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Mask of pen
robbery
By Mohammed
Haruna
Newsdiaryonline Tue April 12,2011
Whoever is elected our president this weekend
along with members of the next National Assembly (NA) have their
Number 1 job clearly cut out for them; it is to review this
year’s budget passed last month by the federal legislators but
which is unlikely to be signed by President Goodluck Jonathan
any time soon, considering the horrified reaction to the bill by
the Minister of Finance, Mr Olusegun Aganga.
“The 2011 budget,” the minister said a week
after it was passed on March 17, “is supposed to signal the
beginning of fiscal consolidation, but we now have another
expansionary budget which is unimplementable.”
Actually the budget is worse than
unimplementable. In his inimitable style, Mahmud Jega, Editor of
Daily Trust and its
Monday back-page columnist, likened it to day light armed
robbery in his column of March 21 entitled “Mask of the armed
robber”. It’s worse than even that.
A master of the anecdote, Jega likened the
budget to the case of a bank robber in the UK who inadvertently
gave himself away when he instructed his lawyer to appeal his
prison sentence. “The bank clerk who said she recognised me! How
could she recognise me? I was wearing a mask when I did the
job,” the bank robber told his lawyer.
Jega likened this to the explanation offered
by the chairman of the House of Representatives Appropriation
Committee, Mr. Ayo Adeseun, on why the NA more than doubled the
roughly 111 billion Naira budget proposed for it by the
President in this year’s budget to over 232 billion. According
to Adeseun, the NA did so in order to establish its own
independence and guarantee its ability to check the excesses of
the Executive.
To say the NA needs to double its budget in
order to assert its independence and check the Executive, Jega
said, is as convincing an argument against the accusation that
the NA’s self-approved budget is day light robbery as that
offered by our UK bank robber of his innocence.
As I’ve just said, it’s actually worse than
armed robbery; it is pen robbery. And the big irony of this is
that the co-head of this robbery is the Senate President,
Brigadier-General David Mark - the other head, of course, being
the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Dimeji Bankole.
The reader may recall that more than 26 years
ago the Senate President advocated the shooting to death of what
he described as pen robbers. He said this in January 1985 as a
Colonel and military governor of Niger State at the launching of
the fourth phase of the War Against Indiscipline (WAI) campaign
of then military Head of State, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari.
A pen robber, Mark said then and I agreed in my column in the
New Nigerian of
February 1, 1985, was worse than an armed robber. “Not only does
he kill individuals,” I said, “the pen-thief indeed kills
society.”
To buttress my point, I quoted figures from a
submission by Dr. Festus Iyayi, the radical lecturer at the
University of Benin, during a seminar in April 1983 at Ahmadu
Bello University, Zaria, on “Indiscipline and Corruption”
sponsored by the President Shehu Shagari’s government.
Pen-thieves, Iyayi had reckoned from what he said was his
monitoring of press reports alone, made away with more than 7.6
billion Naira in fraud, kickbacks, bribes and wastages, a
princely sum then and even now when it looks like peanuts in the
context of the phenomenal increase in the country’s oil revenues
since oil price went into three digits following the Gulf wars.
The damage this scale of venality does to
society is obviously far, far greater that anything even the
most notorious armed robber can. And this year’s budget, even
more than those of previous years which have been outrageous
enough, is nothing if not venality on a grand scale.
The commonsense warning by economic experts
about the futility of budgets that are almost perpetually run on
the red and at the same time have bigger recurrent expenditure
than capital, simply seems to have no truck with those who
prepare, approve and execute our budgets, at least since the
return of democracy to the country in 1999. On the contrary, it
seems the more the experts cry out against the foolishness of
such budgets the more profligate our elected officials become.
For example, last year’s budget, like several
others before, was a deficit budget and was in the ratio of 25%
to 75% between capital and recurrent expenditure. As if that was
not bad enough, by October, which was two months to the end of
the year’s budget, only 30% of the capital vote had been
released, all this according to the Minority Leader of the House
of Representatives, Alhaji Mohammed Ndume.
It says a lot about the credibility and
practicability of this year’s budget that the Minister of
Finance, Aganga, has in effect said it is worse than last
year’s.
Initially the president proposed a total of
4.226 trillion Naira. He subsequently added a worrisome 312
billion “to augment key priority areas of ministries,
departments and agencies,” he said, without identifying exactly
what those priorities were. In the end he proposed a total of
4.538 trillion.
With no rhyme or reason the NA added 433
billion Naira to all this, making a total of 4.971 trillion.
Most of the addition was recurrent expenditure. As with last
year’s, the NA also raised the oil revenue benchmark
unilaterally. This year it raised the benchmark from $65 per
barrel to $75 against last year’s unilateral increase from $55
to $67.
All this is obviously worse than day light
armed robbery in a country like Nigeria where there has been
little or no transparency and accountability in its budgetary
and overall governance system.
In more civilized climes the period of
election in which we are would have seen any elected official
who had anything to do with this barefaced pen-robbery kicked
out of office. Happily scores of our federal legislators who
have been part of this travesty of a budget have suffered defeat
at polls last weekend. Sadly, not all of them have.
Going by the Senate President’s logic 26 years
or so ago all those involved in this apparent pen robbery should
be shot. Back then I disagreed with him. I still do. And it is
not because they don’t deserve to be shot. They do. I disagreed
with him because I didn’t think shooting anyone would solve the
problem of the venality of our country’s elite.
“Obviously if anyone should be fodder for the
executioner’s bullets,” I said back then, “it is the pen-thief.
Yet to shoot pen-robbers will not end corruption as Governor
Mark obviously believes. It should be instructive that shooting
armed robbers has not stopped armed robbery.”
Part of the solution, I said then in partial
agreement with a monograph on the issue of corruption, morality
and discipline in society by late Dr. Mahmud Modibbo Tukur, a
radical lecturer in the History Department of ABU, Zaria, and
one time president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities,
was equity between the poor and the rich in the way we define
and punish venality. It was not right, I said then, to shoot
armed robbers and send goat thieves to long years in prison
while the system made it almost impossible to catch big thieves,
never mind giving them the punishments that they deserve, short
of being shot.
In retrospect I should have added the obvious
need for massive public expenditure on infrastructure –
agricultural, power, transport, educational, etc - as a means of
ending the poverty that is a prime source of corruption in our
society. Not too
long ago the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal
Commission (RMAFC) under its erstwhile chairman, Engineer Hamman
Tukur – no relation of the radical lecturer - seemed to have
worked out a novel and transparent way to successfully attack
the country’s terrible infrastructural deficit.
Its blueprint worked out how Government can
benchmark certain amounts daily from our daily oil production
for effective investment in such sectors as power ($13.83 per
day, says the commission), rail ($6.64), Agriculture ($6.92) and
coal reactivation ($2.77), without disrupting our normal
budgetary system.
From what the Minister of Finance, Aganga, has
said of this year’s budget it would be a surprise if President
Jonathan signs it before the new Government comes in on May 29.
In the event that he does, the first job of the next National
Assembly should be to review it and throw out all those terrible
bits of self-aggrandizement by the ruling elite which the budget
is so riddled with.
That should be the beginning of a budgetary
process in which we cut our coat according to our clothes and in
which we spend more on capital items than on recurrent.
In defence of Jega-By
Mohammed Haruna
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