This is one of such times that I really appreciate Opalaba. He sat and walked with elders and has been instrumental to my learning a bit of their wisdom. When he once told me of his wish to be hearing impaired even for a season, I thought that he was crazy. Then he repeated the wish, suggesting that what prevents us from auditory impairment also prevents us from a happy state of mind. How true!
In the last few days, I just wish I had no ears. The cacophony of lousy news that have passed through my ear canal have been dangerously depressing.
Take the fiasco that has been the lot of Budget 2016. First, it was lost and found. That never got explained. Then it was padded and unpadded. By whom and for what? We were not told. Then it was passed. And we praised the Almighty in anticipation of the goodies that will flow. Then in his wisdom, PMB decided to verify if it was a fake, the proverbial oja okunkun or deal of darkness. And behold, he found plenty to worry his honest soul.
The accusation and counter-accusation followed. Was the Lagos-Calabar rail project there originally? Was it surreptitiously added? Was it passed by the Land Transport Committee? etc. And we got a house of senators divided against itself.
The committee that vetted and passed the rail project provision confirmed that it did. However, the Appropriation Committees in their wisdom removed it. Why? Well, if it wasn’t in the main budget, then it must have been a padding. Therefore, it cannot be included. It may also just be that the committees resented not being directly informed or involved by the minister. Anyway, they axed the rail project.
But there is more to vex the ears and this one is capable of turning a simple headache into a migraine attack. Senate President is charged with violating the provisions of the Code of Conduct Bureau. He protested and initially refused to appear. When he finally did, he fought hard to stall the proceedings. He contested the legality of the body. It wasn’t a court, he claimed. The Supreme Court ruled that it was. Then Senator Saraki approached the Federal High Court with a plea to find the CCT incompetent because of its composition and the investigation of its chairman by EFCC. The assigned judge was about to deliver his judgment but chickened out because of media outcry accusing him of corruption and favouritism.
The case went on with lurid revelations about Saraki’s fat bank accounts, including hefty daily lodgments. The nation also got to know how he rakes in a monthly pension of N1.2 million from Kwara State even while he was earning regular income as senator.
In the middle of the revelations at the trial, another bombshell hit the country by way of Panama Papers, a leaked information about offshore shell companies owned by the rich and famous worldwide. Saraki was featured prominently as allegedly having companies on British Virgin Island fronted by his wife. A prime minister of Iceland who was outed in the same expose resigned immediately from office. Saraki vowed not to resign just because of his ongoing trial at CCT. And since he denied that the Panama Paper leakage had anything to do with him, he hasn’t considered that as a ground for resignation.
Meanwhile, the judge who had recused himself from Saraki’s case at the Federal High Court has, at the instance of Saraki, been ordered by the Chief Judge to deliver his judgment. The order was strange. But nothing is normal about what we have witnessed since the beginning of the 8th National Assembly under Chairman Saraki.
One of the strangest is the new Senate effort to amend the CCB/CCT law which places the bodies under the SGF. Whatever the merit of the move, the timing is injuriously self-regarding. The Supreme Court had ruled against Saraki that CCT is a court of law. Taking advantage of that ruling, Saraki and his loyalists in the Senate have initiated an amendment to the law seeking to move the CCT out of the SGF’s office and to place it under the judiciary. Should the amendment succeed, how does it affect the ongoing trial? Needless to add, the timing is just as suspect as the timing of the invitation of the former Chairman of EFCC before Senate shortly after Saraki’s wife was invited by the EFCC last year.
The mother of all headaches is the state of the economy and the groaning of the masses. We know that PMB inherited a complete rot. It’s his unfortunate lot as it happened back in 1984. And we know that with this kind of mess, it takes time for a nation to turn the corner.
The US economy was in the tanks in 2008 as Obama campaigned for the presidency. And when Obama won, he had to battle the odds for his entire first term. It’s only in his second term that the situation started to change. That is in a country with all the endowments—material, intellectual, infrastructural and political, compared to Nigeria with all the deficits. It is important, however, to get right the medication that the disease needs so that we don’t worsen the ailment.
When SGF declared recently that the Federal Government borrows an average of N600 billion monthly to pay the salary of its workforce, I saw my blood pressure run out the window. For I had thought that salary payment issue was a state malady. When I read that my state governor had just reached an agreement with labour to dedicate a hundred per cent of federal allocation to salary payment, I shuddered at what this means for the development of state which I am aware he cares so much about.
There is a structural problem. A state or a nation cannot devote 60-90 per cent of its resources to salary and allowances and expect to develop. If productivity is high, we may expect that the salary going out will bring in much more dividends. But when there is disenchantment and hunger occasioned by non-payment of salaries due to scarce resources, productivity cannot be anything but low.
The private sector, which should be the driver of economic development and therefore the major employer of labour, is unable to play this role because we have for long neglected the creation of the conditions for the private sector to do that. We have neglected infrastructure. When the money was flowing like a river in the rainy season, we squandered the opportunity.
No less culpable is the indiscipline that characterises the hiring of civil servants. When I marvelled at the high percentage of resources going to salary payment and wondered aloud how it was possible that states don’t cut their coats according to their clothes, my friend who is familiar with the unenviable career of the rot gave me a tutorial.
“It’s all politics”, he declared. “In the matter of appointment and dismissal of permanent secretaries, politicians hardly pay attention to the monetary implications. But if you retire a Permanent Secretary, you are bound by law to pay his salary till the end of his life. Now, you will hire a replacement, and that one will also earn his or her salary even if your successor retires him or her. Add to this the many cases of politically-motivated employment of junior and middle level officers into the system.”
Does it matter that expending the entire resources of a state or the nation on less than 10 per cent of the population is morally outrageous and economically imprudent?
NATION
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