Tag: Oby Ezekwesili

Although it manifests itself as a crisis of the economy, the various maladies that have brought Nigeria to the very brink of collapse have their root causes in the structure of the Nigerian state, the character of the country’s politics and the sheer moral bankruptcy of its ruling elite. This was the submission of the late Professor Claude Ake, in one of his characteristically insightful pieces titled ‘What is to be done?’

The solution to the country’s protracted crises of poverty, instability and underdevelopment thus lies largely in the political realm and not in the supposedly a-political IMF/World Bank economic technocrats to whom the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have handed over the country’s destiny over the last one and a half decades.

So severe has the Nigerian crisis degenerated; so alarmingly has poverty deepened and so appalling has become the inequality between social classes that fears of the possibility of a mass revolution have been echoed in the most unexpected, conservative quarters.

Former Minister of Solid Minerals and later Education in the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, has once again drawn public attention to one of the key manifestations of our dysfunctional political system. A key member of the Obasanjo administration’s economic management team and ‘due process’ enforcer, Mrs.Ezekwesili has a way of making government officials catch cold anytime she sneezes. Speaking at a one day dialogue session on the ‘Cost of governance in Nigeria’, Madam ‘due process’ threw another bombshell, when she disclosed that members of the National Assembly have expended over N1 trillion over the last eight years.

Coming on the heels of the disclosure last week by The Economist magazine, that Nigerian legislators are the highest paid in the world, Mrs Ezekwesili’s assertion naturally touched the raw nerves of the legislators and put them on the defensive. Just as presidential aides did when Mrs Ezekwesili accused the Jonathan administration of financial profligacy earlier in the year, spokesmen of the National Assembly largely ignored the message and went crudely after the messenger.

They would like to know, they said, how much was allocated to her office when she was a Minister. Some wondered why she focussed only on the legislature and neglected other arms of government when computing the cost of governance. A member of the House of Representatives accused Ezekwesili of mischievously lumping together salaries and allowances of the legislators and their aides, salaries of civil servants, capital projects and the running costs of other institutions under the National Assembly.

Now, many of these observations are pertinent and the former Minister would do the public a lot of good by shedding more light on these questions. Luckily, the former Minister has challenged the legislators to a public debate on her assertions. Such an open debate will most certainly enable her amplify on the issues raised in her lecture. Much more importantly, it should shed light on exactly how much our legislators take home as salaries, allowances and other perks that are now treated as classified and confidential information.

This column agrees entirely with the legislators that in all probability members of the executive and their innumerable aides may also be receiving humongous amounts from the public till. Again, the whole issue of outrageous salaries and allowances for elected public officers is not limited to the federal level. It is also necessary to go down the line to reveal what public officers are collecting as remuneration and other perks at both the state and local government levels. Such information will enable the country come up with remuneration for public officers at all levels that is commensurate with the productive capacity of the Nigerian economy and is sensitive to the abysmal living conditions of the vast majority of Nigerians.

Of course, Mrs Ezekwesili is not the first to call attention to the outrageous amounts that our public officers award themselves in a society where the majority survive on less than one dollar a day. At a public lecture last year, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mallam Sanusi LamidoSanusi, caused uproar when he disclosed that 25% of the Federal Government’s overheads went to the National Assembly. And speaking recently at the Second Annual Capital Market Retreat in Warri, Delta State, the CBN governor said the country spends 70% of its earnings on salaries and entitlements of civil servants.

In his words “At the moment 70% of Federal Government revenue goes for payment of salaries and entitlements of civil servants leaving 30% for development of 167 million Nigerians. That means that for every naira government earns, 70 kobo is consumed by civil servants…The various tiers of government should cut down their recurrent expenditure and use the funds to provide basic infrastructure like schools, hospitals etc”.

Pointing out that Nigeria does not need 109 Senators or 457 members of the House of Representatives to make laws for her, Sanusi condemned a situation in which the bulk of the country’s total revenue is consumed by the executive, lawmakers and civil servants.

There is no doubt that the degree of impoverishment in the land coupled with the criminal inequality between a microscopic wealthy elite and the majority of poor Nigerians is a time bomb waiting to explode. Already a full scale class war is being fought although it manifests as kidnapping, armed robbery, communal violence, religious intolerance, ritual killings and other sundry acts of wanton criminality.

On the streets of Lagos, you now have scores of urchins who ought to be in school but are armed with bottles of liquid soap and brushes to forcefully wash the windscreen of cars stranded in traffic for a token fee. If something urgent is not done to ameliorate the situation in the land, such street urchins may turn nastier. They may forcefully extort money from motorists by threatening to destroy their vehicles. It is that bad.

I agree entirely with Mrs Ezekwesili that “We must debate public policies as a nation because if we don’t debate public policies, we are going to make silly mistakes because we didn’t involve the stakeholders so policy debates must be encouraged”. Coming from Mrs Ezekwesili, this is a most welcome, even surprising position. For, I had always associated her with those World Bank and IMF technocrats who believe there are no alternatives to their strange brew of neo-liberal cocktail, which they administer in equal measure to all their patients irrespective of the ailment!

In this respect, I was highly impressed and encouraged by the excerpts of a paper delivered by the Deputy Governor, Financial System, of the CBN, Dr Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu, at the Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars in Washington. Lamenting the continued dependence by Africa on the developed world making it difficult for the continent to maximise the inherent opportunities of globalisation, Dr Moghalu said: “We should also note that in this context (extraction of the natural resources), growth could be taking place, but no structured transformation, which creates real wealth is happening…the status quo, based on unrestrained free markets without a conceptual grasp of the opportunities, limitations and even the different kinds of capitalism and their implications for African countries, as well as the exact role of the government and the structure of world trade, cannot create an ennobling environment for Africa to matter in the world economy.”

With such fresh, out of the box thinking by a key member of Nigeria’s policy establishment, there may yet be hope that new ideas can emerge from Nigeria to liberate the country from poverty, underdevelopment and gross inequality while also helping to avert the revolution knocking so impatiently on our creaky door.