Panels in Nigeria do not just help the government to distract, entomb or procrastinate; they also consume virtually everyone who has had the misfortune of heading them. The examples of Abdulrasheed Maina (Presidential Task Team on Pension Reform (PTTPR), Ndudi Elumelu (House of Representatives Committee on Power Sector Reforms), and Farouk Lawan (House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee on Monitoring of Fuel Subsidy Regime) are pointers to the contradictions that afflict the body politic. There are a few less significant cases, and many more near misses. The recent Mallam Nuhu Ribadu panel (Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force), a red herring, escaped the fate of the first three panels by the skin of its teeth and probably by the combustible nature of the panel chairman’s personality.
After many months of controversial manoeuvrings, Maina was last week declared wanted by the police on the instigation of the Senate which had summoned him to shed light on missing pension funds totalling some N195bn. The Maina Presidential Task Team was constituted about two years ago to investigate pension funds mismanagement and to sanitise and modernise the procedure for pension administration in the military, police, Department of State Security (DSS), customs, immigration, prison and pension office (CIPPO) and the Head of Service Pension Offices. However, presenting the Senate’s case against Maina, Senator Kabiru Gaya said: “…N195 billion pension fund is unaccounted for. In the head of service alone, N139 billion was released but N100 billion was paid out to pensioners. In the police service, N131 billion was paid in five years but only N88 billion was paid out, N44 billion is yet to be accounted for. This money belongs to the masses and it is expected that it should be accounted for.”
Why Maina avoided the summons has not been fully explained by any official in the Task Team. But he was quite enthusiastic in declaiming late last year that the team had discovered earth-shaking facts on pension maladministration. As he put it exuberantly and perhaps exaggeratedly: “I want to tell you that what we have uncovered will surprise Nigerians. We have found that pension fund up to N3.3 trillion was stolen by the cabal and we are going to recover all the money…we have recovered about N221 billion and deleted 71,135 ghost pensioners from the civil service list…In addition N74 billion of the N181 billion discovered has been mopped up for utilization in the 2012 budget…We have conducted biometrics for 170,000 pensioners, established e-pension management system, pioneered the payment of pensioners in the Diaspora and introduced smart cards to eliminate physical verification of pensioners.” By the time he began to lyricise his team’s achievements, he had become a hunted and haunted man.
But a national reputation is not secured upon the basis of one aberration. While the Senate was engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with Maina, with the latter still avoiding either arrest or imprisonment, Mr Ndudi Elumelu, a member of the House of Representatives, was left bewildered by how rapidly he transformed from hunter to hunted. It began with the late President Umaru Yar’Adua suggesting that his predecessor, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, had spent some $10bn dollars on power projects without result. Soon, the House of Representatives also declared alarmingly that the Obasanjo government actually spent $16bn on power projects with little to show for it. No one knew nor bothered to verify how the legislators did their calculations. But the sound of $16bn was enough to send the country, which was asphyxiating under a minuscule 3000MW generation of electricity, into a deafening uproar.
In 2008, Elumelu was put at the head of the national consensus to get its pound of flesh from the enraged power sector (not fuel subsidy) cabal, not minding the collateral damage. But before the panel was through with its assignment, an assignment that saw it stepping on giant toes and engaging in acerbic exchange with Obasanjo, stories alleging bribery and corruption against the panel and its chairman became rife. Words of encouragement from governors and sympathisers were sadly insufficient to exculpate Elumelu. He was not even allowed to present his report, having barely managed to complete the assignment without being hounded into jail. He eventually went to jail for about a month, and was tried for allegedly misappropriating some N5.2bn Rural Electrification Agency (REA) contracts. It was only last year that he was discharged and acquitted. As for the panel’s recommendations, a total of some 88, most were thrown out, and the surviving few inoculated against causing damage to anyone’s reputation. The shell-shocked Elumelu is today quietly chewing the cud in the legislature.
If Maina is scurrying animatedly from one rathole to another to evade what his pursuers call capture, and Elumelu has become almost phlegmatic, swearing never again to be lured into any national assignment where he would step on toes, Farouk Lawan, another House of Representatives member, is dismayed by how quickly he has fallen and how numbed he has become. If Maina is as clever as his words and visage indicate, he will humour the furious legislators probing the pension scam and get away with nothing but fierce censure. Elumelu has become a safe ruminant and legislative wonk. He was badly beaten and bruised, but he is still perching on what looks like the moral high ground. This is not the case with Lawan. The petit legislator has been beaten insensate by sickening, short-range blows from the executive branch and one of its men Friday, the illustrious and undiscriminating Mr Femi Otedola.
Lawan’s story is probably the most dramatic and pathetic since Nigeria began its troubling experimentation with parliamentary practices. Member of the House of Representatives since 1999, his star rising with each passing year, and his elocution, like his rich voice, deliberate, endearing and near as oratorical as anyone who is not an orator can get, Lawan seemed made for parliamentary jousting and destined for parliamentary glory. Not only was he leader of the so-called Integrity Group in the Reps, a label he and others in his group acquired when they battled former Speaker Patricia Etteh over corruption allegations, he inspired confidence in many Nigerians about his bona fides, and evoked an unquenchable ability to strive for his country’s glory. In April 2012, according to the prosecutor, he solicited for a $3m bribe from businessman Femi Otedola, and only managed to collect $620,000 of the sum before his luck ran out. The state will try to make the accusation stick; but Lawan will try his best to wriggle out of the net. There is little hope, however, that he will succeed.
But Lawan’s troubles began when he was named chairman of the panel on fuel subsidy payments. The panel did the job with such public daring and flourish that Nigerians were glued to what they dubbed the subsidy opera. In the din, Lawan’s mellifluous voice and characteristic surefootedness, both of which belied his size, could be heard and seen distinctly, soothing wounded hearts and lifting broken spirits. But with the Otedola accusation, the once confident Lawan voice has given way to a hoary, feeble baritone, slower than usual, and many of his statements contradictory and clearly illogical. A court has remanded him in prison until his bail application can be heard later this week. After stalling for many months Lawan now probably feels subdued, disconsolate and haunted, broken in spirit as he is in body, and perhaps with not the faintest idea of a way out.
Of the three gentlemen, Lawan is probably the worst hit. While the courts will be procedurally restrained by legal exigencies to assume his guilt, the public is less troubled by any consideration of conscience. Once Otedola went public, they had concluded there was no conceivable way of escape for the petit PDP legislator from Kano. More, the public sighs in frustration at the paradoxical jinx afflicting panels in these parts, and the seeming impossibility of finding one good man in government by whom we could swear, or failing that, one good man anywhere to probe the failure of government.
