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DEBO ADENIRAN
The Humanity Centre: 610, Lagos-Abeokuta
Expressway, Ijaye Bus stop,
Ijaye-Ojokoro.
P.O. Box 1592, Agege, Lagos, Nigeria.
Tel: 01-4736534, 08023226276,
08037194969
www.thehumanitycentre.org
E-mail: cacolc@yahoo.com, dadnig@yahoo.com
Man created His own God, made His own
World, invented His own Trouble
NIGERIA: GOOD BUSINESS, BAD MANAGERS
-Debo Adeniran
Nigeria has never been lucky to have
good leaders even when it has all the
human and material potentialities to be
one of the greatest nations in the
world. Like bad managers of good
business, bad leaders have succeeded in
ruining good fortunes that Nigeria is
naturally endowed with. Mal governance
of a people is Akin to mismanagement of
a business. It leads to low capacity
utilization, inadequate supervision and
ineffective facility maintenance which
often give room to higher level
corruption. Corruption then dwindles
capital impute which in turn a leader to
bankruptcy.
Politics and Governance of Rights
Violation
The past ten years of civilian
governance had been years of dashed
hopes, truncated dreams, distorted
vision and misdirected aspiration for
Nigerians. All the relief that came our
way with the sudden death of the then
despotic head of state, Gen. Sanni
Abacha with his tyranny was to be
short-lived. Even when it aided the
quick return of the government to
civilians by the succeeding regime of
General Abdusalami Abubakar we were only
almost worse off than hitherto. The
relief was to explode on our faces as
soon as the attempt to elect civilian
leaders turned a democratic sham.
What took place as general election was
and continue as orchestrated selection
of cronies of the then outgoing military
cabals through monumental electoral
manipulation to suit the wishes of the
wealthy and the wicked. Although a
couple of the electoral atrocities were
reversed through courageous judicial
pronouncements, perpetrators are not
deterred. Some of them become even more
brazen in the art of bare-faced mandate
robbery. Cases of Ido-Osi, Ekiti state
electoral abracadabra where Resident
Electoral Commissioner was publicly
intimidated to work against her
conscience; and Osun state where victims
of the robbery are being threatened and
blackmailed with criminal frame-up in
phony bomb throwing, are examples that
will not go in a hurry. Even when the
President courageously admitted openly
that the election that brought him to
power was flawed and set up a Panel to
reform the country’s electoral process,
his minders
would not want the report of the
panel to see the light of the day in its
originality because it does not favour
the machinery of their electoral
manipulation.
Because the election that produced the
new leaders did not count on the ballots
cast but process manipulation, the
resultant government does not recognize
the
powers of the people to control
them. To compensate security agencies
for allowing themselves
to be
used against the will of the
people, police and military bosses were
allowed to convert emolument of their
junior ones to personal use. Victims of
this injustice who protested the
atrocity were either dismissed from the
service or sentenced to life
imprisonments after a kangaroo
orderly-room trial to justify the
miscarriage of justice meted out on the
unfortunate junior security personnel.
This however instigated the serving
junior security personnel against the
people they are meant to protect. They
rob, rape and or open fire on them with
the slightest provocation.
Legistlooting
The principle of Separation of Powers
which engenders checks and balances in a
presidential democracy has been thrown
overboard in Nigeria. Legislators take
bribes to pass Appropriation Bills,
accepts gratifications and share stolen
unspent budget from the executive arms
over which they are expected to perform
oversight functions. They even smuggle
budget items into Appropriation Bills to
satisfy their gluttonous appetite for
riches.
Justice Betrayed
Judiciary that would have served as the
last bastion of hope has compromised its
sanctity. They, for whatever reasons,
sometimes allow themselves to be used
against the will and interest of the
people. It happened in the Justice
Thomas Naron-led first Electoral
Petition Tribunal in Osun State and the
case of Rivers State where the
ex-governor suspected to have helped
himself to the public till was given
perpetual injunction against arrest and
investigation by any security agency. A
magistrate’s court remanded 24 CACOL
activists twice for a total of five
weeks for protesting, with banners and
placards, judicial corruption in Osun
state.
Because of the pervasive injustice in
Nigeria, people were treated with less
dignity than slaves, Odi and Zakibiam
people and their properties were razed,
with military might; OPC, Bakassi Boys
and other self-determination activists
were mowed down while many political
opposition figures were assassinated by
suspicious elements and in suspicious
circumstances that has to do with the
new cult of neo-military ruling elites.
Up till now this bare-faced crime is
getting worse while internecine
engineered by political considerations
become the order of the day. Up till the
time of writing this piece, genocide is
being carried by the Nigerian military
out in the Niger-Delta region against
militant youths who are fighting to
protect their patrimony. As a ploy to
placate angry bereaved family and
compatriots after each unwarranted
attack government is usually quick at
setting up panel of enquiry to
investigate the pogroms and selective
murders. All of such panels usually turn
out to be phony as none of their
enquiries has ever brought any succour
to anyone or anyone to book till date as
if the murderers were ghosts.
Petroleum and Energy Crisis
Before the coming of the present
civilian dispensation, Nigeria has four
refineries that were producing at almost
50 percent capacity on average in the
days of military. This has dwindled to
nothing, meaning zero per cent within
the past ten years thus raising prices
of petroleum products to more than 900%.
Nigerians were at the mercy of the
exploiters of its natural oil and gas
for the volume of their exploitation in
products and cash. We have to import
finished products and their by products
at exorbitant costs to feed our
factories. Meanwhile most industries and
factories that depended on petroleum and
its by products could not survive the
imput starvation had to out rightly
close down their production lines and
either resorted to importing goods they
used to produce or moved out of the
country altogether.
Power of Darkness
Before the advent of the present
republic the power generated by then
National Electric Power Authority (NEPA),
re-branded Power Holding Company of
Nigeria (PHCN), came close to 4000MW.
The Obasanjo’s regime promised to up it
to about 10,000MW. This was not to be,
despite the whooping sixteen billion
dollars expended on supplementary
National Integrated Power Project
between 2004 and 2007. Contracts were
fraudulently awarded full contract sums
were paid upfront to fraudulent firms
with illegal, fictitious and
questionable qualifications and
standing. What the regime had to show
for it is power degeneracy to less than
3000MW. All of the workplaces and homes
had to contend with high cost of fuel to
run power generators or inconveniences
of power cut. This has turned many
able-bodied young men and women to
criminal of varying descriptions who are
over filling various prisons or making
living scary, and dying cheaper in
Nigeria.
Education for Auction
Maybe things would have been better if
we had good educational system.
Curriculum implementation in all
institutions of formal learning had
never been so degenerate in the history
of Nigeria. Public education system had
been killed to pave way for private ones
to profiteer. Opportunistic investors in
the education sector moved from Nursery,
Primary and Secondary Schools into
establishing tertiary institutions.
Government actors see investing in
Universities as a veritable means to
launder ill-gotten wealth from
government coffers into the system
without concern for the quality of minds
they churn out. All levels of public
institutions are in various state of
disrepair: No libraries, no
laboratories, no workshops, no
equipment, no materials, and no
motivated personnel. Their highly
expensive private counter parts are only
embellished with state-of-art facilities
and other wherewithal but lacking
in-depth quality curricular
implementation. Others are substandard
in forms and function; with inadequacies
in everything that could qualify any
contraption as a school. Their products
are like mechanically driven technicians
lacking in versatility; with little or
no intuitive, imaginative and creative
minds. They therefore become
robotically-gullible, hypnotically
dogmatic and pathologically stupid. This
is why they bank only on inherited or
fraudulently scured platform to operate
such as family business, stolen public
institutions or politics.
Most products of decrepit public
institutions find it impossible to
compete favourably with those who had
sound educational background from
well-equipped and facilitated
institutions. The certificates they
wield worth less than the paper that
bear them. Bearers of such certificates
are referred to as educated illiterates.
They are unemployable and the
socio-political and economic environment
does not favour their taking solace in
creating jobs for themselves. They form
the army of idle-handed and therefore
turn themselves over, either as cheap
labour to slave drivers who use them as
machines or unscrupulous politicians as
devil’s workshop used as thugs,
assassins or terrorists. This state of
affairs has also escalated within the
past ten years. It has also dipped
security of lives and properties deeper
in most urban centres and highways.
Health of Death
Quality health care delivery most often
exists only on papers. The available
inadequate hospitals create more deaths
than health. Life-caring machine that
lack adequate, proper and competent
handling churn out foul results. This
elicits wrong treatment and ultimately
leads to compounded ailment which
eventual results in untimely death.
Useless machines and expired drugs are
imported by incompetent business
concerns and badly motivated medical
personnel administer them without
necessary checks and precautions. A case
in view is that of a daughter of the
former president who disguised with her
grandmother’s name to collude with an
Austrian firm to rape Nigerian’s health
care system to the tune of about
N27billion in useless contracts. Quality
innocent lives are in the wake lost in
droves to preventable diseases like
ignorance, stupidity and poverty.
Transportation to Eternity
Transportation of all types at all
levels and varieties pose grave danger
to lives and properties in Nigeria.
Disrepair transportation facilities such
as roads, airports and water ways have
become dilapidated and pose death trap
to users. More human lives were wasted
within the last ten years in avoidable,
road and sea accidents than it happened
in all the military regimes put
together. Most of funds voted for the
fixing of equipments and facilities that
could have prevented such disasters
ended up in private pockets.
Corruption Pandemic
This brings us to the issue of
corruption that has become pandemic in
Nigeria. At the advent of the present
republic Nigerians were given the hope
that the rate at which corruption were
perpetrated in public and private
national lives would be drastically
reduced. The hope was further raised
with the establishment of ICPC in 2000
and EFCC in 2004. The enthusiasm started
to wane with the lack lustre performance
of ICPC but was rekindled with EFCC that
was able to achieve some superlative
feats while the feast lasted. But things
changed at the twilight of the last
tenure of EFCC’s progenitor when it
began to exhibit traces of selective
justice system even when the outfit
continued to deal decisive blows on
high-callibre offenders.
Many cases of corruption that were in
progress in the days of Nuhu Ribadu were
either truncated or frustrated. Even
when the present Chairman of the
Commission gave indications of readiness
to work, the AGF planted so many
landmines on her way of success. These
antics therefore led the adoption of
plea bargain justice system that is
available only to the high ranking
economic rapists. This syndrome gives
room to administering only
slaps-on-the-wrist as punishment for
convicted corruption criminals like
former Inspector-General of Police Tafa
Balogun, former Governor of Edo State
Lucky Igbinedion etc. It also gave
relief to suspected former governors
like George Akume, Peter Odili, Ayo
Fayose, James Ibori, Uzor Kalu, etc.
Whose files were emptied before the new
helmsman (helmswoman?) resumed at the
Idiagbon House headquarters of EFCC. It
also emboldens new entrants into the
cult of high-flying corruptionists like
Chief Kenny Martins of Police Equipment
Fund (Foundation) notoriety, managers of
National Electricity Regulatory
Authority (NERC), Rural Electrification
Agencies and their National Assembly
collaborators.
International scandals mostly bordering
on bribery like those of Halliburton,
Wilbross, Siemens, Sagem ID card,
Pentascope etc. were either ignored or,
frustrated at home and abroad.
Corruption in the National Assembly like
that of bribe for budget, a la
Fabian Osuji, former Minister of
Education, unspent budget, oil, power,
health etc were governed up under
administrative encumbrances.
Attorney-General of Failure
Worst still, the advent of the new
Minister of Justice and Attorney-General
of the Federation Mr. Michael Aondoakoa
became the albatross to the activities
of anti-corruption institution and
agencies. His approach constituted a
clog in the wheel of the appreciable
progress the EFCC made before his
coming. Like the performance of his
principal, President Umaru Yar’Adua, his
approach to justice is slow, cumbersome,
ineffective and therefore unproductive.
The AGF who is expected to be the number
one public defender by his approach
becomes their number one offender.
Michael Aondoakaa used everything in his
powers to ensure that corruption
suspects evade justice. He distorts or
hoards information required to prosecute
favoured criminals both at home and
abroad. He manipulates due process like
ensuring he waters down charges
proffered against his corrupt cronies
before anti-graft agencies file them in
court. And the AGF went to Geneva
Conference on Human Rights to obliterate
the truth about man inhumanity to man
that is prevalent in Nigeria.
Conclusion
One is not pretending to doing thorough
assessment of the current republic in
Nigeria in this piece. It cannot be done
except in a book. However it is clear
that Nigeria is yet to find its
democratic footing, even after 49 years
of self rule and the current decade of
uninterrupted civilian (not civil) rule.
It is also clear that the inability to
harmonize our differing “tribes and
tongues” as typified by the variances in
our socio-cultural and political
orientations we can only pretend to that
“in brotherhood we stand”. And until we
realized that our inability to govern
ourselves up to the par we were under
colonialism or surpass it stems from the
fact that we have not discussed under
which conditions, rules and regulations
we intend to base our agreement to live
together as a country (not even a
Nation). Until we discussed at a
National Conference, that will be
entirely sovereign, we will only
continue to make pretences to
nationhood.
Debo Adeniran
08037194969
dadnig@yahoo.com
Thursday, 28 May, 2009
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