. Today we seem to pick up all international silverware in the most abhorrent and detestable conducts while we take the rare in most human development indices as measured by the United Nations. Consider this checklist: most corrupt country, we are in the top league; worst place to be born, we lead; infant and maternal mortality, we are in top bracket. We also lead among countries with the least school enrolment; countries with the most impoverished population and countries with the highest polio virus prevalence.

    There are other more elegant but damning indicators like Nigeria being among the leading private jet owners; country with the highest importation of rice and wheat; country least conducive for setting up business and country with the highest crude oil theft to name just few. But the other day, we earned more laurels: Nigeria has been named as running the most expensive democracy in the world and our lawmakers stand out singularly as the highest paid globally.

    This new ‘feat’ is coming from no mean quarters than The Economist of London, the supercilious 170-year old quality weekly. In a survey of 28 countries across the world drawing data from various sources like the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority; government websites, IMF and its in-house database, The Economist found that Nigerian lawmakers are by a wide margin, the highest paid in the world. Nigeria tops the table with Kenya in a distant second and Ghana third. The study found that Nigeria’s federal legislators earn a basic salary of $189,500 per annum which the magazine converts to be N30.6 million.

    The survey matched the basic salary of legislators against each country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person and found that a Nigerian lawmaker’s basic pay is 116 times the country’s GDP per person which stands as $1,600. The $189,500 basic pay of a Nigerian lawmaker is about 52 per cent higher than a Kenyan’s ($74,500) which came second. Of course, Nigeria beats legislators from even highly developed countries of the world like USA, Germany, Japan, Canada, Singapore, France, Britain, Israel, Italy, Spain, Australia, South Africa, etc. We beat even oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. While most other countries’ legislature pay is almost proportionate with the per capita income (PCI), especially the highly developed countries, the pay in Nigeria and by a lesser extent, Kenya and Ghana seem to have no relationship with PCI.

    The Economist has done nothing new. As Hardball can confirm, it has only added a global comparison to what we have been shouting about since 1999. Our National Assembly (NASS) has since the beginning of the current republic, continued to evolve as a conclave of such characters we are too dignified to mention on this page. They have relentlessly and remorselessly grown into a cabal of treasury raiders. The governor of the central bank once accused the NASS of cornering about 25 per cent of the GDP but they kicked and cried and almost ate him raw. They have renounced this survey but they never present counter figures. They live in denial and wish hypnotism upon the rest of us.

    But the truth is that we, Nigerians do not know how much our legislators earn, even down to the state houses of assembly. Their emoluments are the best kept secrets in the world and beyond the basic pay as The Economist has shown, no system in the world can fathom their benefits, bonuses and ‘perks’ which are indeed the cause celebre. Beyond the out-of-the-world booty they award themselves, Nigerian lawmakers have perfected a method of stupendously enriching themselves through extortionate ‘over-sighting’ and the other contraption they call constituency fund.

    Two consequences of the lawmakers’ misbehaviour are that Nigeria is perpetually embroiled in budget crises and the MDAs are never put through proper over-sight. Verdict: the NASS has managed to ‘legitimise’ a vastly corrupt system with viral consequences on the polity. Do we need further explanations why Nigeria is in a shambles?

  • Oil theft: Suicidal incompetence

    Yesterday, Hardball in considering this irksome matter of 400,000 barrels per day loss of our crude oil, described the Federal Government’s attitude as some form of ‘weird ignorance’. But upon further reflection, I have found that eminent American historian, Barbara Tuchman, who had long interrogated the question of mediocrity and lack of wisdom in governance had a better grounding on what is going on in Nigeria today. She could have had Nigeria in mind while writing her essay, “An Inquiry into the Persistence of Unwisdom in Government.” She likened our current situation to what she described as “suicidal incompetence”.

    She writes: “A problem that strikes one in the study of history, regardless of period, is why man makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere (government), wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge and decent appreciation of probability – is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do men in high office so often act contrary to the way that reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process so often seems to be paralysed?”

    Why is the Goodluck Jonathan administration apparently suffering mental paralysis in solving a problem that is critical to the very life of the country? Why is it crying out and feeling helpless in a situation that requires drastic and decisive action? If thieves either from within or without could steal this quantity of our most prized product; something as bulky and difficult to contain as crude oil, only heavens know what else is being stolen from this country? Why would a Federal Government that possesses all the might to tackle miscreants no matter how organised they may be, continue to cry out in frustration as if it were a victim of some conspiracy?

    It is this mindset of victimhood that must have informed the confounding calls for help from abroad. The late president, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in calling for help, described stolen oil as “blood crude”. At two different fora, President Jonathan had called on Western countries to come to the aid of Nigeria prompting members of his cabinet like Erelu Olusola Obada (Minister of State for Defence) and Gbenga Ashiru, (Foreign Affairs Minister) to join the chorus. Obada speaking at Chatham House in London last week, parroted the ‘blood crude’ banality while passing all blames and responsibilities to foreign governments. She said that crude oil theft posed dire consequences to Nigeria’s economy stating that the vessels deployed in hauling the illicit cargo were foreign just as the refineries that patronised them.

    How her British audience would have laughed her to scorn. Why are we making such fools of ourselves, how thoroughly embarrassing! They would have marveled at the stark illogicalities of her submission and the sharp incongruities of her position and the ineptitude she had dramatised for her international audience. As Minister of Defence, how could so many crude laden vessels pass under her nose unnoticed; how come they ship out so much unrefined crude? Which is easier: barring rogue vessels from Nigeria’s territorial waters or checking thousand of private merchant ship on the high seas going about their business? Who bears the cost of policing the high seas and the refineries?

    This mind-blowing crude oil theft going on in Nigeria today is the most eloquent testimony to the failure of leadership and government in this country. It is not and it will not happen in any other country in today’s world of sophisticated metering and surveillance technology. It is symptomatic of the incompetence and irresponsibility that Nigerians have had to put up with in all spheres of public life today. Our leaders love the kitchen but they hate the smoke; they love power but they don’t understand the work and rigour that go with it.

    Hardball admonishes that if the Federal Government doesn’t know how to quell the ongoing brigandage, if it seeks foreign help it must be willing to hand over the powers too. Yes, our incompetence has simply reached a crescendo, a self-destruct level.