It is difficult to decide which is more absurd, more laughable, President Jonathan’s denial this past week that the national treasury is broke or his assertion that the financial illiquidity of the federal government is limited to July 2013 and is caused exclusively by so-called “pipeline vandals”. As can be seen in the epigraph to this piece, this was what Jonathan told the nation and the world last week: that the country is not broke; that our national economy only experienced a hiccup in July from the nefarious activities of pipeline vandals; and that those who are saying that the country is broke are doing so out of ignorance and political mischief.
The president is of course completely wrong on both counts. As at the end of this past week, the monthly allocations from our national coffers to the 36 states of the federation have reportedly not been paid for the months of July, August and September. Fearing punitive reprisals from the presidency, the governors have not made their frustration and desperation public. But privately and off the record, they have been grumbling bitterly as they have been trying to meet their recurrent expenditures without the allocations from Abuja. Thus, if you want to know whether or not Nigeria under Jonathan is broke, ask the governors, whether they are in the ruling party, the PDP or in any of the opposition parties.
The truth is that thanks to corruption, waste and squandermania on a colossal scale, Nigeria is at the moment broke, very broke. Indeed, most pundits and commentators on our national economy have been saying this for at least the last four to five months. And if this is the case, for Jonathan to say that the drop in oil revenues in June allegedly caused by the activities of gangs stealing and selling our crude oil is all we have to worry about is to be both naïve and disingenuous.
I am not indulging in mere or gratuitous name calling here when I assert that the President is being both naïve and disingenuous in making these two assertions. He is being naïve because he obviously does not know or is untroubled by the fact that every well informed person in Nigeria knows that the country is broke – and not only from the work of “vandals”. And he is being disingenuous because he obviously and quite deliberately wants to avoid responsibility, indeed glaring culpability for the sorry state of our national economy. This piece is motivated solely by this consideration: we must not allow the President to duck his responsibility for both the state of the national economy at the present time and the untold suffering that the generality of our peoples are experiencing on account of the terribly inept and mediocre stewardship that Jonathan has exhibited as the occupant of Aso Rock starting from the time when he was Acting President to the present moment of the third year of his own incumbency. My central argument is that the President comes from a line of political rulers since the inception of the current Fourth Republic in 1999 who have badly, even criminally, mismanaged our national economy; however, Jonathan has far surpassed every previous ruler in incompetence, wastefulness and squandermania in the management of the national economy. Let me now write directly in illustration of this claim.
The national “savings account” of Nigeria is the so-called “Excess Crude Account” (ECA). Established in 2004, it was created so as to conserve our oil revenues in order to make its accumulation serve as a buffer against the often wide fluctuations of the world oil market and as a sort of “rainy day” fund for the future or long term needs of the country and its peoples. In other words, the ECA is a strategic federation account that calls for the greatest act of prudence, patriotism and responsibility in its management by our rulers, especially the President. As at 2005, the balance in the account stood at $5 billion dollars. Between 2005 and 2010, this balance grew rather exponentially such that by the time Jonathan became Acting President in 2010, the balance stood at around the whopping figure of $20 billion dollars! But ever since then, the account has been relentlessly drawn down and wastefully depleted. For instance, at the beginning of this year, the balance in the account was $11.5 billion dollars; now it is under $4 billion. At this rate, it will be close to zero at the end of the year.
It is worthy of note that Jonathan has never given any explanations for why in less than three years, he has drawn down and more or less completely depleted the savings in the Excess Crude Account (ECA) from a beginning balance of more than $20 billion dollars to less than $4 billion dollars. It is no mitigation of his culpability that, with regard to where all the monies he has withdrawn for the national savings account went, Jonathan has faced no determined questioning from the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) or any of the other leading and usually vocal advocates of good, accountable governance in our country. That being said, and with a certainty that is informed both by present dire circumstances and even more bleak future prospects for the majority of our peoples, I am arguing here that it is neither too late nor too soon to start asking Jonathan and his administration what they have done with the vast sums of money that have been withdrawn from the ECA. To this I would add that as much as the President himself, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has much explaining to do. If, as seems likely, they will not give any explanations at the present time, we must keep our options open so that sometime in the future, changed circumstances will compel them to render an account of their stewardship of our national treasury.
For now, it is fortuitous for us that Jonathan has left many clues for intrepid souls willing to get to the bottom of this scandal as to what he has done with all the monies that have disappeared from the national savings account under his watch. One of the most astonishing of such “clues” is the N2.58 trillion naira that was paid to both real and fake, actual and phantom oil marketers under the humungous oil subsidy scandal of 2011 in which staggering sums of money were paid for refined petroleum products that were never imported into the country and distributed to Nigerian consumers. In essence this was a “subsidy” to a cabal that comprised many of Jonathan’s cronies and backers during the presidential elections of 2011. To get a sense of the scale of theft and waste entailed in this scam, the sum of N2.58 trillion naira paid out was nine times (900 %) of the budget for oil subsidy for that year, 2011; and it was nearly two and half times (250%) of the total national budget for the whole country for the year. As I have explained several times in this column this is quite easily the greatest single theft from our national coffers in the entire 53 years of our collective existence as an independent nation. Moreover, although all the persons and companies to whom the looted sums were paid are known, together with how much each person or enterprise was paid, not a single naira, not a single kobo has been recovered and paid back to the national treasury from the monumental sums looted in that mother of all scams in our country.
President Jonathan has never said a word, never given any explanation for how it came to pass that the N2.58 trillion naira that was in excess of both the particular oil subsidy budget and the more general national budget for 2011 disappeared from the national treasury. We must never forget this fact whether or not Jonathan remains in office beyond 2015. But then we must ask ourselves: Why have the Nigerian peoples, especially as represented in their professional, civic and activist organizations and movements, not confronted Jonathan at every point with the sordid, lurid details of this mega-scam? For it is precisely due to the fact that he has never been seriously confronted on this scam – and many others – that Jonathan was emboldened this past week to assert, against the facts and the realities, that Nigeria is not broke and pipeline vandals are the only culprits we should worry about and go after.
As a matter of fact, Jonathan at the press briefing last week in which he made these absurd claims went so far as to argue that contrary to what anybody may think or say, corruption is not as bad in Nigeria as people make it out to be. Indeed, it is useful to quote Jonathan himself on this point: “If everybody continues to say the problem of Nigeria is corruption, then the feeling is that corruption is our major problem”. In other words, it is only because people say so that corruption appears to be our most important problem; if people stop saying so, corruption will cease being our most important problem! Who has any doubt that behind this facetious and distorted nominalism of Jonathan is the false bravado of a ruler who has never been seriously confronted or challenged on the billions of dollars and trillions of naira that have disappeared from our national coffers since he took office as Acting President?
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
