PERSPECTIVE

Azie and other matters miscellaneous

Mohammed Haruna

For a government like President Olusegun Obasanjo’s that came to power with a crusader’s zeal to fight corruption, its confused and confusing reaction to the release of last year’s audit of the nation’s public accounts by erstwhile Auditor-General for the Federation, Mr. Vincent Azie, has been most surprising.

To be sure the reaction is not the first time government’s behaviour will be at variance with its anti-corruption rhetorics. Before Azie we have had, for example, the amazing case of government’s withdrawal of its prosecution of several senior ministry of defence officials for alleged embezzlement of over 400 million Naira. Again we have also had the case of government’s deafening silence over Senator Arthur Nzeribe’s confession that he suborned the majority of Senators into opposing last year’s impeachment move against the president.

However, even though long before Azie it has been crystal clear that President Obasanjo’s administration did not intend to match its anti-corruption rhetorics with action, Azie’s case probably presents the most conclusive evidence of the absence of the will and of a consistent strategy by the administration to deal with the monster. For a start, Azie’s case has clearly exposed the state of confusion at the heart of government’s anti-corruption programme, or what passes for one.

In the past one week, three senior government officials have tried to explain Azie’s fate since he released his damning audit. First, the Minister of Information, Professor Jerry Gana dismisses Azie as a fifth columnist and hints that he may not remain long as the audit boss. Next, after Azie predictably gets fired, the Minister of Finance, Malam Adamu Ciroma, tells the BBC Hausa Service that Azie had to go because he was grossly insubordinate and incompetent to boot, which was not exactly the same thing as saying, like Gana did, that Azie was an agent, paid or unpaid, of the enemy. To add to the confusion, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Chief Ufot Ekaette, comes along with another story that no, Azie was not “removed as it is being alleged, rather it is his tenure as Acting Auditor-General of the Federation that expired and extending his tenure by the six month prescribed by the Constitution would have amounted to a breach of the constitution”.

Not only has the SGF contradicted the minister of finance, he also seems to have forgotten that the very person the president has replaced Azie with, i.e. Mr. Joseph Ajiboye, had also acted before and had indeed done so for more than the six months prescribed by the constitution.

Apart from the conflict in the explanations of Azie’s case by the three senior government officials in question, there is the fact that all three have tried to shift the focus of attention from the substance of Azie’s audit report to his procedural error. Azie may or may not have intended mischief by short circulating proper procedure, but any government serious about dealing with corruption would not have hidden behind Azie’s error, as the authorities in Abuja have done, to try and bury the main issue, which is that of public accountability. True, evidence improperly obtained is not admissible in a court of law and should not be admissible even in the less demanding court of public opinion. This, however, cannot amount to the same thing as acquittal for the accused. Discharge, perhaps, but acquittal can only come after the failure of every effort to obtain evidence by proper procedure.

The minister of finance has explained that the proper thing for Azie to have done was to have passed his queries first to the Accountant-General of the Federation and awaited the replies to those queries before going to the National Assembly. So far we have not heard from Azie, but it is not unreasonable to assume that he went to the National Assembly only after waiting long enough without hearing from anyone. In any case none of those that Azie querried have obeyed the president’s instructions that, regardless of Azie’s faulty procedure, they should still answer the queries. They have ignored the president’s instructions presumably because they are secure in the knowledge that doing so will cost them nothing. And so far it has cost them nothing.

Now, while the controversy over Azie’s audit report and over his own fate rages on, a far more telling story of lack of transparency in our public affairs is slowly unfolding at the NNPC, the custodian of the country’s petroleum resources, as virtually the only source of public revenue. Last month, the Revenue Mobilization, Fiscal and Allocation Commission, under Engineer Hamman Tukur, charged NNPC with fiddling with the country’s oil revenue. Over 300 billion Naira, said Tukur, has not been unaccounted for from the country’s oil receipts last year. That’s a lie, says Group Managing Director of NNPC, Mr. Jackson Gaius-Obaseke.

Since the RMFAC/NNPC altercation, the Federal Government owned and controlled News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), has weighed in on NNPC’s side with an article declaring Tukur’s allegations as mere fiction. The RMFAC chairman’s allegations, said NAN in an article in the Federal Government owned New Nigerian (February 26, 2003), “could be likened to allegations by the late Tai Solarin in the 1970s that 2.8 billion Naira was missing from oil sales. After thorough investigations, the nation found that Solarin goofed and probably had a score to settle with the then Head of State, Olusegun Obasanjo, and his Federal Commissioner for Petroleum, Muhammadu Buhari. Once more the revenue commission goofed.”

I don’t know the basis of NAN’s conclusion that Tukur, like the late Solarin, was a mere rumour-monger. I’ll be surprised, however, if it turns out that Tukur has merely been peddling fiction. First, Tukur is an engineer of no mean reputation and engineers as a rule deal in fact not fancy. Second, unlike in Solarin’s case, Tukur’s allegation is yet to be thoroughly investigated. Third, NNPC’s much touted quarterly accounts published in the press which its defenders say as evidence of its new-found transparency, are not audited accounts. Even if they are, Enron has since taught us not to regard audited accounts as gospel truth.

Fourth, Obaseki himself has accepted that NNPC refines only a fraction of the crude allocated to it because of our refineries’ low refining capacities. It then sells the balance abroad. However, he has not been forthcoming about whether there is a difference between the cost of the crude to NNPC and how much he sells what he is unable to refine. He has also not been forthcoming on the size of the difference and what he does with it. Again, he has also not explained why the Joint-Venture cash calls remain a First Charge on the Federation Account inspite of the Supreme Court’s ruling to the contrary.

These and several other questions are fairly simple and straight-forward but they have not been adequately addressed. It is therefore strange that NAN can conclusively equate Tukur’s allegations with Solarin’s.

So far the only explanation coming from NNPC about what it does with the revenue of the crude it sells abroad is that it has been using it to subsidize the import of white products on such a scale that it has eliminated the past notorious ques at the filling stations. Last year NNPC said it lost over 52 billion Naira on such imports. This is still a small fraction of the revenue it must have made from selling the crude it couldn’t refine. The question is where is the balance?

Instead of insinuating that Tukur has an axe to grind with Obasanjo, NAN, and those that think like the organisation, will spend their time more usefully finding out and telling us the answers to the questions raised above. Unfortunately it seems even senior government officials would sooner engage in idle speculations about why the petrol ques have returned with a vengeance, than address the root cause of the intermittent shortages of white products, namely our unwillingness to make our refineries work.

Last week, for example, our indefatigable minister of information blamed the return of the ques on the machinations of enemies of President Obasanjo hell-bent on taking the wind out of the president’s campaign for a second term. For Professor Gana to believe or even to mouth such nonsense, shows that he is fast becoming a victim of his own propaganda. Otherwise, how can he not see that his explanation of saboteurs-at-work is an admission that President Obasanjo has no control over the affairs of a country which he is the commander-in-chief of and at whose table all the bucks stop?

Still on the danger of falling victim to one’s own propaganda, most people, I suspect, must have been truly amazed at the Minister of Internal Affairs, Dr. Mohammed Shata claim last week that the jinx surrounding the more than quarter-century old National Identity Card project has at last been broken. An average of 68 people, he said, had been registered per day at each of the 60,000 registration centres, one week after the project was flagged off by the president on February 18. Thus a total of over 24,000,000 adults were registered, he claimed.

Anyone with half an eye on the exercise can see that Shata’s figures are grossly exaggerated. No more than 20 adults a day was more like it. From my own experience few people were actually registered during the first week-end of the exercise. In five of the registration centres I visited in Kaduna during that week-end only one had skeletal services.

In any case, if the exercise was such a roaring success that the minister says it was, why did he have to extend it by another two weeks, with all the attendant costs?

No, honourable minister, the exercises was a near disaster when it took off, and the only you can save it from ending in disaster is to disabuse your mind that it was a success and take remedial measures accordingly.