Tag: President

• By Mike Kebonkwu

Awind of change is blowing in our hemisphere; it is dramatic as it is revolutionary. A Minister of the Federal Republic has just been suspended and ordered to be probed, or otherwise investigated.  She is none other than the glamorous, flamboyant and youthful Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Betta Chimaobim Edu.  She has just held office for a couple of months and had been invited by the anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) over an allegation of transfer of over N500 million to a private account against established financial regulations.  She was initially cocky and dismissive of the allegation; grandstanding that she had done due diligence and therefore not guilty of any wrong doing. 

She succeeded the equally beautiful Sadiya Umar Farouq, Buhari’s pioneer Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development under whose watch a huge sum of over N37 billion was allegedly laundered through one James Okwete now being investigated by the EFCC.   Ms Sadiya Farouq has equally denied wrong doing, clad in a saintly apparel that she does not know the man in question.  No Nigerian official ever takes responsibility; to her if she did not deal directly with the suspect with the EFCC, then she is not guilty even when the incident occurred under her watch.  With all her learning and exposure, she does not understand that like the act of commission, omission and negligence equally constitute not just a dereliction of duty, but could be an offence that one can be held responsible as well. 

There is yet another beautiful and equally youthful Halima Shehu the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Social Investment Programme Agency (NSIPA) one of the agencies under the ministry of humanitarian affairs who admitted to have transferred over N40 billion by ‘mistake’ to private account.  Transferring over N40 billion to a private account by mistake! Mistake indeed! What is happening in this country, are we really alright?    

From 2019 when the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs was established though with good intentions, there was a red flag that it had all the appearances and trappings of a conduit pipe for money laundering.  It had huge budgetary allocation for poverty alleviation to vulnerable people with sweeping mandate but without credible data to work with for the target group or audience.  There was little wonder therefore that the ministry became the proverbial carcass of a whale that people come with all manners of sickles to share.  

In Nigeria, public office is poverty alleviation for the elite and appointment to government office is therefore celebrated as opportunity to come into opulence of obscene wealth and the unquestionable cult of power.  Nigeria venerates public office holders just for the mere fact that they occupy public office; it does not matter whether the person has questionable ethical or moral burden or out rightly found to be corrupt. Appointment therefore is all about self, group or party affiliation and for the perks of office; never about service to the country.  This is the reason why when people commit fraud in government, we raise tribal flags in solidarity and rationalize about others who had been there and never brought to account. 

It is unusual for government in power to investigate a serving minister in our clime for alleged case of corruption or any other malfeasant; this is the reason President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s directive to probe the minister and her ministry is revolutionary and should be supported by Nigerians who have been calling for accountability and probity in public office.  Is Mr President trying to prove the naysayers wrong that he can take on the behemoth called corruption in Nigeria?  Can he truly resist the cartel and take the monsters headlong on a collision course?  Political corruption of public officers has indeed made our nation a big-for-nothing country since independence; it has not changed.  Mr President is an establishment person; he understands official bureaucracy like the palm of his hands.  How far can he go?  He may choose to make a name for posterity and alter the course of our history and trajectory of governance to drive the country on the path of true change where people in official position begin to give account for their acts and omissions in public office.  To do this, he has to commit class suicide which is a very difficult thing to do. 

History beckons; those that change the course of history are not saints; they are mostly imperfect people with flaws.  The Biblical character, Saul was notorious for persecuting the saints but turned out the greatest and most prolific apostle. Mr President is surrounded by hawks, and one wonders if he can play the eagle. We pray Mr President would not prefer to listen to those stinking public office holders who will tell him to ‘off the mic’!  Nigeria bureaucracies reek in a putrid odour of corruption; well-oiled and lubricated by equally tainted civil service and public administrators. In just months in office, two government officials have been exposed to have frittered away N44 billion and over N500 million respectively, under the same ministry. It is both mind boggling and a dress rehearsal at the same time of what some people are capable of doing should they be left for a full tenure of four years in office. 

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People are already calling that the government should not just make a show and scapegoat of a few individuals as facade of a fight against corruption.  The dragnet should be extended to known and or suspected cases and everyone associated with the allegations. The allegation against this triumvirate, all our darling women, responding to the campaign for affirmative action to increase women inclusion in government.  This small incidents speaks to the wider net of graft at the states’ level where monies are simply diverted by governors for projects awarded but not executed, while government officials and phoney contractors ‘chop’ the money.  Most of the former governors were under investigation.  Some of these ex-governors are now serving senators and have converted the red chambers to old peoples’ home to protect themselves and frustrate any attempt to investigate them. Some notable names in the senate today have their files with the EFCC and nothing is being done about their cases probably they have joined the right party as was credited to one time chairman of the APC, the inimitable Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole.  Nigeria is drifting to the abyss due to corruption; nothing is working, infrastructure is still in decay, there is high rate of youth unemployment, insecurity is not abating, just name it. 

Nigerians should not lose this impetus, this is the time to support the government and insist that all those fingered for money laundering and corrupt practices in office should be brought to book.  We should cease to venerate thieves and brigands in three-piece suit and agbada. If we recover twenty percent of what the politicians have stolen from our common patrimony, Nigeria does not need to go cap in hand for foreign borrowing and handout from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

There has to be a thorough mental re-orientation of people aspiring to be leaders in every department of our lives.  It is insane for people to be seen to steal what they do not need. How can one individual steal trillions of naira because he has access to public fund; what does s/he want to do with it?  Certainly, the person should be sent to a psychiatrist or lunatic asylum. Tainted people who are being investigated for corruption should not be rewarded with ministerial appointments where they will continue as if it is a seal of approval that only corruption people that should run government bureaucracy.  Government should not to be run like a cartel of organized crime; Mr President should go the whole hog.

•Kebonkwu Esq is an Abuja-based attorney.

• By Nze Chidi Duru 

When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, declared to the world on the United Nations General Assembly’s stage concerning his new vision of economic relationship with the global north, it was, indeed, an economic trend reversal that he sought when he announced that; “…the question is not whether Nigeria is open for business, but rather, that the question is how much of the world is truly open to doing business with Nigeria and Africa on an equal, mutually beneficial manner.”

At that moment, with Mr President still holding captive, the attention of the world, I recalled the inimitable description of courage in the words of the American author, Richelle Goodrich, in which she observed that: “Courage to me is doing something daring, no matter how afraid, insecure, intimidated, alone, unworthy, incapable, ridiculed or whatever other paralyzing emotion you might feel. Courage is taking action….no matter what.”

This description, to my mind encapsulates President Tinubu’s stand in the present evolving trajectory of the nation – will he pluck the courage to dare to act in the face of a behemoth of numerous challenges, as it were? 

In truth, I am persuaded that Mr President didn’t just happen on the national scene; rather, his emergence is the outcome of the confluence of his courage and a weather intervention requiring a Tinubu’s presidency at this critical time in the life of our dear country. It is, indeed, a time that beckons on our most courageous and thankfully, Mr President, without doubt, stands in the gap for our dear nation. Will he assume the courage required at this time? 

I do concede the onerous tasks Mr President have been engaged with in the pacification of the multiple trouble spots that pockmark our national economic stratum especially the concern over our foreign exchange policy. In this regard, my observation is that if Nigerians don’t pay the right price for the right services, our exposure in the foreign exchange dynamics will continue to bounce, albeit negatively.

It is, thus, with all sense of responsibility that I request Mr President, as a matter of urgency, to intervene in the oppressive and inequitable treatment of Nigerian international travellers. Nigerian travellers have become subjected to discriminatory ticket fares that had become not only unfair and socially suffocating but an assault on Nigeria’s economic standing. Most times, tickets to destinations in Europe and the United States of America by Nigerian travellers are more than two to three times the ticket fares from those destinations to Nigeria. Even more disheartening are the disgraceful services availed Nigerian travellers by these airlines despite the higher ticket fares paid by Nigerians.

Mr President should consider this discriminatory ticket fare as a global plot by international airline operators to purloin our foreign exchange reserves by official subtlety. It is, undoubtedly, one avenue that our foreign exchange reserve is being eroded. May I implore Mr President, working through the foreign affairs and aviation ministers, to immediately move to redress this brazen act of inequity being perpetrated by international airline operators. 

An extension of the worries over our foreign reserves is the value of our national currency, the Naira. While I acknowledge the feverish efforts being made by the administration to strengthen the Naira-Dollar exchange rate especially in the parallel market, and while hoping the outcomes of these efforts become manifest in the shortest possible time, the worry is that beyond the prices of goods and services as reflected in increasing inflation rates, our capital market, especially, the stock market has become susceptible to hostile takeovers by so-called foreign investors.

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The prices of our high valued stocks have become rock bottom prices otherwise known as penny stocks when valued in dollar terms. For instance, Seplat Plc commands the highest possible price on the Nigerian stock market at N1, 980 per unit as of Tuesday, November 7. When converted to the dollar, the price translates to a lowly $1.9 thereabouts. Meanwhile, the price of a unit of Zenith Bank, a value stock by all consideration, as at same Tuesday, November 7, was traded at N33.80k when converted to dollar it would be traded at about 32 cents. These stock prices when reviewed on a dollar basis clearly show how undervalued the Nigerian stock market had become though we see exponential upward movements in the All Share Index and capitalisation of the market in recent times but these indicators are measured by domestic rates not the Dollar. 

The unabating fears for stock market  players like me is that foreign corporate raiders can turn our stock market to a killing field in a moment with a portfolio as little as $20million. This will be to the detriment of domestic shareholders who had held forth in the market and had sustained the market when foreign investors took flight out of the market at the first sign of trouble in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. As a corporate player, I am quite aware of the threat of corporate invaders coming into the country and leveraging a strong Dollar relative to the Naira to pick our value stocks at extremely cheap rates. 

The aggregation of these concerns is rooted in the limited access to foreign exchange, especially, the United States Dollars by those who want it for transactional purposes. A number of financial experts, and even some in the administration, had come forward to argue that the national economy is in this strait because of a shortage of dollar supply into the economy. With due respect to those that hold this position, it is rather commonplace, lacking an in-depth understanding of the use of the USD in the larger Nigerian economy. Yes, the quantum of the USD in circulation is low, yet, it should not be the reason for the near state of crisis that segment of our economy is growing into. USD scarcity does not explain the exponential increase in the Naira – USD exchange rate in the parallel market within a very short time, rising from about N460 in June to N1,300 in early November. This can’t be a about shortage in supply!

Truth be told, the larger percentage of the USD that had been taken out of our reserves are used for many purposes other than transactions. It is no secret that those that have access have turned the USD into a store of value. In this league are active importers that have also become economic saboteurs who inflate the value of their Letters of Credit (LC) and process the USD officially out of the Central Bank of Nigeria. After settling their trade obligations, they criminally convert the remaining value of the LC by a fraudulent discount arrangement from which they hold on to their share of the now cash backed LC, save it in an account abroad and, in classic unpatriotic display, they pray earnestly for the continued erosion of the value of the Naira so they can bring their criminally converted USD back into Nigeria for sale in the black market. This is classic forex round tripping. 

This is a snapshot of just one of the many underhand deals by which some people assail the value of our national currency for their selfish commercial ends. My submission, in this regard, is that these fraudulent conducts of businesses should be declared crimes of national economic sabotage. 

In all these prospective and actual sabotage of our economy, nonetheless, I find succour and confidence in the investment savviness of Mr President, I am thus assured that within the shortest possible time, Mr President will deploy all possible policies to address the concerns highlighted here. I am, indeed, persuaded in the power of courage, the courage to dare and act even when the odds are heavily against acting as appropriate. That’s the Tinubu’s courage.

•Duru is an entrepreneur, thought leader and the Deputy National Organising Secretary of the ruling All Progressives Congress