Date Published: 05/29/09
NIGERIA: GOOD BUSINESS, BAD MANAGERS
By Debo Adeniran
Nigeria has never been lucky to have good leaders even when it has all the human and material potentialities to be one of the greatest nations in the world. Like bad managers of good business, bad leaders have succeeded in ruining good fortunes that Nigeria is naturally endowed with. Mal governance of a people is Akin to mismanagement of a business. It leads to low capacity utilization, inadequate supervision and ineffective facility maintenance which often give room to higher level corruption. Corruption then dwindles capital impute which in turn a leader to bankruptcy.
Politics and Governance of Rights Violation
The past ten years of civilian governance had been years of dashed hopes, truncated dreams, distorted vision and misdirected aspiration for Nigerians. All the relief that came our way with the sudden death of the then despotic head of state, Gen. Sanni Abacha with his tyranny was to be short-lived. Even when it aided the quick return of the government to civilians by the succeeding regime of General Abdusalami Abubakar we were only almost worse off than hitherto. The relief was to explode on our faces as soon as the attempt to elect civilian leaders turned a democratic sham.
What took place as general election was and continue as orchestrated selection of cronies of the then outgoing military cabals through monumental electoral manipulation to suit the wishes of the wealthy and the wicked. Although a couple of the electoral atrocities were reversed through courageous judicial pronouncements, perpetrators are not deterred. Some of them become even more brazen in the art of bare-faced mandate robbery. Cases of Ido-Osi, Ekiti state electoral abracadabra where Resident Electoral Commissioner was publicly intimidated to work against her conscience; and Osun state where victims of the robbery are being threatened and blackmailed with criminal frame-up in phony bomb throwing, are examples that will not go in a hurry. Even when the President courageously admitted openly that the election that brought him to power was flawed and set up a Panel to reform the country’s electoral process, his minders would not want the report of the panel to see the light of the day in its originality because it does not favour the machinery of their electoral manipulation.
Because the election that produced the new leaders did not count on the ballots cast but process manipulation, the resultant government does not recognize the powers of the people to control them. To compensate security agencies for allowing themselves to be used against the will of the people, police and military bosses were allowed to convert emolument of their junior ones to personal use. Victims of this injustice who protested the atrocity were either dismissed from the service or sentenced to life imprisonments after a kangaroo orderly-room trial to justify the miscarriage of justice meted out on the unfortunate junior security personnel. This however instigated the serving junior security personnel against the people they are meant to protect. They rob, rape and or open fire on them with the slightest provocation.
Legistlooting
The principle of Separation of Powers which engenders checks and balances in a presidential democracy has been thrown overboard in Nigeria. Legislators take bribes to pass Appropriation Bills, accepts gratifications and share stolen unspent budget from the executive arms over which they are expected to perform oversight functions. They even smuggle budget items into Appropriation Bills to satisfy their gluttonous appetite for riches.
Justice Betrayed
Judiciary that would have served as the last bastion of hope has compromised its sanctity. They, for whatever reasons, sometimes allow themselves to be used against the will and interest of the people. It happened in the Justice Thomas Naron-led first Electoral Petition Tribunal in Osun State and the case of Rivers State where the ex-governor suspected to have helped himself to the public till was given perpetual injunction against arrest and investigation by any security agency. A magistrate’s court remanded 24 CACOL activists twice for a total of five weeks for protesting, with banners and placards, judicial corruption in Osun state.
Because of the pervasive injustice in Nigeria, people were treated with less dignity than slaves, Odi and Zakibiam people and their properties were razed, with military might; OPC, Bakassi Boys and other self-determination activists were mowed down while many political opposition figures were assassinated by suspicious elements and in suspicious circumstances that has to do with the new cult of neo-military ruling elites. Up till now this bare-faced crime is getting worse while internecine engineered by political considerations become the order of the day. Up till the time of writing this piece, genocide is being carried by the Nigerian military out in the Niger-Delta region against militant youths who are fighting to protect their patrimony. As a ploy to placate angry bereaved family and compatriots after each unwarranted attack government is usually quick at setting up panel of enquiry to investigate the pogroms and selective murders. All of such panels usually turn out to be phony as none of their enquiries has ever brought any succour to anyone or anyone to book till date as if the murderers were ghosts.
Petroleum and Energy Crisis
Before the coming of the present civilian dispensation, Nigeria has four refineries that were producing at almost 50 percent capacity on average in the days of military. This has dwindled to nothing, meaning zero per cent within the past ten years thus raising prices of petroleum products to more than 900%. Nigerians were at the mercy of the exploiters of its natural oil and gas for the volume of their exploitation in products and cash. We have to import finished products and their by products at exorbitant costs to feed our factories. Meanwhile most industries and factories that depended on petroleum and its by products could not survive the imput starvation had to out rightly close down their production lines and either resorted to importing goods they used to produce or moved out of the country altogether.
Power of Darkness
Before the advent of the present republic the power generated by then National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), re-branded Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), came close to 4000MW. The Obasanjo’s regime promised to up it to about 10,000MW. This was not to be, despite the whooping sixteen billion dollars expended on supplementary National Integrated Power Project between 2004 and 2007. Contracts were fraudulently awarded full contract sums were paid upfront to fraudulent firms with illegal, fictitious and questionable qualifications and standing. What the regime had to show for it is power degeneracy to less than 3000MW. All of the workplaces and homes had to contend with high cost of fuel to run power generators or inconveniences of power cut. This has turned many able-bodied young men and women to criminal of varying descriptions who are over filling various prisons or making living scary, and dying cheaper in Nigeria.
Education for Auction
Maybe things would have been better if we had good educational system. Curriculum implementation in all institutions of formal learning had never been so degenerate in the history of Nigeria. Public education system had been killed to pave way for private ones to profiteer. Opportunistic investors in the education sector moved from Nursery, Primary and Secondary Schools into establishing tertiary institutions. Government actors see investing in Universities as a veritable means to launder ill-gotten wealth from government coffers into the system without concern for the quality of minds they churn out. All levels of public institutions are in various state of disrepair: No libraries, no laboratories, no workshops, no equipment, no materials, and no motivated personnel. Their highly expensive private counter parts are only embellished with state-of-art facilities and other wherewithal but lacking in-depth quality curricular implementation. Others are substandard in forms and function; with inadequacies in everything that could qualify any contraption as a school. Their products are like mechanically driven technicians lacking in versatility; with little or no intuitive, imaginative and creative minds. They therefore become robotically-gullible, hypnotically dogmatic and pathologically stupid. This is why they bank only on inherited or fraudulently scured platform to operate such as family business, stolen public institutions or politics.
Most products of decrepit public institutions find it impossible to compete favourably with those who had sound educational background from well-equipped and facilitated institutions. The certificates they wield worth less than the paper that bear them. Bearers of such certificates are referred to as educated illiterates. They are unemployable and the socio-political and economic environment does not favour their taking solace in creating jobs for themselves. They form the army of idle-handed and therefore turn themselves over, either as cheap labour to slave drivers who use them as machines or unscrupulous politicians as devil’s workshop used as thugs, assassins or terrorists. This state of affairs has also escalated within the past ten years. It has also dipped security of lives and properties deeper in most urban centres and highways.
Health of Death
Quality health care delivery most often exists only on papers. The available inadequate hospitals create more deaths than health. Life-caring machine that lack adequate, proper and competent handling churn out foul results. This elicits wrong treatment and ultimately leads to compounded ailment which eventual results in untimely death. Useless machines and expired drugs are imported by incompetent business concerns and badly motivated medical personnel administer them without necessary checks and precautions. A case in view is that of a daughter of the former president who disguised with her grandmother’s name to collude with an Austrian firm to rape Nigerian’s health care system to the tune of about N27billion in useless contracts. Quality innocent lives are in the wake lost in droves to preventable diseases like ignorance, stupidity and poverty.
Transportation to Eternity
Transportation of all types at all levels and varieties pose grave danger to lives and properties in Nigeria. Disrepair transportation facilities such as roads, airports and water ways have become dilapidated and pose death trap to users. More human lives were wasted within the last ten years in avoidable, road and sea accidents than it happened in all the military regimes put together. Most of funds voted for the fixing of equipments and facilities that could have prevented such disasters ended up in private pockets.
Corruption Pandemic
This brings us to the issue of corruption that has become pandemic in Nigeria. At the advent of the present republic Nigerians were given the hope that the rate at which corruption were perpetrated in public and private national lives would be drastically reduced. The hope was further raised with the establishment of ICPC in 2000 and EFCC in 2004. The enthusiasm started to wane with the lack lustre performance of ICPC but was rekindled with EFCC that was able to achieve some superlative feats while the feast lasted. But things changed at the twilight of the last tenure of EFCC’s progenitor when it began to exhibit traces of selective justice system even when the outfit continued to deal decisive blows on high-callibre offenders.
Many cases of corruption that were in progress in the days of Nuhu Ribadu were either truncated or frustrated. Even when the present Chairman of the Commission gave indications of readiness to work, the AGF planted so many landmines on her way of success. These antics therefore led the adoption of plea bargain justice system that is available only to the high ranking economic rapists. This syndrome gives room to administering only slaps-on-the-wrist as punishment for convicted corruption criminals like former Inspector-General of Police Tafa Balogun, former Governor of Edo State Lucky Igbinedion etc. It also gave relief to suspected former governors like George Akume, Peter Odili, Ayo Fayose, James Ibori, Uzor Kalu, etc. Whose files were emptied before the new helmsman (helmswoman?) resumed at the Idiagbon House headquarters of EFCC. It also emboldens new entrants into the cult of high-flying corruptionists like Chief Kenny Martins of Police Equipment Fund (Foundation) notoriety, managers of National Electricity Regulatory Authority (NERC), Rural Electrification Agencies and their National Assembly collaborators.
International scandals mostly bordering on bribery like those of Halliburton, Wilbross, Siemens, Sagem ID card, Pentascope etc. were either ignored or, frustrated at home and abroad. Corruption in the National Assembly like that of bribe for budget, a la Fabian Osuji, former Minister of Education, unspent budget, oil, power, health etc were governed up under administrative encumbrances.
Attorney-General of Failure
Worst still, the advent of the new Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation Mr. Michael Aondoakoa became the albatross to the activities of anti-corruption institution and agencies. His approach constituted a clog in the wheel of the appreciable progress the EFCC made before his coming. Like the performance of his principal, President Umaru Yar’Adua, his approach to justice is slow, cumbersome, ineffective and therefore unproductive. The AGF who is expected to be the number one public defender by his approach becomes their number one offender. Michael Aondoakaa used everything in his powers to ensure that corruption suspects evade justice. He distorts or hoards information required to prosecute favoured criminals both at home and abroad. He manipulates due process like ensuring he waters down charges proffered against his corrupt cronies before anti-graft agencies file them in court. And the AGF went to Geneva Conference on Human Rights to obliterate the truth about man inhumanity to man that is prevalent in Nigeria.
Conclusion
One is not pretending to doing thorough assessment of the current republic in Nigeria in this piece. It cannot be done except in a book. However it is clear that Nigeria is yet to find its democratic footing, even after 49 years of self rule and the current decade of uninterrupted civilian (not civil) rule. It is also clear that the inability to harmonize our differing “tribes and tongues” as typified by the variances in our socio-cultural and political orientations we can only pretend to that “in brotherhood we stand”. And until we realized that our inability to govern ourselves up to the par we were under colonialism or surpass it stems from the fact that we have not discussed under which conditions, rules and regulations we intend to base our agreement to live together as a country (not even a Nation). Until we discussed at a National Conference, that will be entirely sovereign, we will only continue to make pretences to nationhood.
Debo Adeniran
08037194969
dadnig@yahoo.com
Thursday, 28 May, 2009
Debo Adeniran, a Consultant Educationalist was the Pioneer Secretary-General, Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR); First General secretary, Gani Fawehinmi Solidarity Association (GFSA) and Inaugural Assistant General Secretary, Campaign for Democracy (CD). He is the Founding General Secretary, Movement for Yoruba Autonomy (MOYA); Principal, Grassroots PowerPoint Institute for Political Education (GPIPE); Head, Strategy Committee, Centre for Constitutional Governance (CCG); National Coordinator, Child Help In Leadership, Democracy, Rights and Education in Nigeria (CHILDREN) Project; Chairman, Coalition Against Corrupt Leaders (CACOL); Head Consultant, First Faculty Ventures (FFV)
