By Chinedu Ekeke
 |
| Diezani Alison Madueke |
On the highway to infamy, shame and
conscience are two bumps you do not expect to see. Actually, there are no bumps
at all. It’s usually a smooth ride propelled by impunity and an imperial
feeling of invincibility. It was from the centre of that highway that Diezani
Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s petroleum minister, chided citizens, last week, for
their lack of understanding. She wondered why it was difficult for people to
simply comprehend how corruption makes service delivery easy and frictionless.
Descending from the chambers of their
Federal Executive Council (FEC) – by the way the FEC has since last two years
assumed the position of Nigeria’s highest corruption appropriation and
shielding body, only awarding contracts for majorly frivolous projects that
hardly ever get completed – meeting on Wednesday, Madueke sauntered into the
presidential villa’s press corner and thundered to awaiting journalists; “We
cannot eat our cakes and have it [sic]. We cannot keep calling out for
transparency and accountability and pointing at corruption if we are not
prepared to bear some of the hardship that will obviously come when you are
trying to clean up a sector.”
But for my decision to not make this
piece a long one, I would have been interested in knowing where Mrs. Diezani
schooled. I would have loved to know who taught her the rule of concord in
English language, so as to understand the elegance of referring to ‘cakes’ as
‘it’. But she already earned my pardon even before the howler. She doesn’t have
a PhD. And we know that it is tough for even those with PhDs (even if from the
academia) to make coordinated and grammatically correct sentences in this
regime. Dullness could be infectious. I’ve heard that from experts.
Back to her admonition. Those words
aren’t difficult to understand. She said we ate our cakes the day we dared call
for fiscal responsibility and transparency in the management of our oil, and so
should not be that stupid to expect to have the same cakes back since they are
trying to become fiscally responsible and transparent in the oil sector.
Diezani implied that we should have known that lack of corruption and service
delivery are mutually exclusive. Two things are mutually exclusive if they
cannot happen at the same time. Diezani explained to Nigerians that there
cannot be fuel if we do not allow corruption to remain. It is corruption that
makes fuel available, and now that we have forced their hands into tightening
the noose on oil racketeers, it is irresponsible of us to expect that there’ll
be availability of fuel. So, if you want fuel, advocate for corruption. Full
stop.
Now that is a minister in Nigeria;
actually, a high ranking one. Why was she that bold to spew those lines of
insult to a nation that has daily been insulted by her rulers? It is because
she appreciates the premium the current administration she serves places on
corrupt officers: they are protected like a hen protects its eggs. She
understands that she is not supposed to remain a minister by now, in saner
climes, that is. She should have long been explaining to the jury how a
budgetary provision of N240b for fuel subsidy metamorphosed into trillions of
naira under her watch. Since January this year, a consensus had long coalesced
on the decency of sacking Diezani and prosecuting her for her role in the
fleecing of Nigerians as the petroleum minister. On a daily basis, the call for
her sack had intensified. But the man who appointed her, Nigeria’s cheerleader
of the corrupt, has feigned ignorance of the need for Diezani’s sack and prosecution. She has
remained, and her continuous stay has emboldened her to ridicule us even
further.
Consider how she constituted the Nuhu Ribadu-led Task Force and then secretly
compromised two leading members of the committee few weeks later with
appointments into the board of the NNPC without giving a hoot about what
conflict of interest means. As you would expect, the two men punctured the
committee’s report, right in front of the president, and declared that the
recommendations of the Task Force were plain ‘unimplementable’ simply because
the processes that led to the recommendations – not the recommendations
themselves – weren’t satisfactory to them.
It did not even matter that Mr. Steve
Orosanye, the leader of the team to rubbish the report, was not attending
committee sittings. The melodrama worked out as planned, and a credible report
which, by the way, indicted Diezani herself, was pooh-poohed by an
administration that believes in the almighty power of corruption in hitch-free
service delivery. But even before Ribadu’s report, Diezani and the industry
players under her watch had been indicted by every probe panel, or audit firm,
that looked at the oil industry books, for sleaze, sharp practices and opaqueness
in operations. That she is still a minister today justifies her belief in the
wonders of corruption and its ability to get things done – faster – in 2012
Nigeria.
It is therefore understandable why the
federal government dismissed the recent rating of Nigeria by Transparency
International (TI) as the 35th most corrupt nation as untrue. They discussed
and agreed in their FEC meeting – where protection for corruption and the
corrupt must be topping their weekly agenda – that the rating by TI was not a
‘true reflection’ of their regime’s ‘efforts’ at fighting corruption.
The conveyor of the message, Labaran
Maku, who mistakes the Information Ministry he heads for the lying arm of a
joke of a government, said the TI rating, as well as a recent poll by Gallup that
placed Mr Jonathan’s regime as the world’s second most corrupt, were products
of interactions with Nigerians and synopsis of ‘negative media reports’.
It is difficult to understand, as much
as the members of FEC do, the pivotal role corruption plays in the prompt
availability of goods and services in a society and not frown at whoever
condemns it. This present administration has hands-on experience in the
goodness of corruption, that’s why they don’t even think it should be demonized
as much as detractors and opposition do.
But in a bid to create the impression
of a people on the same page with the rest of the world, they have joined in
pretending that corruption is equally evil, but not until they argue out how
corrupt the world sees them to be. For the FEC, Nigeria should have been
declared to be corruption-free, going by the ‘efforts’ they are making in the
‘fight’ against the monster. Remember that the president had openly lied to us
during a statewide broadcast that TI had ranked Nigeria immediately after the
United States amongst the countries that demonstrate indubitable resolve in the
fight against corruption. Such are the kind of stories the regime wants to
hear: concocted lies and half-truths. They seek flattering statistics, but
daily fertilize corruption which is alien to impressive human development index
anywhere in the world.
I never knew that it could be possible
for a meeting of over 50 men and women to not have even one soul who still has
conscience. Yes, I understand the power of free mega money – the type that
comes with just being a Nigerian government official, but I never imagined it
could so freeze up people’s humanity to the height of denying every verifiable
fact around them.
Here’s a government that budgeted N240b
for one year for fuel subsidy (based on prevailing trend of subsidy spending in
the previous years), and then expended over a trillion naira on the same item
before nine months without blinking an eyelid. When they sensed the
inevitability of bankruptcy at such stupid spending rates, they did not bother
to probe the subsidy regime or question the relevant agencies. They simply
understood what happened, and then chose to push their irresponsibility to the
already impoverished masses through fuel tax. Nigerians refused vehemently and
showed visible willingness to bring down their rogue regime.
It was at that point that the House of
Representatives quickly commenced a probe of the subsidy regime. Yet as that
was going on, the government used the president’s closest oil dealer, Femi
Otedola, to rubbish whatever would be the report of that probe. Otedola set up
and bribed Farouk Lawan, the Chairman of the House Committee handling the
probe. As we talk, Otedola is seen everywhere around the president. He hasn’t
been prosecuted for bribery. He hasn’t been prosecuted for economic sabotage.
But Jonathan’s government’s claim to fighting corruption is the prosecution of
subsidy fraudsters. So the question is: when did this government begin their
prosecution of the subsidy scammers? After we botched their plans to cover up
the fraud through fuel tax? Why didn’t they prosecute them before our
anti-subsidy removal protests?
And when you hear prosecution, you
almost want to believe it is the first time the government is trying to
prosecute people. We know their second strategy of growing their pet-monster.
My bet is that this government will bungle the fuel subsidy cases to create
room for judges to quash them on technicalities. We’ve seen all that before.
It is laughable to hear the government,
through Mr. Maku, blame the media for the TI ratings. This is a government that
has presided over the highest cases of treasury looting since the birth of this
country. Punch Newspaper helped us out with a clear summation of how much has
been stolen under the watch of Mr. Jonathan’s government: N5 trillion naira.
That is a whole annual budget! To be clear, I think the Transparency
International rating for Nigeria was too fair. I can’t imagine any other
country in the world with more criminally-wired public servants. That country
must be hell, the abode of Lucifer himself.
But I do perfectly understand why it is
possible that a government could be this bad. Their destination, infamy,
especially in African rulership, has a reward in excess money that unborn
generations cannot exhaust. This reward, like a magnet, sits at the end of the
highway, waiting patiently. From there, it pulls their vehicle, already racing
at high speed, to that realm where petro-dollars matter more than the millions
of Nigerians who die before 50 because no life-sustaining social welfare is in
place and functional.
It is such realization, that fame isn’t
worth as much as the dollars of infamy, that fuels the arrogance of members
this government. And it is that financial reward that we must target if we are
serious about putting a halt to the sustained and determined effort by a few
men and women of dead conscience to convert Nigeria’s public wealth to private
cash.
You can follow @ekekeee on Twitter for
more direct engagement.
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