PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Transparency? What transparency?

kudugana@yahoo.com

“Propaganda” once quipped Noam Chomsky, the world famous professor of Linguistics at the even more famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, U.S.A. “is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” Nigeria was supposed to have become a democracy following the end of its military rule in 1999. Since then, however, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party and governments at all levels have done everything they can to undermine free speech and free choice. As a country which is now a cross between democracy and dictatorship, it seems its ruling cliques have relied on both propaganda and the bludgeon to keep allies and rivals alike in line.

Bludgeons, of course, come in all shapes and sizes. With the PDP and the Federal Government, however, the bludgeons have come in at least three shapes and sizes, namely, threats of expulsion from the ruling party at the slightest hint of dissension, bribes – this may look like a carrot, but bribes are like poisoned chalices – and the highly selective use of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

The chairmen of the two commissions, in particular the indefatigable Nuhu Ribadu of the EFCC, would probably protest this charge, but, without prejudice to their dedication to the war against corruption, it is a charge that is hard to dismiss, if only because of the very loud silence of government over EFCC’s recent damning documentation of grand venality at the Nigerian Ports Authority under the chairmanship of Chief Olabode George, lately the Deputy Chairman (South) of the PDP.

As for propaganda, the PDP may not have invented it, but in the determination of its unelected leadership to extend President Obasanjo’s tenure beyond May 2007, the leadership seems to have taken the systematic spreading of deceptive and distorted information to new heights.

Perhaps it is a sign of the desperation of this leadership to win the war for the so-called Third Term for the president, but the invidious word they have been spreading through the grapevine lately is that the Northerners who have led the country in the past are, by nature, kleptomaniacs and only the continuation of the president in office, especially with the future of oil and gas revenues looking ever so bright, can stop the country from slipping back into its kleptocratic past.

This vile propaganda has a long pedigree, but like all propaganda, as I shall show presently, it is so much rubbish fit only for garbage can. Somehow as a result of the successful propaganda of the average Southern politician against his more politically successful Northern compatriot, the average Southerner has come to believe that the Northern politician is nothing but a thief.

Probably the most glaring example of the perpetrators of this propaganda is Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, he of the 12^2/3rd fame. Back in 1979, the reader may recall, it was his legal gymnastics before the Supreme Court about what constituted 12^2/3rd of the then 19 states of the federation that helped Alhaji Shehu Shagari to secure the presidency against the formidable challenge of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the presidential candidate of the rival Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN.

Apparently in 1979 it did not occur to Akinjide, then the legal adviser of the National Party of Nigeria, the country’s biggest party at that time, that Shagari was a full-bloodied Hausa/Fulani and therefore as Northern as they come. It was only 21 years later that Akinjide seemed to have realized that he must have helped a kleptomaniac – and any one who knows Shagari knows he is anything but -  into office. For, in an interview in The News of September 18, 2000, Akinjide, who became Shagari’s minister of justice and attorney-general, told his readers that “Northerners cannot separate public treasury from private treasury. They believe the two are synonymous, but in the South the public treasury is sacred.”

Akinjide is, of course, not alone in peddling such utter rubbish. His compatriot, the late Justice Adewale Thomson, also shared the same belief. Thomson once wrote in his typically vitriolic column, Megaforce, in the Nigerian Tribune of July 4, 2003, that power must never return to the North. “It is,” he said, “a question of culture. These men by their ethnic culture cannot preserve money. They can only spend with the result that the none-theivish Yorubas became totally impoverished and are now attempting to recover. To allow these people (Northerners) to take over again after Obasanjo’s years would amount to suicide.”

Akinjide’s and Thomson’s vile propaganda against the North can be easily debunked. All it takes is to point out, as I have done several times on these pages, that it was not the Northerners who brazenly defrauded the Cocoa Fund in the days of General Sani Abacha, nor were they the ones who stole OMPADEC, the precursor of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NNDC, blind. Nor again were they the ones who bankrupted the National Bank of the old West or the African Continental Bank of the old East. Last but by no means the least, it was the indigenes of the various States and local government areas themselves and not any outsiders who mismanaged their consolidated revenues which included their own shares from the Federation Account to the extent that life for the people of most Nigerians has remained, as one wise saw put it, nasty, brutish and short.

These indisputable facts are sufficient proof that logically corruption and fraud are human failings that do not have ethnic, sectional or sectarian boundaries. Just as each tribe, section and religion has its heroes so also does it have its share of villains.

This fact and logic, however, has apparently not deterred many of those desperate for President Obasanjo to continue beyond May 2007 from peddling the dangerous nonsense that he is the only antidote to the North laying its supposedly corrupt and corrupting hands on the levers of power at the centre.

The peddlers of this rubbish assume, indeed have said, that President Obasanjo’s government has been the most transparent in the country’s history. This assumption flies in the fact of the facts. Far from being the most transparent government in the country’s history, it has arguably been the most opaque. At least, the just published report of the Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative said nearly as much when it pointed out that the accounting controls of the Central Bank of Nigeria and of the NNPC, which reports directly to the president as his own minister of petroleum, are weak.

If this government has been arguably the most opaque to date, it is undoubtedly the most fiscally irresponsible. The proof was provided by no less than its former minister of finance, Malam Adamu Ciroma, himself. In a speech before a distinguished audience of PDP members at the International Conference Centre, Abuja, on August 19, 2002, Malam Adamu said “As at 30^th June 2002, 92% of all Federal Government revenues are devoted to recurrent expenditure. Only 8% is therefore available for capital spending.” Nothing could be more fiscally irresponsible than this ratio of spending between the capital and recurrent needs of the country.

The ratio may have since shifted in favour of capital expenditure, but it still says a lot about the government’s fiscal discipline that, in spite of the huge oil and gas windfalls of recent years, it has been unable to arrest the decay in our infrastructure.

No matter what Obasanjo’s propagandists say, his administration’s management of its huge oil and gas windfalls has been anything but prudent. First, he has run deficit budgets for most of the past seven years. Second, he has never been faithful to his own budgets in implementing them.

Third, and most important, the impact of his budgets on ordinary Nigerians has been anything but positive. Each budget seems to have spread more insecurity, poverty, and misery among Nigerians than the previous one. For example, the Human Development Index Report of the UNDP for 2005 rated Nigeria as the 158^th poorest country out of 177 surveyed, down from 141 before. It was highly instructive that Bangladesh that competes with us for the position of the most corruption-ridden country in the world went up 14 places even though it had no petro-dollars.

Presumably it is this lack of transparency in the federal government’s handling of its finances that prompted PUNCH, whose publisher is by no means President Obasanjo’s foe, to write a critical editorial in its edition of June 24 last year, on the state of the country’s Federation Account. In that editorial titled “Federation Account and Transparency,” the newspaper pointed out that on at least two occasions, the NNPC shortchanged the Federation Account without any explanation. In November 2004, for example, the NNPC, said PUNCH, shortchanged the Federation Account by 40 billion Naira. It did the same in January 2005 by 15 billion Naira.

Before PUNCH’s editorial, the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC, had accused the NNPC of shortchanging the Federation Account by 302 billion Naira. That charge was never investigated and no explanation was ever offered for the shortfall. Instead, the NNPC boss at the time, Mr. Gaius Obaseki, tried to use the ethnic card to dismiss RMAFC’s query. The RMAFC’s leadership under a Northerner, Engineer Hamman Tukur, Obaseki said unconvincingly, was asking awkward questions about the Federation Account only because a Southerner happened to be the country’s president.

If any proof was needed that that was a cheap and desperate shot, the PUNCH offered one in the editorial in question. “The RMAFC”, it said, “should be commended for raising the red alert even though states and local councils, as joint stake-holders look pretty comfortable with the sloppy handling of the Federation Accounts.”

Nothing better illustrates the Federal Government’s “sloppy” handling of the country’s Federation Account than the long-drawn saga of Nigeria’s debt-buy back from the Paris Club. The country’s debt to the Club, at anywhere between 29 and 32 billion US dollars, is by far Nigeria’s biggest foreign debt stock.

Federal Government officials, especially Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, have tried to paint the outcome of the negotiations for the cancellation of the debt as Nigeria’s bargain of the century. So happy was the minister with the outcome that she said Nigerians should celebrate it as the country’s second Independence after the first from colonial rule in 1960.

This rosy picture of our Paris Club debt buy-back grossly understates the steep price the country has had to pay to secure an end to the debt. This price included paying members of the Paris Club over 12 billion dollars, half of it upfront, at a time our decayed infrastructure was crying – and is still crying - for investment. Perhaps more importantly, the price also included surrendering our economic sovereignty to the IMF and the World Bank whose officials now have to approve each and every one of our budgets.

Equally worrisome was the unilateral manner in which the Federal Government expropriated money from the Federation Account to pay the Paris Club. It took the money without consulting the National Assembly or the State Governments whose total share of the debt was only a relatively paltry 4.2 billion U.S. dollars. Not only that, the money the Federal Government expropriated also included  2.4 billion dollars belonging to the Local Governments that never owed the Paris Club even a dime. The expropriation also included the shares of three States - Katsina, Kaduna and Nassarawa - that also never owed the Paris Club. Besides, since different States owed different amounts, it was only fair and just that any appropriations from the Federal Account should have been in proportion to what a State owed.

If the Paris Club debt saga is not as happy as the federal authorities want Nigerians to believe, their inability to give the country a satisfactory revenue allocation formula, four years after the Supreme Court ruled that the old one was unconstitutional, is even more troubling. Three times since that ruling, the president sent a bill for a new revenue allocation formula to the National Assembly and three times he withdrew the bills without any explanation.

The indications are that he seems unhappy that the formula recommended by the RMAFC would give the States and the Local Governments more money at the expense of the Federal Government. If that is the case, it can be argued that he is more interested in controlling and dispensing patronage than in transparency and fiscal discipline.

At a thanksgiving and dedication service on May 30, 2003 following his controversial victory at the polls almost three years ago, the president told his audience that he had learnt from the mistakes of his first term. “You have,” he said, “a brand new president… This second and FINAL term would be better because most of the things we learnt in the last four years would be brought to practice in the new term” (emphasis mine).

If little has changed from the president’s first term, it is obviously because he has changed his mind about making his second term the final one; transparency and fiscal responsibility would be the last thing to motivate any president or leader who decides to overstay his welcome.

Or, as he himself told military president, General Ibrahim Babangida in an interview in Tell newsmagazine of April 26, 1993, following Babangida’s long-drawn transition programme, “There are only two things that can make a man give his word and go back on it. Fear or greed. I hope Babangida has only one.”