The anonymity of Dr. Atkins prompted me to write an open letter in my column in the defunct Citizen (March 23, 1992) to plead with Babangida to ignore Atkins and his type. “Anyone,” I said in that article, “who lacks the courage to stand up for his conviction deserves only contempt.” I gave other reasons in the article why Babangida should ignore Atkins. His advert, I tried to show, was full of empty sloganeering, self-contradictions, fallacious assumptions, half-truths and even barefaced lies.

The wrap-around political advert that Thisday carried last Thursday, April 20, and which the Sunday Vanguard carried last Sunday, was like the Atkins episode repeating itself – only this time worse; Atkins may have been a faceless coward, but at least someone signed his advertisement. Not only did no one sign the advert it carried the stamp of authority of both newspapers.. This was simply unacceptable professionally and ethically.

My brother Olusegun Adeniyi, tried, the following day, to defend his newspaper’s decision to carry the advert the way it did on the grounds of free speech.

Proponents of the extension of President Obasanjo’s tenure, he argued quite rightly, have a right to be heard. His newspaper’s only mistake, he said, was that it did not carry a disclaimer, like it is now done with, say, cigarettes.

I understand Adeniyi’s predicament. Newspapers are supposed to be society’s watchdog but, from my painful experience with my own Citizen newsmagazine which I managed for barely four years before it went belly-up in 1994, unless you run your newspaper profitably it won’t be around to watch over anybody. I am told that the wrap-around advert in question cost the advertisers a princely N10, 000,000.00, with discount and all. This was good money even the wealthiest newspaper could do with.

But then certain things are simply priceless. A newspaper’s logo, which is its imprimatur, is one such commodity. Therefore even if the wrap-around advert was signed, the newspapers should not have lent their logos to it because of the almost universal condemnation of the Third Term agenda. The fact that it was not signed made the newspapers’ decision worse.

In as much as Adeniyi tried to defend Thisday’s decision to publish the pro-“Third Term” advert on grounds of free speech, it was gladdening that the newspaper showed it was sensitive to its readers’ opinion by not continuing with the series. According to Adeniyi, he received no less than 140 angry texts on his cell-phone from readers on the day the advert appeared, all of them in protest.

As the readers can see, my fundamental grouse with the pro-Third Term advertisement in question was, first, that it was unsigned and, second, that it was a wrap-round that carried the stamp of authority of the newspapers, never mind the pretence of labeling it a political advert. My grouse, however, goes beyond these two reasons.

As with Atkins 12 years ago, the pro-“Third Term” advert was full of contradictions, fallacious assumptions, half-truth, and even barefaced lies. It said there are ten “notable achievements” why Nigerians should “Support The Extension of The Tenure of This Administration.” These, the faceless advertisers said, were achievements in the banking sector, the system of due process, telecommunications, transparency and anti-corruption, privatization, debt-relief, foreign investment, emergence of the middle class, foreign reserve increment and the exploration of more natural resources.

The advertisement then concluded by saying “The facts speak louder than the critics and the cynics.” Really? On each and every one of these areas, it can be easily shown that the facts clearly contradict the claims of the faceless advertisers. As a general remark, however, it is hard to describe the abysmal failure of this administration better than the editorial of Thisday of September 22, 2005. “Any economic reform,” the newspaper said in that editorial, “that does not provide jobs, mass transportation, power, food, health service and social security is a failure. It is not enough for economic reforms to throw up a few beneficiaries even as poverty grinds the masses of the people into the dust.” The truth is that the economic reforms of this administration has destroyed far more jobs than it has created and, in spite of tens of billions of Naira purportedly spent on reversing the decay in our infrastructure – power, roads, refineries, schools, hospitals, etc – the administration has not even been able to stop the decay, much less reverse it.

Let us examine three areas this administration considers its greatest achievements, namely, debt relief, baking reform and privatization.

The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, thinks the Paris Club cancellation of our debts is so great an achievement we should celebrate it as our second independence after the first from colonial rule. The minister and her team no doubt worked hard to get the cancellation, but the outcome of their hard work can be faulted on at least three grounds.

First, is their assumption about the amount we owe the Paris Club. In an interview in The News of October 9, 2000, the eminent economist, Professor Sam Aluko, then the Chairman of the National Economic Intelligence Committee, had this to say about our external debts. “My committee produced evidence for General Abacha that out of the money borrowed, at least 7 billion dollars did not reach Nigeria. All we borrowed from 1979 to 1999 was about $27 billion. We paid $38 billion; we are still owing $29 billion. What type of arithmetic is that?” Clearly Okonjo-Iweala and her team negotiated with the Paris Club on the assumption that there was nothing fraudulent about the $32 billion plus the Club claimed we owed its member-countries. In the light of Aluko’s remarks, this assumption was at best quesionable.

Second, the procedure for paying off the debt was less than transparent. To begin with, the president made both the down payment of $6 billion plus and the debt buy-back of another $6 billion plus from the Federation Account without consulting let alone getting the consent of the other beneficiaries – States and Local Governments – of the account. Neither did he consult the National Assembly which has the sole prerogative of appropriating monies from the Federation Account.

Not only did the president act unilaterally and therefore unconstitutionally, there is suspicion that some government officials personally benefited from the transaction. The minister of finance will no doubt remember the great anger with which she reacted to Simon Kolawole of Thisday when he made this allegation mid-last year. “Who”, the minister retorted, “are those 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 extreme poor taste.” (Thisday, July 20, 2005).

Not too long after the minister’s angry response to Kolawole, the Director-General of the Debt Management Office, Dr. Mansur Mukhtar, admitted that it was indeed “standard operating procedure for all countries in seeking debt relief” to appoint a consultant to handle such matters. For Nigeria, the consultant, he said, was Lazard Freres, “who is one of the most respected names in the area.” The consultant, he claimed, actually did Nigeria a big favour by accepting a fee of $100,000.00 monthly as against the standard fees of between $200,000.00 and $250,000.00.

Mansur did not say for how long Lazard Freres was paid his fees. He thus left room for speculations on its size. There were, in any case, suspicions that the firm did little to earn its “modest” fees.

Third, there seems to be deliberate attempt to understate the price we have paid and will continue to pay for the debt cancellation. As Professor Jeffrey Sachs, of Columbia University, New York, and a World Bank consultant on ending global poverty said, it was heartless to squeeze $12 billion plus out of a country like Nigeria with a rotten infrastructure and so much poverty, as a condition for debt cancellation. It all looked like the creditor-countries were more interested to make hay while the oil sector boomed than in ending the misery and poverty of Nigerians.

And then of course there was the related matter of having World Bank and IMF officials crawl all over our economic ministries and parastatals like the ministry of finance, the NNPC and the CBN under the guise of offering expert advice on development. Such so-called experts, as one John Perkins revealed in his hard-hitting 2005 book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, are no better than highly paid “financial buccaneers” who use every trick one can imagine to subordinate the interests of their clients to those of the mighty US and the West.

On the issue of the banking reform, it can be argued that the problem of the country’s banking system has never been so much the equity base of the various categories of the bank, as the lack of the will on the part of the officials of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, to enforce existing controls. To illustrate this point, recently, one of the banks which had no problems meeting the 25 billion Naira equity and which is one of the oldest banks in the country, appointed someone as managing director who was due to retire on the very day he got the job! This was contrary to the bank’s memorandum and article of association. The CBN looked the other way simply because the new managing director was well-connected to those in authority.

It was this type of selective application of the rules that led to the collapse of many banks in the past. It will do so again if Professor Charles Soludo, the CBN governor, does not apply the rules without fear or favour.

In any case, it was a contradiction in terms to preach the virtues of deregulation on the one hand, and, on the other, to have forced all banks into one equity strait jacket, and worse, in comparatively next to no time.

Finally on privatization, only the blindest supporter of this administration will claim that its privatization programme has been transparent and has brought prosperity to more than a few cronies of those in power. Probably the worse example was the way PENTASCOPE thoroughly gutted the once profitable, even if not very efficient, NITEL. NITEL is, however, not alone as an example of all that has been wrong with our privatization programme in its conception, planning and execution. As General Obasanjo said of Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme, SAP, back in 1993, this administration’s privatization programme has only “created a new class of nouveau riche from commission rather than production” (Tell, April 26, 1993).

Thisday’s faceless supporters of the Third Term agenda can crow on and on about the “notable achievements” of this administration, but the facts on the ground tell a completely different story. This may not be enough reason to deny them their right to free speech, but those of them who prefer to hide behind newspaper logos to make their claims deserve only the greatest contempt.