Tag: miscellaneous

It is miscellany time again.  Time to catch up with broad strokes and short takes on recent occurrences, lest the personalities involved feel neglected.

The Fixer departs

Tony “The Fixer” Anenih has been marking his long-awaited retirement from party politics with a memoir, titled My Life and Nigerian Politics. A memoir being among other things an exercise in self-redemption and self justification, he sought to repudiate his renown for turning election winners into losers and losers into winners.

It was on account of this propensity that I christened him “The Fixer,” back in 1993, at the height of the June 12 presidential election crisis when, as national chairman of SDP he led a team of likeminded chiselers to bargain away Chief Moshood Abiola’s victory and settled             instead for an Interim National Government as the vehicle to “move Nigeria forward.”

That trade-off was a grand betrayal of millions of Nigerians yearning for a new order that held a vast promise not just for national growth and development, but more crucially for forging one nation out of the plethora of tribes inhabiting the space called Nigeria.

Anenih has described the day the agreement setting up the ING was struck – a day of infamy, the jarring echoes of which can be heard even now – as “the happiest day” of his life.

He must have been living a life of unspeakable misery up to that moment.

Anenih says in the book that military president Ibrahim Babangida’s calculation was that the NRC candidate Bashir Tofa would win the election, thus empowering the authorities to pivot  on the many infractions of the electoral law Tofa had committed wittingly or unwittingly to justify annulling the election and hand Babangida the perfect excuse for clinging on to power.

Against their uninformed calculations, Abiola won a sweeping victory, the type that no presidential candidate had ever won in Nigeria or is likely to repeat.  Babangida then had to manufacture all kinds of reasons for annulling the election, from the implausible to the infantile.

To cite just one such reason:  The election had to be annulled because it failed the test of “absolute fidelity” to the rule of law, said the self-designated president who routinely enacted retroactive laws and just as routinely eviscerated the jurisdiction of the courts.

The truth is that Babangida simply did not want to give up power, and would have found or confected any number of reasons for annulling the election, no matter who won.

Anenih is quitting his tawdry trade when his reputation is in tatters.  He will never get another chance to mend it.  But he surely has earned his rest.

Just how much is N2.1 billion?

It is a vast sum of money that can buy almost everything one desires and still leave more than pocket change.  But it is hard to conceive its bulk, its physical dimension.

It has been calculated that if you stack up one million US dollar bills, you will end up with a pile that is as high as the Empire State building in New York, including its antenna spire.  That translates into 1,454 feet, or 443 metres from the ground.

If you stacked up one billion Naira in one Naira bills, your pile would reach at least twice the maximum altitude of 52,000 ft for commercial airliners – or six miles from the ground, assuming that the one Naira bill and the one US dollar bill have the same thickness.  And that is just one billion Naira.

But we are talking two billion Naira and some, the amount of money reportedly ferried to Ayo Fayose and company, by agents of the Jonathan Administration, on the eve of the 2014 Ekiti gubernatorial election, Musiliu Obanikoro, Minister of State for Defence.

If you prefer an avoirdupois perspective to a vertical one, here is how the thing shakes out:  The chopper they hired for the task had to make two trips.  It could not deliver in just one trip.  The bullion van that conveyed the money from Akure airport to Ado-Ekiti fared better.  It needed just one trip.  Though it is just a year old, it moaned and groaned and coughed and belched all the way to destination, I gather, never having ferried such freight before.

Roughly one half of this sum –N1.1 billion- was reportedly handed over to Fayose’s agents at             his Spotless Hotel, in Ado-Ekiti, and the balance went into his Zenith Bank account .  The remittance was to ensure that the PDP and Fayose would prevail over incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi and the APC.

The bank’s staff took 10 full days to count the money.  The electronic counters deployed for the task just kept breaking down, unaccustomed to such heavy traffic.  Such was the strain on the  staffers doing the counting that they had to take a two-week paid vacation thereafter, according to knowledgeable sources.

The luckless clerks at Spotless Hotel, which is far less endowed with banking hardware than  Zenith Bank, spent at least twice as many days to sort things out.  By one credible account, the hotel even had to shut down for the exercise, fobbing off its curious okada clientele with the bogus claim that stock-taking was in progress.

Judges and Money

It is not yet proven that the vast sums of money reportedly found warehoused in the official residence of some senior officers of the judiciary were proceeds of the corruption and perversion of justice, or the fruits of conduct inconsistent with their exalted positions.

One judge said his son had given him the money for safekeeping.  Isn’t that refreshing, edifying even, in the days when children are so disobliging, that some children repose more faith in their parents than they do in the banks?

Another judge said the money came from selling rice after hours.  As everyone knows, tedium is the hallmark of a judge’s life.  No fun, no variety; just one stultifying case after another.  If a judge decides to sell rice on the side to break the monotony, and to make a roaring financial success of it, personally, I would give him high praise for enterprise.  Seriously.

Yet another judge says the money allegedly found in his house was his cumulative savings over the years from his unspent salary and allowances.  Now, if all our top officials were as frugal, as self-denying and as abstemious as the judge aforementioned, would the economy now be in recession?  Would our foreign reserve be so anaemic?  And would the rate of inflation have risen so dramatically?

Prosecuting the judge in question is, in my view, tantamount to criminalising thrift.  Instead, I would recommend a Presidential Medal for Parsimony.

One judge says he was groggy from anti-malaria medication when DSS operatives barged into his residence to conduct their unlawful search, only to emerge from one section of the house  bearing a vast sum of money in local and foreign currencies and order him, by force of arms, to acknowledge that the haul had been found on his property.

It is deeply to be regretted that the judge was not accorded the humane and decent treatment enjoined by the Constitution.   What would the DSS have lost by suspending its operation and rushing him to hospital?

Still another judge has been charged with receiving sums of money in local and foreign currencies running into billions of Naira from law litigants and law firms between 2013 and 2016, with his wife reportedly serving as liaison.

That is ominous.  A woman can no longer collect on behalf of her husband?  And judges cannot warehouse their money, like the women traders at Oke-Arin Market, in Lagos?

This war on corruption sef!

Can you for a moment imagine what Nigeria would be going through now if Dr Goodluck Jonathan had not gone down to defeat in last year’s Presidential election – defeat so heavy that he could not refuse to concede?

For one thing, the massive looting of public resources that we must now regard as a fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy in his time would never have come to light, or would have done so when it no longer mattered.  Or again, it would have been portrayed as the contrivance of the usual detractors too far gone in their malevolence or envy to perceive, much less appreciate, the great transformation occurring all round them.

But even his most unyielding detractor will have to concede that Dr Jonathan, whom no one has  ever accused of possessing a fine sense of discrimination despite his advanced training in ichthyology, was right on this one. What took place was stealing pure and simple, unworthy of being dignified as corruption, even though in Dr Jonathan’s book, the latter was the greater crime, the former apparently rating no higher than third-degree malfeasance.

Just when you think you have heard the ultimate revelation, the next day brings forth disclosures that make the totality of what had been reported stolen earlier seem benign, almost edifying even. By some conservative reckoning, as much as one half of the GDP may have been stolen during each year Dr Jonathan held office.

But you cannot blame Dr Jonathan for that.

“My approach to corruption,” (read “stealing”) “was don’t make any money available to anyone to touch,” he told Bloomberg TV New York, after a speech at Bloomberg Studios in London and reported in The Guardian (Lagos).

There you have it.

Jonathan fought corruption by simply refusing to make money “available to anyone to touch,” persuaded that if you can’t touch it, you can’t steal it.  In the digital age, it is indeed true that a great deal of stealing occurs in cyberspace, with the touch of a button on a computer keypad or the swiping of an electronic card.

But much of the thieving that occurred under Jonathan’s administration was of the old-fashioned kind, like officials presenting handwritten notes at the Central Bank and driving off with billions of dollars stashed in cartons, or having one-half of the payroll for an entire agency delivered to their homes every month for several years, or burying millions of dollars in make-believe septic tanks in their homes.

According to the best authorities, if Dr Jonathan had not pursued the tight-money policy that made money unavailable for touching, Nigeria’s entire GDP, plus some, will have been stolen each year he was in office.

And there would have been nothing left to execute his Transformation Agenda, the fruits of which are all around us, not least the glut in food production and the millions of new farm jobs he talked about in the Bloomberg interview, thanks to the electronic wallet scheme that delivered fertilisers directly to farmers even in the most remote villages, cutting out the massive corruption that had paralysed the distribution chain.

I am in a position to announce that, in the years ahead, Dr Jonathan will be giving the world the benefit of his unique approach to fighting corruption  — just don’t make money available for anyone to touch – by way of a Distinguished Lecture Series he has graciously agreed to teach online, under the auspices of The Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan School of Public Management and Finance at the Federal University of Otuoke, where he is set to be named the Dame Patience Faka Jonathan Distinguished Professor of Public Service.

Be sure to tell prospective enrollees that you first learned about the programme from this column.

Prime Minster David Cameron must be ruing the day he promised to organise a referendum to determine, once and for all, whether the UK should remain in the European Union or quit.  He didn’t do it on a whim; he calculated that a “yes” vote would silence all the sniping on the Tory back bench and unite the party behind him.

In the event, the Brexiteers won a narrow victory – a plurality of less than 2 percent, with 30 million subjects or roughly 70 percent of the population voting.  But it is a victory with likely consequences so far-reaching that we can only glimpse their hazy out lines now.  It may well go down as the day when everything changed for the residents of those sceptred isles.

A week later, the “United Kingdom” seems anything but united and not much of a kingdom. Those who “won” seem only slightly less confused than those who “lost.”  There is no great rejoicing in the streets.  It is almost as if the people had sleepwalked through the whole thing

But trust the Brits.  They will muddle through this one, as they have always done.  It is not for nothing that they invented the science of muddling through.

Every major development elsewhere has a way of turning Nigerians into more than detached observers and leading them to draw parallels with their homeland.  The Brexit referendum was   no exception.

A Nigerian election or referendum in which winner and loser are separated by less than two percentage points would most certainly have been declared “inconclusive.”  Even a poll won by a far higher margin would still have been declared inconclusive if the authorities chose not to proclaim the results.  And there would have been no shortage of arguments to support the claim that it was incurably inconclusive.

I am reminded again of the June 12, 1993 presidential election in which the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the National Republican Convention (NRC) were the contestants.  The winner of the poll, so said       a front-page editorial in the New Nigerian, the fully-funded official mouthpiece of the Northern Establishment and whichever among its factions was running the country, was Arthur Nzeribe’s misbegotten Association for a Better Nigeria (ABN), which was not even a party to the election.

How so?

Because, said the New Nigerian, ABN’s phantom registered membership of 25 million which had stayed home on Election Day as instructed by Nzeribe, outnumbered almost 2:1 those registered electors who had voted for the SDP and the NRC.

And that was by no means the most trifling argument that led a large swathe of the public to accept that the election was indeed inconclusive.

Finally, at the risk of sounding boorish, I have to ask again whether Senate President Bukola Saraki cares about anybody or anything other than Saraki, and whether he knows the difference between statesmanship and careerism.

That he has been standing trial charged with perjury is scandal enough.  Now, based on a police report, he has been charged with complicity in the forgery of documents that created the path through which he and Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu carried out their hostile takeover of the institution.

Saraki is praying the court to stand the letter proceedings down, on the ground that simultaneous prosecution will imperil his right to a fair trial and the performance of his constitutional duties.

Our laws presume .an individual innocent until he or she is proven guilty.  But in other climes whose traditions and usages Saraki claims to embrace, that presumption always yields to the far higher principle of noblesse oblige.

Saraki can still earn himself an honourable place in Nigeria’s history by bowing to this hallowed principle instead of clinging desperately to his career – such as it is – through employing the tawdriest contrivances e’er devised by the best lawyers that money can buy.