Our battalion of presidential spokespersons are ever so eager to exculpate the President from responsibility for the broken down anti-corruption war
In the First Republic, the Prime Minister earned five thousand pounds, the minister, three thousand, same as that of a permanent secretary and a university professor. The legislator earned eight hundred pounds and his job was not full time. They came for two months to debate the appropriation, recess and came back four or five months later for another two months. Today in the National Assembly, there is obviously nothing to keep them engaged full time, all the year round. You only have to watch their scanty numbers at the plenary on television. In the First Republic there was decency and discipline. When the first post independent national development plan was introduced in 1962, despite the political differences between the NPC, NCNC and the Action Group, Prime Minister Balewa, the regional premiers and their ministers all took a ten percent cut from their salaries to trigger the need for domestic savings to finance our plans. Now, what do we have? You suddenly see somebody who did not own even an ordinary bicycle before becoming a Local Government Chairman but who after two years will now have a string of houses and exotic cars without a single agency of government, either of internal revenue or anti-corruption, asking questions. You will see somebody who was not known to be a millionaire but who, after three years in the House or at the National Assembly, will now invite people to come and see him donate two hundred motorcycles and a hundred cars or buses as ‘dividends of democracy. Or, you wake up to see forty pages of a newspaper advertisement, congratulating somebody, because he is forty or fifty as governor or senator. It is nothing short of a national disaster. And I keep asking, have you ever seen a page of the London Times, the Independent, the Telegraph or the Times of India, to name only a few, in which a minister is congratulating the president or the governor? What model of government is Nigeria practicing for God’s sake?
The above is the slightly edited, recent jeremiad of Chief Philip Asiodu, a distinguished former Nigerian Permanent Secretary, who is no doubt extremely tortured at what nonsense today passes muster as governance in a country which he served to the best of his abilities.
You will not but pity Nigeria, and, of course, ordinary Nigerians, when you now read that the country ranks with the likes of Nepal, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan on the global corruption perception index. That was as at the Transparency International’s last report in December, 2012, and could, in fact, now be far worse when you factor in other incidences of public service corruption, especially the humongous oil subsidy racket at the lead of which you find mostly, scions of the topmost chieftains of the ruling party who, on the long run, are far beyond the long arms of the law, whatever the make-belief antics of the EFCC. Or won’t their cases also go before Nigerian courts?
For moving up a measly four places on the Transparency list, scoring 27 out of a possible 100 and placing 139th out of the 176 countries surveyed, officials of the Jonathan administration are yet to stop gloating, attributing the pitiable upward movement to President Jonathan’s fierce anti- corruption efforts when the world knows better. Those who advised the President to have a Face book account should also have told him that employing the new media is like walking naked into a cocktail party. The entire world now daily reads us like a book.
In spite of the fact that there is no more a hiding place, Mr President has gone on a self-congratulation binge regarding how intangible corruption is in Nigeria. He has even pointedly told the U.S to mind her many problems, man- made and natural, and stop getting unnecessarily exuberant about the minuscule corruption in his dear country.
If Mr President, for very understandable reasons, cannot be persuaded to see Alamiesiagha’s state pardon as a corruption of the process by the mere fact of grafting totally inappropriate names to the list in order to fake a semblance of an even-handed ‘pan-Nigeriana’, then let us quickly remind him of other acts of putrefaction which have no other name besides corruption. Indeed, it needs be mentioned that Alamiesiagha’s pardon was so badly received by the outside world that the U.S could not hold back from issuing the following statement: ‘The US views this development as a setback for the fight against corruption, and also for our ability to play the strong role we’ve played in supporting rule of law and legal institution-building in Nigeria, which is very important for the future of the country’.
Not only did Britain come out to say Alamiesiagha has a pending criminal case in the U.K, Mr Bill Gates was so pissed off, he cancelled a scheduled visit to Nigeria even when he was already in Ghana, citing the same issue.
Earlier in this self-propelling blitzkrieg, the President had, at General Owoye Azazi’s obsequies in Yenegoa on December 30, 2012, said the following: “Corruption is not the cause of our problems. Nigeria has more institutions that fight corruption. Most of the issues we talk about are not corruption. If we do things properly, if we change our attitude of doing things, most of the things we think are caused by corruption are not’.
In one respect, that is what decent Nigerians are saying: ‘change our attitude of doing things’: banish impunity, follow the due process and allow both the anti-corruption agencies, the police and the courts, do their work without trying to hamstring them because of the next election.
A case in issue, eloquently showing that under this administration anti-corruption war has gone down the drain, is the issue involving the Minister of Communications Technology and a certain Dr. Gwandu who was, December last year, fired by President Goodluck Jonathan allegedly over controversial secret spectrum allocations to some favoured companies at some ridiculous prices.
Since issues relating to the matter are already before a court, we would merely sketch the story here.
As the story goes, Dr Gwandu did nothing more than expose corruption but rather than be commended, he had to go because he had, in the process, roughened some feathers. He was said to have exposed the lopsidedness in federal government’s sale of a 450 MHz Spectrum to an unlicensed company – reportedly owned by a close friend of a very senior government official – in which they paid a ridiculous $6 million for a license that should have fetched the nation over $50 million. Second is the waiver granted to a company linked to a top official at the NCC at the expense of other companies operating in the industry, while the third revolves around his expose of the selling of 800 MHz spectrum to a company for about 13 million Euros when equivalent spectrum sells in Germany, Italy and France for 1.153 billion, 992 million and 891 million Euros respectively.
Therefore, for allegedly ‘undermining the interest of the country in relation to the operations of a UN body’, the minister in a letter with ref no: MC/ST.01631T4, dated April 12, 2013, and addressed to the Secretary General of the ITU, wants the union to sack Dr Gwandu, not only as the chairman or vice-chair of the two organs but also as a representative of Nigeria.
The above is symptomatic of the anti-corruption battle under President Jonathan. For ages, top officials of the office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation sat on billions, in their homes, of pension funds, monies belonging to old men and women who had served the country in their prime and some of who are now dying wretched deaths on queues for their pension peanuts which remain unpaid for years. When, for once, the National Assembly acted pro-actively and ordered that the prime pension fraud suspect be presented before it, the police, which provided the man with 24-hour guard, claimed it did not know his whereabouts until he reportedly bolted out of the country.
Only this past week, a former EFCC Chairman was heard complaining about the useless laws with which the anti corruption agency operates. But since updating these will involve serious work, you can trust the National Assembly not to touch that much needed review with the longest spoon.
And in all these, our battalion of presidential spokespersons are ever so eager to exculpate the President from responsibility for this broken down anti- corruption war hiding under the distinction between the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary, and, forgetting that there is something called moral leadership and that the buck stops at the President’s table.
