On the highway to infamy, shame and conscience are two bumps you do
not expect to see. Actually, there are no bumps at all. It’s usually a
smooth ride propelled by impunity and an imperial feeling of
invincibility. It was from the centre of that highway that Diezani
Allison-Madueke, Nigeria’s petroleum minister, chided citizens, last
week, for their lack of understanding. She wondered why it was difficult
for people to simply comprehend how corruption makes service delivery
easy and frictionless.
Descending from the chambers of their Federal Executive Council (FEC) – by the way the FEC has since last two years assumed the
position of Nigeria’s
highest
corruption appropriation and shielding body, only awarding contracts
for majorly frivolous projects that hardly ever get completed – meeting
on Wednesday, Madueke sauntered into the presidential villa’s press
corner and thundered to awaiting journalists; “We cannot eat our cakes
and have it [sic]. We cannot keep calling out for transparency and
accountability and pointing at corruption if we are not prepared to bear
some of the hardship that will obviously come when you are trying to
clean up a sector.”
But for my decision to not make this piece a long one, I would have
been interested in knowing where Mrs Diezani schooled. I would have
loved to know who taught her the rule of concord in English language, so
as to understand the elegance of referring to ‘cakes’ as ‘it’. But she
already earned my pardon even before the howler. She doesn’t have a PhD.
And we know that it is tough for even those with PhDs (even if from the
academia) to make coordinated and grammatically correct sentences in
this regime. Dullness could be infectious. I’ve heard that from experts.
Back to her admonition. Those words aren’t difficult to understand.
She said we ate our cakes the day we dared call for fiscal
responsibility and transparency in the management of our oil, and so
should not be that stupid to expect to have the same cakes back since
they are trying to become fiscally responsible and transparent in the
oil sector. Diezani implied that we should have known that lack of
corruption and service delivery are mutually exclusive. Two things are
mutually exclusive if they cannot happen at the same time. Diezani
explained to Nigerians that there cannot be fuel if we do not allow
corruption to remain. It is corruption that makes fuel available, and
now that we have forced their hands into tightening the noose on oil
racketeers, it is irresponsible of us to expect that there’ll be
availability of fuel. So, if you want fuel, advocate for corruption.
Full stop.
Now that is a minister in Nigeria; actually, a high ranking one. Why
was she that bold to spew those lines of insult to a nation that has
daily been insulted by her rulers? It is because she appreciates the
premium the current administration she serves places on corrupt
officers: they are protected like a hen protects its eggs. She
understands that she is not supposed to remain a minister by now, in
saner climes, that is. She should have long been explaining to the jury
how a budgetary provision of N240b for fuel subsidy metamorphosed into
trillions of naira under her watch. Since January this year, a consensus
had long coalesced on the decency of sacking Diezani and prosecuting
her for her role in the fleecing of Nigerians as the petroleum minister.
On a daily basis, the call for her sack had intensified. But the man
who appointed her, Nigeria’s
cheerleader
of the corrupt, has feigned ignorance of the need for Diezani’s sack
and prosecution. She has remained, and her continuous stay has
emboldened her to ridicule us even
further.
Consider how she constituted the Nuhu Ribadu-led Task Force and then
secretly compromised two leading members of the committee few weeks
later with appointments into the board of the NNPC without giving a hoot
about what conflict of interest means. As you would expect, the two men
punctured the committee’s
report,
right in front of the president, and declared that the recommendations
of the Task Force were plain ‘unimplementable’ simply because the
processes that led to the recommendations – not the recommendations
themselves – weren’t satisfactory to them. It did not even matter that
Mr
Steve Orosanye, the leader of the team to rubbish the report, was not attending committee sittings. The melodrama worked out as planned, and a credible report
which, by the way, indicted Diezani herself, was pooh-poohed by an
administration that believes in the almighty power of corruption in
hitch-free service delivery. But even before Ribadu’s report, Diezani and
the industry
players under her watch had been indicted by every probe panel, or
audit firm, that looked at the oil industry books, for sleaze, sharp
practices and opaqueness in operations. That she is still a minister
today justifies her belief in the wonders of corruption and its ability
to get things done – faster – in 2012 Nigeria.
It is therefore understandable why the federal government dismissed the recent rating of Nigeria by
Transparency International
(TI) as the 35th most corrupt nation as untrue. They discussed and
agreed in their FEC meeting – where protection for corruption and the
corrupt must be topping their weekly agenda – that the rating by TI was
not a ‘true reflection’ of their regime’s ‘efforts’ at fighting
corruption.
The
conveyor of the message,
Labaran Maku, who mistakes the Information ministry he heads for the
lying arm of a joke of a government, said the TI rating, as well as a
recent poll by Gallup that placed Mr Jonathan’s regime as the world’s
second most corrupt, were products of interactions with Nigerians and
synopsis of ‘negative media reports’.
It is difficult to understand, as much as the members of FEC do, the
pivotal role corruption plays in the prompt availability of goods and
services in a society and not frown at whoever condemns it. This present
administration has hands-on experience in the goodness of corruption,
that’s why they don’t even think it should be demonized as much as
detractors and opposition do.
But in a bid to create the impression of a people on the same page with
the rest
of the world, they have joined in pretending that corruption is equally
evil, but not until they argue out how corrupt the world sees them to
be. For the FEC, Nigeria should have been declared to be
corruption-free, going by the ‘efforts’ they are making in the ‘fight’
against the monster. Remember that the president had openly lied to us
during a statewide broadcast that TI had ranked Nigeria immediately
after the United States amongst the countries that demonstrate
indubitable resolve in the fight against corruption. Such are the kind
of stories the regime wants to hear: concocted lies and half-truths.
They seek flattering statistics, but daily fertilize corruption which is
alien to impressive human development index anywhere in the world.
I never knew that it could be possible for a meeting of over 50 men and
women to not have even one soul who still has conscience. Yes, I
understand the power of free mega
money
– the type that comes with just being a Nigerian government official,
but I never imagined it could so freeze up people’s humanity to the
height of denying every verifiable fact around them.
Here’s a government that budgeted N240b for one year for fuel subsidy
(based on prevailing trend of subsidy spending in the previous years),
and then expended over a trillion naira on the same item before nine
months without blinking an eyelid. When they sensed the inevitability of
bankruptcy at such stupid spending rates, they did not bother to probe
the subsidy regime or question the relevant agencies. They simply
understood what happened, and then chose to push their irresponsibility
to the already impoverished masses through
fuel tax.
Nigerians refused vehemently and showed visible willingness to bring
down their rogue regime. It was at that point that the House of
Representatives quickly commenced a probe of the subsidy regime. Yet as
that was going on, the government used the president’s closest oil
dealer, Femi Otedola, to rubbish whatever would be the report of that
probe. Otedola set up and bribed Farouk Lawan, the Chairman of the House
Committee handling the probe. As we talk, Otedola is seen everywhere
around the president. He hasn’t been prosecuted for bribery. He hasn’t
been prosecuted for economic sabotage. But Jonathan’s government’s
claim to fighting corruption is the prosecution of subsidy fraudsters.
So the question is: when did this government begin their prosecution of
the subsidy scammers? After we botched their plans to cover up the fraud
through fuel tax? Why didn’t they prosecute them before our anti-subsidy removal protests?
And when you hear prosecution, you almost want to believe it is the
first time the government is trying to prosecute people. We know their
second strategy of growing their pet-monster. My bet is that this
government will bungle the fuel subsidy cases to create room for judges
to quash them on technicalities. We’ve seen all that before.
It is laughable to hear the government, through Mr Maku, blame the
media for the TI ratings. This is a government that has presided over
the highest cases of treasury looting since the birth of this country.
Punch Newspaper helped us out with a clear summation of how much has
been stolen under the watch of Mr Jonathan’s government: N5 trillion
naira. That is a whole annual budget! To be clear, I think the
Transparency International rating for Nigeria was too fair. I can’t
imagine any other country in the world with more criminally-wired public
servants. That country must be hell, the abode of Lucifer himself.
But I do perfectly understand why it is possible that a government
could be this bad. Their destination, infamy, especially in African
rulership, has a reward in excess money that unborn generations cannot
exhaust. This reward, like a magnet, sits at the end of the highway,
waiting patiently. From there, it pulls their vehicle, already racing at
high speed, to that realm where petro-dollars matter more than the
millions of Nigerians who die before 50 because no life-sustaining
social welfare is in place and functional.
It is such realization, that fame isn’t worth as much as the dollars of
infamy, that fuels the arrogance of members this government. And it is
that financial reward that we must target if we are serious about
putting a halt to the sustained and determined effort by a few men and
women of dead conscience to convert Nigeria’s public wealth to private
cash.
ekekeee
In
November, Mr. Femi Badejo, who works with one of the Access Bank
branches in Lagos and his security guard, Joshua Moses, were victims of
trigger happy policemen. They had responded to a distress call, after
armed robbers raided the banker’s home in Ikota, but ended up shooting
at him.
