\u00a0Posted: October 21, 2013 – 15:13<\/p>\n
I have to confess that I have always had a soft spot for Stella Oduah, the currently embattled Aviation Minister.\u00a0 The way I heard it, through abundant doggedness and feminist wiles, she forged a successful little business empire for herself in our dog-eat-dog business environment.\u00a0 In a place like Nigeria, you\u2019ve got to admire that.<\/p>\n
But as these things often work, once a person starts down a particular path or habituates that path for too long, they often don\u2019t know how to stop or how to behave in a different (public) milieu.\u00a0 And I think that is partly what has happened to our Stella.\u00a0 That, and the way government works in Nigeria.<\/p>\n
When the story first broke that the Aviation Ministry paid a whopping $1.6million for just two cars, I immediately saw the imprint of the Federal government and Jonathan\u2019s re-election run all over it.\u00a0 My suspicion was confirmed with the stony silence emanating from the Federal government.\u00a0 This was further reinforced when the major concern of the National Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) was in looking to track down the whistleblower.\u00a0 Their only interest seems to lie in wanting to prosecute somebody for spoiling their scam.\u00a0 They want to charge the person with every criminal statute under the sun.\u00a0 The Director General of the NCAA, Mr Fola Akinkuotu even compared the whistleblower to the American fugitive du jour, Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n
Naija!<\/p>\n
This is how it works:\u00a0 A major election looms on the horizon.\u00a0 Winning elections in Nigeria is super expensive.\u00a0 Stakeholders have got to be settled.\u00a0 Godfathers have got to be fathered.\u00a0 Kings, high and low Chiefs have got to be buttered-up.\u00a0 Community leaders, women leaders, youth leaders, student leaders, NURTW leaders, agbero leaders, all have got to receive their own dividend.\u00a0 Parties have got to stock up on GMGs (Ghana Must Go), and Party delegates have got to be bought off with at least $5,000 each.<\/p>\n
And so, Parties and office holders begin to look for funds.\u00a0 The first place office holders in Nigeria look is in the direction of the public purse.\u00a0 In Nigeria, over the years, various ingenious ways have been devised to raid the treasury to fund elections.\u00a0 One way is to task States under their control, Ministries and other government Parastatals to contribute specified amount of money to the Party.\u00a0 This was what caught out the UPN Party of old with the Buhari\/Idiagbon un-smiling junta.<\/p>\n
During the period leading to major elections, plenty of contracts are awarded but none is ever executed.\u00a0 Strange taxes and levies begin to get introduced in schools and other areas.\u00a0 Government houses and offices suddenly need to be refurbished.\u00a0 Legislative quarters all of a sudden require a facelift.\u00a0 Government begins to replace its fleet of vehicles.\u00a0 Another aircraft or two is purchased.\u00a0 Managing Directors and Directors General begin to lean on government contractors to cough-up more roja or their returns get hiked-up another 5 percentage point or so.\u00a0 \u2018Warehousing\u2019 of Ministries budgets take on more urgency than hitherto.\u00a0 And if all of that proves insufficient, Ministers have to come up with other means of putting together their own allocated election fund contribution.\u00a0 A Minister who is unable to deliver in full knows that he or she will not make the next cabinet; and so the pressure is really on.<\/p>\n
Stella has done what is expected of her.\u00a0 Unfortunately for her, one busybody soul decided to sing to Saharareporters and all hell has broken lose.\u00a0 Ms. Oduah was caught with her bloomers in the penny jar.<\/p>\n
But because this is a Federal Government \u2018project,\u2019 government functionaries and other lackeys will try to focus on acne rather than call out the dermatologist for a chronic case of leprosy.\u00a0 And because this is Nigeria, before you know it, the whole matter will devolve into an ethnic one.\u00a0 It might even degenerate into a gender one.<\/p>\n
We have a real problem here.\u00a0 Our elections are too expensive.\u00a0 People that run for elective offices and most of our appointed officials have to mortgage almost everything to get into office.\u00a0 Once in office, their primary focus understandably becomes recouping their money and making a nice little profit in the process as well.\u00a0 And if you want to be returned to office, then the cost is even more prohibitive.\u00a0 Methinks Ms. Oduah, other Ministers, Directors General, and Managing Directors of Federal organs are all at it at the moment on behalf of their administration.\u00a0 Same thing is going on at the State level.<\/p>\n
Typically, the Federal government would hunker down and try to protect one of its own rather than do what is right.\u00a0 Because in abandoning Ms. Oduah, the government risks exposing itself and almost certainly revealing its own complicity in the whole thieving mess.\u00a0 Saharareporters, as usual, has done exceedingly well in helping to expose a long-standing malaise, in my view, and Ms. Oduah must be held firmly accountable in this particular case.<\/p>\n
demdem@hotmail.co.u<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0Posted: October 21, 2013 – 15:13 I have to confess that I have always had a soft spot for Stella Oduah, the currently embattled Aviation Minister.\u00a0 The way I heard…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18392,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-opinions"],"yoast_head":"\n