When the incredible issue of a missing/
counterfeited 2016 budget arose some weeks
ago, I was expecting to hear from the APC that
Goodluck Jonathan was to blame. Surprisingly,
that did not happen. Instead, blame was traded
between the presidency and the national
assembly, seemingly forgetting that both organs
of government are now controlled by the same
APC.
The stock-in-trade of this government is to
blame Goodluck Jonathan for everything. If there
is petrol shortage: Jonathan is to blame. If there
are power cuts, Jonathan is to blame. If there
Boko Haram killings, Jonathan is to blame.
This government has apparently not yet heard
the aphorism that: “the buck stops with the
president.” Nine months down the road from his
inauguration, the president continues to pass the
buck to Goodluck Jonathan. Then came the
defining issue of the 2016 budget.
419 budget
Mr. President did not just send the budget to the
National Assembly, he presented it himself with
great fanfare and bells and whistles. This was
supposed to be his signature proposal. With
seven months squandered ostensibly trying to
get a cabinet of saints and angels who turned
out to be the same old same old, many with
corruption allegations hanging over their heads;
the budget was expected to provide redemption
for the government.
It would provide a bold new start to the
government’s much-heralded “change” with a N6
trillion “zero-based” proposal that would defy
Nigeria’s austere economic circumstances, and
put us firmly on the launch-pad to economic
recovery and diversification.
This makes it all the more perplexing that the
2016 budget has turned out to be the biggest
blunder of this government in a catalogue of
blunders that has now come to define it. I am
still waiting for those who voted for APC to
admit they blundered royally. In their blunder,
they have given us a government that keeps
going from one blunder to another.
Denying the budget
We did not need Olisa Metuh, the opposition
spokesman conveniently padlocked by the EFCC,
to expose the blunders in the 2016 budget
proposals. Different government spokesmen have
competed to distance themselves from it as
much as possible. Charles Dafe, Director of
Information, Ministry of National Planning,
blamed the blunders in the budget on the
government’s insufficient knowledge of the zero-
based budgeting. Who is to be held responsible
for this ignorance? Surprisingly, Dafe forgot to
mention Goodluck Jonathan.
Isaac Adewole, the Minister of Heath, also forgot
to blame Goodluck Jonathan. Instead, he
maintained: “rats invaded Nigeria Budget
documents and smuggled in foreign items.” You
may well ask who was supposed to buy rat
poison. Did Goodluck Jonathan forget to hand it
over on his departure?
Lai Mohammed, the past-master at blaming
Goodluck Jonathan for everything, could not
blame Jonathan for once. The man who
promised to hold 365 carnivals in 365 days in
2016, and was awarded a budget allocation
bigger than the Ministry of Agriculture, openly
disowned the government’s “budget of change.”
Apparently, someone had gone ahead to change
a number of the items in it; much in the spirit of
the APC’s highfalutin change mantra. Among
them, the N5 million proposed for buying
computers for the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)
and the Film and Video Censors Board
mysteriously became N398 million.
The Ministry of Education was also unable to
scapegoat Goodluck Jonathan. Instead, a
fictitious N10 billion that showed up in its figures
was attributed to a “typographical error.” That
just might qualify as one of the most expensive
typos in the history of Nigeria. But how can N10
billion be a typo when it should not even be there
at all? Was it N1 billion they were trying to put
that mistakenly became N10 billion? Or was it
N10 million? What difference does it make when
no one can even tell us what the money is
meant for?
Outright fraud
How come a significant amount of these so-
called errors have to do with the presidency
itself? What error accounts for the N3.8 billion
allocated for capital projects at the State House
Clinic meant for the president, vice-president and
their families alone; compared to the N2.6 billion
allocated for all the 17 government teaching
hospitals nationwide. How come the amount
budgeted for feeding the president is more than
sufficient to feed entire villages for years?
There is really no point in itemising the bogus
anomalies in the budget because they are just
too many. But a few examples should exemplify
just how ludicrous they are. In the president’s
so-called budget for change, N259 million is
allocated for buying tyres, batteries, fuses and
other whatnots for the cars in the presidency.
N27 million is allocated for buying c-caution
signs, fire-extinguishers and towing-ropes.
Spurious sums in excess of N100 billion are
included repetitively. Bogus costing of N53.7
million is repeated 52 times; while those
amounting to N37.8 million appear over 369
times. In some cases, the purchase of the same
vehicles, computers and furniture are replicated
24 times to the tune of N46 billion. N795 million
is set aside just to update the website of one
ministry, putting to shame the amount alleged to
have been used for Babatunde Fashola’s
infamous website while he was governor of
Lagos State.
In short, Buhari took five months to choose
ministers. He had eight months to prepare a
budget. Nevertheless, he ended up by presenting
one of the most bogus and fraudulent budgets
Nigerians have ever seen. That is the change we
can surely do without.
Forex market
Other changes have only entrapped law-abiding
Nigerians. The daughter of a friend of mine, C.Y.
Ogunseye, was getting married in the United
States. He travelled abroad expecting to make
use of his Nigerian credit card. After he got to
Chicago, Buhari made changes that pulled the
rug from under his feet. His credit card had
become invalid, to all intents and purposes.
Clearly, no one in the presidency put a human
face to the changes they made, which might
have made them ease Nigerians into the new
policy so that people like C.Y. already abroad
are not caught in the lurch.
Another friend of mine, Pamela Mommah, has a
daughter in university in Belgium. Since Buhari
came in, it has become near-impossible to pay
her school-fees. Now we are told overseas
school-fees have been placed on the CBN’s
foreign-exchange prohibitive list. The monies for
them will now have to be sourced from the
parallel market. The president had promised to
make the naira equal to the dollar while asking
for our votes. Now that he is president, the naira
is in free fall. It has depreciated by over 50
percent since the inception of his presidency –
from N225 to N335 to the dollar.
The same president who recently went outside
the country on a five-day sabbatical which
possibly included a medical check-up, has also
included buying foreign-exchange officially for
overseas medical treatment on the prohibitive
list.
As if these blunders were not enough, the vice-
chancellors in 12 of the universities established
by Goodluck Jonathan were summarily dismissed
by the government, replaced by new government
appointees. This has become another example of
the government becoming a law unto itself.
Vice-chancellors are tenured. That means they
cannot be removed before the expiration of their
term without a prima facie case of incompetence
or dereliction of duty, and even then only on the
recommendation of the board of the university’s
governing council. But the government not only
sacked the VCs without board approval, it sacked
the boards before sacking the VCs.
Having done this, it then replaced the VCs in a
manner completely contemptuous yet again of
Nigeria’s federal structure. Four out of the
twelve newly-appointed VCs are from Kano
University alone; an action clearly in violation of
Nigeria’s federal character principle.
Corruption baton-change
Since the inception of the Buhari administration,
all we have been hearing is corruption,
corruption, corruption. The president insisted he
would kill corruption before it killed Nigeria.
Therefore, we all expected the government to
come up with steps designed to kill corruption;
something no nation on earth has ever done
before. However, instead of even attempting to
kill corruption, the government has merely been
determined to kill the PDP.
So what is the state of corruption in Nigeria
today? By all account, it is hale and hearty,
thank you very much. All that has happened is
that the baton of corruption has been passed
from the PDP to the APC. One example here
should suffice.
A lot of song and dance has been made by the
government since its inception of cleaning up the
NNPC. The former petroleum minister, Diezani
Allison-Madueke, has been excoriated to the
position of “public enemy number one.” The
president has refused to appoint a Minister of
Petroleum Resources, deciding to oversee that
portfolio himself and, thereby, keep a tight rein
on the oil industry. But he has given us a
Minister of State for Petroleum Resources in the
person of Ibe Kachikwu.
So is corruption now being choked to death in
the Nigerian oil industry? If reports are to be
believed, that is far from the case. According to
Bako Abdullahi Yelwa, a former official of the
Kaduna chapter of the Independent Petroleum
Products Marketers Association of Nigeria
(IPMAN), the change that has happened is
merely that a new cabal of thieves and robbers
are now controlling the NNPC and its affiliate,
the Petroleum Products Marketing Company
(PPMC).
Yelwa maintains this is responsible for the never-
ending cycle of fuel scarcity that remains
prevalent all around the country. The new cabal
is said to insist on extorting money before
issuing the allocation of petroleum products.
Yelwa insists the kerosene allocations promised
IPMAN members have been diverted to the
“relations, friends and cronies” of the Minister of
State for Petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu.
He said, “I challenge anybody to ask any
marketer if they have gotten allocations. PPMC
staff are frustrating independent marketers. Why
will they ask for a percentage of our profit before
giving us allocation? And when we refuse, they
frustrate the process of getting our allocation.
They only give product allocation to marketers
that have given them a share of their profit
upfront.”
The president needs to address the issues raised
here expeditiously. Since he is now the de facto
Minister of Petroleum Resources, one need
hardly point out that these kinds of sharp
practices, nine months after his election, cannot
continue to be attributed to Goodluck Jonathan.
Mr. President, the buck now stops with you.