Why on earth are Jonathan’s appointees sitting pretty as head of critical agencies of state when he knew that their track record during the campaigns and presumed voting pattern during the election point unerringly to the fact that they neither believe in his candidacy nor his policies?
In the first of my quartet of articles captioned: ‘Periscoping The Ideal Presidential Candidate For The APC’ through which I vigorously campaigned for the candidature of contestant Mohammadu Buhari as the party’s best foot forward, I asked interested Nigerians to weigh in with their own preferences. One of the earliest responders was a young man, Biodun, a graduate of Insurance Studies from the University of Lagos. He had nothing but the best words for contestant Buhari. However, he wrote me again this past week, almost a changed man, especially when news broke about how untidy President Buhari’s first budget had turned. He wrote:
“President Muhammadu Buhari’s inability so far to look the greedy Nigerian politicians in the eye and failure to remove their itchy hands from the Nigerian treasury will most likely be his albatross; one to make his presidency as uneventful as those of other presidents before him. Nearly all of us that laboured to have him elected had infectious enthusiasm about his coming to power, believing that the excessive perks politicians vote themselves annually would end through appropriate and prompt constitutional amendment at the instance of the executive.
Nine months after, President Buhari has still chosen to look the other way. The huge crowds that turned up at his iconic political rallies all over the country have turned out the losers as the salaries and perks of these legislators remain as outrageous as ever with constituency allowances without constituency offices, unending purchases of exotic cars in the name of committee work, unearned severance packages for, among others, ex-governors who already got paid gratuities as well as life pensions with cars every two years, a house in any choice part of Nigeria etc.
For how long will President Buhari look askance? That is not to mention immunity and billions of security vote for governors when insecurity is one of our greatest problems in Nigeria. Local government autonomy too appears not to be any issue President Buhari wants to bother himself about, perhaps because he still won’t look the governors and their godfathers in the face. (The columnist, like the late Uncle Bola Ige, believes that Local Government issues should be a complete state matter with no interference, whatever, from the federal) The other day, Buhari complained that he has his reservations about Nigerian courts’ willingness to join him to make Nigeria a difficult place for corruption to thrive and promptly got a response from the Punch newspaper, counselling him to arrest and prosecute corrupt judges, siting examples from other countries.
The truth is that he takes too long to act on anything. He is a well loved president, perhaps more than any other president Nigeria has had, but President Buhari is failing to live up to how the huge crowds of Nigerians that attended his political rallies want him to act. Maybe as a reminder to the president, Nigerians want him to do the following: remove the clause for 36 ministers from the constitution, grant local government autonomy, remove immunity and severance pay for politicians (and considerably reduce the pay for ex presidents and vice). The president should get involved in the processes of constitutional amendment and get all these done quickly for the good of. Nigeria. All these outrageous politicians’ perks should end. Civil servants must take a minimum 30 per cent pay cut and politicians 80 per cent, while all sorts of pensions for politicians are abolished. Public office is a privilege, not a right. Nobody should fleece Nigeria in the name of being elected to public office. Concerning this shambolic 2016 budget, the least said the better.”
And so ended the young man’s jeremiad.
Unlike the colony of naysayers who are still bellyaching over President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s ouster, and therefore criticising the incumbent, the furore over President Buhari’s completely manipulated 2016 budget is a massive testimony to the efficacy as well as the effectiveness of his change mantra. This certainly is not the first time budgets in Nigeria are mercilessly padded and under any of the past PDP presidents of those 16 years of locust, the regime of the habitual letter writer inclusive, this same budget, warts and all, would have been passed with aplomb. Padding Nigerian budgets has always been the product of an evil collusion between members of the National Assembly committees and our evil, sorry civil servants, especially the permanent secretaries and the Budget Office but by far worse are the Director-Generals of MDAs. These loots are then creatively creamed off during the legislators’ meaningless, so-called oversight functions. As you read this, only a miniscule number of our National Assembly members would be worth less than a billion naira in net worth. Yet they make the most noise, faking integrity.
Two things must have happened in the instant case. The overriding ambition of the current leadership of the National Assembly which led them to mess up their party leadership, had resulted in a nebulous National Assembly where both the Senate President and his House counterpart as well as their PDP Deputy Senate President – an anomaly of the first order – as distinct from the arm of government they represent – behave like they are above their political party, the APC. In the circumstance, only a fool will wager that they would, on any or on all issues, buy into Buhari’s agenda. Were this not a self-inflicted problem, one should have been moved to pity the APC which having sown the wind in many instances, would sure come to reap the whirl wind, the Kogi State self-immolation being a good example.
Since the party is that confused in the National Assembly, a wounded PDP whose debauchery over the past 16 years, but especially in the last six years of President Jonathan is being daily exhumed, though complicit in the usual yearly budget padding, must have been waiting to show to Nigerians that Buhari though might be a good corruption fighter, he is certainly not adept at administering the country.
The idea is to make him look like a giant with clay feet. You can hardly ever best their choice of the budget to attempt to desecrate a man so highly admired at home and internationally: a man US Secretary of State, John Kerry, would do anything to praise to high heavens at an in international forum as the world recently saw less than a month ago at the World Economic Forum.
Unfortunately, however, there is a sense in which the president brought this on himself. Why on earth are Jonathan’s appointees sitting pretty as head of critical agencies of state when he knew that their track record during the campaigns and presumed voting pattern during the election point unerringly to the fact that they neither believe in his candidacy nor his policies? No, as bona fide Nigerians, nobody is suggesting that they should be made to lose their jobs, but for Christ’s sake why were many of these people not moved to less sensitive posts? No Nigerian, abreast of what happened under President Jonathan, can fake any ignorance of how the duo of the Finance Minister and the Secretary to the Government of the Federation ensured that not less than 75 per cent of the heads of the regulatory agencies came from their part/s of the country. Since these persons then ran their posts as they deemed, what would they not do to open up Buhari as worse than Jonathan?
As things stand, it is good the president has ordered an inquiry into the budget disaster but it has got to be a proper one. He must assign Nigerians of integrity to do this yeoman’s national service and whoever is found culpable must be tried for economic sabotage. The in-house old budget mafia must have leveraged on the newness to the system of both the finance minister, who they have been using their huge international connections to denigrate, as well as the budget minister, both of who Nigerians, fortunately, know to have performed very well at their past desks.
In conclusion, if the Secretary to the Government of the Federation – not Head of Service – wants President Buhari to succeed, he must persuade the President to empanel a committee of civil service veterans on which all the geo- political zones are represented but peopled only by the likes of civil servants of impeccable integrity like Dr Goke Adegoroye and Dr Tunji Olaopa. These are the ones I know and trust, imbued as they are, with the Pa Simeon Adebo administrative DNA. There must be such men all over the country. Look for them to help this government.
NATION
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