The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Questionable

  • Nigeria to TI: Your corruption rating is questionable

    Nigeria to TI: Your corruption rating is questionable

    The Presidency yesterday put a question mark over the criteria used by the Transparency International, the anti-corruption watchdog, to rank Nigeria the 148th least corrupt in the world.

    Aso Rock Villa dismissed as “very misleading and unfair” the conclusion reached by the TI in its assessment of the Federal Government’s anti-corruption crusade.

    Reacting to the TI annual report on corruption released on Wednesday,the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the President,Mallam Garba Shehu,while government welcomes constructive criticisms from the anti-corruption watchdog, the organisation has a responsibility to reflect the larger picture of the concrete and verifiable achievements of the Buhari administration since it came into office in May 2015.

    “Political will is the first major component of fighting corruption in any country and President Buhari has made a huge difference by demonstrating not only the political will, but also the extraordinary courage to go after high profile looters, including former military service chiefs and judges,” Shehu said in a statement in Abuja.

    He added: “It was once unthinkable to touch or prosecute the ‘big men’ for corruption in Nigeria, but President Buhari has ended impunity for corruption.

    “Today, the Buhari administration has made accountability the bedrock of governance and corruption is no longer fashionable because it attracts consequences.

    “Blocking leakages for corruption through the rigid enforcement of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) had made life tougher for corrupt officials. He regretted that these efforts were not acknowledged by the corruption Watchdog.

    “Figures published by the EFCC, the anti-corruption agency, reveal that  N738.9 billion was recovered in just two years of the Buhari administration and this impressive and unprecedented record is worthy of mention and acknowledgement by anybody genuinely looking at the larger picture of the country’s progress in the war against corruption.

    “During the 7th session of the Conference of State Parties to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption in Vienna, Austria, the chairman of the agency, Ibrahim Magu, noted that the figure represents $2.9 billion dollars.

    “Besides these impressive recoveries of looted funds, the EFCC has recorded more than 140 successful prosecutions.

    “The Federal Government has also signed international agreements to recover the proceeds of corruption and to block the laundering of stolen assets abroad by public officials.

    “Anybody who knows where Nigeria was coming from would not believe that corruption is worse under the Buhari administration.”

  • Forensic Medicine: Questionable injuries are not acts of God (1)

    Africa and indeed Nigeria are blessed with abundant human and material resources: that is a fact. That we are underachieving and underdeveloped is a settled matter and I will not be discussing that point here. What is most concerning is the magnitude of abuse of humans and other resources that we have been blessed with to improve our lives. We the residents of this frontier called Nigeria (and Africa) are the principal perpetrators of such abuses against our fellow human beings and it has been on-going for millennia.

    A couple of weeks ago, we discussed abuse in its various forms. I pointed out then that abuse can result into physical, psychological, financial injuries or death of the victims.  Abuse is not the only cause of deaths as we all know. Deaths can result from accidents, very often as a result of one person’s negligence or the other. There is no doubt that deaths of anyone—young or old—very frequently results from natural causes such as definite disease states such as cancer.

    In the elderly, death may come due to old age.  Death may therefore not be due to natural causes. Death that is questionable may be as a consequence of a deliberate act of harm (abuse) such as beating a person to death, poisoning, burning or deprivation of necessaries. Death may also result from negligence (act of not paying due care and attention to what one is doing or  a person is not carrying out his/her duty to the standard expected of that individual and position that the person occupies).

    Now, it’s the subject of such questionable deaths and injuries that we shall explore in this article. In medical professional circle and in law, the medico-legal examination of such questionable deaths is carried out by a Coroner.

    Coroner cases are integral part of forensic medicine. It’s a very important aspect of every decent society to question and find the root causes of what caused the death or injury of a member of the society that we all belong to.

    We will examine the nature of forensic medicine and how it applies to you and the society that we live in. We will also take a look at how you and your family can benefit from forensic medical work. In addition, we will examine the reasons why forensic examination is almost a taboo or why the practice of forensic medicine suffers from a high resistance in Nigeria. First, the scope of forensic medicine and the law.

    Let us deal with the word: “Coroner”: The history of coroner and indeed the name “coroner” (from Crown) came from the English in the 11th Century England. The principal reason for establishing coroner is simply to protect the interest of the Crown in Criminal Proceedings. The coroner was formally established in England by Article 20 of the “Articles of Eyre” in September 1194 to “keep the pleas of the Crown”) from which the word “coroner” is derived. In those days, it was the duty (as its now) of the local county official to defend and protect the interest of the Crown in courts. By the year 1215 when the Magna Carta (that brought much human rights to the world as we now know it) came into being, the word “coroner” had been enshrined in law.

    Ultimately, it became established that “the person who found a body from a death thought sudden or unnatural was required to raise the “hue and cry” and to notify the coroner” and hence the modern function and meaning of a coroner . Therefore, coroner is a person whose standard role is to confirm and certify the death of an individual within a jurisdiction (say in Lagos State or Nigeria).

    With this in mind, we can now look at what is “forensic medicine”.  “The application of medical knowledge to the investigation of crime, particularly in establishing the causes of injury or death is called forensic medicine.

    The meeting point of Forensic Medicine and Coroner:  Coroner and forensic medicine indeed have a meeting point at what is called autopsy:  which means examination of the dead to find the cause of death.  To use the words of Encyclopedia Britannica, the primary tool of forensic medicine has always been the autopsy.

    Frequently used for identification of the dead, autopsies may also be conducted to determine the cause of death. In cases of death caused by a weapon, for example, the forensic pathologist ( a medical doctor)—by examining the wound—can often provide detailed information about the type of weapon used as well as important contextual information. (In a death by gunshot, for example, he can determine with reasonable accuracy the range and angle of fire.)

    Forensic medicine is a major factor in the identification of victims of disaster, such as landslide or plane crash. In cause-of-death determinations, forensic pathologists can also significantly affect the outcome of trials dealing with insurance and inheritance.

    Therefore, a common but extremely powerful tool that exposes criminality is autopsy which in the hand of a coroner can bring justice to victims even if dead. Forensic medicine as a whole can bring justice and restitution to the living injured.

    Next week, we shall examine coroner in more details.

  • Questionable diversions

    •Diversion of a loan for rail to other unknown projects is a pointer to the financial recklessness of the Jonathan years.  Buhari should get to the root of the matter

    In the run up to the last general elections, the erstwhile Goodluck Jonathan administration touted the revitalisation of the country’s railway transportation network as one of the successes of its transformation agenda. To some extent, there was indeed some achievement recorded in this sector as revealed by the Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Transportation, Alhaji Mohammed Bashar, while briefing President Muhammadu Buhari on the activities of the Ministry at the Presidential Villa, Abuja this week.

    According to Alhaji Bashar, the rehabilitation of the Lagos- Kano rail route has been completed and is now operational twice weekly. In the same vein, rail operations have reportedly commenced from Kano to Port Harcourt through on to Gombe. Yet, the over celebration of these modest attainments by the Jonathan administration indicates the pedestrian level of its vision and its overestimation of its performance — a key reason why it was voted out of office by the vast majority of the Nigerian electorate.

    The disclosure by Alhaji Bashar to President Buhari that a substantial part of a financial facility obtained from the Chinese Exim Bank in 2012 for the construction of a standard gauge rail line linking Lagos to Kano, is another evidence of the gross mismanagement of resources and utter impunity that characterised the immediate past dispensation. According to the Permanent Secretary, only $400 million of the $1.005 billion loan remains with the Ministry, the rest having been diverted to other undisclosed purposes by the Federal Ministry of Finance.

    We agree with President Buhari’s query as regards the legality and propriety of diverting foreign loans obtained in line with signed agreements to other projects. In his words “I hope that due process was followed before such diversions were carried out. Taking money from one project to another has to be done properly”. This practice is surely one of the reasons for the scores of abandoned and uncompleted projects that abound in the country.

    If the loans obtained for the transformation of our railway network had been fully, transparently and efficiently utilised, critical parts of the country would today be linked by a modern rail system with beneficial impact on the economy.

    It is a sad disgrace that the rail lines and locomotives in a country of our stature and resource endowment remain only marginally better than what was inherited from the colonial era. This is why it is important that the Buhari administration gets to the root of the diverted funds in the transportation sector with a view to finding out what use they were put to and if due process was followed.

    It is unlikely that the diversion of funds to purposes other than that for which they were earmarked is limited to the Ministry of Transportation. There is thus the need for the Buhari administration to get a holistic view of such funds diversion across Ministries, Departments and Agencies in order to put things right and aid the process of economic recovery.

    It is noteworthy in this respect that the President has set up a seven-man Presidential Advisory Committee against corruption led by the respected jurist, Professor Itse Sagay and comprising other men and women of high integrity.

    This committee should assist the government in combatting the menace of corruption including arbitrary diversion of funds from legally specified purposes in a coordinated, coherent and comprehensive manner. We urge President Buhari to see the radical modernization of the country’s rail system as an urgent and indispensable imperative for accelerated economic growth and development.     

  • Questionable confusion

    Questionable confusion

    •The court must find out the source of misrepresentation of its order on Diezani’s suit

    THE orchestrated confusion over the actual order made by the Federal High Court, in the suit brought by the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, to frustrate the summons extended to her by the House of Representatives, over the alleged N10 billion bill on jets, is embarrassing. So, we share in Justice Ahmed Mohammed’s angst that a simple ruling of the court that the defendant, the House of Representatives, should be put on notice, has been misrepresented by the House spokesman, Zakari Mohammed, to mean a restraining order against the House in the performance of its constitutional responsibility. That is scandalous, and there is need to find out who engineered this misinformation.

    Rightly, the court has summoned the House to explain the source of this misinformation, as counsel to the minister and the House have both denied knowledge of such an order by the court. But even more importantly, the court must ask itself: what is the substance of the suit brought by the minister to it? If as we suspect, the minister is on mere frolic, to frustrate a clear constitutional prerogative of the House of Representatives to investigate and expose corruption, inefficiency and waste in the administration of laws within its legislative competence, the court has no business allowing such a frivolous suit on its cause list.

    Even as the confusion lingered, it is reassuring that the Speaker, Alhaji Aminu Tambuwal, has assured Nigerians that the probe on the incredulous sums allegedly expended by the minister on chartering private jets for her trips, has not ended. Indeed, it must not. For, how can the House of Representatives which is clearly mandated by the provisions of sections 88 and 89 of the 1999 constitution to conduct such a probe it has told Nigerians it shall do, over the Alison-Madueke’s saga, turn around to do otherwise? The claim by the House, that a court has issued an order, which the court has openly denied, puts the integrity of the House in question over its determination to conduct the investigation.

    It is bad enough that such humongous sum has been allegedly wasted by the minister and her cohorts. But it will be heart-rending were a constitutional watchdog, like the House of Representatives, give itself out as either not giving a damn about such serious allegations of corruption, or of having been compromised by that rapacious agency of government.

    The House and indeed Nigerians are not unaware of the grave opacity pervading the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, neither are they unaware of the great length the ministry is reputed to usually go, to ensure that its activities are never opened for scrutiny. It is public knowledge that efforts in the past to bring the ministry to be publicly accountable never succeeded, and unless the House moves swiftly, the general impression will be that this probe has suffered a similar fate.

    While we acknowledge the rights of individuals to approach the court to ventilate their claims, we are surprised at the minister’s resort to court in this instance. After all, unless she has something to hide, the issue at stake was ordinarily the propriety of the costs she incurred as a public official, which should be in the public domain. Notably, the House is not in a position to convict, merely to expose corruption and make necessary laws to correct any defect. So, what is the haste by the minister, to stop a mere investigation for? On our part, we urge the court to quickly dispense with the matter, in the overriding interest of public policy.

  • A Questionable Decision on Egypt

    A Questionable Decision on Egypt

    American policy toward Egypt continued on its tortured, confusing path this week when the Obama administration resumed some aid to what has become an increasingly repressive state. No matter how American officials try to spin it, the decision will come across as a vote of confidence in a military-dominated government with an authoritarian agenda and a track record of violent crackdowns on dissenters and political opponents.

    After Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, was overthrown in July, President Obama waited several months before suspending some of the military aid that most benefits the generals who staged the coup. The weaponry put on hold included Apache helicopters, Harpoon missiles, M1-A1 tank kits and F-16 warplanes.

    The decision, which was announced on Tuesday, authorizes the delivery of 10 Apaches. Secretary of State John Kerry cleared the way for the transfer by certifying that Egypt was upholding its obligations under the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

    When the aid suspension was first announced, American officials said future decisions on releasing weapons would rest on Egypt’s progress toward a “sustainable, inclusive, nonviolent transition to democracy.” Fortunately, the administration is still withholding most of the promised weapons, and Mr. Kerry did not make the mistake of arguing that Egypt has shown any serious signs of democratic reform.

    A Pentagon spokesman said the helicopters would help Egypt fight Islamist militants in Sinai who have been attacking government security forces and destabilizing a territory that abuts Israel. That argument is puzzling; a Pentagon official told Congress in October that the hold on the Apaches was “not affecting” Egyptian operations in Sinai, and, on Thursday, the Egyptian military itself said it had gained “complete control over the situation.” The Americans seem to be unconcerned about the use of the Apaches in indiscriminate destruction of civilian homes in Sinai, which could fuel more antigovernment extremism.

    As for the state of Egyptian democracy, since the coup, some 16,000 people have been locked up, mostly for peacefully exercising their right to free speech and assembly, and more than 1,000 people have been killed at the hands of government security forces, according to Human Rights Watch. As Egypt plans to vote for a new president in May, the favorite is Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the former general and defense minister who led the overthrow of Mr. Morsi and the crushing of his Muslim Brotherhood allies.

    America is under pressure from Israel, Saudi Arabia and Congress to improve ties with Egypt, and it has its own interests in ensuring that Egypt honors the peace treaty with Israel, cooperates on counterterrorism and allows ships to transit the Suez Canal. But the Obama administration has refused to even call the coup a coup and moved too gingerly to protest the military’s excesses. It has to be more honest about the unsavory choices it is making, including whether any support for a repressive army will ever bring stability and democracy.

    – New York Times

     

  • Questionable MOU

    Questionable MOU

    • FG/Namibia refinery joint venture is not in Nigeria’s interest

    AT a time that fuel scarcity is biting harder on the home front because of graft in fuel importation chain: Also at a period that the nation’s four refineries’ moribund state is accorded tepid official efforts; it is sad that President Goodluck Jonathan has gone abroad to arrange the construction of jointly-owned petroleum products’ refinery with Namibia. That was the hallmark decision reached through a joint communiqué issued in Windhoek, Namibia at the end of his visit purportedly made at the instance of President Hifikepunye Pohamba. This arrangement, in our view, is economically unsound.

    The visit produced 11 Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) reportedly assented to by the two leaders, which among others, include: training of Namibian diplomats at the Nigerian Foreign Service Academy, provision of volunteer health professionals to Namibia under the Technical Aid Corps Scheme, initiative on youth development, bilateral air service agreement and waiver of visa requirements for citizens holding diplomatic and official passports. Others are extradition treaty, cooperation in the legal field, treaty on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters, understanding in the field of geology, mining, mineral processing and metallurgy, trade, investment and economic cooperation and cooperation in the field of tourism.

    However, the crux of the agreement is the refinery that is scheduled to be wholly private sector driven. Notwithstanding the fact that the two presidents have urged members of the Organised Private Sector in their respective countries to take advantage of the opportunities arising from the joint venture by making the project a reality, its un-strategic location in the Namibian area of Walvis Bay is of concern.

    We know that no nation is an island, especially in contemporary situation where the world has become a global village. Nonetheless, we believe that a nation, while dealing with other countries must consider that vital principle of comparative advantage. For instance, Nigeria is an oil producing giant and we thought that this reality would have been of paramount consideration whenever the country is reaching an understanding with Namibia or any other country.

    Why would President Jonathan not convince stakeholders in Namibia to consider setting up the refinery in Nigeria? Was the important economic point of proximity to raw materials not of any issue in the two presidents’ deliberations? After all, we are aware that there is no oil in Namibia. The questions now are; what could then be the motivation for Nigerian investors going as far as Namibia to seek partnership before building a refinery? Is it not possible for them to emulate Aliko Dangote whose Greenfield refinery, a private idea, will soon become functional?

    In our view, it makes more economic sense to have the refinery established in the country and the end-products exported to Namibia and other countries that might be in need of them. Being a private sector -driven initiative, the choice of site of such refinery would go a long way in reducing production cost, bring down petroleum products prices, provide readymade market for the country’s high domestic fuel consumption and cushion the effect of current intractable fuel scarcity. Above all, such adroit economic move will also generate more profits for investors from both countries.

    That this obviously rational economic choice was not made has left us wondering about the genuine identities of the powerful forces behind these so-called investors from both countries. Are these ‘investors’ truly out to follow rational economic sense or they are just disguised persons that are merely desirous of protecting the interests of their unseen promoters? The Nigerian public deserves to know.