Patitos Post

The current administration is acting the Ostrich!

Sometime ago I wrote an article ‘Is Rabbit Dead….or Dying?’ and there dwelt on how Nigeria as a nation can draw lessons from John Updike’s classic ‘rabbit series’ of books in our efforts to cope with the global recession. Since then I have had some more time to reflect on the Nigerian society as reflected in the headlines of our newspapers and bylines of news broadcast. The major story I find is that there is almost a sense of denial in Nigeria that we are in a recession. I speak of the fact that Nigerians experienced extreme poverty at a time the price of crude oil, the main stay of the economy sold at above $140 per barrel. As a thinking man, I begin to ponder on this-if there was no prosperity when oil was at $140 how are we to see it when oil is below $40 per barrel? And with the way that governments at all levels are carrying on, the policy seems to be to ape the ostrich and bury our head in the sand.

I begin to wonder in my spare time whether we are the way we are because we do not want to solve our problems or because we do not know our problems. One could be forgiven for thinking that Nigeria is awash with cash if one pays attention to the news. Nigeria is hosting a multi million dollar FIFA fiesta in 2009, National Assembly votes hundreds of billions for its maintenance, Governor in 300 million naira wedding extravaganza. That is what I see in the newspapers. I see nothing about the emergency that the president promised to declare in the power sector.

Much as he may have made some mistakes while in office, I was pleased to see one of the more realistic items in the headlines the other day coming from former president Obasanjo. He was reported as saying that Nigerians should prepare for hard times. To me this was such an obvious reality that I was surprised the president had not called for such preparations. You can then imagine my surprise when there was such a hue and cry against Obasanjo for giving his advice!

Does it mean that my country men are yet unaware of what awaits them if they do not retreat from the paths they have allowed themselves to be taken on by leaders whose only objective in office appears to be to revel in the pomp of office?

Could we be in doubt that our economy is contracting when our stock market lost 243 billion naira in one week? If we are still in doubt about the economic times that we live in, others are not in doubt and are beginning to take steps to protect their economies. The British have just increased the points needed by highly skilled migrants before they could qualify for British jobs. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is not shy at saying that British Jobs have to be preserved for British people.

The whole world over, governments have prepared or are preparing bail outs for their industries and businesses. As I write this president Barrack Obama just got his almost one trillion dollar economic bail out bill passed. Germany already has a bail out plan on the go in excess of 500 billion dollars. Every where people are cutting cost and tightening their belts. The state of California the richest place on earth has been reduced to giving out IOUs to its workers and citizens instead of cash.

The point I am trying to make is that everywhere in the world governments and people are waking up to the realization that the world has been living above its means and has to cut back and retrace its steps. My question today is what are we doing in Nigeria to prepare to beat the global recession?

It is not enough to cut the salaries of politicians. Politicians have never depended on their salaries in Nigeria. In fact over the years we have seen politicians who have ‘donated’ their salaries to the public. The public itself has come to see this as an empty gesture.

So what do we do now? Where do we start? One way to protect Nigeria from the global recession is to plug all loop holes. By this I mean the unnecessary expenditure that we engage in year after year without any positive impact on the society at large. Let us examine a few.

Firstly Nigeria is a poor country that has the capacity to be rich, very rich indeed, but as at now we are still a poor country. Even in the best circumstances we can not afford to spend even 5 million naira per annum on our legislators but as I speak to you today we spend more than double that amount per legislator in the National Assembly. Daily we are inundated with newspaper reports of state legislators on a tour of Europe or the Americas and more recently South Africa at staggering cost. I read where legislatures of a very poor state spent 200 million naira on a legislative tour of a European country.

Gestures, even small gestures have the power to motivate people in the direction they need to move. Sarah Palin when she was running for governor captured the imagination of the Alaskan people when she promised to sell off the governor’s official plane. It was a small measure meant to help reduce the cost of government but it appealed to the people’s sense that government had to cut cost to reflect the reality of the day. If a state that doubled its own revenue in 2008 is cutting out a plane for its governor how much more so is it more pertinent for a country with shrinking revenue to do away with presidential jets, for the president, the senate president and speaker. Even the British prime minister does not have a prime ministerial plane. He travels in commercial flights, always on British Airways. How ironic that we do not have a Nigerian Airways but we have a Nigerian presidential jet. Did I say jet? I meant jets. As a matter of fact, until the coming of Arik as an airline, the biggest fleet of planes in Nigeria was the presidential fleet. You can tell a lot about the priorities of a people by these little ironies.

One other way we can cut costs is by reducing foreign travels for our civil servants. Nigeria spends literally tens of billions in esta codes for unnecessary foreign trips and our government officials and civil servants have acquired a reputation of turning up for international events in hordes to the consternation of their hosts and other participating countries! A recent example was the historic inauguration of president Barrack Obama. I was to be in Washington D.C for this event but aborted my plans at the last minute and was aghast at the fact that Nigeria had two delegations, one from the presidency headed by Emeka Anyaoku (a man I hold in high esteem) and then another representing the ministry of foreign affairs and headed by the minister in charge of the ministry, Chief Ojo Maduekwe with each official in the delegation raking in hundreds of dollars as daily esta code. To put this in perspective, Kenya which is the source of the president’s roots asked its own officials not to travel to Washington D.C for the event but to watch it on T.V as the country had better use for its resources than to send officials on government’s bill. The president and governors can show their preparedness to cut unnecessary spending by making executive orders that only the most essential overseas trips are allowed. It certainly will save Nigeria billions of naira in unspent esta codes.

I read a lot about how one government official’s convoy or the other has ran into helpless pedestrians killing them. These reports in the newspapers are just regular reminders that our government officials do not need so many cars. Why do the president, governor, minister and commissioner need convoys of sometimes over 30 cars? Pragmatically speaking this is one of the more wasteful ventures that we in Nigeria have come to take for granted. Many people think that these cost only a token, but let us take stock. A brand new car costs about 6 million naira and on the average there are about 5 cars per convoy in Nigeria. So let us say 30 million is spent on each convoy just to purchase cars. A rough estimate of fuelling these cars will probably be 15 thousand naira per month so let us assume that the average convoy is fuelled at a cost of 75 thousand naira per month which will be 900 hundred thousand naira per annum. Now how many convoys are there in a state? Considering that you have the governor, his deputy, their wives and maybe 12 commissioners and 5 special advisers you are probably talking about 15-20 convoys per state. For 36 states you would have between 540-720 convoys. When you now add the Federal Government to the equation with the president, his vice, their aides and ministers, heads of parastatals, the military and paramilitary and the police the figure balloons to perhaps an additional 500. Now we have a conservative estimate of at least a thousand convoys each costing conservatively 30 million in vehicle costs, 900 thousand per annum in fuel cost and perhaps 250 thousand in repair cost. Now we are talking about 30 billion naira in cost of vehicles, annual fueling cost of about a billion naira, plus repair cost of about 300 million. How can these costs be sustained in a country with most of its population living on less than a dollar a day?

In this era of a global economic recession we have to face economic realities. I admire our zeal for religion and believe that any religion is better than no religion, but I sit down sometimes to ask myself why a country with so much poverty insists on spending something like 40 billion naira in sponsoring pilgrims to holy places each year? Surely we must encourage our citizens to be God fearing, but scarce public resources should not be spent in such a manner. 40 billion naira can be better spent on providing one nutritious meal per day to Nigeria’s 25 million primary school students to ensure proper brain development and put them in good stead to develop into the kind of man power that Nigeria needs to develop itself from the bottom up. As former president Bill Clinton famously said a country can not become rich by what is under the ground but what is between the ears. Nigerians must be allowed to go to Mecca and Jerusalem, but there is no reason why the government has to pay for an already over paid and underworked top civil servant to go and seek forgiveness for the over invoicing he has indulged in all year long. We must be prudent, in fact I take that back. We have no choice but to be prudent in order to survive in today’s world.

One other headline that keeps recurring in Nigerian newspapers is that of governors donating money to different organizations. On reading these stories one may be forgiven if you left with the impression that these donated monies were the governors’ personal funds. Not at all. I have never heard of another country where governors have so much power and liberty to make gifts of public money. How and why can a governor donate 5 million naira at a book launch for private citizen? Why should a governor donate public funds to his old boys association? Why should a governor donate public funds to a beauty queen’s pet project? Each of these scenarios is real in today’s Nigeria. In fact Nigerians may be surprised to know that in every year since 1999 when Nigeria returned to supposed civil rule (I thought civil rule was meant to be civilized) more than 1 billion naira has been donated each year by governors and other government officials. How easy it must be to donate money that does not belong to you, Nigerian governors have it made!

In a related issue I can not begin to express my frustrations at the rate Nigerian governors and government officials are building new or refurbishing existing state houses. In these lean times even in the best of times it is certainly not a priority to build a new place for a governor to live in. imagine one of these governors was proud to list one of his achievements in offices as the building of a befitting government house! What can be more befitting than for a governor to stay in his house and spare the state the cost of building another mansion that will be rejected by the next elected governor as unfitting for his taste? There is too much opulence in Nigerian state government house. It is not a coincidence that in California the wealthiest geographic location per capita known to man, many governors have lived in their own abodes sparing the state the cost of running the governor’s mansion. Any wonder why the state’s citizens are the wealthiest in the world. Governor Jerry Brown stayed in a condo and he did not consider it unbefitting and this was a man whose father was also governor of California.

As we face this global recession, it may be inevitable that Nigeria has to make immense sacrifices. But, no longer, can we push these costs on the backs of poor Nigerians. With all our country’s resources, our long, rich history of capitalism, our immense oil reserves, and our extensive human capital, how do we remain so poor? We need to remake Nigeria — the way it is governed, the way it operates. We need to give ordinary Nigerians an opportunity to build the future they want and deserve. And we need to do it now.

There has never been a better time to reign in our elite’s excesses, to go to war with corruption, to end the /two Nigeria’s/ that we see every day. As the global recession deepens, this isn’t a time to just get by — to survive — as Obasanjo warns. It is a time to make dramatic change. We will not survive the next 2-3 years by bearing costs on our poor. We will prosper by ending corruption; we will prosper by restructuring our economy

I have taken time to read Nigeria’s newspapers to see if we are living as a people who are aware of the world that we live in and the rapid changes we are facing. The advanced world who are better able to afford a life of excess has woken up to the fact that they have been living beyond their means and are taken steps, making frenzied efforts to adjust to the reality of today. My fellow Nigerians are we doing the same? Well reading about governors and their 300 million naira wedding extravaganzas, billions being budgeted for sporting fiesta we can barely afford, 2.3 billion naira being spent on cars for legislators who already have more than enough personal cars and our continued thirst for foreign imports that are eating away at our foreign reserves all lead me to say to Nigerians WAKE UP! If we are to frustrate that analysis by Senator Russ Feingold on Nigeria becoming a failed state, the time to act is now, even yesterday.

PU

I am appalled as I believe every Nigerian should that the Federal Executive Council meeting this week was stalled due to a power outage. How very apt that the president and his ministers should feel the pains that ordinary Nigerians go through on a daily basis. I am tempted to ask Mr. President what happened to the power emergency he promised to declare in the power sector while he was campaigning. This ought to serve as a reminder to the president that the word emergency means some thing that is urgent and important, in other words a crisis. Not something that one ought to wait for two years to implement.

Imagine what it would have been like if we had a visiting dignitary at the presidential villa when this happened. How would that reflect on Nigeria?

This president promised a lot during his electioneering campaigns but has delivered very little, and in fact the argument may be made that he has actually reversed the gains of the previous administration.

In the midst of all these problems and with so much poverty in the land, this administration still finds the time to spend money in hosting a FIFA fiesta only to be told off by a VP of FIFA who publicly stated that he was disappointed in Nigeria

Publicly I have advised this administration to begin to invest some of the excess crude funds and the huge reserves inherited from Obasanjo in building refineries. Nigeria has a unique adavantage in that she is surrounded by oil thirsty countries and has oil in abundance. In this age of a global economic melt down, we should have invested in our refining capacity and gradually stop importing fuel and refine locally for our consumption and for sale to our West African neighbours. This is not a very difficult task and believe me that 523 billion naira spent on our legislators since 1999 could have been put to better use in this venture.

While we await the emergency Mr. President promised, may we advise that he stock up on candles in the event that power failure affects next week’s FEC meeting!

PU

The recent decision by the Senate of the National Assembly to pull out of the Joint Committee on Constitution Review leaves one aghast at the fate of Nigeria under the PDP whose members dominate the Senate. We are told that they are unable to reach a concord with the house and so are pursuing their own amendment efforts. How does the PDP which prides itself OF being the largest party in Africa come to terms with the fact that though it has a majority in both the house and Senate, it is helpless to call its legislators to order? Any one familiar with the root cause of this crisis will realize that ego rather than patriotism has caused this divide in our parliament.

For those not in the know, the attempt by the two chambers to jointly review the constitution was truncated when some members of the house refused the vice chairman designation given to the deputy speaker in Minna some months ago while the JCCR was having a ‘retreat”. This is the cause of this falling out and we are told by Vincent Ogbulafor that his PDP will rule Nigeria for 60 years. The question is, how can a house divided against itself stand? This is true for the PDP as well as the National Assembly.

It is no longer news that 523 billion naira has been spent on the National Assembly since 1999 and they have passed just 523 laws in that period. We can begin to see that an idle mind is the devil’s play ground because if these legislators had enough work to do they would not have the time to sink to such pettiness. The remuneration of our legislators is not tied to productivity, this brings me to the point that if they are not so busy (and they obviously are not if in 10 years they could pass only 523 laws) then the best thing to do would be to  make the job of legislating at the federal level a part time job.

In this age of a global economic meltdown, how can we justify spending hundreds of millions per legislators, maintaining them in official quarters, paying for offices as well as office supplies and a string of aides. I can not count how many times I have been given complimentary cards by individuals who describe themselves as ‘Special Assistant’ to Senator or Representative this or the other. My fellow country men it bleeds my heart that we are so wasteful yet we are such a poor nation where more than 65% of our population lives on less than a dollar a day. How can our legislators in good faith accept to earn so much and why did the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) approve such sums for their remuneration?

I watched on T.V as several  several ASUU staff complained of the wretched state they exist under and I was touched. Then on the same NTA broadcast I watched as bodies of young men were strewn on the bare floor shot by the police as armed robbery suspects, five minutes later the announcer was giving a news summary about the menace of kidnapping and I changed the channel only to meet another news broadcast focusing on the Niger Delta militancy. I decided I had had enough of bad news and switched to CNN and there was a special on Nigerian youths who had formed a formidable credit card scam syndicate in New York. All these problems with our youths going terribly astray and yet we are spending more on less than a thousand legislators than we are spending per federal university with 40 time as many people consequently our youths are less educated than their contemporaries in other countries and were they can not compete in a knowledge worker global economy they become vulnerable to crime. And while all this is going on, the legislators charged with making laws that will secure their well being and good governance are busy squabbling over who would be chair man and vice chairman of the JCCR! Before our very eyes, the Nigerian police was reported to have arrested a serving senator with charms and thugs near a polling station in Ekiti, this man was released and is currently seating to make laws for our ‘good governance’!

Nigerians are clearly very intelligent people but we need a positive environment to explore ideas and add value to society, but where the government neglects its responsibility of providing this positive environment, things like what I have described above begin to occur. Bad leadership has a more telling effect on our youths and the day we summon the will to address this is the day we see a drop in armed robbery,kidnapping, militancy, 419, yahoozee and credit card scams. Nigerian youths do not have a natural aptitude for crime but are a victim of a leadership that has conditioned some to act in ways that bring us all shame.

But how can we resolve this? How can we come out from under this unsustainable system wherein Nigeria is a cow that everyone is milking and no one is feeding. How?  LEADERSHIP IS THE KEY. We must begin to prepare for 2011 now and cleanse the Augean stables of bad leadership at every level. If you love Nigeria, register to vote and begin to identify leaders with conscience at all levels starting from your local government (LGAs matter a lot believe me) up to your federal and state legislators and also the presidency. Vote in 2011 and remember to guard your votes. What happened in Ekiti should teach us that it will not just happen, we need to guard our votes.

Also take time to build up and affirm youths. The government is not doing it so we have to fill that vacuum as individual Nigerians. The creation of a new Nigeria rests on our youths and on us breaking the so called North-South dichotomy. If you do not have friends outside your tribe and religion take time to make some. Learn something about other parts of Nigeria. Tribalism has hindered our growth causing us to spend our energies fighting each other and the cabal that put these legislators in Abuja thrive on divide and rule.

PU

Everyone who lives in Nigeria can attest to the fact that  the present administration is not in a hurry to get things done. Things move at a very sleepy pace and as the administration celebrates its second anniversary, one can be forgiven if he/she gets the impression that the administration’s goal in government is to reverse policies. That’s why it beats me that an administration that has very little to point to by way of achievements does not see it fit to heed the wise counsel of its own chosen Central Bank governor to prune its seven point agenda to a more manageable number.

The logic is simple. If you are unable to attain even one of your stated seven point agenda halfway into your first term you do not need a crystal ball to tell you that the prudent thing to do will be to prune them.

Let’s take the emergency the president promised to declare in the power sector. What has become of that? Two years into a four year tenure and we are yet to see the emergency. Rather than an emergency we have seen a lag in the pace of the NIPP.

Now the president’s apologist are fond of saying that he needs time and is not known to hurry, but this is patently untrue. The president has demonstrated time and again that he is able to act fast when it suits him. For instance he acted fast in dealing with the Ribadu ‘insubordination’. He also acted fast in going to Ekiti state to campaign for his party and promising the then candidate Segun Oni a historical 6 year tenure before the election. This president equally acted fast in reversing the policies of the previous administration that he disagreed with, revoking the sale of our refineries to the duo of Dangote and Otedola only weeks after he took office. Mr. President is capable of acting fast.

It is this same sluggardly attitude to work that led to Nigeria being openly disgraced not by a president or vice president of a country, not by a United Nations Secretary General, but by the Vice President of FIFA , an international civil servant, who publicly at Lagos called the reputation of the Vice President of Nigeria  into question for making  promises he could not keep. Jack Warner then proceeded to give Nigeria an ultimatum. How could we have sunk so low that a VP of FIFA is giving us an ultimatum?

This is the Law of the Lid principle. A nation of of capable persons endowed with intellect, vison and drive will come to nothing if the leadership does not have the necessary qualities required to provide direction. Where such a leadership is lacking, we will have a lid on our development and that lid is the leadership which prevents us from fulfilling our potentials. We can not grow beyond the level of our leadership.  Leadership is similar to leading the way out of a jungle. We can have the best brains and the best brawn, but if the leadership does not know the way out of the jungle, we will continue to move in circles within that jungle and remain in that loop until a capable leader emerges. In fact a less capable people with a more capable leadership will find their way out of the jungle before us. This is the reason why Nigerians do very well whenever they leave the country to another country that offers a level playing field. The problem is not with Nigerians but with our leadership.

With this type of environment prevailing where we have no sense of the dire situation we face and the urgency with which we must face it, no one can fault anybody who gives the wise counsel that the government should be realistic and cut its coat according to its size and reduce its seven point agenda to something more realistic.

If the president can face for instance the issue of electoral reform and can implement the refomrs suggested by the Justice Uwais committee and find the political will to rein in his own party and ensure that INEC is truly independent by allowing the NJC appoint the INEC chairman and baord members, he would have fulfilled the promise he made on the day of his inauguration to Nigerians to clean up the electoral process and would have given Nigeria the greatest legacy ever from a leader-the ability to freely choose capable leaders. But rather than do this we saw what transpired in Ekiti state and the way the government reacted to it.

And to think that the president complained about not being invited to the G8 summit! To think that administration officials are complaining the Obama is visiting Ghana rather than Nigeria. Someone needs to tell this administration that actions have consequences. We can not just assume that because we have the largest population in Africa we are automatically the Giant of Africa, that is wishful thinking. We have the potential to become the Giant of Africa only when we are led by a leadership that understands that the true test of leadership is influence and where you can not influence your own population you stand very little chance of influence the continent of Africa and until we can influence the continent of Africa we can not truly be called the giant of Africa. Do not get me wrong, I want Nigeria to be the giant of Africa, but I will not bury my head in the sand and pretend, I will rather we do what we have the capacity to do i.e lead Africa by providing good leadership first to our own population and then to the West African sub region and in Africa as a whole. 

To put this into perspective, the FIFA VP Jack Warner recently painfully said about my dearly beloved country thus,  ”Frankly, from an objective point of view, Nigeria is not ready to host the tournament,”, I ask the president what does he think other African countries will make of us after reading and hearing these words which was widely broadcasted by the international media. Would they hear these words and accept that we are the ‘Giant of Africa’?

This president needs to have a sober reflection about his place in history. Two years have gone, he has two more years. When we hear the name Yar’adua, we remember his own father who was a noted minister in the first republic and his brother Shehu who was a political sage and nationalist, he should not be the one who brings that name into disrepute.

And to the rest of Nigeria, we need to realize that we do not have to be tied to our history, rather we should be tied to our potentials and fulfill them. In 2011, we should all be prepared to vote and to guard our votes. Let us remember that a people deserve the type of government they get. Let us go beyond complaning at beer parlours and under trees and take concrete steps to bring about change. When evil men combine, good men must associate even more. I am seeking Nigerians who are passionate about changing Nigeria to unite with me. Let us ignite a positive change movement aimed at enthroning good leadership at all levels of government come 2011. Please write to me at utomifornigeria@yahoo.com and lets dialogue on practical steps we can take to achieve this end.

Saturday June 13th (next week), at the Law School, Adeola Hopewell, V.I Lagos, at 2:PM, I’m having an interactive session with youths so we can take the struggle for a better Nigeria from mere talk to action. Remember well done is better than well said. Join me on that day so in future we can tell our kids we contributed in making Nigeria a better country.

PU

It has just come to my attention that 523 billion naira has been spent on the national assembly alone since May 30th, 2009  and curiously the national assembly has made just 523 laws in that period. Mathematically this brings the cost of passing a legislation  in Nigeria to a billion naira per law! Can we sustain this type of system? Of course not. I am never tired of saying that what we have now is a system where Nigeria is a cow that everyone is milking but no one is feeding. What happens when oil dries up and we have not invested in other ventures to diversify our economy?

The real reasons we have ethnic and religious tensions in Nigeria has less to do with ethnicity and religous differences and more to do with the fact that there is not enough to go round and in the competion for scarce resources pressures builds up and people are vulnerable as a result of their poverty to bigots who stir up differences and then start to fight each other. For instance The Plateau indigines and the fulani have been living peacefully for ages, but now they are fighting. Why?  It is because our population has grown in geometric progression and our resources have shrunk in an arithmetic progression. As such, we can not justify spending so much on a group of people who are less than one percent of one percent of one percent of Nigeria.

I often read in our papers about the Senate President and Speaker of the House flying in presidential jet, their fellow legislators going on retreats abroad, and billions being spent on cars for committees with the scandals that follows. Why are all these expenses necessary?  I vividly recall a past senate president saying on T.V that “we are not in Abuja to spread poverty”. No wonder our legislators have in recent times requested that they should get an automatic ticket. 

These are the same legislators who jettisoned the Joint Committee on Constitution Review because of a triffle quarrel over who would be chairman and deputy chairman. Where is the patriotism in this? Unless we are willing to suppress ego in favour of patriotism we are not going far as a nation.

We are a poor nation and we need to realize this and focus our resources on the singluar objective of developing the bodies and minds of our long suffering populace so that tomorrow we can have a knowledge worker society that is not dependent on government but is so productive that government is dependent on them.

Our legislators do not have the sense of the urgency of the desperate situation we are in in Nigeria and have shown where their priority lies.  Many do not want to change the status quo which we need to change in order to rebuild Nigeria simply because some where not elected and have no affinity with the people they represent and their God fathers benefit from the status quo they are preserving. It is a notrious fact that many of them where selected by God fathers to whom they owe their seats and thus their loyalty.

This is the reason why now more than ever we as Nigerians have to insist that this administration implement the reforms suggested by the Justice Muhammed Uwais Committee. People should be allowed to choose their leaders at every level! The only way to get a legislator or any elected official to behave is when his survival is tied to the electorate. So when Justice Uwais’s committee says that the president should not appoint the chairman of INEC and that ALL court cases arising out of elections should be concluded before the winner is sowrn in and that only a limited amount of money be spent on campaign we as Nigerians should see the wisdom in this and support the committee.

I therefore call on all well meaning Nigerians to write the president and request politiely that he implements Justice Uwais’s Committee’s resolutions. Do not say within yourself that what will this do. Remember nothing ventured, nothing gained.  We should never underestimate the great difference small changes can make. Do not say to yourself that others will wirte, remember that if everybody does no do the work of somebody, there is one person who will do it and that is Mr. Nobody. Do something today, write the president and request him to act. He can be reached at;

H.E Umaru Musa Yar’adua,

President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces,

Federal Republic of Nigeria

Aso Rock Presidential Villa, Three Arms Zone, Abuja FCT.

 

You may also write the Senate President and the Speaker of the house to express your outrage at the cost of legislating in Nigeria.

PU

I have been thinking deeply about the decay in the moral fabric of the Nigerian society. Like a lot of people I want to find a solution, but I believe that the key to finding a solution lies in discovering the root cause of the problem. A look back at Nigeria will show that like other countries we always had a degree of corruption, but this corruption was manageable up to the mid to late seventies. What changed then and made some Nigerians in power lose all sense of proportion when it comes to corruption.

Looking at this objectively, I believe that the corruption index in Nigeria grew in the 80s because we had rulers who imposed themselves on us and who were largely amoral but amiable and rather than the press calling attention to this weakness in our leaders, they fell in love with these leaders and began to celebrate them for their skills at trickery, double talk, manipulation and dribbling the populace. And as any management student knows, the headship principle is a very powerful one and people tend to immitate a leader moreso when the press celebrates such a leader. What we celebrate always appreciates in value. And since we celebrated trickery in our leaders in the 80s, this character trait was projected downward to the populace and was imbibed by the youth and the impressionable. if we look back and do an objective analysis, we will find that that was the period that we began to lose all sense of proportion in the practice of corruption. This is also the era in which we can trace the origins of advance fee fraud, 419, and other forms of obtaining by trickery andget rich quick schemes like wonder banks. Remeber, fish starts to rot from the head!

When you read former president Olusegun Obasanjo’s prison memoirs “This Animal Called Man” one of the things that makes you marvel is the fact that a particularly charismatic ex military ruler had in giving one of his trusted military boys a government job was quoted as telling him ‘never let me hear you complain that you are broke’. That is clearly a license to steal! And as any matured person knows, a child given permission to steal by the father does not go surreptitiously or stealthly, but goes directly about the act of stealing.

Again in the 80s, a newspaper report also quotes a former Perm Sec of being stunned at his minister’s over invoicing acts and innocently blurted out ‘but sir, that is stealing’. When we have the head of an administration so brazenly tolerant of corruption and we have the media celebrating him for his skills at manipulation, it is only a matter of time before officials stop being corrupt because corruption has become official! In such a case, the corrupt then becomes those who refuse to be corrupt!

And how do we stop this trend that has brought us so much scorn and shame worldwide? How do we truly begin to rebrand Nigeria? How do we roll back corruption?

In my view, the only way we can do this is by demanding as a people a leader that is principally a moral leader who in his private and family life has shown that he is able to lead and to create wealth for himself without corruption and who has discipline, vision and a passion for change all governed by his conscience.

Do we have such a leadership now? Of course not.

What message is the president giving to the populace when his closest friends and kitchen cabinet advisers are  ex governors who are facing charges of corruption and who are legendary for their acquisition of wealth without work. And when The Guardian newspapers confronted the president, his response was that he could not deny them access to him because they were his friends and former colleagues. To put this in perception, this will be like Obama consorting with disgraced former Illinois governor Blagojevich and justifying it that he can not abandon his friends.

In other climes, persons tainted by corruption are pariahs, they are stigmatized  and shunned as they should be. A former President of South Korea committed suicide rather than live with the stigma of corruption (not that I support suicide). The point is that corrupt people should be shunned not celebrated by a president, acknowledged and inducted into honour at churches, swooned over while spraying corruptly acquired naira at parties and certainly not be be received and titled by traditional rulers!

A true leader will make sacrifices for his principles and convictions. He can not show tolerance for corruption by consorting with known or suspected corrupt elements because his actions are projected to the people by the media and they soon follow suit. Yar’adua can not fight corruption while still romancing these suspect characters. It will be like a man sleeping with a prostitute at night and preaching against prostitution at his mosque in the day time. There is a name for that-Hypocrisy!

Nigeria can only successfully fight the corruption scourge by rallying round a leader irrespective of ethnicity or religion who has a track record in his private life of principle centred leadership and who has zero tolerance for corruption and a strong desire to battle it by first of all leading by example and choosing a genuine and passionate patriot and delegating authority to him/her to prosecute the anti corruption battle and then giving him the political support he/she will need to protect his/herself from the repercussions of stepping on powerful toes. Corruption will fight back in fulfillment of Newton’s law  of motion that every action has an equal and opposite reaction!

These principles I have described above are natural principles that we must harness in other to make progress. They are light houses that guide us when we have missed the way. If we refuse to harness them and fight against these principles, we will only break ourselves. We can not sow evil and reap good, as ordained by nature, we must reap what we sow! Until we get this right, we may continue to grope in the dark and as I am never tired of telling Dora Akinyuli, genuine rebranding should be a projection of things that are already happening. Rebranding will not just happen because you spend billions on consultants. Business as usual will only produce more of the same. We should not be tied to our past, we need to be tied to our potential.

PU

2PM Saturday the 13th of June, 2009 (next week) at The Nigerian Law School, Adeola Hopewell V.I. Lagos. I’m initiating a website for interacting with Nigerians especially youths. This site is not about Utomi, I want the input of youths. The aim is to secure a better future for them. We plan an interactive forum in Lagos so youths can tell me what they want in the site. Can you attend? You could also email me at utomifornigeria@yahoo.com!

I was in Abuja today, and drove by the offices of NAFDAC and the EFCC and I was again struck by the dramatic change in the activities of these two national institution from what obtained just two years ago. What has happened at these two agencies is a very good example of the difference between Leadership and Management. A lot of people think that these two things are the same, but they are actually quite different. Leadership refers to the proactive siezing of new opportunities and breaking new bounds. It involves a decision to make a way where there was no way and charting a new course. It also involves the setting up of an efficient structure and a hierarchy that hitherto did not exist.  leaders deliver results and the true test of leadership is influence-a true leader has influence and commands respect. Finally, a leader does not derive his influence because of his office, but because of what he/she has done with the office!  Management on the other hand refers to keeping watch over structures and hierarchy that have been created and expanded by some other person. It is possible that a good manager may expand the teritory won by a leader, but more than likely a manager will keep watch and maintain what he/she met. Finally many managers deliver activity rather than results and while a good manager may get respect, an average manager usually has to demand respect rather than command it. Remember it is not the title that makes a person a leader. You may be a manager of a bank by official title, but by conduct you are a leader, while you may be the head of an organization, but by conduct be a manager!

Dora Akinyuli  was a leader at  NAFDAC. I daresay that few had heard of NAFDAC before she came in, but the truth is that it did exist before her, but was a toothless bulldog. It was just a place where civil servants did nothing and collected salaries at the end of the month. And then came Dora. Having lost her own diabetic sister to fake drugs in 1988, Dora infused life into NAFDAC and suddenly Nigerians were so sensitized against fake drugs that the merchants of death dealing in that trade began to plot her death.  Dora escaped death by the whiskers in an assassination because her NAFDAC was efficient. She dared to shut down the bakery of a very influential ex first lady, and flexed muscles with the late Lamidi Adedibu in Ibadan and came out on top. She was acknowledged by Time magazine in a full spread as one of the most influential people in the world. But what do we have now? NAFDAC has come under the influence of a manager and has returned to being a toothless bulldog. When was the last time you heard about NAFDAC in the news? If you heard of it then it must be because of a courtesy call on its office not because of any act of putting fake drugs merchant to flight.

Similarly, the EFCC under Malam Ribadu was a different EFCC. Say what you want about him, but Nuhu Ribadu was a leader. A man who could go after the richest ex-military ruler, a man who arrested, cinvicted and jailed his Inspector General of Police, who arrested powerful ex-governors and reduced them to tears in court, who influenced the choice of the previous administration in choosing their successors is a very powerful leader. Ribadu never gave excuses for an inability to prosecute corruption, he knew it was a cancer that has reduced Nigeria to a laughing stock and impeded her progress and he did something about it. Due to his efforts, Nigeria which was blacklisted by the Finacial Action Task Force before he came on board was delisted and we improved significantly on the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index. There was also a robust cooperation between the EFCC under Ribadu and the Metropolitian police of London, The FBI and other world law enforcement bodies. Interestingly on the same that his predecessor and the current  president granted interviews severely criticizing him, Ribadu was invited by no less a body than the U.S congress to educate it on the issue of 3rd world corruption. It just goes to show you that you can not keep a good man down!

While it is fashionable for some to accuse Ribadu of selective prosecution, none have been able to say that he arrested innocent people. We should not allow mental laziness to beguile us. Corruption has reached desperate heights in Nigeria and desperate illnesses require desperate surgeries!

For all the current administration’s efforts to demonize Ribadu, they can not point to any achievement of theirs in the anti corruption battle except an empty call for the adherence to the ‘rule of law’. The rule of law actually means that the law guides you not ties you. Within the scope of the law, a leader can make an impact in the anti corruption battle if there is the will.

In the final analysis, an unbiased observer may come to the conclusion that since any reasonable man intends the consequences of his actions,  the actions of the current leadership (managers) of the EFCC and the current administration points to the conclusion that they intend to tone down the anti corruption war. For as Sherlock Holmes would say, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth. How else can you explain that ex-governors who were arrested and charged to court by Ribadu and whose cases are still being ‘managed’ in court by the current EFCC are regular visitors to our presidential villa!

I am a known critic of former president Obasanjo, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due. In the last administration, the institutions that projected the power and efficiency of government especially in the more effective second term of Obasanjo where the EFCC and NAFDAC and key ministers like Nasir El’rufai and ‘madam due process’ Oby Ezekwesili as well as Ngozi Okonjo Iweala.  Obasanjo deserves credit for the political support he gave his economic team that enabled them to show leadership and achieve amongst other things the exit of Nigeria from the Paris club of debtors by paying up the nations debt (which is again piling up) and building a sizeable foreign reserve (although some of  it could have been spent on much needed infrastructure). Also the former  president showed some foresight in setting up the excess crude account which the current president condemned when he came in, but which has come in handy particularly with the sharp drop in oil revenue. 

It has also become a favourite past time of this administration to cast aspersion on the person of Malam Nasir El’rufai. However if you had visited the FCT Abuja when Nasir held sway and pay a visit today the difference is very clear. Nasir showed leadership by running Abuja in a most business like manner. He cleaned up land registration by establishing the Abuja Geographic Information Service (AGIS) and restored a lot of the city’s original master plan and stepped on very powerful toes. He kept the city clean and beautified it, every morning you could actually see workers cleaning up the city. He invested heavily in infrastructure. He showed leadership by beginning with the end in mind and remained focused even when powerful forces agitated against him. But visit Abuja today and see what ‘managers’ have done. What has happened in the intervening years since El’rufai left office is a sharp decline in the physical appearance of Abuja.

This administration should consider the damage it has done and continues to do to the psyche of Nigerian youths when it’s principal officer condemn the contributions of Nigerians who exhibited leadership in their performance of national assignments. I want to seize this opportunity to celebrate Nuhu Ribadu, Malam Nasir El’rufai, Oby Ezekwesili, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala and Bode Agusto. To them I say this-remember that no matter how far falsehood has travelled, it must eventually be overtaken by truth. 

 

PU!

It is really a shame that an administration that came in by way of questionable elections is turning out to be very intolerant of contrary opinions. First time President Yar’adua bared his fangs he shut down Channels T.V for publishing a news item that purportedly emanated from the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) and which was first carried by the international media. And then in the run up to and after math of the Ekiti re run “election” (if it can be so called) the FG shut down Adaba FM a station that allowed the AC candidate Fayemi to broadcast his message. And now the government has come all out to stop Gen. (Rtd) Buhari from broadcasting his jingles on the radio!

Some might say it serves Buhari right due to his past actions of dethroning a democratically elected government and muzzling the media with his infamous decree 2. But we have to remember that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. For Gen.  Buhari’s enemies who are jubilating, they need to remember that when a slave sees his fellow being buried in a shallow grave, he should realize that he will be so treated when his time comes.

Over reacting to opposition is actually a symptom of weakness. A confident leader is tolerant of contrary opinion as he knows that if you prevent open opposition you fester subterranean opposition which is the lesson that Gen. Buhari himself learned only too late in 1985. I call on all lovers of freedom everywhere to condemn this act. Nigeria is a democracy and guarantees freedom of expression. Any government should be afraid of its people, its people should not be afraid of it!

In my last article ‘Rabbit at rest in a global recession’ I made the point to ask if Nigeria was the way it was because we could not see our problem or because we could not solve it. I had intended this to be a rhetorical question, but I was somewhat surprised when recent events answered this question. By this I refer to the Federal government’s reaction to the Electoral Reform Committee’s recommendations. Being mindful of the belief that you get what you expect, I had made an effort to expect that this administration would do the right thing and accept the Committee’s recommendation because I was convinced that those recommendations would go a long way to ensuring that the next election would be largely free and fair and would produce an administration that had the moral authority to begin to make the changes needed to set Nigeria on the right path. I know for a fact that there is a direct connection between how an administration comes into being and its ability to govern effectively.

The president in his first month in office confessed to the world that the process that brought him in was thoroughly flawed and to address it he set up an Electoral Reform Committee headed by Former Chief Justice, Mohammed Uwais . The committee has now come out to say to the government that to have a free and fair election you must have a truly independent electoral body and to have a truly independent electoral body you must have a neutral person heading this body and to achieve this end you must have such an appointment made by the National Judicial Council whose members are independent of the executive. And what has the president who set up the ERC in the first place done? He has rejected this proposal. How then can we have a better election if we stick to the same logic that produced what we saw in 2007? Has this government shown that it has the willingness to change for the better? Well we have seen the hand of this administration.

As the late U.S president Franklin Roosevelt said, the job of the president is primarily one of moral leadership. How does a president get his initial moral leadership rights? The very obvious answer is that his initial moral leadership comes from the process that brought him into office. A straight forward process will produce a president who has moral authority and he can then build on this and increase it until his capacity for effective leadership is so strong. But where a leader comes into office by suspicious means how then can he have moral leadership? And when a leader does not have moral authority how can he effectively govern and bring about positive changes in the country he governs? Everything is connected to everything and in Nigeria we can see how the moral issues plaguing our leaders are having a ripple effect on the society. An administration that emerges from a flawed system which is riddled with fraud will not have the moral authority to condemn fraud. An administration that came about via an election where money was used as inducement will not have the moral authority to challenge theft of public funds. And where you have a government that is deficient in this manner this deficiency will trickle down on the society. A government cannot give out what it does not have.

And we are beginning to see the actual results of a failure in moral leadership in the day to day life of the ordinary Nigerian.

For instance, we have been living with some insecurity in Nigeria and have come to accept it as the norm, but never before have we experienced insecurity on such a grand scale as we have today. I am no prophet, but I am almost certain that tomorrow’s headlines will have one story or the other about dare devil armed robbers and kidnappers. Relatives of high profile politicians and civil servants dare not visit certain parts of the country without adequate security and even then they hold their breath. An ever Increasing population is competing for diminishing resources leading to more incidences of riots and ethnic clashes because government is focused on how to cure its lack of moral leadership rather than how to create an environment conducive for the creation of sustainable wealth.

I love the youths as they are the key to bringing about change in any society because they are more flexible, more able to change their ways and are impressionable and a good leader can make the right impression on them and galvanize them in the direction they should go. My love for our Nigerian youths is the reason I feel pains when I watch NTA news. I cannot count the number of times I see the bodies of young people shot by the police as armed robbery suspects. I have trained myself to look at the youth and see them with the eye of potential and I am saddened when I see these scenes on television. But how do we help our youths to fulfill their potential when the government and our elders are caught in this loop of failed leadership and still causally dismiss measures that can help us break out of this cycle of failed leaders and a failing society.

Yes armed robbery is bad, but in Nigeria it is to a large extent a symptom rather than a disease and to eradicate the symptom we need to cure the disease. Untold millions of unemployed youths read the newspapers and watch the news cast and see politicians who had been arrested by the EFCC for stealing billions of naira and are out on bail being received at our presidential villa, being celebrated at parties and also being recognized and even celebrated in churches! These are the very people who have a vested interest in seeing that the Uwais Committee’s recommendations come to naught.

As a society we have shown undue tolerance for corruption and intolerance for law enforcement. If you are in doubt of this then consider the haste at which the government acted in handling Nuhu Ribadu’s ‘insubordination’ and compare it with the slow pace of the trial (or lack of it) of those he arrested. Oh what positive impact the government would have made had it acted with its ‘Ribadu’ haste in accepting and implementing the Uwais committee’s recommendations!

Have we paused to think about the type of subliminal messages we are passing across to these youths when we celebrate looters and punish those who go after them? As the late Fela Kuti sang ‘authority man in charge of money, him no need gun him need pen, pen get power gun no get, if gun go steal 2 thousand naira pen go steal 2 billion naira, you no go hear them shout thief their thief”. I am tempted to believe that if Bernie Madoff where to have been a Nigerian, he would have been out on bail and be making the rounds of government houses and parties.

This attitude we have of celebrating what should be disdained is the very reason why our youths have taken to violent crimes. As Ezeulu said in Achebe’s Arrow of God a she goat does not suffer in its parturition while an elder is in the house. If our youths can see leaders giving national awards to men whose source of wealth is certainly questionable, if churches can give honours to men whose incomes can never justify the large donations they make, if we have heads of law enforcement bodies attending parties and dancing with those whom their own agents have previously arrested, then inevitably we will have the scenario we now experience. We reap what we sow. The failure of our leadership has a more telling effect on our youths and the day we summon the political will to address these failures is the day we will begin to see a reduction in violent crimes, 419, drug smuggling, credit card scams and other ills that plague our youths. Nigerian youths do not have a naturally aptitude for crime, a majority of our delinquents are the product of an environment that has conditioned them to act in ways that have brought us shame and scorn all around the world.

So next time we watch the NTA news and see our youths being shot as robbery suspects or kidnappers, next time we are at a Western airport and get the ‘look’ after we produce our green passport, next time our foreign business partners tell us that they cannot extend credit to Nigerian companies and next time our internet friends stop responding to our emails after discovering that we are Nigerian, I want us to remember that in democracies a people get the leadership they deserve.

I do admire Prof. Dora Akinyuli and her achievements at NAFDAC, but I am yet to see the wisdom in the PR campaign of Rebranding Nigeria while Nigeria remains the same. More of the same will only produce the same old same old. As the late MKO Abiola was fond of saying of his enemies ‘even if you change the name of honey it would still be sweet’. This rebranding seems to me like staring at a mirror and not liking what you see and then proceeding to adjust the image in the mirror. If we do not like the man in the mirror we have to change the man in front of the mirror. Until we have a government that is willing to change the values we have been forced to live by after years of misgovernance by adventurist in power we will not see any significant change despite rebranding projects and ‘heart of Africa’ campaigns.

And how do we change Nigeria? Sometimes I am asked why Nigerians are so passive about the obvious social injustice that pervades the country. The answer I always give is that Nigerians are passive because Nigerians have no stake in government. The key to participation is involvement. Nigerians do not pay taxes and rely almost exclusively on oil wealth to function.

Now imagine this scenario if you will. Imagine that you are an entrepreneur and have formed a company with fellow entrepreneurs but the company is being run by grants given to it by Western donor agencies and no one has invested a kobo. Then imagine if you will that the president of the company is all of a sudden building mansions, buying state of the art cars and throwing wild parties. What would your reaction be? As a member of the company you might be concerned but you are unlikely to take action. You may say to yourself ‘is it my father’s business?’

Now imagine that instead of a grant from the donor agencies , the company was being funded by funds contributed by each entrepreneur and that after dues were collected you find the president of the company living in this manner. How would you react? Of course your reaction would be different. You would scream blue murder and hold the president to account for your dues. Court actions would follow and the president would not hold his office for very long.

This is the major reason why Nigerians are passive, because they see themselves as beneficiaries of a Father Christmas government that does nothing except collect rent from oil. The key to changing people’s behaviour is in changing their roles. If Nigerians can be made to pay tax they would stop seeing themselves as beneficiaries of government rather they would see themselves as stakeholders or even shareholders and only then would they begin to hold their leaders to account and lose their passivity.

Nigerians should not say to themselves that they would only start paying taxes when the government is being better run. We have the process backwards if we think in that manner. As a matter of fact only when we start paying taxes will government be better run because we will lose our passivity and become assertive and instead of us being afraid of the government, the government becomes afraid of us.

And we need to remember that we have a history of holding governments to account when we pay tax. The famous Aba women’s riot was all about taxes and holding government to account and this happened in 1929. In 1948, the Abeokuta Women’s Union led by the late Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was able to change the native authority government in Abeokuta on an issue of taxation without representation. There were other instances of Nigerians holding government to account, but what you see is that as oil income began to be the source of income for the government and emphasis shifted from tax collection to oil rent collection, Nigerians began to be more passive and the more passive they became the more assertive the government had to become which in turn makes the citizenry even more passive creating a serious co dependency that has led us to where we are now-an unsustainable system where Nigeria is a cow that everyone is milking and no one is feeding.

In conclusion, I call on all Nigerians of good will and in particular I call on those Nigerians who pay taxes, be it income tax, VAT tax or whatever form of tax to write a letter to the Nigerian Federal Government and state that as a stake holder in Nigeria (by virtue of your taxes) you support the recommendations of the Justice Mohammed Uwais led Electoral Reform Committee’s recommendation and politely (because the president deserves our respect) ask him to reconsider the decision of the Federal Executive Committee to alter these recommendations. The president can be reached by mail at the following address;

H.E Umaru Musa Yar’adua,

President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces,

Federal Republic of Nigeria

Aso Rock Presidential Villa, Three Arms Zone, Abuja FCT.

PU