The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Self-serving

  • Senate’s self-serving confidence vote

    Dr Bukola Saraki, long before becoming the Senate President, was undoubtedly one of the most powerful Nigerian leaders. In 1990, with just about one year post NYSC experience, he became a director of ‘Societe Generale’, a bank owned by his father. The billions he allegedly borrowed within the same year without collateral was said to have hastened the collapse of the bank.  Following the pressure mounted by Societe Generale Paris, which owned a majority stake in Societe Generale Nigeria on the Inspector General of Police to question Saraki about illegal and “unauthorized withdrawals of money,” he was soon after slammed with felony theft and felony conspiracy charges. (Police file no. AR-1360/X/F/Vol.12 on December 7, 1990, as quoted by Sahara Reporters). But Nothing came out of it despite a 30-count indictment against the Sarakis just as nothing came out of his alleged involvement in the Intercontinental Bank’s debt rip-off and the ‘case of alleged conspiracy, forgery and stealing of the sum of N21 billion belonging to Joy Petroleum’ probably because laws in Nigeria, as some have argued, are made to protect the powerful.

    In 2003, Saraki’s father promoted him governor of Kwara, a fiefdom he had impoverished for over 50 years. He was there until 2011 when he moved on to become a senator.  When the PDP turned the heat on him for assuming the role of a whistle blower in the fuel subsidy scam by claiming that Joy Petroleum which he allegedly had interest benefitted from the N1.7 trillion fuel subsidy scam, he traded PDP off for APC.

    Similarly when APC, his new party in its wisdom believed he did not have the moral strength to drive the change mantra upon which the party defeated a sitting government, Saraki who does not believe there is  anything money, influence and ‘politricks’ cannot buy, traded off the victory of his party with the opposition. While his 51 other elected party members were having a meeting at another venue,  he, by his own account, hid inside a small car in front of the senate chambers for three hours after which he sneaked in to be adopted Senate President by 48 opposition senators and about eight of his supporters.

    When his wife was invited by EFCC following PDP’s (Kwara) petition, over some contracts linked to her while he was the governor, Saraki who has never been associated with failure in his various battles with the judiciary and his different parties, saw only a ‘witch-hunt’.

    That was soon followed by his arraignment  before the Code of Conduct Tribunal by the office of the Attorney General which slammed him with the following charges: Making anticipatory declaration of House 15A&15B McDonald, Ikoyi, Lagos; Failure to declare property on Plot 2A, Glover road, Ikoyi; Failure to declare property on No 1, Tagus Street, Maitama, Abuja (Plot 2482, Cadastral Zone A06, Abuja; Failure to declare property No. 3 Tagus Street, Maitama, Abuja (plot 2481, Cadastral Properties Limited); Claiming to own property on no 42 Gerald Road, Ikoyi and earning N110,000,000,00) per annum at a time the property was under construction; Failure to declare N375m GTB loan converted to 1.5m pounds sterling and used to purchase property in London; Operating a foreign bank account; Transfer of $3.4m from GTB to foreign bank account during tenure as governor and failure to declare leasehold interest in no 42, Remi Fani-Kayode Street, Ikeja among others.

    Saraki ran to a high court in Abuja with all the SANs money could buy in order to stop his appearance before CCT. Leaving nothing to chance, he also approached the Appeal Court. Meanwhile some SANs like Agbakoba   who had earlier warned APC against sanctioning Saraki for trading off the victory of his party was on Channels Television.  First he said, by virtue of his status as SAN and former President of NBA, he was sure the High Court was superior to the Code of Conduct Tribunal. Then he wanted the CJN to make an urgent public pronouncement to clear the air. If Agbakoba appeared confused, no one was deceived.

    Saraki was to tell reporters after his arraignment that ‘most of them (charges) are frivolous, mischievous and not current’ while his Chief Press Secretary, Sanni Onogu, issued a statement admitting  ‘some of the issues contained in the sheet are subjects of issues earlier decided on or on-going in courts’. Saraki also speaking to his colleagues during plenary says, “I wish to reiterate my remarks before the tribunal, that I have no iota of doubt that I am on trial today because I am President of the Nigerian Senate, against the wishes of some powerful individuals outside this chambers.’

    Two conclusions can be deduced from the above. First, that some of the allegations against Saraki are true after all. This however has not stopped 83 senators (48 PDP and 35 APC) from passing what Senator Kabir Marafa, the Senate Unity Forum’s spokesman described as ‘worthless self-serving motion brought to abuse the collective sensibilities of Nigerians and supported by some overzealous neophytes that see the Senate President as a Divisional Police Officer and the committees as roadblocks.’  Second, if it takes immoral usurpation of the senate presidency seat for Saraki who has been engulfed in endless judicial battles since 1990 to finally clear his name by establishing ownership and explaining the sources of funding for all the properties his detractors attributed to him, I think it will be victory for him and for Nigeria.

    Marafa has given what appears a plausible explanation for the disgraceful role of his 35 APC senators in the senate’s assault on the sensibilities of our people. He says they are probably after juicy committee chairmanships. The role of the 48 PDP senators who have never broken rank however is understandable. They all share a common world-view with their leading light, David Mark, and Ike Ekweremadu, who jointly presided over the 7th Senate, celebrated as the most expensive legislature in the world where members smiled to their banks while PDP wheelers and dealers almost wrecked the nation’s economy through monumental stealing.

    There is also a lesson to be drawn from the betrayal of our nation by the 83 senators who chose to bury their heads like ostrich in the sand instead of confronting the issues of morality and ethics before them. Their hypocrisy is in the character of our self-serving political class who after identifying our derailed federal arrangement  as the source of corruption, crisis of indigenship, infrastructural decay, collapse of the educational and the health sectors, chose to apply as palliatives  what has often been described as ‘social engineering efforts of the military’ viz NYSC, Government colleges, federal universities, quota system of admission into the tertiary institutions and bureaucracy, senseless funding of LGAs by federal government to which they are not accountable.

    However, the public is not deceived by self serving vote of confidence on Saraki by powerful senators such as Andy Uba, Buruji Kashamu, Mohammed Goje, Theodore Orji , Joshua Dariye, Jeremiah Useni, Biodun Olujimi, Godswil Akpabio, and Stella Oduah who like him believe the law is only for the protection of the most powerful.

  • Self-serving vs. selfless service

    When they took power, the soldiers, matched out on a straight path towards their vision of a good society, but the mission became more elusive, the closer they came towards it – Robin Luckman.

    The Action Group at its Executive and Parliamentary Council of July 1953 attended by Bode Thomas,  SLA Akintola, Rotimi Williams, Obafemi  Awolowo, Anthony Enahoro and others agreed  that the ‘extreme confederalist eight-point demand of the north be accepted in order to guarantee the independence of the regions and allow the north to discover secession doesn’t pay’. Enahoro and Okodudu had argued against confederal arrangement.  Awo, a federalist who however toed his party line reasoned that the problem of the country was not regionalism but the interference of the centre in the affairs of the regions. That became a self-fulfilling prophesy in 1962 when Ahmadu Bello, who according to Trevor Richard, at the height of his power presented a gift of a horse to Zik and the Holy Koran to Tafawa Balewa declaring, he has like his great grandfather, divided the country among his trusted children, coerced the duo to remove one leg of the tripod that had held our nation together. This was done through an illegal declaration of state of emergency in the West and imposition of SLA Akintola who had been disciplined by his leaders as Premier without election. He also had the backing of the centre when he went on to declare himself premier against the wishes of the majority of his people in 1965. Rioting and violence quickly followed.

    That was the excuse an ill-equipped albeit patriotic Nigerian military politicians who saw themselves as custodians of our constitution that was under attack needed to intervene ostensibly to save Nigeria from self-serving politicians who had betrayed the spirit of our constitution. Without requisite educational training, the needed compass in the management of society, the soldiers tried to navigate an unfamiliar terrain. As Luckman observed above, their disastrous outing in January and July 1966 were missions in self-destruction.  From 1967 to 1970, they plunged the nation into a civil war. The achievements credited to the military under Gowon like the Lagos second bridge, the Onitsha Bridge, expansion of net work of roads were all conceived before independence in 1960.

    The bungling soldiers, burning with patriotic fervour once again descended upon themselves in 1975. This time around, ill-informed and ill equipped Murtala  Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo destroyed our universities and the bureaucracy, the two institutions that sustain society.  And tragically, instead of looking at 1962 when the rain started beating us, we simply replaced the parliamentary system inherited from the British with American Presidential system ignoring the fact that our problem was not the constitution but the men who would operate it. Obasanjo, playing god has since publicly admitted supporting the presidential bid of Shehu Shagari whose ambition was to be a senator in 1979. By 1983, Shagari smoked away while Akinloye and NPN wheelers and dealers once again brought the nation to it’s knees through profligate consumption.

    Babangida, Gusau and Abacha, as ex-President Shagari has since revealed, carried out the coup against his government and only brought in Buhari because of his integrity. But Buhari took responsibility for the crudity of his ill-informed military junta’s retroactive laws that resulted in the murder of some Nigerian drug pushers and the obnoxious Decree Four that led to the imprisonment of Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor of Guardian newspapers for reporting and publishing the truth that they claimed embarrassed government. And without understanding the forces at play in our society, the junta went all out for politicians without making a distinction between governors who used state funds to build universities for their youths, governors who expended state resources to build new houses and marry new wives, and those governors who took foreign loan which never got to Nigeria but kept in banks in Europe. As it was in 1966 and 1975, they waged war against their superiors.

    But once again in the night of many knives, Buhari was deposed by those who put him in power. He was clamped into prison for three and half years. From prison, he had an opportunity to watch, obviously in disbelief as members of his junta now at the helm of affairs released jailed journalists, appointed others senior advisers and ministers. He watched as those who only yesterday supported his rejection of Nigeria membership of OIC, the IMF loan and its conditionalities  declared ‘there was no alternative to SAP’ (Structural Adjustment Programme) which later resulted in ill-advised privatization and the sharing of the nation’s wealth among soldiers and their fronts. He watched in pain as Babangida and Abacha took the nation through a fraudulent 13 years of ‘transition without end’. And he has since 1999 observed from close quarters how PDP pillaged our land like a conquered territory.

    Motivated more by a desire to serve, he contested the presidential election as the candidate of the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) in 2003. He was defeated by President Olusegun Obasanjo.  He didn’t have money to buy justice. Before the end of 2007, nearly all politicians who rode on his back to power had deserted him for PDP. Again in 2007, he was outfoxed. Frustrated, he abandoned ANPP and in 2010 formed CPC, according to him “as a solution to the debilitating ethical and ideological conflicts in the former party.” In 2011, the over 12million votes he garnered without money and a national platform but just on account of his integrity was not enough to match Jonathan’s over 22million votes. And realizing elections are never won on the basis of righteousness, he joined forces with ACN, ANPP, a faction of APGA and a faction of PDP, groups he would have ordinarily dined with using a long spoon. He secured an historic victory by defeating incumbent ex-President Jonathan in four of the country’s six geopolitical zones on March 29.

    To paraphrase Joanna Baillie, a 19th century British poet, ‘there is always a survivor in the destruction of a noble line’. Buhari seems to have been specially prepared for the task ahead. By an irony of fate, Buhari once confessed that but for Ahmadu Bello who in the cause of his selfless service to his people picked him up from the village without any connection, he would never have had the advantage of joining the military. Fate beckons on him today to see where our nation derailed in 1962. He is adequately equipped for the onerous task. Joking during his recent visit to Prime Minister Cameron of Britain about those the junta he headed jailed unjustly 30 years ago, he had made reference to his own unjust incarceration.  He has been betrayed by his military colleagues. He has equally been betrayed by politicians. He has been a military governor, a minister of petroleum and a Head of State. Unlike 1984, he today has a deeper knowledge of Nigeria and her diverse cultures. He is conscious of the baleful legacies of the Hausa Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba parasitic elites who were only out to serve selves rather than provide services to the people. He can attach weight to the advice coming from Obasanjo, Danjuma, Babangida and others who have been beneficiaries of an aberration we call a federation. Nigeria is the only federation in the world where the centre gets involved in education, health, agriculture, and decides how local councils manage the affairs of their remote communities.

    Of course Nigerians that voted for Buhari have faith in his ability to ensure those who stole the country blind through fraudulent fuel subsidy deals, crude oil theft, and fraudulent privatization and monetisation policies return their loot. But the major challenge lies in the political will to tamper with the structure that supports and sustains self service as against selfless service as we once had it. As Edmund Burke, in a manner of speaking says, we cannot climb the palm tree from the top. Unfortunately that exactly is what Nigerian politicians and their young multi-billionaires’ fronts have been doing. If the current system where politicians without character in Abuja decide who from Daura secures admission into the military school in Zaria was in place during the first Republic, President Buhari  by his own admission would have remained a herdsman in Daura and the cause of history would have been different.

  • Jonathan’s $1b loan ‘self-serving’

    Jonathan’s $1b loan ‘self-serving’

    A professor of Geo-Physics, Joseph Adeniyi Olowofela, has urged Nigerians to reject President Goodluck Jonathan’s $1 billion (about N165 billion) proposed loan to strengthen security in the fight against insurgency.

    Prof Olowofela described the move as self-serving, destructive and against national interest.

    The expert, who was answering questions from members of the Oyo State Correspondents’ Chapel during a visit to his Ibadan home, also urged members of the National Assembly to turn down the President’s request “…because it is in bad faith”.

    The politician, who is the Caretaker Chairman of Ido Local Government Area of Oyo State, noted that the loan would not serve the interest of Nigeria but the personal interest of a few people in his government.

    Olowofela said: “The proposed loan? Certainly, this is not the appropriate time. In fact, many people feel that there must be another reason behind it.

    Some were even saying maybe it is a plot by Mr President to execute his political campaign programme. You know, because when you look at the spate of impeachment across the country, people believe a lot of money would have changed hands. So, if you are seeking such a quantum of funds this time around, some believe that it is a plot to perpetuate the present administration in power. That is the feeling of majority of Nigerians, and that is my feeling too.”

    Rather than ask for a loan to equip military, Olowofela said Jonathan should have made food security his priority to ensure that Nigerians are able to have food on their tables.

    He said: “This is because the greatest security is food security. If he has said we need to borrow a specific amount of money to make sure that the teeming youth of this nation are gainfully employed, that you want to kick start industrial revolution, may be that one may be understandable. But as it is now it appears the proposed loan is not in good fate.”

  • Not a task for the self-serving

    Not a task for the self-serving

    The wholesale review of the 1999 Constitution that the National Assembly is currently undertaking, with not a little help from the Presidency, was from the outset a dubious venture.

    That document was drafted in haste and wreathed in secrecy so encompassing that not even President Olusegun Obasanjo who swore to protect and defend it and abide by it had seen it at the time he took office. After going through it, the late Gani Fawehinmi warned that it was strewn with booby traps, and that the framers did not take into account Nigeria’s altered political environment and the yearnings of the people.

    Its defects soon became clear even to those who stood to profit the most from them. Piecemeal amendment followed piecemeal amendment, but defects kept surfacing. Instead of abandoning that strategy and calling for a new Constitution, to be prepared by a Constituent Assembly and ratified by sovereign people of Nigeria in a referendum, President Jonathan Goodluck and the National Assembly settled for a trainload of amendments — as many as 75 at one point, 54 at the last count – in an exercise they now call a constitutional review.

    A Constitution that requires 54 amendments in one fell swoop is a constitution crying to be re-written altogether. But they will hear none of it. They are pressing ahead with this untidy strategy, armed with the self-serving and threadbare claim that the sovereignty of the Nigerian state inheres in them, and that since there cannot be two sovereigns in the same political space, a Sovereign National Conference or a Constituent Assembly has no place in the present scheme of things.

    They conveniently forget that they were elected to make laws for the governance of Nigeria, not to rewrite a new Constitution through the back door. Nor are they mindful that, even with all its imperfections, the 1999 Constitution declares unambiguously that sovereignty belongs to the people, and that the government derives its authority from the people.

    In any case, what kind of constitutional review is it in which the protagonists gather a more or less rented crowd in one city in each federal constituency for several hours in one day, presents them with a “template” of 54 proposed amendments, ask them to vote for or against each with nary a debate, and then celebrate the outcome as a triumph for popular consultation, the kind of which has never been witnessed in the history of constitution-making in Nigeria?

    The whole thing is a sham, and a prologue to future political grief.

    That much is clear from what happened the other day when the National Assembly set out to amend the law governing nationality. It botched the effort spectacularly and ended up, according to many persons learned in the law, actually endorsing child marriage.

    Senate President David Mark has said that the Senate was “tricked” into voting for a law upholding that atrocious practice. He deserves full mark for candour. But his candour raises many troubling questions. On how many other issues or occasions has the Senate or the House of Representatives been “tricked” into enacting one law or another? Where is the expertise, the mastery, in a legislative body that can be so easily swindled? Where is the judgment?

    Today, nobody can say with certitude where the law actually stands on child marriage. If the Senate vote is not revisited, it will probably take a ruling of the Supreme Court to clear the air, all because legislators arrogated to themselves the task of rewriting the Constitution through the backdoor – a task for which they are ill-equipped.

    The on-going constitutional review, as its protagonists have chosen disingenuously to call it, is misbegotten. It was conceived in bad faith. The way it is being carried out will not win plaudits for transparency, political sagacity, or competence.

    There is yet one more development that makes it clear that on-going review does not belong in the province of the National Assembly. That is the issue of local government “autonomy”.

    The House of Representatives voted for amendment that would make local councils autonomous, but the Senate voted against.

    “Autonomy,” whether in political science or praxis, or in the sociology of the professions, is a beguiling term. But what does it really mean? What does it mean in the context of the proposal before the National Assembly?

    The local government is probably the first layer of government citizens encounter, and the layer they encounter most frequently. When effective and efficient, it touches the lives of the residents in fundamental ways, improving their quality of life. Even in dysfunction, it still has consequences, deleterious ones to be sure, for the residents.

    How it is to be organised and structured, what powers it will exercise, and what status it will enjoy: these matters are far too important to leave to the determination of a legislature whose members always have their eyes on the main political chance.

    They belong, instead, to the people – the people who will be most affected by the policies and programmes of the local government, the people as sovereign exercising constituent powers. The people have neither surrendered nor delegated those powers to a body elected to make laws for the governance of Nigeria.

    What the National Assembly is doing in the name of a constitutional review is therefore a usurpation, and a self-serving one at that. Constitution-making is not a task for the self-serving.

    To return to the issue of “autonomy”: In a polity that is supposedly a federation but is in many significant respects centrally administered, what will this so-called autonomy consist in? How will local government councils enjoy autonomy when the states enjoy no such thing?

    Those advancing the case for local government autonomy probably have in mind a situation in which local government councils will receive their financial allocations directly from the Centre and disburse the funds as they like, without any interference from state governments. They reject the present practice, whereby state governors can dissolve elected councils at will, for political reasons.

    If this is what the “autonomy” they are canvassing consists in, there is much to be said for it. But why save it for local councils and deny it to state governments?

    What is the meaning of “autonomy’ in a setting in which a state governor is vested with responsibility as “chief security officer” of the state, but the police commissioner is appointed by, and takes his orders from, the Centre and actually operates at cross-purposes with the elected governor as in Rivers State, to cite the most recent example of this practice?

    Only a comprehensive overhauling of the Constitution – an overhauling that takes into full account present realities and the yearnings of the people – can make for a more harmonious union. The task of preparing such a Constitution, warranted by the preface “We, the people”, belongs to a Constituent Assembly or a Sovereign National Conference.

    The on-going constitution review, it is necessary to insist, is a costly sham. Its protagonists are sowing the seeds of future grief.

     

  • Self-serving amendments

    Self-serving amendments

    The Senate Committee on Constitutional Amendment has concluded its work on the amendment of the 1999 Constitution and has presented its recommendations. The major issue that has dominated the discussions on the constitution is that it is a military-imposed document which has rubbished the principle of federalism and the federal structure that was the foundation of Nigeria at independence.It is on this score that right-thinking citizens have always insisted that the 1999 Constitution cannot be adequately amended and that what it seriously needs is a complete overhaul. Furthermore, in order for such a complete reworking to be carried out, there has to be the involvement of all stakeholders, including all the geo-political zones, and the nationality groups. The central political debate in the last fourteen years has been over this issue.

    The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has been the ruling party in the centre since the beginning of the Third Republic and it has ensured that the idea of a national conference does not see the light of day. In addition, the party has insisted that there is no urgent need for a constitutional overhaul and it has settled for piece-meal amendments to the extent that such efforts do not jeopardise its political dominance, especially at the centre. It is in this context that the amendments just submitted by the Senate committee must be understood. They are self-serving amendments. To make this point, I will highlight two related areas from media reports.

    “No rotational presidency” is the title of a report in The Nation of Thursday, June 6, 2013. And in its own report, The Nigerian Tribune also of Thursday, June 6, 2013 highlighted another aspect of the amendment: “Senate Committee Amendment Recommendations: Successors can’t vie for dead President’s, Gov.’s offices.”

    The reason that the Senate Committee advanced for the rejection of rotational presidency is that “the Constitution should not make Nigerian leadership subject to ethnic or regional considerations” according to The Nation’s report. Rather the committee submitted that such issues should be a matter for consideration among the various political parties.

    There have been echoes of these incoherent and self-serving recommendations for constitutional provisions in the recent past. During the 2005 Political Reform Conference, the Northern position was a rejection of the concept of rotational presidency among geo-political zones because, “it is subject to manipulation and abuse by unpatriotic Nigerians. It is neither in our constitution nor in our electoral laws.”

    Yet, the North did not find it inconsistent when in the same submission, it recommended that the “Presidency should rotate between the North and the South.” It in fact went on to demand that it was the turn of the North to occupy the position of the president. In addition, the North suggested “that constitutional provision needs to be made for rotation within the states to provide opportunity to the various minority groups have (sic) access to the position of governorship within the States and to give them a sense of belonging.”

    Now, the Senate Committee wants us to believe that, with its recommendation, the concept of rotational presidency would be laid to rest. This is far from the case. The reason has to do with the other provision in the Senate Committee recommendation, namely that “a vice president or deputy governor who completed the tenure of office of a president or governor who died in office would not be eligible to seek election to the office in any subsequent future elections.” The amendment, as reported in The Nigerian Tribune is a new Section 136 (2) which is now to read: Where a vice-president-elect or vice president succeeds the president-elect or president, in accordance with Subsection (1) of this section, he (sic) shall not be eligible to contest for the office of the president in any subsequent elections.” There is a similar provision for the deputy governor.

    What is interesting about these new provisions is that they effectively reinstate what the provision on rotational presidency is supposed to take away. It is understood clearly by every politically conscious citizen that we operate a political system in which ethnicity and religion play active roles and ticket balancing is the rule. Dr. Jonathan would not be president today if he wasn’t vice president to Malam Yar’Adua. The president comes from the north; the vice comes from the south. And when Jonathan took over, it was expected that the vice president would come from the north, hence the emergence of Sambo. The new amendment effectively preserves this arrangement and thus, the concept of rotational presidency and rotational governorship.

    Let us assume for the purpose of argument that the next president comes from the North. We can be sure that his or her vice will come from somewhere in the South. Let us assume further that something happens and the president vacates office and his or vice takes over. This means that the new president is from the south. What the amendment says is that this new president must only complete the term of the former president and cannot present him or herself for any subsequent election to the presidency.

    We know what motivated this amendment. It was the controversy generated by Jonathan’s presenting himself as a candidate after he completed the term of Yar’Adua and the North insisted that since Yar’Adua was elected as a Northern candidate and since he was entitled to two terms, the North was being robbed of its chance. It was an argument that failed because it was considered an unfair and untenable demand in a democratic setting. Since there was no constitutional provision for rotational presidency, the North cannot lay claim to the Yar’Adua presidency as its own.

    Imagine now what this new amendment effectively means. Were it to be operative when the Jonathan candidacy was being challenged by the North, he would not have a chance and a new candidate would emerge. Can such a new candidate emerge from the South in the face of the Northern position? This amendment only solidifies the position and demand of the North for respect for rotational presidency between the North and the South despite the absence of and the deliberativeness of the provision against rotational presidency. Therefore there is crass incoherence between the two amendments that I have chosen to highlight here.

    I do not need to go into the challenge to democratic tenets of the new amendment that prevents any individual, whether vice president or deputy governor, from contesting any elections. That it has been offered as a constitutional provision—as a foundational principle of state—by a committee of the upper legislative body speaks volumes about our democracy and its trustees.