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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Gbenga’s Freudian slip
Call it a Freudian slip writ large, but the controversial interview by the nation’s First Son (?), Gbenga, which The News of January 16 used as its cover story must rank as arguably the greatest damage anyone has done to the image and substance of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration. The title the magazine’s General Editor, Ademola Adegbamigbe, used for his preface to the story, “Venom of Baba’s son”, couldn’t have been more apt; Gbenga spared no one, not even his dad, in that interview, albeit inadvertently so. That the interview itself was, in a manner of sparking, a Freudian slip is obvious from the fact that it was purely the result of a chance meeting between Gbenga and Omoyele Sowore, The News’ correspondent. This was the chance meeting at the unlikely venue of our border post with Benin Republic – Seme – which ended in Gbenga giving Sowore a ride in his vehicle, a ride that Gbenga will rue for a long time, if not for the rest of his life; the interview was said to have greatly angered his father who is said to have a reputation for being unforgiving.
Not only has Gbenga’s inexplicable outburst in The News against just about everyone and everything damaged his old man’s claim as Nigeria’s greatest crusader against corruption – Gbenga, says with the authority of a First Son, that it’s all selective – his interview has the potential of drawing public attention to the dismal record of his old man’s economic reforms.
So far the controversy over the president’s self-perpetuation agenda has managed to draw the public’s attention away from the failures of these reforms – the high unemployment, the inflation, the decay in our infrastructures, above all, the insecurity in the land.
As Thisday said in its editorial of September 22, 2005, “Any economic reform that does not provide jobs, mass transformation, power, food, basic health services, and social security is a failure. It is not enough for economic reforms to throw up a few billionaires even as poverty grinds the masses of the people into the dust.” And most Nigerians would agree with Thisday that this is exactly what the president’s economic reforms have done. Indeed there are political observers who think the third term controversy is a deliberate ruse to allow a select few steal this country blind with few, if any, questions asked.
Whether this cynical view of the third term agenda is true or not the fact remains that today there is a lot more talk about the country’s politics than there is about its economics. Which is a great pity because the country’s economics is in a much worse shape than its politics, never mind the persistent claims of a turn-around by the president himself. Gbenga’s claims about his father’s commitment to economic reforms may have the unintended but desirable effect of drawing public attention to those reforms.
If Gbenga is to be believed – and I don’t see why not – those who want his old man to stay beyond his second term do so, not so much because he is doing a great job mending the economy, but because they are the greatest beneficiaries of those reforms. And these beneficiaries are not only “the top players in the private sector” as The News described them, but presumably even the Americas who, in public at least, have rejected the president’s alleged third term bid. The Americans have since developed a keen interest in our oil and gas following the instability of the Middle East, their main source of fossil fuel.
Baba says Gbenga, would, however, not oblige them because, again according to Gbenga, first, the old man is too old to stand the riguors of high office much longer as he is older than he claims and, second, “because he is busy doing so many things. You can see that planes are falling off the skies left and right. Baba has no time to get involved in these claims.”
If indeed the president has been too busy mending the economy to have time for those urging him to stay on beyond 2007, then his exertions seem to have achieved pretty little. The fact alone that planes have been falling off the skies implies that those exertions, at least in the aviation sector, have yet to achieve the desired results. But there is a lot more than planes dropping off the skies to suggest that the president’s economic reforms are not as curative or as altruistic as its proponents often claim.
Take just two areas of these reforms, namely, the Paris Club debt cancellation and the Fiscal Responsibility Bill. When news about the debt relief first broke last June, some of the president’s men went as far as to dub it the country’s Second Independence, after that of October 1, 1960 from our colonial masters. Not only that, anyone who raised questions about the credibility of the debt cancellation or its costs was called all kinds of names.
For example when Simeon Kolawole of Thisday claimed that some of those pushing for the debt cancellation had personal interests in the matter, he managed to get the minister of finance’s dander up. Responding in Thisday of July 20, 2005, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala angrily asked, “Who are these people who would handle the buy-back? Would Mr. Kolawole care to name them? Mr. Kolawole must know more than the Paris Club, Mr. President, myself, the DMO and others working on this because we do not know what and whom he is talking about. The statement is libelous, disrespectful and in extremely poor taste.”
Clearly the minister meant no third parties were involved in the negotiations for the debt cancellation. Six months later, this official position seems to have changed. It has now turned out that there has indeed been a third party and its name is Lazard Freres. .Persistent rumours about the involvement of third parties, including the son of the minister, apparently forced the Debt Management Office last week to issue a less than persuasive rejection. “The appointment of Lazard Freres as consultant by the federal government to assist Nigeria at all levels of the negotiation process,” said this statement, “is a standard operating procedure for all countries engaged in seeking debt relief. Lazard Freres is one of the most respected names in the area.”
The statement went on to say that the consultant’s fees were negotiated down from “the standard $200,000 - $250,000 a month to $100,000 a month DUE TO THE FACT THAT BOTH THE MINISTER AND THE DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE DMO HAD THE TECHNICAL EXPERTISE TO DO MOST OF THE WORK.” (Emphasis mine).
The question the minister of finance and the chaps at the DMO should address is what expertise is required for the remaining work that would justify recruiting and paying a consultant the princely sum of $100,000 a month? And while they are at it, they should also be spelling out to Nigerians the other costs they have to pay for the debt cancellation.
It is possible that the benefit Nigerians may enjoy from the debt cancellation is worth the cost, but we can never know for sure if we are not told the details. After all, the devil, as they say, is always in the details.
As with the debt cancellation story, Nigerians know pretty little or nothing about the Fiscal Responsibility Bill, the second area of reform I mentioned earlier. Nearly two years ago, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala issued a pamphlet spelling out why Nigeria needs the bill. First, she said, the rules on expenditure were not always adequate and their enforcement was not always consistent. Second, she said, though the country has six zones, 36 states and 774 local governments “we have only ONE ECONOMY”, and there was therefore the need for coordination of economic and financial policies among all tiers of government. Third, the country, she said, has this nasty habit of being profligate in times of oil boom, only to suffer serious debt hangover when the boom ends. The Fiscal Responsibility Bill, she said, was the prevention needed to avoid the painful cure for a debt hangover.
Two years after the executive sent the bill to the National Assembly, it is yet to be passed into law – thanks in part to the fact that the presidency does not seem to have given it the kind of priority it has given the president’s third term agenda and thanks also to the fact that it does not seem to have done its homework well in putting the bill together; last month it was stood down by the Senate for the good reason that the bill did not contain the financial implications of its implementation.
However, even if the bill were to be passed today, there is no guarantee that we will see an end to the fiscal indiscipline that has characterized the Obasanjo administration since its inception. Truth be told, the minister of finance was, by and large, wrong to talk about the inadequacy of rules of expenditure in our public sector, because the sector does have such a thing as Financial Regulations. She was right, however, to talk about inconsistency in the enforcement of the existing rules. The Fiscal Responsibility Bill may plug some of the loopholes in the existing system, but as with anything man-made, it will come with its own set of loopholes, since nothing man-made is perfect. The difference is always the honesty and sincerity with which a set of rules are applied.
Gbenga’s Freudian slip in The News, is perhaps the most damning exposure of the bad faith with which his father’s administration has implemented and, in some cases, even formulated its economic reforms. If the interview brings about a shift in the nation’s priority from our politics to our economy, it may turn out to be one of the most positive interventions in the on-going debate about the direction of our political-economy.
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