The Nation Newspaper

Tag: incompetence

  • South Africa’s Central Bank accuses anti-graft watchdog of incompetence

    South Africa’s Central Bank has accused the head of anti-graft watchdog of incompetence, following her proposal to switch the target of its monetary policy from inflation and currency stability to economic growth.

    Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane set off a political row and sparked a selling frenzy in the rand currency last month when she said the Reserve Bank current mandate focuses on a “few commercial interests”.

    In a scathing court filing, Governor Lesetja Kganyago said the constitutionally mandated watchdog was “reckless” and her later explanation of the report showed a lack understanding of the constitution and the Central Bank’s powers and functions.

    “This is a grave, rudimentary error,” Kganyago said. “The only explanation that the Public Protector has offered for her clearly unlawful conduct exposes her own lack of competency.”

    Opposition parties, Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters, have also branded Mkhwebane incompetent and urged her to resign or for parliament review her ability to execute her duties.

    Public Protector spokeswoman Cleopatra Mosana rejected the accusations of incompetence, saying Mkhwebane continued to “discharge her duties as prescribed by the constitution.”

    Mkhwebane has been in the job since October last year. Her proposal was also opposed in court by parliament and finance minister Malusi Gigaba, both of whom have said she over-stepped her powers.

    The call threatened to further stain South Africa’s credentials as an investor-friendly emerging market, coming less than a week after mines minister Mosebenzi Zwane spooked investors by raising the minimum threshold for black ownership of mining companies to 30 percent from 26 percent.

     

  • Balarabe Musa, PDP’s incompetence and APC’s fascism

    Balarabe Musa, PDP’s incompetence and APC’s fascism

    Former Kaduna State governor, Balarabe Musa, recently used piquant phrases to describe the character and operations of Nigeria’s two leading parties, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Mallam Musa, who is and also the chairman of the almost forgotten Peoples Redemption Party (PRP),  is undoubtedly an agitated and impatient idealist, but his characterisation of the two bungling and bumbling parties is unimpeachable. The progressive politician had mercilessly skewered the two parties last week while responding to reporters’ questions last week in Abuja. The PDP, he summed up, was incompetent; and the APC, he growled, was fascistic. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo had delivered a similar judgement on the two parties not too long ago; but Mallam Musa possessed better and ethical justification to reach the salient conclusions the entire country seems to be coming round to.

    “I will tell you they are complete failures,” said Mallam Musa of the parties. “If PDP was incompetent, APC is even worse. In the case of the PDP government, it was just incompetence, and you can negotiate with incompetents. But in the case of the APC, it is fascism and you know that you have no stand with a fascist who clears the obstacle by any means. This is what we are experiencing now. We have replaced incompetence with fascism.” The divisions between the two parties may however not be as neat as the former governor painted it. While the PDP was truly incompetent in office, especially judging from the reckless wastage of the country’s resources and the mindless stealing that undermined the economy under its 16 years leadership, the APC, on the other hand, is not just fascistic, it has managed so far to have combined that singular vice with a multiplicity of dubieties and incompetence.

    To dwell on the PDP, despite the telling effects of its incompetence and the bold relief in which that ineptitude is increasingly etched, is to flog a dead horse. It is sufficient to say that the party, which had boasted it would rule Nigeria for 60 years without explaining why it chose that silly and arbitrary figure, had no system in place to govern well, nor the men to champion its cause and promote the modest values it managed to conceive. It suffered a humiliating defeat in 2015, a consequence of its lack of discipline, dearth of values, and partisan pride. Unlike shortly after it lost the general elections, when some people wondered whether the country was not too hasty and sentimental in repudiating the PDP, only a few people now view the exposure of the kleptocracy that hobbled the nation without concluding that keeping the inept PDP in power for 16 years was both excessive and indefensibly generous.

    Mallam Musa was neutral in judging the two parties, though he will of course be unable to supplant any of them with his own fairly untested and nearly forgotten party should that thought ever cross his mind. There is nothing to show he thinks of any supplantation, however, for like every other Nigerian, he is realistic enough to know that to nurse a party to national prominence, if not invincibility, requires both financial and human resources of grandiose and intimidating proportions. His current frustrations in running the PRP, including getting justice for the party when it is assailed by conspiratorial busybodies and conniving jurists (see box below), is a testament to the abominable course politics has taken in the country.

    No one will question why Mallam Musa dismissed the PDP as incompetent. But given the unrestrained national excitement over President Muhammadu Buhari’s rejection of avarice, some Nigerians may cavil at the former Kaduna governor’s disparaging conclusions. But Mallam Musa is neither given to histrionics nor has he ever been accused of been flighty, irrational and tempestuous. His point of view may be disagreeable, and his ideological conviction considered inflexible, anachronistic and unworkable. But he is a logician of great accomplishment, an ethical politician of high standing, not by persuasion but by deep and genuine conviction. Such men rarely exaggerate or say something out of spite. If Mallam Musa says APC is fascistic, he is probably, if not unimpeachably, right.

    The former Kaduna governor did not elaborate on the fascism label; but he needn’t. The facts are clear for everyone to see, even to those mesmerised by the president’s unconvincing rationalisation of many of his draconian actions. Section 1 (1) of the 1999 constitution says: “This Constitution is supreme and its provisions shall have binding force on the authorities and persons throughout the Federal Republic of Nigeria.” But repeatedly, the president and his cabinet have placed themselves above the constitution. Suspects are routinely detained for longer than the constitution mandates; and when regardless of the government’s umbrage the courts summon the courage to grant bail, sometimes as many times as possible for effect, the Buhari presidency ignores the courts, and accuses them of colluding with saboteurs and conniving at corruption. In the opinion of President Buhari, the outrage caused by the malfeasance of the suspects far outweigh the government’s disobedience of the courts.

    In other instances, the Buhari presidency goes beyond pursuing the media trial of suspects to outrightly disobeying the constitution by detaining suspects ad infinitum. In the popular case of the Shiite leader, Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, the government not only approved of the massacre of more than 300 of his followers — men, women and children — and their hasty burial in two mass graves, the injured and almost blinded leader and his wife have had their constitutional rights suspended or even abrogated. There are many other cases, sometimes during security operations and anti-corruption war, when the government has backed its campaigns with autocratic, poorly conceived and unconstitutional measures. The country shudders to think what would happen to the liberties guaranteed the people by the constitution had the ruling APC been a united, pacesetting and ideological party fascinated by its own repressive tendencies.

    Mallam Musa does not of course indicate whether he thought the disunity in the APC significant enough as a factor in the party’s fascistic approach to governance. Nor is it clear to anyone whether the disunity had anything to do with any ideological struggle within the party. What seems clear is that a faction of the party has hijacked power, not on ideological grounds, but probably on sectional, cabalistic or even sectarian grounds. It is that faction’s brutal use of power, its abhorrent deployment of Machiavellian tactics, and its camorra-like methods that gall the judicious and emit the fascistic signals picked up by Mallam Musa and every Nigerian sensitive about the concepts of freedom and justice.

    The former Kaduna governor is right to say that Nigerians can indeed negotiate with an incompetent leader, for an incompetent leader is sometimes amenable to other views; but not so a fascist. A fascist is obsessed with his own point of view, believes himself to be infallible, is paranoid about other people’s objections and observations, hates to be proved wrong, and is overall messianic about his role and objectives in leadership. There is indeed no negotiating with a fascist. Mallam Musa sees the APC as a fascist party; it is unlikely he exaggerates. He must however hope that he does not become a Cassandra whose warnings are fated to be disbelieved, and that the current factionalism in the party does not give way to one supreme, fanatical faction with which neither man nor gods can reason.

  • Farce and incompetence in Bello’s Kogi

    Farce and incompetence in Bello’s Kogi

    GOVERNOR Yahaya Bello, the so-called digital governor of Kogi State, spent the better part of one year and two successive panels screening the state’s workforce for ghost workers. After he brought the exercise he described as staff verification to an inglorious conclusion a few weeks ago, claiming with fanfare to have discovered over 18,000 ghost workers out of a little over 27,000 state staff roll, it was clear he was working to a predetermined answer. The verification exercise was riddled with contradictions and gross ineptitude, salary payment itself is still haphazard, deductions lack arithmetic and financial coherence, and the governor is engaged in a war of attrition with institutions and agencies for the purpose of getting as many workers as possible struck off the payroll, regardless of extant rules and laws.
    For a government that claims to groan under a monthly wage bill of more than N5bn (they have dishonestly included LG staff salaries), and whose second verification panel claims to have saved the state government about N2.6bn every month, it is incredible that the state still finds it difficult to pay salaries as and when due, not to say pay all workers full salaries at the same time. Kogi obviously operates outside known mathematical laws. And despite the second panel claiming to remedy what the state government described as the first panel’s shoddy verification exercise, it is remarkable that there are still complaints galore among state workers, some of whom, estimated to be nearly half of the workforce, have not been paid for more than six months.
    The governor, it seems, would prefer not to pay any worker at all. Seizing upon the screening panel’s recommendations, but without recourse to either its own terms of reference or the law, the state has asked professors in the state university and chief lecturers in the College of Education, and any other top civil servant, including chief nursing officers in state hospitals, to retire on account of salary and promotional stagnation that have lasted for eight years. In Kogi, the lecturers and directors do not have to reach retirement age, and neither the law nor any other rule matters. What matters is that Mr Bello is obsessed with cutting staff strength by hook or crook or simply not paying them at all using one pretext or the other. He prefers to splurge the state funds on other trifles. The famous roundabouts in Lokoja’s main street that conjured spiritual nightmares in his excitable imagination, and which he destroyed shortly after he assumed office, have remained abandoned. Instead, the restless traveller governor is erecting garish sentry posts on all the access roads to Government House, Lokoja.
    Those who imposed this naïve and dangerously inept governor on Kogi can look back with sadistic pleasure at the consequences of their meddlesomeness. Kogi now groans under a power shift of other people’s making, a shift that is in essence humiliating and disruptive. With no development happening anywhere in the state, and with workers hungry, sick and oppressed, Kogites are in a quandary about what to do to survive the next three years until either God or the ballot box puts paid to the impressionable young governor’s clownishness and propaganda.

  • Minimum Wage and wages of incompetence

    Minimum Wage and wages of incompetence

    The news is still well out there that a disproportionately high number of governors in Nigeria are tired of paying the N18,000 minimum wage to their workers. In a communiqué issued by its chairman, Governor Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara State, the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) at the endof its meeting recently at the Old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, said a cut in the minimum wage was inescapable. The NGF in that boondoggle advanced all manners of reasons to justify its decision. Where the reasons outlined are not laughable, they are, to put it charitably, bizarre! Of course the principal raison d’etre is the worsening economic situation in the country.

    But what the governors in that circus display failed to say directly is that they are at their wits’ end and so are unworthy of their positions. But as usual, they are people who do not like monkey but still refuse to let go of its tail! The Chichidodo they are, they detest faeces but lovingly enjoy the maggots produced therefrom!

    First, let it be noted that it is callous and unforgivable for the governors concerned to assault workers with the claptrap that they can no longer pay the N18,000 minimum wage after they have punished the same people with backlogs of unpaid salaries and continue to decimate their lives with irregular and fragmentary payments! How long will the already financially gelded Nigerian workers be stranded in the woods of needless and preventable economic misery?

    If the governors involved carry the day with respect to reduction in the minimum wage rather than ensure an upward review as agreed about five years ago, then the Nigerian workers must indeed be custom made for suffering. I mean, if the governors succeed in either reducing the take-home (which has never taken the workers half way home) or renege on the agreement to jack up the pay, then no one should weep for the body of workers in the country. They probably derive some joy from the punishment. Strange, at times, are the ways of humankind.

    The workers in Nigeria must put forth a formidable front and a united voice. Let the Nigerian workers draw sense and strength from the abolitionist, Frederick Douglas, who himself fought hard to wrench freedom from his heartless slavers. To all those enslaved in whatever form, Douglas’ voice of encouragement rings out thus: ‘Those who will be free must themselves strike the first blow’. They must also drink from Soyinka’s well of helpful thought: ‘When dealing with hardened recidivists, justice is best served through pitiless rigours and remorseless pursuit’. The minimum wage-cutting governors are not normal human beings to be engaged with weak punches or vacillating deportment. The workers will need the unrelenting ferocity of a lion in their fight against these common foes.

    To wrestle the demons of pain and punishment that are the governors, the workers through their leading voices must not sip or quaff from the bottle containing the liquid of hurting compromise or blind betrayal. The representatives of the workers must not be carried away by the sumptuous gastronomies that often adorn the tables of the enemies they are warring against during negotiations. Any member of the workers’ negotiating committee with gastronomic lunacy must be excused from the group.

    The workers must remember that they have compromised too much. They must remember that the N54,000 they proposed five years ago as the minimum wage was brutally slashed to the present amount that is being viciously threatened with a violent decimation. They accepted the pittance back then on the condition that after five years, the minimum wage would be reviewed upward, not lacerated. Surely, the workers have compromised too much to now settle for another offensive rationalisation from the problem-generating governors. Let the workers arm themselves to the teeth with all the weapons of logic and uncompromising incorrigibility – they must manfully duel and effectively slay the dragons of their sorrow and pain.

    Happily, some governors – yes from the same overly cossetted group of governors under the NGF – have dissociated themselves from the asphyxiating voices of incompetence and Schadenfreude. Governors like Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State have said it was possible to pay the minimum wage. This in itself is a ringing rebuke to the wage-cutting group of governors. There is another encouragement for the workers; they must stand pat on their decision to refuse the cut in the minimum wage. If some states can still afford to pay this wage in spite of the harsh economic downturn that a majority of the governors have now erected as a pillar of excuse to afflict workers and their families, absolutely others are inexcusable.

    That governors are poised to cut the minimum wage is an eloquent testimony to the fact that political leaders in Nigeria barely think of leadership positions as problem-solving platforms. We are enormously blessed with leaders who are expert at gaining control of the levers of power but are as ignorant of the end to which to put power. Yes, the decline in oil receipts and reduction in the strange federal allocation to states make them insolvent. But what should never be overlooked or trivialised is the acute lack of financial managerial competence on the part of a large number of the governors.

    The wages of incompetence in Nigeria are the oceanic and crippling poverty, the huge deficit in infrastructural development, the painfully increasing erosion of the dignity of the human person, the pervasive and suffocating youth unemployment, the daily summary termination of many an otherwise active mind.

    The wages of incompetence are the hefty bailout packages given to the poor managers of resources. When you bail out wastrels, you empower them to up the ante of reckless spending, misplacement of priority and unprofitable projects. You do not bail out states run by profligates who when confronted with their abhorrent habits often pass the buck. Spendthrifts do not take responsibility for their objectionable actions. To come to their aid with bailout funds is tantamount to encouraging them to continue to cavort in their pools of wastefulness

    If the governors cannot think soothing solution to the problem of shortfall in revenue, if they cannot be creative and reorder their individual state’s accounts, if they cannot cut their coats according to their cloths, and if they cannot ingeniously rise to fulfil their statutory responsibilities, in addition to doing away with bogus and barren projects, let them relinquish their posts. If for the reason of the severe losses in revenues they cannot upwardly review the minimum wage, they must not cut it and they must cultivate the habit of paying it regularly. Otherwise, the workers and their dependants need a clean break from the taxing wages of incompetence that the downward review of the minimum wage is a part of.

     

    • Ademola writes from Bodija, Ibadan, Oyo State.

  • ‘Incompetence’: Edo retires Perm Sec

    Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole has ordered the compulsory retirement of the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, Mr. Felix Otoide, for incompetence.

    According to a statement by the governor’s media aide, Peter Okhiria, the retirement takes immediate effect.

    Otoide earlier served on the Board of Internal Revenue and as a permanent secretary in the Ministry of Youths and Sports.

  • 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.