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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA FSR and Government’s Resort To Blackmail (I) With the strike jointly called for by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) over fuel subsidy removal (FSR) at least suspended for now, it seems Government has won the day against the mass demonstration for the restoration of the subsidy, assuming, that is, that it existed in the first place. When the two unions issued a joint statement saying the strike will go on until the old price of 65 Naira per litre is restored, they said “We shall neither surrender nor retreat.” They may not have surrendered completely but they have certainly retreated. Even then it should be clearly obvious to all that while Government seems to have won the battle for FSR, it has lost the argument for same. It has done so in spite of the brave efforts of the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. Before, during and after the well publicized town hall meeting in Lagos on FSR under the umbrella of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN), the two led the war for FSR. As field commanders of the war, Government, they said again and again, can simply not continue to subsidize petrol consumption, certainly not on the scale of last year’s which they said had reached 1.36 trillion Naira by October. To carry on like that, they said, apparently plausibly, is to mortgage the future of our children, possibly even grandchildren. Problem however, is that, first, when you scratch the surface of their arithmetic, as some oil experts have done, it does not quite add up. This is because, to begin with, their arithmetic is based on the opportunity cost of not selling the 450,000 barrels of crude meant for local refining at the international market, whereas the arithmetic should be based on the cost of bringing it up and transporting it to the refineries since the 450,000 barrels are over and above our OPEC export quota. Then there is the template used by the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) for fixing the price of petrol at 141 Naira per litre. This template is made of 24 odd elements, with several of them, like the taxes and the demurrage on the item, looking either arbitrary or fishy or both. Next there is the conflicting figures of our rate of consumption among the four institutions involved in the business, namely, CBN, PPPRA, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR).Their figures, as Mr. Peter Esele, the President of TUC, pointed out at the NPAN town hall meeting, have ranged between 30 million litres per day to 40. A margin of error of 10 million litres, as Mr Esele said, is obviously untenable. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), America consumed an average of 379.7 million gallons per day or 1.7 billion litres per day of petrol in 2010. Depending on which figure of Nigeria’s consumption you pick, this could mean Nigeria consumes somewhere in the region of 1/43 or 1/57 of what the Americans consume. Either figure looks questionable when you compare our economy’s relatively puny $135 billion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with America’s mighty 14 trillion, i.e. over 100 times the size of Nigeria’s. This is not to mention the fact that the automobile is central to America’s way of life, which it certainly isn’t in Nigeria. The questionable plausibility of the oil arithmetic of the FSR protagonists apart, there is the question of how Government came about spending over five times the 250 billion Naira it budgeted for subsidy in its 2011 budget, a provision based on the performance of the year before. The most likely one phrase answer to this question is Government’s totally reckless disregard of the Fiscal Responsibility Law of 2007; a recklessness in pursuit of the presidential ambition of Dr. Goodluck Ebele Johnson. Otherwise it is difficult, if not impossible, to explain how the huge excess crude account he inherited as acting president following the death of his boss, Alhaji Umaru Yar’adua, virtually disappeared and our foreign reserve ran dangerously low in the run-up to last April’s general elections and we even restarted borrowing from abroad in spite of all the promises Government made that we will never do so again after the so-called debt forgiveness from the Paris Club. Now, if all of these alone do not convince you that Government lost the argument for FSR even before the debate started, surely its apparent complicity in the resort to crude blackmail by leading figures and groups from the president’s South-South geo-political zone so that Government would have its way, should. Last Sunday’s Thisday’s editorial, “False Alarm by Niger Delta Elders,” captured this fact very well. Commenting on the claim by the president of the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC), Mr. Miabiye Kuromiema in company of the rather voluble Alhaji Asari Dokubo of the Niger Delta Volunteer Force, that some nameless person were planning to assassinate the president along with the National Security Adviser, General Andrew Owoye Azazi, the army chief, Lt-Gen. Azubike Ihejirika and Senate President, Mr. David Mark, the newspaper rightly dismissed the claim as crying wolf where none existed. It also dismissed the subsequent claim by the South-South Elders led by the Ijaw leader and former Minister of Information, Chief Edwin Clarke, that some vested interests were trying to use the protest over FSR to remove the president from office. “We find it very worrisome,” said the newspaper, “that senior citizens (most of whom have held senior government positions in recent past) would promote divisive tendencies. We also condemn any attempt to criminalize the genuine protest of Nigerians over the removal of subsidy by the federal government.” It concluded by saying it is “a great disservice to President Jonathan that some politicians are using his name to further inflame already frayed passions by raising false alarm at this critical stage of our national life.” What the newspaper did not add but should have was that the President has not shown any disapproval of the untoward words and deeds of his compatriots. On the contrary, he seems to be all too pleased with their dangerous alarmist and divisive antics. The prize for false alarm and divisive tendencies would, however, go, not to Chief Clarke’s group for claiming that some faceless groups want to use the FSR protests to remove the president. It would not even go to Messrs Kuromiama and Dokubo for claiming some people are planning to assassinate Mr. President, et al. No. The prize for false alarm and divisive tendencies will go to the latter two along with three others for signing a widely publicized “Open Letter to the Nation (1)” on behalf of the IYC – the sixth person on the document, one Dr. Chris Ekiyor did not sign the document - claiming the protests over the FSR was a plot “to make Nigeria ungovernable for His Excellency, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (so as to) portray him as clueless, weak, incompetent and unable to hold Nigeria together.” Apology Last week I said President Goodluck Jonathan travelled to South Africa where the ruling African National Congress was celebrating its centenary, with the First Lady, Dame Patience, in tow, while the war over FSR raged. This was a most egregious mistake on my part as neither travelled out of the country at the time. The error is deeply regretted. FSR and government’s resort to blackmail (II) Except for Malam Nasir el-Rufa’i, a former minister of the Federal Capital Territory, and Pastor Tunde Bakare, the convener of the Save Nigeria Group and the vice-presidential candidate of the CPC in the last elections, whose names the publication barely stopped short of calling, it did not directly identify the group that is allegedly after the president. Even then it hardly left anyone in doubt that the group was the usual suspect of so-called core-Northerners whose apparent crime was that they had insisted that the ruling party obey the provisions of power rotation among the country’s six geo-political zones written in cold print in its own charter and to which the president himself was a signatory. “For the first time in Nigeria’s 51 years,” Mr. Kuromiema, et al said, “they are not in power and the current president is not their anointed candidate.” These villains, they said in a thinly disguised attempt at pitching Igbos against Northerners and Muslims against Christians, “are the ones breeding and sponsoring Boko Harm, (the) devilish group (that) is currently killing innocent Igbos and Christian minorities in the North.” Obviously, the fact that the group has killed many Muslims, including leading Islamic clerics who disagreed with the sect’s version of Islam, seems lost on the IYC leaders. Even more obviously, the fact that Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, a scion of the most powerful emirate in the North (Kano) – the most authoritative, of course, is Sokoto – is the most vigorous defender of FSR, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, the finance and co-ordinating minister included, seems to have escaped the blinkered eyes of the leaders of the IYC. Likewise the fact that the protest against the FSR has been organised and led by leaders of a coalition of labour unions, civil society and other organizations, supported by legislators in both chambers of the National Assembly across ethnic, sectional and sectarian divides, seem to have also escaped the hate-filled eyes and minds of the IYC leaders. Not surprisingly, they proceeded in their bigoted publication to single out the North for attack over the war on the FSR and to renew its call for “Resource Control.” The Kaduna Refinery, they declared accordingly, is “an illegal refinery” and they will “no longer allow any drop of oil extracted from Ijawland to be refined outside Ijawland.” They also threatened to “secure” the country’s oil rigs should PENGASSAN, the union of oil and gas workers, carry out its threat to join the NLC/TUC strike if an agreement was not reached in federal government’s negotiations with the unions by the past weekend. The IYC concluded its publication by issuing the ominous threat that “President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan may well be the last President of a united Nigeria. So be it.” That the government is complicit in all these crude blackmail and threats is obvious from its deafening silence over the threats, in sharp contrast to its vigorous and loud reactions to the threat from Boko Haram. In blaming the North for the Delta region’s grinding poverty in spite of its oil riches, it is obvious that Chief Clarke himself has all too soon forgotten - and militants like Dokubo have never read - some of the things the Ijaw leader told newspapers about the causes of the region’s poverty as recently as less than five years ago. For example, in an interview in The Nation (August 11, 2007) he decried what in effect he said was the selectivity of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in its war on corruption. “Nigerians,” he said, “are worried ...why recent activities of EFCC resulting in the arrest of certain governors in the country has not affected the former governors of the Niger Delta who were known all over the country and world as the most corrupt and investigated governors by EFCC.” Earlier in the interview, he had talked about how he could not defend the governors of the region over allegations of corruption during the 2005 National Conference under President Olusegun Obasanjo. “It would be recalled that in 2005 at the National Conference,” he said, “the South-South delegates under my leadership...could not defend accusations by other delegates from the other five zones that our governors were corrupt and that if the 13 per cent paid as derivation to develop the area had been judiciously utilized, the crisis in Niger Delta would have reduced if not ended. Sadly we had no answer because the truth is bitter and we could only tell them it was an internal problem which we were going back to address.” To which, ironically, Chief James Ibori, the Ijaw leader’s arch-villain, could only have concurred. “Our son (Eric) Opia is on the run,” he said in an interview in the rested Post –Express (July 11, 2001). “Those who stole from OMPADEC (the precursor of NDDC) are still walking the streets. Those that ate OMPADEC money are not from the Niger Delta region. If Opia took money and actually embezzled it, yes he is our son. The money is still within the region.” Opia, you will recall, ran out of the country to far away Australia to escape prosecution over allegations that he mismanaged OMPADEC as its one time boss.
In yet
another interview in The Guardian (September 9, 2007) the Ijaw
leader wondered why people were talking about the alleged corruption of
“(Saminu) Turaki (the governor of Jigawa State) and other governors who
received very little money from the Federation Account whereas (Peter)
Odili (Rivers) received about “But where is the money?” he asked. “Does Asaba look like a capital city after eight years? It does not. So that is the problem. Benin is worse that when we were there in 1975 during (Dr. Samuel) Ogbemudia’s administration.” In threatening to return to their demand for resource control, it is obvious that the hot-headed militants of the IYC have either never read the wise counsel of Dr. Sunday Mbang, the former Primate of the Methodist Church who comes from the oil producing Akwa-Ibom State and who was himself once a fiery president of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) - he once said in an interview in Thisday (July 31, 2000) that “Whether they like it or not, we will not allow any Muslim to be the president of Nigeria. I am declaring as President of CAN” – in an interview in the Vanguard (April 1, 2001), or the militants have chosen to ignore his prudent words. Asked by the newspaper if he believed in resource control, he replied emphatically that he did not. “We are,” he said, “living in a funny country. Those who are pushing for resource control may have resources today. Do they know tomorrow? The southern governors pushing for resource control because it suits their purpose for the moment are being short-sighted. If the oil for which they are pushing for resource control gets exhausted today and tomorrow something more valuable is found in the north, what happens? They go to the north to beg them to reverse the situation?” The retired senior cleric concluded by telling the champions of resource control in effect to shut up. “Don’t,” he said, “talk about resource control because when you start the resource control grammar you don’t know where it will end. Now it is the state, before you know it, it will be the local government. Before you know it, it will be the community... I come from Akwa-Ibom and I can assure you if you press for resource control in Akwa-Ibom, the local government where those things are located will soon say they should control them. And there will be no end to it. So let us be careful.” When President Jonathan declared his intention to run for the presidency at the Eagle Square, Abuja, on September 18, 2010, he said he “...came to launch a campaign of ideas not calumny. I have come to preach love, not hate. I have come to break you away from the divisive tendencies of the past which has slowed down our drive to nationhood. I have no enemies to fight.” Very fine and inspiring words. Trouble is, the way the man’s presidency has winked and possibly sometimes even instigated the divisive tendencies of all too many elderly and not-so-elderly leaders from his region and religion suggests he never meant those fine and inspiring words he preached that fine day in September 2010. Truth be told, the man has talked and acted more like he is the president of a section of this country than that of all Nigerians. In spite of those fine and inspiring words, his presidency has been the most divisive and clueless the country has ever had. |