Malam Ahmed Joda chaired President Muhammadu Buhari\u2019s Transition
\nCommittee, which interfaced with former President Goodluck Jonathan\u2019s
\nteam. In an exclusive interview, the \u2018super permsec\u2019 of the 1970s and
\n1980s, would not reveal any of the recommendations his committee made to
\nPresident Buhari. But he was forthcoming on the state of the nation and
\nthe challenges the new government will face in the next four years. Malam
\nJoda was frank and witty in this explosive interaction.<\/p>\n
Q: Can you recall your experience when you were appointed to head the APC
\ntransition committee and your feelings over the appointment?<\/p>\n
A: I really don\u2019t know how I felt. I had gone to bed and there was a bang
\non my door at about 1:30 am and I was naturally feeling sleepy and even
\nafraid that anybody should wake me up at that hour. But they persisted so
\nI opened the door and asked what it was and they said it was the
\npresident-elect who wanted to speak with me. I woke up a little bit jolted
\nand the person who was on the telephone said the president-elect wanted to
\nspeak to me but they couldn\u2019t get me earlier so he had just gone up but
\nwanted\u00a0 to see you tomorrow. I do get surprises like that sometimes but I
\nwent to bed and slept without knowing what he was calling me for. But I
\nguessed that it must be some kind of involvement in the transition, though
\nI didn\u2019t know in what capacity. The next day I flew back to Abuja and met
\nwith the president. He told me about my appointment as chairman of his
\ntransition committee. I thanked him for the honour and privilege to serve
\nour country and that was it. He then gave me a letter with the terms of
\nreference attached and said I should do the work in two weeks and I made
\ntwo observations. That, for the size of the task the number of the members
\nwas too small because I anticipated that we needed to set up a number of
\nspecialized committees that would receive volumes and volumes of papers
\nfrom both the government and from other interested parties: the business
\ncommunity, the society groups, individuals who felt they wanted to make an
\ninput. He explained to me why the size of the committee was kept too low
\nand I said the time was too short, but he said I should try and do it. Our
\nfirst problem was where to meet and work;\u00a0 how to get the personnel that
\nwould help to do the work, set up the secretariat and appoint the resource
\npersons, appoint rapporteurs and everything. It took us three days to find
\na suitable area of buildings where we could do our work efficiently. We
\nthen had to buy the computers and the necessary hard and software with
\nwhich to work. At the end of the first week we were ready to go and I had
\nmy first meeting with the former secretary to the federal government after
\none week of being appointed and we learnt that the government handover
\nnotes, upon which our terms of reference were based, would not be
\navailable to us until sometime in May, which would be four weeks after we
\nwere appointed and two weeks after our mandate would have terminated. We
\nhad to strategize to receive memoranda; sometimes even without invitation
\nthere were a lot of memoranda coming from the public, trade groups,
\nchambers of commerce, industry experts whether oil or gas, agriculture or
\nelectricity or transport, railway, waterways, port, harbours; everything
\nwas coming. But there was nothing coming from the government and we did
\nnot receive a single piece of paper until May 25, four days to the
\nhandover. This came in many volumes amounting to 18,000 pages so we had to
\nset up our work groups and about five sub-committees. We spent the next
\nthree to four days trying to sort these papers out and assigning them to
\nthe various committees. We couldn\u2019t start real work until the first of
\nJune and we eventually submitted our report and our recommendations. on
\nFriday the last week to the president.<\/p>\n
Q: Specifically, what were the major terms of reference given to your
\ncommittee?<\/p>\n
A: Broadly speaking, we were to receive the handover notes from the
\noutgoing government, study the notes, analyze them and make
\nrecommendations to the government on the economy specifically, on
\ngovernance, security, corruption, on ministries and departments of
\ngovernment and agencies, defence; nearly everything you can think about.
\nSpecifically, we had to look into revenue streams from NNPC, from Federal
\nInland Revenue Service, Customs and other big corporations of government.<\/p>\n
Q: In the course of your assignment were you under some kind of pressure
\nfrom people coming to lobby for one favour or the other?<\/p>\n
A: There was a lot of that from people who wanted contract, who wanted to
\nbe given special favours. They were coming to me day and night and I said
\nto them these are my terms of reference; they didn\u2019t include things like
\naward of contracts or recovery of bad debts from government or for
\nemployment of any group of people or individuals. I told them these were
\nnot part of our terms of reference. But we continued to receive them and
\nnobody believed me when I said I could not appoint them ministers or
\nchairmen or whatever; they said look you have influence on Buhari and I
\nsaid I don\u2019t have and even if I had I didn\u2019t think he would respect me if
\nall I did was go to him with piles papers and saying he should do this
\nfavour to this or that man or this or that woman. Also, I was inundated
\nwith telephone calls. For example, somebody telephoned and after
\nintroduction said he wanted to vie for the position of minister of sports.
\nI said well I don\u2019t know the address to which you would send it to.<\/p>\n
Q: Did you come under similar pressures from people connected with the
\ngovernment of the past government who wanted to cover or influence certain
\nthings?<\/p>\n
A: No! Not one single case. I have had people coming to me to say they had
\ninformation about what went wrong, but I said to them we were not an
\ninvestigative panel, and even if we were given that term of reference we
\nwould politely tell the president that we could not be investigators
\nbecause we didn\u2019t know how to investigate and more importantly we didn\u2019t
\nhave time to undertake such investigations. But where people submitted
\ndocuments incriminating people we just put them in envelopes and sent them
\nto the relevant authorities.<\/p>\n
Q: You said it was barely four days to May 29 when you received
\ncommunication from the past government\u2019s transition committee. How did
\nthat delay impact on your assignment?<\/p>\n
A: Of course, it delayed our work because we were mainly to receive the
\nhandover notes from ministries, departments and agencies of government.
\nBut we could not receive them for five or nearly six weeks after our
\nappointment and, to that extent, our work was delayed. But as soon as we
\nrealized that this was going to happen we devised methods of getting our
\ninformation because so much of this information is in the public domain.
\nThe problem was that you couldn\u2019t define the true situation in the
\ngovernment.<\/p>\n
Q: When you submitted your report to the president you called on Nigerians
\nto be patient with him over his cabinet appointments.\u00a0 What informed that
\nappeal?<\/p>\n
A: Well, I was the chairman of the transition committee in 1979 when
\nGeneral Obasanjo handed over to president Shagari. That handover was the
\nmilitary deciding on their own to handover power back to the civilians.
\nThey conducted the elections, accepted the outcome and decided to hand
\nover and go and rest. There was no acrimony between incoming and the
\noutgoing government because they were all polite and nice; it was smooth.
\nBy the time I was appointed chairman the Obasanjo administration had set
\nup a complete office, furnished it and equipped it together with committee
\nand conference rooms. He had also appointed people from the civil service
\nand from the private sector to serve as rapporteurs, resource persons and
\nso on. All we needed to do was to walk into these offices and start work;
\nabsolutely there was no problem. In 1999, I was on what Obasanjo called
\nPresidential Policy Advisory Group under the chairmanship of General T.Y
\nDanjuma and I was Number Two and the same thing happened. We had a
\ncomplete office block already made, vehicles and buses and our
\naccommodation had been booked and when you arrived everything was smooth,
\nincluding all the handing over notes were prepared on the first day. We
\nhad everything. Now, this election is the first time in the history of
\nNigeria that an opposition party had uprooted a ruling party. It was not
\njust changing the president or changing the members of the states or
\nnational assemblies. We were all witnesses to the election campaigns, how
\nbitter it was. There were predictions that the country would collapse;
\nthere were also all sorts of allegations and counter-allegations and the
\nenvironment was very hostile. People were expecting the worst, but God, in
\nHis infinite mercies, diffused all the tension but, perhaps, the outgone
\ngovernment did not expect to lose the election, I don\u2019t know. They lost
\nthe election and had to put up a brave face. I, as a person, I completely
\nunderstood the difficult situation emotionally they were in but the
\nmeetings I had with both the SGF and\u00a0 Vice President Namadi Sambo were
\nextremely friendly. They offered me all the cooperation and we discussed
\nthings as Nigerians. I personally decided that I was not going to enter
\ninto any controversy or make the situation worse. In any case, whatever
\nthey did or did not do would not likely affect the critical question of
\nthe change of government on May 29. And if they didn\u2019t give us any
\ninformation that information would be ours on that May 29. Therefore, I
\nworked on this basis and I think our committee accepted that way of doing
\nthings instead of creating unnecessary additional tension to the political
\nenvironment.<\/p>\n
Q: Was there any interface between your committee and some of the critical
\nsectors of the past government and if there wasn\u2019t, how did you cope?<\/p>\n
A: The situation was this: we were to receive the handing over notes,
\nstudy them and wherever necessary to seek clarifications from wherever,
\nwhether ministers, civil servants or chairmen of boards or chief
\nexecutives of parastatals. But, like I told you, we did not receive those
\nnotes in time and our terms of reference although extended by the
\npresident limited us by the mere fact of our name \u2018transition committee\u2019.
\nOn\u00a0 May 29, we could not be a transition committee because the transition
\nhad ended. We did not want to ask for extension in order to be able to
\ninterrogate the other government people. In any case the ministers had
\ngone and it would have been a complicated, probably expensive exercise to
\nbring them. We did not want to stay and nobody asked us to extend our time
\nto interrogate them so what we said in our report is that look in view of
\nthe fact that the handover notes were delayed we did not have time to
\ninterrogate, question or interact with any of the people of government;
\ntherefore we leave this to the incoming government. In any case, it would
\nbe an investigative thing by now and the government can do what it likes.<\/p>\n
Q: What would you consider to be the greatest challenges you face in
\ncarrying out this assignment?<\/p>\n
A: Nigeria should be ready to face a lot of challenges. The biggest in my
\nview is corruption; it is everywhere. There is no department, no ministry
\nthat can be said to be free of corruption. There is nowhere that fraud
\ndoes not take place on a daily basis. It has become embedded in the minds
\nof the people because the rule books have been thrown away and everybody
\nis doing what they like. Nobody follows the rules anymore. You employ
\npeople anyhow and pay them anyhow and I think you in the media have a
\nfairly idea of what is going on and are surprised how bad things are. I
\noften wondered, since the beginning of this exercise, if the PDP and
\npresident Jonathan had won the election what would have been the fate of
\nNigeria. It would have been more difficult for them to face the challenge
\nbecause they had been telling people that everything was good; the roads
\nare good. They were not talking about the absence of light in the house,
\nbut they were talking about the capacity to produce electricity is 12,000
\nmegawatts out of which only 5,000 could be released. But even out of this
\n5,000 at the time they were doing the handing over notes only 1,300
\nmegawatts were being generated, but they were talking about 35,000
\nkilometers of distribution lines and so on, but nobody told us the real
\nproblem – that there is no gas, or there is no capacity to transmit the
\nelectricity that could be generated; that even when it is delivered at the
\npoint of distribution the distribution system is so weak that it can\u2019t
\ntake it. I personally didn\u2019t know that until I got into this exercise.
\nNow, if they came back, they couldn\u2019t wake up in the morning and say we
\ncan\u2019t pay salaries, we couldn\u2019t do this or even pay contractors and might
\neven not be able to pay pensions and gratuities or finance any of our
\noperations. We were told at the beginning of the exercise that the
\ngovernment was in deficit of at least N1.3 trillion and by the end people
\nwere talking about N7 trillion; everything is in a state of collapse. The
\ncivil service is bloated and the military and police, if you are a
\nNigerian, you know what they have been facing for a long time; everywhere
\nis in a mess and these things have to be fixed. Now back to your question
\nabout the delay of appointment of ministers and other key officials. These
\nare large numbers of people; in my experience as a civil servant one of
\nthe most difficult tasks is to get a list of names to appoint to existing
\nappointments. Buhari, as a politician, knows a large number of people but
\nnot intimately. They have come and joined the political party in which
\nthere is Buhari and his knowledge of them can only be superficial. The
\nonly people he will know intimately are his friends, his relations and
\ncolleagues at work. But when you are forming a cabinet the Constitution
\nsays the entire country must be represented. Now in Benue, for example,
\nthere may be at least 20 to 30 people who can claim to be ministers and
\nwho by their paper qualifications and working experience are suitable
\nmaterials\u00a0 for appointment but is that all you want from a minister? If
\nyou want to know the integrity of a person, his performance at his
\nworkplace, his relations with his workplace or even with his community and
\nother weaknesses he has, you have to have all these and analyze them. If
\nBuhari came\u00a0 to be president in Nigeria on his claim that he is a man of
\nvery high principles, a man of integrity and courage, then you can\u2019t go to
\nhim as a leader of your community and say \u2018Joda is a good man, appoint him
\nminister because he has his paper qualifications.\u2019 You have to investigate
\nthese things so that they meet, not only the criteria you laid down, but
\nyour own expectation of the man; it needs some time.\u00a0 We have made
\nmistakes before; I have known of ministerial appointments during the
\nmilitary days when they had announced the name of somebody is a similar
\nname to somebody else and the young man arrived to be sworn in or you
\nappoint a minister and suddenly something surfaces. I don\u2019t know where you
\nwere when Murtala was the head of state, but if you can go and read back
\nthe newspapers of that time (August 1975) you will see that there were at
\nleast two people in the military government; serving officers who had to
\nbe replaced immediately because no checks were carried out on them. In the
\npast, when you were prepared to ignore security reports as had happened in
\nthe recent past in Nigeria you can appoint anybody, but Buhari says he is
\ngoing to work with perfect people and the he appoints someone only to
\ndiscover a week later or a month later that there is really no way you can
\nkeep him there; what happened? How did the man get there? But I am not
\nmaking excuses; I am talking to you as a former civil servant who has had
\nsome experience of how things are done. For example, to appoint a chairman
\nof let\u2019s say the cement company in Yandev or Ashaka; I was permanent
\nsecretary industry and we had about 30 of such companies in which
\ngovernment had majority shares at that time and we had to work on
\nassembling names for every one of these thirty companies. We had to
\nproduce about 5 or 6 people times 30 and it was extremely difficult.
\nBecause if I tell you I want somebody you will go and bring your friend or
\nschoolmates. It is unavoidable because you can only bring names of people
\nyou know and politically there are people vying for these things.<\/p>\n
Q: Having served as chairman of transition committee in 1979 and as again
\nas a member in 1999; now you have just chaired another transition
\ncommittee, what parallels can you draw from these?<\/p>\n
A: By 1979 the civil service was still intact; it was largely efficient
\nand it had a tradition of being loyal to the government of the day for the
\ntime being; it had not been politicized. People were not put there on
\npolitical basis, but largely on their merits and they were prepared and
\nwilling to do their work. I served in the Gowon administration and in the
\nMurtala administration and that of Obasanjo, but none of them interfered
\nwith the civil service. Now, I think we have been witnesses to what had
\nbeen the practice in recent years: permanent secretaries, directors of
\ndepartments, chief executives of parastatals were all appointed on the
\nbasis of their party loyalty, if not affiliations. You could not survive
\nin the system if you were independent and it is also a demoralized
\nservice; it is over-established and inefficient. So what happened in 1979,
\nI had left the service in April 1978, so all the people in government; the
\npermanent secretaries from the new head of service and the secretary to
\nthe government down to directors were all people with whom I had worked
\nand who were junior to me in service. So it was easier for me to talk to
\nthe SGF and HOS without any restraint at all and they told me the truth
\nand if the information is there they give it to me. The man who was now
\npermanent secretary in the cabinet office and who was liaising with my
\ncommittee was my deputy permanent secretary and if I had any problem I
\ncalled him and said, \u2018George, I don\u2019t have this. What is the matter?\u2019 And
\nwithin the next one hour he would bring it; it is not so anymore and, like
\nI said, these were polite times when people recognized the government as
\ngovernment, not the political party of the government. The chairman of the
\ndefunct NPN, the late Adisa, was very powerful but he was also a gentleman
\nwho understood how to handle people. Even if he wanted to discuss
\nsensitive political issues he did it in such a way that you cannot afford
\nnot to listen to the man; it is no longer the same.<\/p>\n
Q: Given the picture you have painted how challenging is the task before
\nthe new administration?<\/p>\n
A: I think the new administration has a pretty good idea but the situation
\nwe are going to meet is going to be difficult. They should have prepared
\nthemselves to face these challenges adequately. That is why it is
\nnecessary for the government of Buhari to select those who would work for
\nhim to be extremely careful of how they select the people who will be
\ndoing the work for them; people who are willing and able to do the job and
\nwho are capable of delivering the goods. These are people who must devote
\nthemselves absolutely to the people of Nigeria and it is possible. It was
\npossible under Awolowo, it was possible under Sardauna. I was a very young
\nman of about 32 but I know now what I did not appreciate before that those
\npeople – and I have worked with the two of them – were men who understood
\ntheir responsibilities and duties and they encouraged those who worked for
\nthem to tell them the truth and nothing but the truth. It was possible for
\nme to go to Sardauna and tell him that a decision they had taken or this
\naction they had taken in my view was wrong and he would said sit down and
\ntell me why you think it is wrong and I would tell him. And if he agrees
\nwith you he would thank you and if he doesn\u2019t agree with you he would take
\ntime to explain to you why he preferred his own decision to yours. I once
\nserved in a committee in which Awolowo was chairman and I knew he felt
\nvery strongly about a point why the committee was set up. When the
\npresentation was made to him in his office he didn\u2019t allow the meeting to
\ncontinue because he said he now agreed that he didn\u2019t know the basis of
\nthat recommendation. It was like that; you don\u2019t receive decisions from
\nabove. I don\u2019t know at what point a decision from above was invented, but
\nwe never had it in our own vocabulary; everything had to be reasoned and
\neverything had to be recorded.<\/p>\n
Q: Talking about the cost of governance, the new administration is
\ninheriting a battered economy with over bloated system of governance; what
\ndo you think is the way out?<\/p>\n
A: A lot of work needs to be done. I don\u2019t know exactly how the budgeting
\nsystem operates now but up to the time I left you had a budget which
\ncaptured every item of expenditure. Go and look at the published budget
\nestimates of the sixties and up to the seventies and, if you look at it,
\ntake the ministry of, say agriculture. You will find out that the top of
\nthe line on the salary page one; minister, so much salary per annum; one
\nminister of state, salary is so much per month; one permanent secretary,
\nsalary so much per annum. That is under the administration of the ministry
\nof agriculture; then you have senior assistant secretary at so and so much
\nper annum; ten assistant secretaries, so much per person per annum right
\nup to the cleaner everything is listed and when it was approved you could
\nnot have a ghost worker because the salaries were clearly earmarked and
\nyou could not employ unless there was vacancy. If there were supposed to
\nbe ten assistant secretaries in an establishment but only eight in place
\nduring the budget year you could employ not more that number to fill those
\nvacancies. But now you have a situation where you have only ten vacancies
\nbut twenty people are employed; all the ten extra people are illegal and
\nare not covered by the budget and under what we used to call the finance
\nmanagement Act it is a criminal offence to do that because you are
\nbreaching the approved budget. How do you employ these people by getting
\nnames from The Presidency that this or that man be appointed director in a
\nministry which already had one director, but The Presidency or Senate or
\nHouse of Representatives or you have the senators and the members of the
\nHouse asking for contracts from ministries and parastatals, and if you
\ndon\u2019t give them the contracts they will put up an investigation against
\nyou. So why government is bloated is because it is from the presidency,
\nfrom the ministers, from the senators, from the House of Representatives
\nand all these are because of this impunity from high places where
\neverybody feels that they would have their way. So unless you clean up
\nthese things but the cleaning process cannot also be immediate because in
\na situation whereby there is so much unemployment and the government says
\nit has sacked thirty or fifty thousand people, what is the public\u2019s
\nreaction? If issue a press release to that effect everybody would be
\nangry. Therefore what I think the government can do is to sit down to see
\nhow they can rationalize this whole thing. I believe there are so many
\njobs to be done in Nigeria if we get our act right; that anybody you
\nremove from a ministry, for example, out of twelve or thirteen River Basin
\nDevelopment authorities and if they are working they can dramatically
\nchange the economic fortunes of Nigeria because instead of producing one
\ncrop per year you can be producing three and people will be fully engaged
\namong which would not be the farmers alone but irrigation engineers,
\nirrigation technicians, it would be thousands of jobs. But all that you
\nhave at the River Basin Development Authorities now are idle people with a
\nboard of directors of about seven or eight members being paid allowances
\nand so no and so forth; guest houses, protocol and administration people,
\nfinancial people but no irrigation people. And there are so many engineers
\nin Nigeria who are either idle or underutilized all over the place. These
\npeople can almost immediately put back to work and I am sure if you have
\nsensible projects for irrigation you can find the financing. Our railways
\nare not working but they could be made to work so you don\u2019t need to sack
\npeople there but at the moment all you are doing is to pay pensions and
\nsalaries of people who are there idling away. Take Ajaokuta Steel Company;
\nit has been there for over thirty years doing absolutely nothing and
\nmaintaining so many people. Why can it not be made to work? If there is
\nnothing for them to do there or at Alaja Steel or Kaduna Steel Rolling
\nMill, Jos, Oshogbo; there are engineers there and instead of wasting there
\nget them to do something that is beneficial to the economy and to
\nthemselves. You cannot have an engineer who is idle living there without
\ndoing any engineering job for the next five years and still be called an
\nengineer. If a doctor doesn\u2019t practice for five years he is not a doctor
\nfor you to submit yourself to him. So the solution is sitting down to look
\nat the service as it is, rationalizing it and creating jobs; public works
\nwhere everybody gets engaged and the country see the results.<\/p>\n
Q: Still on the cost of governance how would you react to reports over the
\nproposed N9billion allowances for national assembly members, a development
\nthat this is generating controversy?<\/p>\n
A: You know I am an old man and I am used to the old ways. When I was
\npermanent secretary here the premier of Northern Nigeria, the Sardauna you
\nhear about, and his house is there and you can go and look at it. It had
\ntwo bedrooms, one sitting room, one dining room, a kitchen and boys
\nquarters. The family lived in the boys quarters while he lived in the main
\nhouse. There was a conference room attached to the house and there was one
\nguest house where important visitors to Kaduna lived. He also had two
\nsaloon cars and one other car attached to him; the two saloon cars were
\nthere because if he was going on tour, say,\u00a0 an engagement in Kano or
\nZaria if he insisted on getting there like say 5pm he insisted on keeping
\nto time because he didn\u2019t want to keep people waiting. So if along the way
\nhe had a puncture tyre he would not wait for it to be repaired so he jumps
\ninto the second car and kept to time. They had to explain that to the
\nnorthern public as to why Sardauna had two cars. His office had no air
\nconditioners and when they said he must have an air conditioner he said no
\nit was a waste of money. And, he said, in any case I don\u2019t like air
\nconditioner. Even when they insisted it was not necessarily for him,
\nsometimes for foreign dignitaries,\u00a0 he said no. So, until he died there
\nwas no air conditioner in his office or house. The Governor, Sir Kashim
\nIbrahim, after Sardauna got two cars.\u00a0 It was felt that he, too, as
\ngovernor should not have less, so he was given a second car and a pick up
\nvan which was used to convey the family to the markets or if they were
\ngoing on a trip it conveyed food items and assistants. My first shock
\nafter the military took over and Gongola was created\u00a0 and I was invited to
\ngovernment house. When I got there I found about six cars with escort
\nvehicles, which Sardauna never had, and an ambulance with large convoy of
\nabout a hundred people. If you go to Abuja today half of the governors are
\nthere and the sort of expenditure in terms of allowances is so high. I was
\npermanent secretary from 1966 to 1978 and never had an official driver,
\nnever had an official car, never had a cook, never had a gardener. I paid
\nmy electricity bills and water rates. Of course, they gave me a house but
\nthey would give you chairs and a dining table but no bed sheets, no
\ncurtains, no pillows and pillow cases. What the government did for us was
\nthat you could apply for a loan to buy a car and they would give you an
\nallowance that you could use the car for your official duties. There was
\nwhat was called the basic allowance; they gave you that and it took care
\nof fuelling and servicing the car, going to your office and back to your
\nhouse. But if you were in Lagos and had to go on official trip to Ibadan
\nthey you applied for what was called touring advance and there was
\nsomebody who knew the exact kilometers from Lagos to Ibadan, in those days
\nit was miles. They had a table and they would give you that money; Lagos
\nto Ibadan and Ibadan to Lagos and they said okay where would you go when
\nyou get to Ibadan for your duty? If you went from Apatagangan to the
\nsecretariat you were required to come back and explain how you spent the
\nmoney and if there was any surplus you returned it and in the case of an
\nover expenditure that you could justify they paid you. They didn\u2019t just
\ngive you N100,000 when you said you were going from Lagos to Kano as they
\ndo now,\u00a0 though going to Kano and coming back may be N50,000. And if you
\nwere working in Kaduna, for instance, you were not allowed to use
\ngovernment vehicles to go to your village for a weekend or to a naming
\nceremony or any social event. Today, I know people who go every weekend,
\n200 to 300 kilometers for purely personal affairs, not only for themselves
\nbut with escorts, followers with three, four cars. Every trip might cost
\nN1million or even N2million; this country cannot afford to continue like
\nthis. I don\u2019t really know whether this can be solved. You said we want
\nfuel subsidy, but are you really getting fuel subsidy? Maybe in Abuja they
\nare selling it at N87 per liter but anywhere in-between Abuja and Kaduna
\nis N130 and who is getting it? I can tell you; they take the fuel to
\nCameroon, Chad, Niger, Benin Republic and sell it three times the cost.
\nAnd what are you getting here? When you say you are selling N87 per liter
\nthe meter is tempered with so that by the time you buy ten liters you
\nprobably get only seven liters. And this fuel is not even delivered;
\nsometimes they just take the subsidy and go and they give it to the
\nblack-market. So there is a lot to clean up.<\/p>\n
Q: So how can we come out of this?<\/p>\n
A: The government has to come out and tell the people of Nigeria this is
\nthe situation we are in; in this sector this is what is happening and they
\nshould put it in a way that people would see and understand it and
\nappreciate any decision they want to take. If they take the decision to
\nremove fuel subsidy this is the reason and they should so explain it not
\njust for a few but to the ordinary man to also know why he or she must pay
\nmore and what are the benefits. There are a lot of tangible benefits that
\ncan occur if the government can get out of this racket and apply the money
\nto do other things. Our schools are in bad shape and they may find the
\nmoney to fix the schools, the roads, provide drugs in the hospitals. But
\nif for policy reasons they cannot do it then they have to find the money
\nto do the other things which are necessary.<\/p>\n
Q: There was the Steve Orosanya report during the tenure of Obasanjo that
\nrecommended the merger and even scrapping of so many research agencies
\nthat have outlived their usefulness.\u00a0 Do you think this is one of the ways
\nforward?<\/p>\n
A: Let me first confess that I have heard a lot about the Orosanya report
\nbut, unfortunately, I have not laid my hand on it. I have looked for it
\nand have been promised, but I haven\u2019t gotten it so I don\u2019t know the
\ndetails of its contents. But I was also engaged under the Obasanjo
\ndispensation to review government parastatals and agencies. Government, at
\nthe beginning of our exercise thought that there were about just 500
\nparastatals and agencies, but by the time we finished our work there were
\nover 800. Some of them were established many years ago and have ceased to
\nhave any relevance and they had no need to exist. They were forgotten and
\nthe people remained there and they continued to be reflected in the budget
\nant to be paid for. They should have been wound up and it was so
\nrecommend. This is about fifteen years now and I don\u2019t know what has
\nhappened, but I have the impression that more are being more added. I
\nthink the Orosanya report, if it has addressed these issues, should be
\nrevisited and actions taken immediately. People, especially those out of
\ngovernment, are too fearful of any suggestion that more unemployment would
\nbe added in the market and an institution, no matter how irrelevant
\nemploys people and they get paid but they are really not doing anybody any
\ngood; not even for themselves. When you make people redundant you don\u2019t
\njust throw them away, you should work out an exit for them. I remember
\nwhen I was growing up there was one small generator supplying electricity
\nto the European Quarters and it was so fragile that if there was raincloud
\nin the sky, with the possibility of thunder, there was a man employed to
\ngo and switch it off so that it is not damaged by thunder. But this man
\nremained there even when electricity was expanded and got to the town, but
\nif there was a storm in Yola he would just go and switch it off; nobody
\ncould tell him to do otherwise. This continued until well into the 1990s
\nwhen he died and that stopped. The same story in Yola; the toilet in Yola
\nAirport in the arrival departure hall was the cleanest in any airport in
\nNigeria that I used to wonder why. If you went to Lagos Airport at that
\ntime, or Port Harcourt, the toilets were always filthy and smelling but
\nreverse was the case at the Yola Airport; it was not only clean but always
\nsmelling fresh. I discovered that the only reason was because this man was
\nso well trained by the European about cleaning toilets and so and he
\nmaintained that standard until his death and if you go to Yola Airport now
\nit is like any other.<\/p>\n
Q: After submitting your report to the president, were you still under
\npressure from lobbyists for appointments into the new government?<\/p>\n
A: Yes! When you came didn\u2019t you see people here waiting for me? Wherever
\nI go; I came to Yola and went to my village on Sunday. There is no road to
\nmy village. In the dry season, we just manage to go to the village. I went
\nto see my sister and the family and when I was going they collected CV\u2019s
\nand gave me. I couldn\u2019t throw them away so I continued to receive them by
\ntelephones, by emails by text message.<\/p>\n
Q: Given the enormous task ahead, what would you advise the president,
\nBuhari?<\/p>\n
A: Well, I am not an adviser to the president. I was a chairman of his
\ntransition committee and I have finished my work. He has the sole
\nresponsibility of assembling his advisers to advise him on every aspect
\nand he can call on anybody in Nigeria to help him do this task. I am
\nthinking of writing-if you people will agree to publish-some of my
\nthoughts of what should happen. But I don\u2019t think I am entitled to be
\nwriting to the president every day to say this is what he should do or not
\ndo. He is receiving too much of that kind of advice.<\/p>\n
Culled From Daily Trust<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malam Ahmed Joda chaired President Muhammadu Buhari\u2019s Transition Committee, which interfaced with former President Goodluck Jonathan\u2019s team. In an exclusive interview, the \u2018super permsec\u2019 of the 1970s and 1980s, would…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exclusive","category-interviews"],"yoast_head":"\n