Ezekwesili, Jonathan and the $67b question, by Fani-Kayode
Former Education Minister, Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili, kicked up dust when she asked what the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency has done with the $67billion left by former President Olusegun Obasanjo. The dust is yet to settle as both the Obasanjo and Jonathan camps have been charging at each other. In the following articles, Femi Fani-Kayode, who worked closely with Obasanjo, and Dr. Reuben Abati, President Jonathan’s adviser on publicity, square up.
I think that it is a pity that President Goodluck Jonathan’s
Government declined to take up the challenge of the former Minister of
Education, Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili, to a public debate on the
$67billion USD savings that President Obasanjo left behind in 2007. I do
not think that our government ought to have run away from the debating
ring.
Government ought to have accepted the challenge of a rigorous public debate and allow the Nigerian people to listen to it and make up their own minds about who was right and who was wrong. I thought that the response of the Special Assistant to the President On Public Affairs, Dr. Doyin Okupe, to Obiageli Ezekwesili was more logical and made far more sense than that of the Honorable Minister of Information, Labaran Maku’s, but I still believe that Ezekwesili was right. I believe that the government’s position on this issue and it’s attempt to over-aggressively defend what I personally consider to be the indefensible is not only disingenuous but it is also essentially dishonest and self-seeking.
The charge that our foreign reserves were heavily depleted between 2007 and 2013 cannot be convincingly or logically denied. In 2007, President Olusegun Obasanjo left 45 billion USD in our foreign reserves and 22 billion USD in our Excess Crude Account. If the two figures are added up the amount that you will come up with is 67 billion USD of savings for our country. This is the figure that Obiageli Ezekwesili cited. It represents what was in both our foreign reserves and our Excess Crude Account put together.
Let us look at the history. When President Olusegun Obasanjo came to power in 1999 Nigeria only had 1.5 billion USD in her foreign reserves and consequently no-one in the world took us seriously. We were poor, weak and lonely and we were viewed as a failed state and a pariah nation. No-one trusted us, no-one wanted to do business with us and no-one seriously believed that we as a people or as a nation were capable of enduring the rigours of serious economic recovery, prudence and fiscal discipline. As far as the developed world was concerned Nigeria was only good for it’s endless supply of sweet bonny light crude oil. Yet Obasanjo proved the world wrong and showed that Nigerians could do far better than they thought. After eight years of good stewardship and the display of fiscal discipline and remarkable prudence he built up those foreign reserves from a measly and pitiful 1.5 billion USD in 1999 to no less than 45 billion by 2007.
This was quite an achievement yet sadly what took place after Obasanjo left power was very disheartening. It was not only a downer but it was also sad and unfortunate. I say this because by the Federal Governments own admission, and four long years after leaving 45 billion USD for the Yar’adua administration to build on in 2007, we still only have that same figure of 45 billion USD left in our foreign reserves today. Worse still this was after it had plummeted to a shameful 30 billion USD under late President Umaru Yar Adua. Had it not been for the fact that whatever was coming in after we left in 2007 and over the last 4 years was being recklessly shared and spent by the Yar’adua and later Jonathan administrations our foreign reserves ought to have doubled and reached at least 100 billion US dollars by now. That is just the foreign reserves alone and I am not even adding the Excess Crude Account figures yet. If I were to do that I would be talking about an expected increase of up to 150 billion USD by today. That is what we ought to have in the savings kitty today if the two governments that succeeded Obasanjo knew anything about prudence, good management and fiscal discipline.
The difference is that under Obasanjo it was ”save, save, save” whilst under Yar’adua and later Jonathan it has been ”spend, spend, spend’. Yet if they insist on spending the question is what do they have to show for such high expenditure and what has this cost the Nigerian people in real terms. I believe that these are legitimate questions. Mrs. Ezekwesili may have been inelegant or a little too harsh in her use of words when she made those weighty assertions in her speech but her analysis and conclusions surely cannot be faulted. Yet the Government has given no reasonable explanation or response to her or the Nigerian people and they do not even appear to like the fact that questions are being asked.
As a matter of fact they appear to believe that it is an achievement for us to be exactly where we were four years ago in terms of our foreign reserves by openly boasting that we have 45 billion USD saved today. The questions that we should put to them are as follows – did you not save anything in the last 4 years in either foreign reserves or the Excess Crude Account? Where did all the money that accrued to you and that you ought to have saved go? How come 4 years after being handed 45 billion in foreign reserves and after billions have come into your hands through record price crude oil sales you still only have 45 billion saved? Is this not strange and absurd? Is this the way a responsive and responsible government ought to behave? Do they know the true meaning of ”saving for a rainy day”?
It is not surprising that the Prime Minister of Great Britain, The Right Honorable David Cameron, asked just a few days ago where the 100 billion USD that Nigeria received from oil sales in the last few years has gone. Would our Government be good enough to answer his question and tell him even if they feel that they don’t owe the Nigerian people themselves an explanation? As far as I am concerned it is not something that our government should be proud of that 4 years after Obasanjo handed 45 billion USD to them as savings in foreign reserves they have not built on it in all that time but rather they have spent all the receivables and inflows that came in after that time and that ought to have been saved.
Yet the story does not stop there. It gets worse. Apart from the sorry tale about our foreign reserves, the story about the usage and outright draining of our Excess Crude Account is even more damning. It goes like this. When President Obasanjo left power in 2007 the Excess Crude Account had just over 22 billion USD in it’s coffers. This figure was built up by Obasanjo from zero in 1999 because at that time there was no Excess Crude Account. In 8 years he built it up from zero to 22 billion USD. Yet when the Yara’dua administration and later the Jonathan administration came in ALL the money in that account was shared with the state governors and spent.
The Federal Government saved nothing for a rainy day and instead chose to just spend all the money.
Umaru Yar Adua’s government but, in fairness to President Jonathan, he has now been able to build it up to approximately 10 billion USD. This represents approximately half the figure that Obasanjo left in that account in 2007 but at least it is a step in the right direction. Yet if both the Yar adua and Jonathan government’s had continued to save and not just spend all the money we would have had at least 50 billion USD in the Excess Crude Account today and not just a paltry 10.
Whichever way one looks at it, when one sees all these figures and considers the strong position that we were coming from in 2007 it represents a failure in fiscal discipline by both the Yar’adua and Jonathan administrations. This is because the Federal Governmentt was meant to build up on the legacy that they inherited in 2007 and not spend and squander all that money. For the purpose of emphasis permit me to repeat the fact that had they been doing the right thing in the last 4 years and not overspending we ought to be hitting at least 100 billion USD in our foreign reserves by now and at least 50 billion in the Excess Crude Account. Yet we have not seen anything near that and instead all we have seen is a depletion and a drain of both accounts and the monies that ought to have accrued to them since 2007.
Finally when President Obasanjo came to power in 1999 our foreign debt was 30 billion USD. Yet by sheer dint of hard work by the time he left office 8 years later he had paid off the foreign debt compltely and for the first time in its history Africa had a debt-free nation. This was a monuemental achievement by any standard and one that which every serious-minded and patriotic Nigerian ought to be proud of no matter what side of the political divide they stand. Yet sadly 4 years later we are back in chronic debt to the tune of 9 billion USD and we are still borrowing. In view of the foregoing it is perfectly legitimate for anyone to ask how come so much money was spent, what it was spent on and how the government has managed our resources over the last 4 years. As a matter of fact not asking any questions would be most unpatriotic and it would lay some of us open to the charge of cowardice and collusion.
Since 2007 we have seen nothing but depletion of our resources and more and more borrowing. Unlike President Obasanjo, both President Yar Adua and President Jonathan’s governments did not build up our reserves or save any money. Instead they both spent recklessly and borrowed more and more. As a matter of fact if our government continues to borrow at the rate it has been borrowing for the last four years for another two years Nigeria will be back to having a foreign debt of close to 30 billion USD very soon. That was where we were in 1999 and if that were to ever happen it would be a tragedy of monuemental proportions.
I sincerely hope that other than the usual insults, intimidation, sponsored stories, persecution and baseless allegations that are channeled against and heaped on some of us for pointing out these matters and raising these questions, the Federal Government will endeavour to change it’s ways and display a greater degree of fiscal discipline and accountability to the Nigerian people. To that extent I am in total agreement with my former cabinet colleague in the Obasanjo administration, Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili.
*Femi Fani-Kayode was former Presidential spokes-person and Aviation Minister during the Obasanjo administration
THE RESPONSE
A loosely bound group of yesterday’s men and women seems to
be on the offensive against the Jonathan administration. They pick
issues with virtually every effort of the administration, pretending to
do so in the public interest; positing that they alone, know it all.
Arrogantly, they claim to be better and smarter than everyone else in
the current government. They are ever so censorious, contrarian and
supercilious.
They have no original claim to their pretensions other than they were privileged to have been in the corridors of power once upon a time in their lives. They obviously got so engrossed with their own sense of importance they began to imagine themselves indispensable to Nigeria. It is dangerous to have such a navel-gazing, narcissistic group inflict themselves with so much ferocity on an otherwise impressionable public. We are in reality dealing with a bunch of hypocrites.
With exceptions so few, they really don’t care about Nigeria as a sovereign but the political spoils that accrue from it. And so they will stop at nothing to discredit those they think are not as deserving as they imagine themselves to be. President Jonathan has unfairly become the target of their pitiable frustrations.
Underneath their superfluous appearance, lies an unspoken class disdain directed at the person and office of a duly elected president of the country. It is a Nigerian problem, perhaps. In the same advanced societies which these same yesterday men and women often like to refer to, public service is seen and treated as a privilege. People are called upon to serve; they do so with humility and great commitment, and when it is all over, they move on to other things. The quantity surveyor returns to his or her quantity surveying or some other decent work; the lawyer to his or her wig and gown; the university teacher, to the classroom, glad to have been found worthy of national service. When and where necessary, as private citizens they are entitled to use the benefit of this experience to contribute to national development, they speak up on matters of public importance not as a full-time job as is the case in Nigeria currently.
What then, is the problem with us? As part of our governance evolution, most people become public servants by accident, but they soon get so used to the glamour of office that they lose sight of their own ordinariness. They use the system to climb: to become media celebrities, to gain international attention and to morph into self-appointed guardians of the Nigerian estate. They mask self interest motives as public causes and manipulate the public’s desire for improvements in their daily struggles as opportunity for power grab.
They are perpetually hanging around, lobbying and hustling for undeserved privileges. They exploit ethnic and religious connections where they can or join political parties and run for political office. They even write books (I, me and myself books, packaged as cerebral stuff); if that still doesn’t work, they lobby newspaper houses for columns to write and they become apostolic pundits pontificating on matters ranging from the nebulous to the non-descript. Power blinds them to the reality that we are all in this together and we have a unique opportunity to do well for the taxpayers and hardworking electorate that provide every public official the privilege to serve.
Unsatisfied with the newspaper columns, they open social media accounts and pretend to be voices of wisdom seeking to cultivate an angry crowd which they feed continually with their own brand of negativity. They arrange to give lectures at high profile events where they abuse the government of the day in order to gain attention and steal a few minutes in the sun; hoping to force an audience that may ‘open doors’ for them, back into the corridors of power. These characters are in different sizes and shapes: small, big; Godfathers, agents, proxies. The tactics of the big figures on this rung of opportunism may be slightly different. They parade themselves as a Godfather or kingmaker or the better man who should have been king. They suffer of course, from messianic delusions. The fact that they boast of some followership and the media often treats them as icons, makes their nuisance factor worse. They and their protégés and proxies are united by one factor though: their hypocrisy.
It is in the larger interest of our country that the point be made that the government of the day welcomes criticism and political activism. This is an aspect of our emergent democracy that expands on the growing freedom of expression, thought and association but there is need for caution and vigilance, lest we get taken hostage by the architects of odious disinformation. Nigerians must not allow any group of individuals to hold this country to ransom and no one alone should appropriate the right to determine what is best for Nigeria. The accidental public servants who have turned that privilege into a life-long obsession and profession must be told to go get a life and find meaningful work to do.
Those who believe that no one else can run Nigeria without them must be told to stop hallucinating. The former Ministers, former Governors, former DGs, and all sorts who have been busy quoting mischievous figures, spreading cruel propaganda must be reminded that the Jonathan administration is in fact trying to clean up the mess that they created. They want to own the game when the ball is not in their possession. They want to be the referee when nobody has offered them a whistle. They seek to play God, forgetting that the case for God is not in the hands of man. One of the virtues of enlightenment is for persons to have a true perspective of their own location in the order of things. What they do not seem to realise or accept is that the political climate has changed.
When one of them was in charge of this same estate called Nigeria, he shut down the Port Harcourt airport and other airports for close to two years under the guise of renovation. The Port Harcourt airport was abandoned for so long it was overgrown with weeds after serving for months as a practice ground for motoring schools. It was reopened without any improvement and with so much money down the drain, and the pervasive suspicion that the reason it was shut down in the first place was to create a market for a new airline that had been allowed the monopoly use of the other airport in the city.
Under President Jonathan, airports across the country are being upgraded, rebuilt and modernized; in less than two years, the transformation is self-evident. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy from our see-no-good commentators comes from the one who superintended over the near-collapse of the aviation sector who is now audacious enough to claim to be a social critic.
For the first time since 1999, the Nigerian Railway Corporation is up and running as a service organization. The rail lines have become functional from Lagos to Kano; Ewekoro to Minna, and very soon, from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri, Abuja to Kaduna and Lagos to Ibadan. They couldn’t do this in their time, now they are busy looking for money that is not missing with their teeth. When questions are asked, they claim they invented the ideas of due process and accountability. They once promised to solve the crisis of electricity supply in Nigeria. But what did they do? They managed to leave the country in darkness with less than 2,000 MW; abandoned independent power projects, mismanaged power stations, and uncompleted procurement processes. The mess was so bad their immediate successors had to declare an emergency in the power sector. It has taken President Jonathan to make the difference. Today, there is greater coherence in the management of the power sector with power supply in excess of 4, 200 MW; a better conceived power sector road map is running apace, and the administration is determined to make it better.
They complain about the state of the roads. Most of the contracts were actually awarded under their watch to the tune of billions! They talk about corruption, yet many of them have thick case files with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the courts and the police on corruption-related charges. One of them was even accused of having awarded choice plots of government land to himself, his wives, his companies and other relations when he was in charge of such allocations! Really, have we forgotten so soon?
These yesterday men and women certainly don’t seem to care very much about the Nigerian taxpayer who has had to bear the brunt of the many scandals this administration is exposing in its bid to clear out the Augean stable. They’d rather grandstand with the ex-General this, Chief that, Doctor this and ex-(dis)Honourable Minister who has no record of what he or she did with the funds the nation provided them to deliver results to protect our interest so that we don’t end up continuing to make the same wasteful mistakes.
It is enough to make you shudder at the thought of any of them being part of government with access to the public purse; but then we’ve already seen what some of them are capable of doing when in control of public money, authority and influence; and to that the people have spoken in unison – they have had enough. Nigerians are wiser and are now familiar with the trickery from these persons whose claim to fame and fortune was on the back of their public service.
Our point at the risk of overstating what is by now too obvious: We have too many yesterday men and women behaving too badly. We are dealing with a group of power-point technocrats who have mastered the rhetoric of public grandstanding: carefully crafted emotion-laden sound bites passed off as meaningful engagements. That is all there is to them, after many years of hanging around in relevant places and mingling in the right corridors, all made possible through the use/abuse of Nigeria. Our caveat to their audience is the same old line: let the buyer beware!
Dr. Abati is Special Adviser (Media and Publicity) to President Goodluck Jonathan
Government ought to have accepted the challenge of a rigorous public debate and allow the Nigerian people to listen to it and make up their own minds about who was right and who was wrong. I thought that the response of the Special Assistant to the President On Public Affairs, Dr. Doyin Okupe, to Obiageli Ezekwesili was more logical and made far more sense than that of the Honorable Minister of Information, Labaran Maku’s, but I still believe that Ezekwesili was right. I believe that the government’s position on this issue and it’s attempt to over-aggressively defend what I personally consider to be the indefensible is not only disingenuous but it is also essentially dishonest and self-seeking.
The charge that our foreign reserves were heavily depleted between 2007 and 2013 cannot be convincingly or logically denied. In 2007, President Olusegun Obasanjo left 45 billion USD in our foreign reserves and 22 billion USD in our Excess Crude Account. If the two figures are added up the amount that you will come up with is 67 billion USD of savings for our country. This is the figure that Obiageli Ezekwesili cited. It represents what was in both our foreign reserves and our Excess Crude Account put together.
Dr. Oby Ezekwesili
Let us look at the history. When President Olusegun Obasanjo came to power in 1999 Nigeria only had 1.5 billion USD in her foreign reserves and consequently no-one in the world took us seriously. We were poor, weak and lonely and we were viewed as a failed state and a pariah nation. No-one trusted us, no-one wanted to do business with us and no-one seriously believed that we as a people or as a nation were capable of enduring the rigours of serious economic recovery, prudence and fiscal discipline. As far as the developed world was concerned Nigeria was only good for it’s endless supply of sweet bonny light crude oil. Yet Obasanjo proved the world wrong and showed that Nigerians could do far better than they thought. After eight years of good stewardship and the display of fiscal discipline and remarkable prudence he built up those foreign reserves from a measly and pitiful 1.5 billion USD in 1999 to no less than 45 billion by 2007.
This was quite an achievement yet sadly what took place after Obasanjo left power was very disheartening. It was not only a downer but it was also sad and unfortunate. I say this because by the Federal Governments own admission, and four long years after leaving 45 billion USD for the Yar’adua administration to build on in 2007, we still only have that same figure of 45 billion USD left in our foreign reserves today. Worse still this was after it had plummeted to a shameful 30 billion USD under late President Umaru Yar Adua. Had it not been for the fact that whatever was coming in after we left in 2007 and over the last 4 years was being recklessly shared and spent by the Yar’adua and later Jonathan administrations our foreign reserves ought to have doubled and reached at least 100 billion US dollars by now. That is just the foreign reserves alone and I am not even adding the Excess Crude Account figures yet. If I were to do that I would be talking about an expected increase of up to 150 billion USD by today. That is what we ought to have in the savings kitty today if the two governments that succeeded Obasanjo knew anything about prudence, good management and fiscal discipline.
The difference is that under Obasanjo it was ”save, save, save” whilst under Yar’adua and later Jonathan it has been ”spend, spend, spend’. Yet if they insist on spending the question is what do they have to show for such high expenditure and what has this cost the Nigerian people in real terms. I believe that these are legitimate questions. Mrs. Ezekwesili may have been inelegant or a little too harsh in her use of words when she made those weighty assertions in her speech but her analysis and conclusions surely cannot be faulted. Yet the Government has given no reasonable explanation or response to her or the Nigerian people and they do not even appear to like the fact that questions are being asked.
As a matter of fact they appear to believe that it is an achievement for us to be exactly where we were four years ago in terms of our foreign reserves by openly boasting that we have 45 billion USD saved today. The questions that we should put to them are as follows – did you not save anything in the last 4 years in either foreign reserves or the Excess Crude Account? Where did all the money that accrued to you and that you ought to have saved go? How come 4 years after being handed 45 billion in foreign reserves and after billions have come into your hands through record price crude oil sales you still only have 45 billion saved? Is this not strange and absurd? Is this the way a responsive and responsible government ought to behave? Do they know the true meaning of ”saving for a rainy day”?
*Fani-Kayode
It is not surprising that the Prime Minister of Great Britain, The Right Honorable David Cameron, asked just a few days ago where the 100 billion USD that Nigeria received from oil sales in the last few years has gone. Would our Government be good enough to answer his question and tell him even if they feel that they don’t owe the Nigerian people themselves an explanation? As far as I am concerned it is not something that our government should be proud of that 4 years after Obasanjo handed 45 billion USD to them as savings in foreign reserves they have not built on it in all that time but rather they have spent all the receivables and inflows that came in after that time and that ought to have been saved.
Yet the story does not stop there. It gets worse. Apart from the sorry tale about our foreign reserves, the story about the usage and outright draining of our Excess Crude Account is even more damning. It goes like this. When President Obasanjo left power in 2007 the Excess Crude Account had just over 22 billion USD in it’s coffers. This figure was built up by Obasanjo from zero in 1999 because at that time there was no Excess Crude Account. In 8 years he built it up from zero to 22 billion USD. Yet when the Yara’dua administration and later the Jonathan administration came in ALL the money in that account was shared with the state governors and spent.
The Federal Government saved nothing for a rainy day and instead chose to just spend all the money.
Umaru Yar Adua’s government but, in fairness to President Jonathan, he has now been able to build it up to approximately 10 billion USD. This represents approximately half the figure that Obasanjo left in that account in 2007 but at least it is a step in the right direction. Yet if both the Yar adua and Jonathan government’s had continued to save and not just spend all the money we would have had at least 50 billion USD in the Excess Crude Account today and not just a paltry 10.
Whichever way one looks at it, when one sees all these figures and considers the strong position that we were coming from in 2007 it represents a failure in fiscal discipline by both the Yar’adua and Jonathan administrations. This is because the Federal Governmentt was meant to build up on the legacy that they inherited in 2007 and not spend and squander all that money. For the purpose of emphasis permit me to repeat the fact that had they been doing the right thing in the last 4 years and not overspending we ought to be hitting at least 100 billion USD in our foreign reserves by now and at least 50 billion in the Excess Crude Account. Yet we have not seen anything near that and instead all we have seen is a depletion and a drain of both accounts and the monies that ought to have accrued to them since 2007.
Finally when President Obasanjo came to power in 1999 our foreign debt was 30 billion USD. Yet by sheer dint of hard work by the time he left office 8 years later he had paid off the foreign debt compltely and for the first time in its history Africa had a debt-free nation. This was a monuemental achievement by any standard and one that which every serious-minded and patriotic Nigerian ought to be proud of no matter what side of the political divide they stand. Yet sadly 4 years later we are back in chronic debt to the tune of 9 billion USD and we are still borrowing. In view of the foregoing it is perfectly legitimate for anyone to ask how come so much money was spent, what it was spent on and how the government has managed our resources over the last 4 years. As a matter of fact not asking any questions would be most unpatriotic and it would lay some of us open to the charge of cowardice and collusion.
Since 2007 we have seen nothing but depletion of our resources and more and more borrowing. Unlike President Obasanjo, both President Yar Adua and President Jonathan’s governments did not build up our reserves or save any money. Instead they both spent recklessly and borrowed more and more. As a matter of fact if our government continues to borrow at the rate it has been borrowing for the last four years for another two years Nigeria will be back to having a foreign debt of close to 30 billion USD very soon. That was where we were in 1999 and if that were to ever happen it would be a tragedy of monuemental proportions.
I sincerely hope that other than the usual insults, intimidation, sponsored stories, persecution and baseless allegations that are channeled against and heaped on some of us for pointing out these matters and raising these questions, the Federal Government will endeavour to change it’s ways and display a greater degree of fiscal discipline and accountability to the Nigerian people. To that extent I am in total agreement with my former cabinet colleague in the Obasanjo administration, Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili.
*Femi Fani-Kayode was former Presidential spokes-person and Aviation Minister during the Obasanjo administration
THE RESPONSE
Face-off : The hypocrisy of yesterday’s men, by Reuben Abati
5:45 pm
They have no original claim to their pretensions other than they were privileged to have been in the corridors of power once upon a time in their lives. They obviously got so engrossed with their own sense of importance they began to imagine themselves indispensable to Nigeria. It is dangerous to have such a navel-gazing, narcissistic group inflict themselves with so much ferocity on an otherwise impressionable public. We are in reality dealing with a bunch of hypocrites.
With exceptions so few, they really don’t care about Nigeria as a sovereign but the political spoils that accrue from it. And so they will stop at nothing to discredit those they think are not as deserving as they imagine themselves to be. President Jonathan has unfairly become the target of their pitiable frustrations.
Underneath their superfluous appearance, lies an unspoken class disdain directed at the person and office of a duly elected president of the country. It is a Nigerian problem, perhaps. In the same advanced societies which these same yesterday men and women often like to refer to, public service is seen and treated as a privilege. People are called upon to serve; they do so with humility and great commitment, and when it is all over, they move on to other things. The quantity surveyor returns to his or her quantity surveying or some other decent work; the lawyer to his or her wig and gown; the university teacher, to the classroom, glad to have been found worthy of national service. When and where necessary, as private citizens they are entitled to use the benefit of this experience to contribute to national development, they speak up on matters of public importance not as a full-time job as is the case in Nigeria currently.
*Abati
What then, is the problem with us? As part of our governance evolution, most people become public servants by accident, but they soon get so used to the glamour of office that they lose sight of their own ordinariness. They use the system to climb: to become media celebrities, to gain international attention and to morph into self-appointed guardians of the Nigerian estate. They mask self interest motives as public causes and manipulate the public’s desire for improvements in their daily struggles as opportunity for power grab.
They are perpetually hanging around, lobbying and hustling for undeserved privileges. They exploit ethnic and religious connections where they can or join political parties and run for political office. They even write books (I, me and myself books, packaged as cerebral stuff); if that still doesn’t work, they lobby newspaper houses for columns to write and they become apostolic pundits pontificating on matters ranging from the nebulous to the non-descript. Power blinds them to the reality that we are all in this together and we have a unique opportunity to do well for the taxpayers and hardworking electorate that provide every public official the privilege to serve.
Unsatisfied with the newspaper columns, they open social media accounts and pretend to be voices of wisdom seeking to cultivate an angry crowd which they feed continually with their own brand of negativity. They arrange to give lectures at high profile events where they abuse the government of the day in order to gain attention and steal a few minutes in the sun; hoping to force an audience that may ‘open doors’ for them, back into the corridors of power. These characters are in different sizes and shapes: small, big; Godfathers, agents, proxies. The tactics of the big figures on this rung of opportunism may be slightly different. They parade themselves as a Godfather or kingmaker or the better man who should have been king. They suffer of course, from messianic delusions. The fact that they boast of some followership and the media often treats them as icons, makes their nuisance factor worse. They and their protégés and proxies are united by one factor though: their hypocrisy.
It is in the larger interest of our country that the point be made that the government of the day welcomes criticism and political activism. This is an aspect of our emergent democracy that expands on the growing freedom of expression, thought and association but there is need for caution and vigilance, lest we get taken hostage by the architects of odious disinformation. Nigerians must not allow any group of individuals to hold this country to ransom and no one alone should appropriate the right to determine what is best for Nigeria. The accidental public servants who have turned that privilege into a life-long obsession and profession must be told to go get a life and find meaningful work to do.
Those who believe that no one else can run Nigeria without them must be told to stop hallucinating. The former Ministers, former Governors, former DGs, and all sorts who have been busy quoting mischievous figures, spreading cruel propaganda must be reminded that the Jonathan administration is in fact trying to clean up the mess that they created. They want to own the game when the ball is not in their possession. They want to be the referee when nobody has offered them a whistle. They seek to play God, forgetting that the case for God is not in the hands of man. One of the virtues of enlightenment is for persons to have a true perspective of their own location in the order of things. What they do not seem to realise or accept is that the political climate has changed.
When one of them was in charge of this same estate called Nigeria, he shut down the Port Harcourt airport and other airports for close to two years under the guise of renovation. The Port Harcourt airport was abandoned for so long it was overgrown with weeds after serving for months as a practice ground for motoring schools. It was reopened without any improvement and with so much money down the drain, and the pervasive suspicion that the reason it was shut down in the first place was to create a market for a new airline that had been allowed the monopoly use of the other airport in the city.
Under President Jonathan, airports across the country are being upgraded, rebuilt and modernized; in less than two years, the transformation is self-evident. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy from our see-no-good commentators comes from the one who superintended over the near-collapse of the aviation sector who is now audacious enough to claim to be a social critic.
For the first time since 1999, the Nigerian Railway Corporation is up and running as a service organization. The rail lines have become functional from Lagos to Kano; Ewekoro to Minna, and very soon, from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri, Abuja to Kaduna and Lagos to Ibadan. They couldn’t do this in their time, now they are busy looking for money that is not missing with their teeth. When questions are asked, they claim they invented the ideas of due process and accountability. They once promised to solve the crisis of electricity supply in Nigeria. But what did they do? They managed to leave the country in darkness with less than 2,000 MW; abandoned independent power projects, mismanaged power stations, and uncompleted procurement processes. The mess was so bad their immediate successors had to declare an emergency in the power sector. It has taken President Jonathan to make the difference. Today, there is greater coherence in the management of the power sector with power supply in excess of 4, 200 MW; a better conceived power sector road map is running apace, and the administration is determined to make it better.
They complain about the state of the roads. Most of the contracts were actually awarded under their watch to the tune of billions! They talk about corruption, yet many of them have thick case files with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the courts and the police on corruption-related charges. One of them was even accused of having awarded choice plots of government land to himself, his wives, his companies and other relations when he was in charge of such allocations! Really, have we forgotten so soon?
These yesterday men and women certainly don’t seem to care very much about the Nigerian taxpayer who has had to bear the brunt of the many scandals this administration is exposing in its bid to clear out the Augean stable. They’d rather grandstand with the ex-General this, Chief that, Doctor this and ex-(dis)Honourable Minister who has no record of what he or she did with the funds the nation provided them to deliver results to protect our interest so that we don’t end up continuing to make the same wasteful mistakes.
It is enough to make you shudder at the thought of any of them being part of government with access to the public purse; but then we’ve already seen what some of them are capable of doing when in control of public money, authority and influence; and to that the people have spoken in unison – they have had enough. Nigerians are wiser and are now familiar with the trickery from these persons whose claim to fame and fortune was on the back of their public service.
Our point at the risk of overstating what is by now too obvious: We have too many yesterday men and women behaving too badly. We are dealing with a group of power-point technocrats who have mastered the rhetoric of public grandstanding: carefully crafted emotion-laden sound bites passed off as meaningful engagements. That is all there is to them, after many years of hanging around in relevant places and mingling in the right corridors, all made possible through the use/abuse of Nigeria. Our caveat to their audience is the same old line: let the buyer beware!
Dr. Abati is Special Adviser (Media and Publicity) to President Goodluck Jonathan
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