Category: Editorial

Why is it that many governors in Nigeria often lose a sense of limit and prudence? The lavish 50th birthday celebration of Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State last weekend has brought this question to the fore once again. According to reports, the celebration of Governor Okorocha’s day climaxed last Monday with a grand ceremony which had in attendance, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe and former Head of State, General Ibrahim Babangida (rtd). Also present to felicitate with Okorocha were five fellow governors: Peter Obi of Anambra State, Emmanuel Uduaghan of Delta, Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers, Isa Yuguda of Bauchi and Shehu Shema of Katsina, among other dignitaries from across the country.

Nothing wrong with these invitations. What was reprehensible was that Governor Okorocha seemed to need the attention of the entire state riveted to his show, so he had the state shut down. Thus, government offices, schools and markets in the state were closed last Monday and teachers, students and the civil servants were directed to report at the Heroes Square, venue of the grand finale of activities marking the governor’s birthday.

We wonder what point the governor, an elected state official wanted to prove by celebrating his 50th birthday, which is a private affair, in such elaborate and wasteful manner. Getting a prime minister and all the dignitaries to attend must have cost a lot of money. Who is paying for all this? Then the hidden costs of closing down the business of the entire state for a whole day may never be accurately quantified, but the losses are surely enormous in terms of man hours and lost opportunities.

In fact, in celebrating his birthday, the governor failed to attend an official duty in Enugu last Sunday where governors and leaders of the Southeast met to take a crucial decision. As reported, Governor Okorocha was absent because “he was celebrating his birthday.” When did personal matters take precedence over official affairs of state for an elected officer?

It is disturbing that as this elaborate ceremony was going on, workers in the state had not received their salary for September, one week into another month. Imo is a very impoverished state with hardly any industry or large viable enterprise. Indeed, there is nothing that can be described as a viable economy beyond government business. The major source of sustenance is the monthly federal allocation. Basic infrastructure is weak if not non-existent; schools are dilapidated, no potable water and healthcare facilities are inadequate. Imo State is also one of the states ravaged by flood, with thousands of the citizens displaced and are now at the mercy of the weather.

We dare say that a state like this requires a sober and serious leadership that can harness the available resources, re-orientate the people and build systems and institutions that can engender a viable economy. On the contrary, we have observed over time that the governor who was voted to office on a groundswell of the people’s goodwill and high expectations is given to arbitrariness, flamboyance and wastefulness. We had cause to caution on this page a few months ago when he released a list of multitudinous appointees with many bearing frivolous and laughable titles.

Again, we advise that with about one and half years of his tenure gone, he does not have the luxury of time. He must brace up to the serious business of governance in a highly deprived environment. Quality leadership is driven by good personal examples. A lavish and disruptive birthday party doesn’t speak well.

Diezani Alison-Madueke, Minister of Petroleum Resources courts controversy with ease. If her inept management of the subsidy sleaze should have earned her resignation, her recent disrespect to journalists before the Senate’s Committee on Petroleum (Downstream) Resources presents her as an intolerant public official. For yet-to-be deciphered reasons, the minister seems to think she is above the law. She is not!

We condemn her unabashed affront to free speech by her attempt to prevent journalists from covering her appearance before the committee by flinging away their recorders and cameras. Diezani’s security details commenced the seemingly well-rehearsed assault against reporters covering the Senate. They reportedly seized and threw away stationed recorders and cameras, an action that Senator Magnus Abe, chairman of the committee deprecated by insisting that the verbal proceedings on the probe of fuel allocation mess be recorded.

The minister, in defiance of this order, flung away a repositioned midget placed before her by a reporter from The Daily Trust. Another reporter was rudely bluffed from placing a midget before her while the minister reportedly mumbled that she could not tolerate placement of voice recorders directly in her front. We ask: How then could the important proceedings meant to proffer solutions to the perennial fuel scarcity across the country and the shameful disparity in the price of petrol, as well as what she has done so far on the promised Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of the country’s refineries be put on record? Her conduct was so disgusting that some newsmen reportedly left the proceeding room in protest.

We are not in doubt that Mrs Alison-Madueke will not want to answer questions on why the Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC) ceded its power of allocation of petroleum products to oil unions in its locations. This has led to the disparity in petrol prices across the country from the official rate of N97 to between N110 and N115. We further ask: Why should a trade union take over the function of a statutory agency under her leadership? Why is it that only the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation’s (NNPC) trucks are allowed to load products? Is it true that hidden costs, in collaboration with the union and the security agencies, are injected into the final cost of petroleum products?

The Senator Magnus Abe-led committee should be commended for insisting that the session be recorded for posterity. However, the minister’s conduct is crude and primitive. Such is not expected from any public official, not in the least one in charge of the crucial petroleum sector. What point was she trying to prove other than to show her contempt for men of the Fourth Estate of the Realm and particularly that important legislative arm, the Senate.

Her conduct reminds of the better forgotten behaviour of Dr. Omololu Olunloyo, former governor of old Oyo State who showed contempt for journalists in the Second Republic by tearing the Reporters’ Notebook of one of them at a public function. What about the finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala who refused to answer the question posed to her by The Nation’s US correspondent recently?

In the developed countries, Mrs Alison-Madueke ought to have left office a long time ago when her mismanagement of oil subsidy came to the fore. This is why we condemn her military style approach to an important arm of democratic governance and journalists performing their lawful duties. We want to remind her of the reality that she is a minister appointed to serve the people and not vice-versa. Also, the easy way for feedback from the public is through reportage of her activities by the media that she has shown unwarranted contempt for. It is high time she purged herself of the erroneous belief that she is untouchable.

Universities the world over give honorary degrees to people that have made significant contributions to the society, and professionals with ground-breaking discoveries and innovation. However, most universities in Nigeria that give such awards do so to undeserving people whose only qualification is that they have deep pockets or they are political office holders. The attraction, to them, more than anything else, is the pecuniary gain that the institutions would get from such persons. This has made the awards an all-comers’ affair, thus eroding the privileges and respect that go with them, a thing that has remained a source of worry to people who know the value of the degrees.

The good news now however is that the university administrators themselves have seen the need for a change of attitude with a view to restoring the lost glory of the honorary degrees. With effect from January 1, next year, the universities would stop giving honorary degrees to just anybody. The Association of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities says it will, from that date, stick to best practices by giving honorary degrees only to those deserving. Its secretary-general, Prof. Michael Faborode, said with effect from 2013, only persons who meet the criteria set for such purposes would be given the awards.

This position, taken at the 27th conference of the association held at the Nasarawa State University in Keffi is commendable; that is however if the vice-chancellors have the courage to put their words into action. Honorary degrees, under normal circumstances should not be given to politicians in office. Indeed, honour cannot be an all-comers’ affair, hence the maxim, ‘give honour to whom honour is due’. This is probably one of the reasons why the universities themselves award their certificates and degrees to people found worthy, not only in learning but also in character.

Of course, the descent of standards on the part of the universities is a reflection of the larger Nigerian society. We have completely lost all sense of values, hence the country is what it is today; things can only get worse if we do not retrace our steps. By beaming the searchlight on themselves, the vice-chancellors have played a pivotal role expected of them. As leaders in the Ivory Towers, many of them have seen it all; they have the benefit of what obtains in other countries and should have an idea of how to make things work in the country. Nobody expects them to have a cure-all answer to all the country’s problems, but the decision they have taken is important, no matter how tokenistic it seems. It is also courageous, to the extent that it specifically envisages that serving politicians would be shut out of the awards.

This is a pleasant and distinct departure from the national practice whereby some persons are given National Honours just because they have been elected or appointed into certain offices. This is wrong and many people have always said so, but the government would not listen. Thus, we have had situations where some people were given such honours only to be pushed out of office for fraud or other criminal behaviours.

It is heartwarming that those at the helm of affairs in our universities have realised the need for them to retrace their steps by giving honour only to the deserving. Perhaps nothing could be more disgusting than seeing universities giving honorary degrees to non-performing political office holders. There are clearly laid out procedures for giving such degrees; we urge the universities to adhere strictly to these to stop the erosion of academic culture and tradition.

Honorary degrees are not necessarily about generating money for the universities; they are more about contributions to the society and integrity. The vice-chancellors have demonstrated wisdom in their new thinking; they however need the courage to see through their dream.

In the build-up to next month’s presidential election in the US, fundraising could prove crucial in the final stretch of the White House race. This was highlighted by the reaction of President Barack Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, to the inflow of a record $181 million in September to boost the president’s re-election effort. “That’s by far our biggest month yet,” he reportedly said in an e-mail to supporters, urging them to chip in more as the November 6 election date draws near.

Obama’s campaign said via Twitter that 1,825,813 people donated to the campaign last month. Of that, 567,000 were new donors. A vast majority of the donations – 98 percent – were $250 or less; the average contribution was $53. Obama’s advisers are reportedly proud of his campaign’s base of low-dollar donors, especially at the end of the election cycle when supporters can keep giving even if they have donated before, as the president may need fresh infusions of cash to fund ads in swing states such as Ohio, Florida and Iowa. Since the campaign officially kicked off in April 2011, 3.9 million people have donated to the Democratic Party candidate, Obama’s campaign said.

On the other hand, although Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has not yet released his September fundraising figures, the results are also expected to be on the high side. The Romney team reportedly raised $12 million online after the recent first presidential debate in less than 48 hours, with 60 percent of the money from first-time donors.

Both candidates continue to raise money even in the final month of the campaign, reflecting the importance of deep coffers to fund expensive advertising on the home stretch. Reports say that Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised more than $114 million in August, just beating Romney’s $111 million; that followed three months when Romney out-raised the incumbent.

This detailed accounting of campaign funds and identification of sources is truly remarkable, from the Nigerian point of view, and actually reflects the workings of a developed democracy. The beauty of the fundraising figures is the transparency of the process, which is sadly lacking in our country. What is clear from the fundraising record is that the system encourages donations from every stakeholder, however small or apparently insignificant. The donors, in this case, were not necessarily moneybags, contrary to what our own local structures encourage.

In Nigeria, it is a notorious fact that candidates for political office more often than not rely on funding by a select number of moneyed people, who will then be in a position to influence governance on account of their financial contributions. The democratisation of fundraising, which is obvious in the US case, is to be commended as it gives the ordinary people a voice in the scheme of things.

It is noteworthy that despite the fact that Obama is the incumbent president, he is still bound to raise campaign funds publicly and declare such funds publicly. In our own context, incumbent political office holders are known to abuse their positions by using public funds to drive their campaigns. The public is never informed about the source or scale of campaign funds and the political space is often a theatre of claims and counterclaims about campaign spending and funding.

For example, the coming governorship election in Ondo State has thrown up wild allegations about the size of the incumbent governor’s war chest and many members of the public are ready to swear that the source of the funds is the state coffers. The US example of political fundraising and accounting offers useful lessons to our polity that we can only ignore at our peril.

When Republicans began questioning President Obama’s birth certificate four years ago, it seemed at first like a petulant reaction to a lost election, a flush of nativist and racist anger that would diminish over time. But the preposterous charges never went away. As this election cycle shows, many in the Republican Party continue to see the president as the center of a broad and malevolent liberal conspiracy to upend the truth.

To live and seethe in that world of conspiracy theories means rejecting any form of objective reality. When unemployment numbers make the administration look good, they are obviously “cooked.” When poll numbers put Mr. Obama ahead, they are skewed. Birth certificates are forgeries. Safety-net programs are giveaways to supporters. Health insurance reform is socialism. And campaign donation disclosure is antibusiness.

It’s an upside-down version of life, and it is not innocuous. When desperation leads political critics of the president to discredit important nonpolitical institutions — including the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve and the Congressional Budget Office — the damage can be long-lasting. If voters come to mistrust the most basic functions of government, the resulting cynicism can destroy the basic compact of citizenship.

Last week, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.8 percent, depriving Mitt Romney of his standard talking point that the rate had never been below 8 percent during Mr. Obama’s term. No one expected Republicans to celebrate a positive trend for the country, but almost immediately the anchors on Fox News and the editors of right-wing Web sites saw something more sinister: a conspiracy, led by the Obama campaign, to manipulate the numbers to make the president look good a month before the election.

The charge was absurd. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which along with the Census Bureau conducts the underlying household survey, is run by career civil servants and is impervious to political pressure and manipulation, as all but the hypnotized in Washington understand. But, this time, the conspiracy theorists went beyond the usual suspects. Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, said Mr. Obama’s Chicago staff obviously changed the numbers, though he had no evidence of chicanery beyond the outrageous charge that the numbers came from an “ideologue division of the federal government.”

To Mr. Welch and his fellow cynics, the facts were inconvenient, so they had to be wrong. And not just wrong, but deliberately so. That’s the same mentality that led ideologues last month to accuse independent pollsters of deliberately skewing polls to show Mr. Obama ahead, though no such charges are emerging now that Mr. Romney is improving in the polls. And this trend is reinforced when people who know better, like Newt Gingrich and Senator John McCain, trash the civil servants atthe State Department and the Congressional Budget Office. (Mr. Romney, to his credit, did not question the latest jobless figures.)

Democrats aren’t happy about the latest polls, but they aren’t suggesting Mr. Romney is manipulating them, just as they didn’t undermine the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the jobless numbers were high. Many are far more worried about a conspiracy that is verifiable and serious: the concerted effort by Republicans over the last four years to deprive minorities, poor people and other likely Democratic supporters of their voting rights.

That, of course, doesn’t seem to bother those who see“Chicago’s” evil hand everywhere. When there is real-world evidence of political collusion, the conspiracy theorists are nowhere to be found.

– New York Times