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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
2011: Playing With Fire One hundred days into the Jonathan presidency it is now apparent that its leitmotif, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding, is President Goodluck Jonathan’s blind (?) ambition to remain president beyond 2011 in spite of his party’s zoning agreement which says the presidency should remain in the North till 2015. All sorts of reasons, some sensible but mostly self-serving and ridiculous, have been advanced to justify the violation of the agreement cast in cold print. My concern this morning, however, is not with those reasons that I have, in any case, discussed on several occasions on these pages. My concern this morning is the grave danger the president’s ambition poses for the peace and security of this country coupled with the equally grave danger his leitmotif poses to the prospects of good governance in the country. The two most glaring manifestations of this danger are, first, the apparent inability of the Jonathan presidency to halt the fiscal indiscipline he inherited from his predecessor and, second, the deal he appears to have struck with Alhaji Ali Modu Sherrif, the ostensibly opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) governor of Borno State, not to contest Sherrif’s seeming political stranglehold of the state in return for his support of Jonathan’s presidential ambitions. Of these two, the second poses the graver and more immediate danger because of what seems to be the governor’s strategy of attempting to use religion to rule by proxy, using his brother, after his two-term limit would have ended next year, as we shall see presently. Let’s, however, begin our analysis with the first danger. Penultimate Monday, Daily Trust led the day’s edition with a story that should worry anyone concerned with the economic health of this country. The federal, state and local governments, the story said, have persistently violated the Fiscal Responsibility Act since January last year. Initiated by former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo, in part fulfilment of conditions dictated by our external debtors for the controversial external debt pardon he secured during his second term, the act came in to force in July 2007 after a very long and tortuous run in the National Assembly. In apparent anticipation of the act, Obasanjo created an Excess Crude Account in 2004 into which oil revenue in excess of budgeted benchmarks, which were invariably set below the high international market price the country enjoyed virtually all through his 8-year tenure, was deposited. There was much opposition to the account led by the Hamman Tukur Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) on grounds that it was, at best, of dubious legality because our constitution stipulates that all revenues collected by the Federal Government should go to the Federation Account. Obasanjo still went ahead presumably because the account would, at least ostensibly, enable the country save for rainy days. The account, according to Trust, peaked at $20 billion in January 2007. Today it is down to $3.4 billion. The depletion, said the newspaper, has been due to “persistent withdrawals...since 2009,”that is, since before Jonathan became president following the death of President Umaru Yar’adua in May. Of the $17 or so billion withdrawn from the account since February 2009 it seems only $5.3 billion was invested in any capital project – Yar’adua’s emergency power project. Even that investment has been somewhat opaque. The remaining withdrawals have been shared among the federal, state and local governments. More likely than not these have been spent on recurrent items. Recently when the former finance minister who was instrumental to securing the external debt pardon and who is now managing director at the World Bank, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, came home for the National Honours awards ceremony she expressed some concern about the depletion of the account and also about the furtive way our external debts are building up back to a worrisome level. There is reason to suspect that recent raids on the account have been conducted in aid of Jonathan’s apparent decision to challenge his party’s zoning agreement, his self-declared ambivalence notwithstanding. Few things can be more inimical to public interest than the surreptitious use of public funds to finance private ambitions. Among these is the recent “deal” between Modu Sherrif and Jonathan to scratch the other’s back, in a manner of speaking. An indication that this deal exists was the governor’s vote against zoning during the most recent meeting of the Northern Governor’s Forum in Kaduna even though, like the country’s ruling party, his too has practiced zoning since its establishment in 1998. Last week in an apparent quid pro quo the governor got his youngish sister-in-law the important job of the minister of state of finance against stiff opposition from the state chapters of both his own party and the PDP which is Borno State’s leading opposition party. If merely removing an uncomfortable itch in the back, in a manner of speaking, is all there is to this mutual back-scratching between the country’s No. 1 Citizen and his Borno State counterpart, the deal would not have mattered much. Unfortunately there may be a lot more to it than that. Opposition elements in the state including those from the governor’s own party who have been trouping in their large numbers into the state chapter of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), the new opposition party led by General Muhammadu Buhari, twice ANPP’s presidential candidate, have been accusing Sherrif and his aides of attempts to use the spectre of Boko Haram to demonise them; party flags in front of their offices in the state have all too often been mysteriously replaced by those of Boko Haram, the Maiduguri, the state’s capita,l based Islamic sect whose insurrection across at least four states in July last year was harshly put down by the army. Over 800 people were said to have lost their lives, most of them innocent victims. In the wake of the insurrection its leader, Muhammadu Yusuf, and several of his lieutenants were extra-judicially murdered by security forces. During the first anniversary of the insurrection last month unanswered questions about the killings were raised again in the media and by human rights organisations. As if in answer to those questions the police published full page adverts in several newspapers, including the Daily Trust of July 27, in which it bemoaned its officers and men who lost their lives during the insurrection. In the advert entitled “NIGERIA POLICE STILL MOURNS,” the police listed the names and ranks of 32 officers and men who reportedly lost their lives during the fight. They were, the police said, victims of “some misguided elements in the name of Boko Haram (who) took it upon themselves to attack law and order (and) sought to overthrow civil liberties and truncate our democracy.” In the opening paragraph of the advert, the police said it was “stunned at the macabre murder, in cold blood, of her personnel. It was indeed a most gruesome episode, as some of these officers were slaughtered like animals, and some roasted.” Given the understandably bitter memory of the police over the Boko Haram insurrection as revealed by the wordings of its advert and given also its central role in general elections, it is obvious that whoever is trying to demonise opposition elements by conjuring up the fearsome image of Boko Haram is playing a very dangerous game that can set this country, or at least a large part of it, on conflagration. Opposition claims against the Borno State governor may be baseless but at home and abroad the use of Islamo-phobic mongering by politicians far less desperate to hang on to power than Jonathan and Sherrif are too common to dismiss the claims of the opposition elements in Borno State with the waive of the hand. |