At any given time, one Nigerian official or delegation is to be found traipsing in a foreign country purporting to study how that country solved or is grappling with a particular issue, or its experience with a particular phenomenon.
European countries used to be the destinations of choice, but any country will do these days, since the real purpose, usually, is to cash in on the obscenely generous terms of official travel.
No coach please, and business class as a last resort. Only the first class can begin to meet the discriminating taste of officials travelling at the public expense. If a more opulent class were available –Super First Class say — I have no doubt that they would settle for nothing less.
Then there is the travel allowance they call estacode, reputedly the most indulgent in the world. It could be as high as $500 a night, depending on an official’s status. So, the longer the trip lasts, the more it profits the officials undertaking it.
The package, I gather, usually includes an out-of-station allowance, to compensate for the hardship the trip is sure to inflict on the poor traveller, plus an extra baggage allowance to take care of all the stuff he or she is sure to bring back home
These trips are not always to foreign climes, it is necessary to stress. And there is never a shortage of pretexts.
During the partial re-run of the gubernatorial election in Ekiti several years ago, a chieftain of the PDP and chair of the House Committee on Elections ensconced himself in the room where returns were being tallied, to advance the fortunes of sure his party’s candidate. When challenged, he said he was there in his official capacity to perform “oversight” functions.
I will not be surprised if, on being found fiddling with the locks on the vault of the Central Bank, the chairman of the House Committee on Banking said he was merely performing oversight functions as mandated by the Constitution.
But I digress.
As I am writing these lines, a source who is more often wrong than right, tells me that a Joint Committee of the Senate and the House on environment issues is preparing to travel to Inuit territory in the Canadian tundra to find out how the aboriginal people there are coping with their permafrost landscape.
Why embark on a study conditions in arctic Canada when Nigeria lies in the tropics? I asked in stunned disbelief.
“A stitch in time, you know,” he said. The Committee is moving proactively. Climate expert are predicting that weather patterns across with world will change so dramatically that Africa will be locked into the brutal cold of the Arctic winter, while the North America will be baked by the unforgiving tropical sun.
And so, the Joint Committee, anticipating such a frigid future, will set out any moment from now for the arctic region to study conditions there and prepare Nigerians for their future environment.
Mission accomplished, the Committee may well decide that a location half-way between the frigid Arctic and the torrid tropics is the ideal place for reflecting on their findings and writing its report.
The report is likely to be forwarded to another committee which may or may not include any members of the House Committee aforementioned, for comment and criticism. If the panel were to include one notoriously disputations fellow well-known in bureaucratic circles, the review will most likely eventuate in a fresh wave of trips to write the report, ending in the serene resort of Bellagio, in Italy, where there would be few distractions.
Bellagio, you hear; not some hardscrabble town in Ghana where the House Committee on Health went to write its report so as to avert the disruptions caused by the epileptic power supply in Nigeria. For, thanks to President Goodluck Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda, the power supply is now no worse than that of Ghana.
Even so, Abuja or the Mambila Plateau or Obudu Retreat is not Bellagio. Jos is ruled out because of those grisly “Fulani herdsmen” visitations. Lagos? Too many distractions.
In keeping with this jamboree tradition, a high-level Executive-Legislative team, led by no less a person than the Minister of Finance and the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has just completed its mission in the UK and the United States where it held meetings with “Diaspora Nigerians” in London, Washington DC, New York, and Houston. The delegation includes, but is most likely not limited to the chairman, Senate Committee on Finance, chairman, Senate Committee on Local and Foreign Debts, Chairman, Senate Committee on Rules and Business, chairman, House Committee on Aid, Loans and Debt Management, member of the House Committee on Diaspora, member of the House Committee on Finance, and chairman, House Committee on Appropriation. Interactive sessions in the four cities, with invited professionals, were organized by the Debt Management Office, led by its Director-General.
Purpose?
To provide Diaspora Nigerians with opportunities for funding critical development projects back home. For good measure, the meetings provided the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and other members of the team an avenue to update Nigerians in the Diaspora on the development of the economy, and the major achievements of the Transformation Agenda of the Goodluck Administration.
The meetings also reassured Diaspora Nigerians of developments in the country with respect to the Ebola Virus Disease and the government’s management of the situation.
The context – or the pretext—for this trip would appear to be a World Bank report indicating that Nigerians abroad had remitted more than $10 billion home in the first half of this year, and that the second half could even witness a bigger volume of transfers.
For the most part, these remittances were made to service obligations to relations and friends back home – pay school fees and delinquent rents, assist the living, bury the dead, and generally attend to the hard-luck stories that the next phone call from home is sure to relate in a way guaranteed to move you to head immediately to the nearest Western Union to wire money charged to your Credit Card.
If there is anything left, the “Diaspora Nigerian” may trade in the stock market, build a house in the village over a ten-year period, or raise a mortgage to buy one in the city.
This practice has been going on for decades and will continue as long as there are so-called Diaspora Nigerians with obligations to discharge back home. No Executive-Legislative intervention was required to start it, and none is required to sustain it.
The team that Dr Okonjo-Iweala led to London and Washington, DC and New York and Houston was preaching to the choir. There is something to be said for that, to be sure. You court the choristers so that they do not migrate elsewhere.
But this particular choir is not the type that migrates. Though domiciled abroad, it is part and parcel of the Nigerian reality. You do not need to make a round trip of 20,000 miles at a huge cost to an anaemic exchequer to preach to it.
