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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Bad Workmen...
Since Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), stirred the hornet’s nest with his charge of profligacy against the members of the National Assembly during the Eighth Convocation Lecture of the Igbinedion University, Okada, on November 26,2010, there has been an increasing criticism of our presidential system of democracy as something inherently expensive. The big irony of the CBN Governor’s speech was that he intended it to be a criticism neither of the legislators nor of the system itself. If anything it was more a criticism of the Executive arm - which the CBN is part of - given the conditions he listed if our economy is to grow. Some newspapers reported him as saying during the open hearing over his controversial remark that he mentioned the National Assembly overhead of 25% in only one sentence in his two and half hour lecture. Actually the nearly 10,000 word, 33-page or so lecture did not contain even one word about the legislative overhead. His remark on the legislators was merely off the cuff. And so you could not in fairness blame the man if the newspapers decided to dramatize the remark in front page banner headlines. In doing so, however, the newspapers succeeded in drawing the public’s much needed attention to the cost of our democracy. And given the way our politicians have been spending money as if it’ll soon go out of fashion, this could not have been bad. Trouble is we seem to be drawing the wrong lessons from the controversy. First, the focus on the legislators, as I said when I wrote on the subject recently, is wrong and unfair. The Executive overhead, as we all know, is much larger than that of the legislators. So also are the depth and scope of corruption in government given the fact that the Executive arm initiates budgets to begin with, and also exercises enormous powers in their implementation across all three arms of government. True, only legislators appropriate. They also have enormous powers of investigation to prevent corruption, inefficiency and waste in the disbursement of the monies they appropriate. It is a reflection of how diligently they have carried out their jobs that our political-economy is in the terrible mess in which it is. Even then we cannot hope to tackle profligacy, corruption, inefficiency and waste in government if we focus on only one arm of government, especially when it is, practically speaking, the junior partner, at least financially speaking. Just take a look at this year’s budget of 4.226 trillion Naira proposed by the presidency. Expected revenue is 2.830 trillion. This means the country will borrow 1.40 trillion. This is too much borrowing. To make matters worse 3.221 trillion of this will be recurrent expenditure. Less than a third of this, or 1.005 trillion, will be capital expenditure. In other words the presidency is borrowing a mind-boggling 2.830 trillion Naira not to invest in repairing our terribly dilapidated infrastructure. It is borrowing those huge sums for consumption. This, to put it mildly, is fiscal irresponsibility of the highest order. And the greater blame for this can only be the Executive’s. As if to underscore the extent of the Executive’s culpability, on the very last day of last year, the presidency did what, as far as I know, no government before had ever done; dip its hand into the local reserve in dollars meant for rainy days and share out one billion American dollars among the three tiers of government just like that, without even the National Assembly’s appropriation. This was as unconstitutional as it was criminal. The second wrong lesson we are drawing from the controversy over the federal legislators’ profligacy is the increasing tendency of blaming our presidential system of government for the high cost of our governance. The other day, the controversial and eloquent Pastor Tunde Bakare, the Convener of the Save Nigeria Group, for example, blamed the system for this high cost. This was in an interview in The Punch of December 20, 2010. “The presidential system,” he said, “is by nature extremely expensive. At a time that the Babangida junta foisted that system on our citizens, their opinions were not sought.” Bakare is not alone in blaming our presidential system. Chief Olu Falae who’s been even more involved than the pastor in our politics, shares the same opinion. In an interview with the Sunday Mirror (December 26, 2010), he said we should not only return to part-time legislating and replace our two-chamber federal legislature with one. The chief said we should return to the parliamentary democracy of the First Republic. “We must,” he said, “return to parliamentary system of government. It is this presidential system that has now created the nonsense we now have in Nigeria.” Even the most casual review of our newspapers would suggest that more and more people, not least of all newspaper pundits, are beginning to agree with both the activist pastor and the politician. With due respect to all who share their opinion, nothing could be more wrong than to condemn our presidential system as inherently expensive. To begin with it is not true, as Pastor Bakare said, that Nigerians were not consulted before the system was “foisted” on them. (He was certainly wrong to blame former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, for imposing the system. If his memory had served him well, he would have remembered that the system was first introduced in 1976 by General Murtala Mohammed in his four-year transition programme which he unveiled before his assassination in February 1976 but which his successor, General Olusegun Obasanjo, eventually implemented.) The presidential system was adopted by the Obasanjo Constituent Assembly (CA) in 1979. The introduction did stir a lot of controversy at the beginning especially following an allegation by the late radical politician, Malam Aminu Kano, that the soldiers had a sneaky plan to foist it on the country. However, of, I think, the 400 odd members of the largely elected CA only a handful dissented against the replacement of the First Republic parliamentary system with the American presidential model. Not only was the system not imposed on Nigerians, there is nothing inherently expensive about it. And you do not need any more proof than the fact that it costs the Americans who started it all much less than it is costing Nigerians, at least relatively speaking. The fault, truth be told, lies not in the system. It lies in us. The problem is not so much the tool as how we have chosen to use it. We are getting bad results not because the tool is the wrong one. We are getting bad results because we, or more specifically, our politicians, are bad workmen.
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