The reappearance of long queues at filling stations with thousands of Nigerians desperate to spend the Christmas and new year holidays with their loved ones, stranded at motor parks across the country and the recent release of some 1,488 names including ‘dead appointees’, to fill vacant board positions are all symptoms of absence of governance. The president admitted this much with his apology to Nigerians during his New Year address four days ago. He told Nigerians that he was “saddened to acknowledge that for many, this Christmas and New Year holidays have been anything but merry and happy”, blaming everything on our compatriots who, “Instead of showing love, companionship and charity, chose this period to inflict severe hardship on us all by creating unnecessary fuel scarcity across the country.” He promised ‘to get to the root of this collective blackmail of all Nigerians and ensure that whichever groups are behind this manipulated hardship will be prevented from doing so again.”
For several days before this apology, it was a blame game. The Senate asked us to hold NNPC and independent marketers responsible for our sufferings. This was followed by buck-passing between NNPC, Independent Petroleum Marketers of Nigeria (IPMAN) Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC). Then followed the theatrics of Dr. Maikanti Baru, the NNPC-Group Managing Director as he spoke of attempts to arrest tankers trying to cross the borders in the north, or agonised over those diverted from Abuja to south-east or personally sealing off defaulting fuel stations. On his part, Ndu Ughamadu, the NNPC spokesman was asking no one in particular questions which he and his boss could answer such as why our daily consumption of 30million litres of fuel suddenly jumped to 50million litres. As in the many times we passed through this familiar path in the past, government officials’ diversionary tactics did not bring relief to desperate Nigerians searching for fuel for their cars or to power their generators.
And why is absence of governance a betrayal of sacred trust between the government and the governed? It is because thinkers all over the ages discovered that of all God’s creations, man is the most evil. They are fortune-seekers who often want freedom for themselves while abridging freedom of others. The privileged who often live on the blood of the weak and poor want freedom without responsibility. Because of man’s inhumanity to man, life was nasty, brutish and short. To cage man who more often than not is insane, thinkers settled for government. And to head the government, they recommended not a righteous man such as a pastor or an imam but a Leviathan-a huge fearful sea monster whose authority cannot be questioned once we promised our allegiance and traded our freedom for his protection of our lives and properties.
For his honesty and patriotic zeal, Buhari earned our trust. We therefore in 2015 elected him to replace Jonathan who instead of governing allowed his party men and ministers to convert our commonwealth and national patrimony to personal use. We equipped Buhari with awesome apparatus of state power starting with the police, secret police, soldiers EFCC, ICPC etc. to hunt down well known evil men among us such as armed robbers, kidnappers thieving governors, budget padding senators and assembly men, some NNPC and PPPRA officials and their fronts-the oil marketers. We didn’t ask Buhari to appeal to man’s conscience because we found that to be a scarce commodity among enemies of state. We had expected his government to take protective and pre-emptive actions when the stability of state is threatened but Buhari chose not to govern.
For instance, this column like other concerned Nigerians has in the last two years appealed to him and his APC to constitute the boards of some of the over 500 small government his administration needs to execute his programmes. Instead of hearkening to our plea, he chose to put his fate and by extension fate of Nigerians in the hands of members of his self-serving incompetent kitchen cabinet and institutions like NNPC and PPPRA.
If a further proof of absence of governance is needed, it would be in Garba Shehu, the president’s spokesman’s claim that “the president’s trips for medical attention slowed down completion of the process,” of appointing board members. If the president was away, there was an acting president. And that no one cross-checked the list to ensure round pegs are not put into squared holes is sufficient evidence that the list was released not for the purpose of implementing party policies but probably to forestall a backlash from disgruntled party members in 2019 which is just around the corner.
Most of the small governments whose boards Buhari is now trying to belatedly constitute have been in the hands of his political opponents in the last six years. For instance, PPPRA was a creation of PDP as a response to artificial fuel scarcity they created at the beginning of the fourth republic with a bill passed into law by NASS in February 2003 and assented to by Obasanjo in May 2003. Before Buhari took over reins of power, this was “an agency with staff strength of 249, supervised by an unwieldy 22-man strong board, earning a scandalously whopping salaries and allowances of N57.9 billion per annum”. Its mandate: To “liberalise the downstream sector of the petroleum industry, privatise the refineries, deregulate and liberalise the imports of petroleum products and, generally, make the products available at reasonable prices”. Incidentally, this mandate happened to be a mere duplication of that of Pipelines and Product Marketing Company, (PPMC) which was set up in 1988 to “profitably and efficiently market refined petroleum products in the domestic as well as export markets, especially in the ECOWAS sub-region, provide marine services and also maintain uninterrupted movement of refined petroleum products from the local refineries.”
The staffs of PPPRA were the greatest defenders of Diezani Alison-Maduekwe, the former minister of petroleum, now facing money laundry charges in Britain. They once told Nigerians that “the minister of petroleum resources has put measures in place that consistently prevented corruption in the downstream sector of the oil industry” even at a time a house committee report confirmed that a theft of N1.7 trillion occurred in PPPRA in 2011, when Col. Ahmadu Alli served as chairman of the body.
What, if one may ask, is the relevance of these parasitic bodies two and half years into President Buhari’s administration?
In his intervention on the fuel scarcity crisis, Prof Wole Soyinka, our elder-statesman reminded us that faced with fuel scarcity crisis in 1977, Buhari as minister for oil had back then assured Nigerians it would be over in one year. That was 40 years ago and two and half years as President doubling as oil minister. It is Soyinka’s belief that Nigerians as “a people, are surely credited with the most astounding degree of patience and forbearance on the African continent – except of course among themselves, when they turn into predatory fiends”.
But has it not be said that, a people deserve the government they get? Buhari might have not been able to properly articulate our crisis of nationhood, but the successes he has recorded in his anti-corruption crusade, Boko Haram insurgency war and the battle against economic saboteurs are clear demonstrations of his commitment to the nation. The question at this critical period in our nation’s history therefore is – if not Buhari who else? Can we conceive of Saraki, Ekwerenmadu, Dogara, Dino Melaye El-Rufai, David Mark or any of those former ex- governor turned senators’ presidency today?
