PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Mask of Pen Robbery

ndajika@yahoo.com

Whoever is elected our president this weekend along with members of the next National Assembly (NA) have their Number 1 job clearly cut out for them; it is to review this year’s budget passed last month by the federal legislators but which is unlikely to be signed by President Goodluck Jonathan any time soon, considering the horrified reaction to the bill by the Minister of Finance, Mr Olusegun Aganga.

“The 2011 budget,” the minister said a week after it was passed on March 17, “is supposed to signal the beginning of fiscal consolidation, but we now have another expansionary budget which is unimplementable.” 

Actually the budget is worse than unimplementable. In his inimitable style, Mahmud Jega, Editor of Daily Trust and its Monday back-page columnist, likened it to day light armed robbery in his column of March 21 entitled “Mask of the armed robber”. It’s worse than even that.

A master of the anecdote, Jega likened the budget to the case of a bank robber in the UK who inadvertently gave himself away when he instructed his lawyer to appeal his prison sentence. “The bank clerk who said she recognised me! How could she recognise me? I was wearing a mask when I did the job,” the bank robber told his lawyer.

Jega likened this to the explanation offered by the chairman of the House of Representatives Appropriation Committee, Mr. Ayo Adeseun, on why the NA more than doubled the roughly 111 billion Naira budget proposed for it by the President in this year’s budget to over 232 billion. According to Adeseun, the NA did so in order to establish its own independence and guarantee its ability to check the excesses of the Executive.

To say the NA needs to double its budget in order to assert its independence and check the Executive, Jega said, is as convincing an argument against the accusation that the NA’s self-approved budget is day light robbery as that offered by our UK bank robber of his innocence.

As I’ve just said, it’s actually worse than armed robbery; it is pen robbery. And the big irony of this is that the co-head of this robbery is the Senate President, Brigadier-General David Mark - the other head, of course, being the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Dimeji Bankole.

The reader may recall that more than 26 years ago the Senate President advocated the shooting to death of what he described as pen robbers. He said this in January 1985 as a Colonel and military governor of Niger State at the launching of the fourth phase of the War Against Indiscipline (WAI) campaign of then military Head of State, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari. A pen robber, Mark said then and I agreed in my column in the New Nigerian of February 1, 1985, was worse than an armed robber. “Not only does he kill individuals,” I said, “the pen-thief indeed kills society.”

To buttress my point, I quoted figures from a submission by Dr. Festus Iyayi, the radical lecturer at the University of Benin, during a seminar in April 1983 at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, on “Indiscipline and Corruption” sponsored by the President Shehu Shagari’s government. Pen-thieves, Iyayi had reckoned from what he said was his monitoring of press reports alone, made away with more than 7.6 billion Naira in fraud, kickbacks, bribes and wastages, a princely sum then and even now when it looks like peanuts in the context of the phenomenal increase in the country’s oil revenues since oil price went into three digits following the Gulf wars.

The damage this scale of venality does to society is obviously far, far greater that anything even the most notorious armed robber can. And this year’s budget, even more than those of previous years which have been outrageous enough, is nothing if not venality on a grand scale.

The commonsense warning by economic experts about the futility of budgets that are almost perpetually run on the red and at the same time have bigger recurrent expenditure than capital, simply seems to have no truck with those who prepare, approve and execute our budgets, at least since the return of democracy to the country in 1999. On the contrary, it seems the more the experts cry out against the foolishness of such budgets the more profligate our elected officials become.

For example, last year’s budget, like several others before, was a deficit budget and was in the ratio of 25% to 75% between capital and recurrent expenditure. As if that was not bad enough, by October, which was two months to the end of the year’s budget, only 30% of the capital vote had been released, all this according to the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Mohammed Ndume.

It says a lot about the credibility and practicability of this year’s budget that the Minister of Finance, Aganga, has in effect said it is worse than last year’s.

Initially the president proposed a total of 4.226 trillion Naira. He subsequently added a worrisome 312 billion “to augment key priority areas of ministries, departments and agencies,” he said, without identifying exactly what those priorities were. In the end he proposed a total of 4.538 trillion.

With no rhyme or reason the NA added 433 billion Naira to all this, making a total of 4.971 trillion. Most of the addition was recurrent expenditure. As with last year’s, the NA also raised the oil revenue benchmark unilaterally. This year it raised the benchmark from $65 per barrel to $75 against last year’s unilateral increase from $55 to $67.

All this is obviously worse than day light armed robbery in a country like Nigeria where there has been little or no transparency and accountability in its budgetary and overall governance system.

In more civilized climes the period of election in which we are would have seen any elected official who had anything to do with this barefaced pen-robbery kicked out of office. Happily scores of our federal legislators who have been part of this travesty of a budget have suffered defeat at polls last weekend. Sadly, not all of them have.

Going by the Senate President’s logic 26 years or so ago all those involved in this apparent pen robbery should be shot. Back then I disagreed with him. I still do. And it is not because they don’t deserve to be shot. They do. I disagreed with him because I didn’t think shooting anyone would solve the problem of the venality of our country’s elite.

“Obviously if anyone should be fodder for the executioner’s bullets,” I said back then, “it is the pen-thief. Yet to shoot pen-robbers will not end corruption as Governor Mark obviously believes. It should be instructive that shooting armed robbers has not stopped armed robbery.”

Part of the solution, I said then in partial agreement with a monograph on the issue of corruption, morality and discipline in society by late Dr. Mahmud Modibbo Tukur, a radical lecturer in the History Department of ABU, Zaria, and one time president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, was equity between the poor and the rich in the way we define and punish venality. It was not right, I said then, to shoot armed robbers and send goat thieves to long years in prison while the system made it almost impossible to catch big thieves, never mind giving them the punishments that they deserve, short of being shot.

In retrospect I should have added the obvious need for massive public expenditure on infrastructure – agricultural, power, transport, educational, etc - as a means of ending the poverty that is a prime source of corruption in our society.  Not too long ago the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) under its erstwhile chairman, Engineer Hamman Tukur – no relation of the radical lecturer - seemed to have worked out a novel and transparent way to successfully attack the country’s terrible infrastructural deficit.

Its blueprint worked out how Government can benchmark certain amounts daily from our daily oil production for effective investment in such sectors as power ($13.83 per day, says the commission), rail ($6.64), Agriculture ($6.92) and coal reactivation ($2.77), without disrupting our normal budgetary system.

From what the Minister of Finance, Aganga, has said of this year’s budget it would be a surprise if President Jonathan signs it before the new Government comes in on May 29. In the event that he does, the first job of the next National Assembly should be to review it and throw out all those terrible bits of self-aggrandizement by the ruling elite which the budget is so riddled with.

That should be the beginning of a budgetary process in which we cut our coat according to our clothes and in which we spend more on capital items than on recurrent.