By Biodun Jeyifo
 |
| Prof. Biodun Jeyifo |
Mr.
Chairman, all protocols duly observed, ladies and gentlemen. It gives me great
pleasure to at last be able to give this lecture. I say this because, first, I
was to have given the lecture last year but could not do so for all sorts of
reasons and, second, because this year once again, other pressing engagements
and commitments almost made it impossible for me to give the lecture.
There
is another reason why I am very delighted to be giving the lecture and this is
simply the fact that the sponsors of the lecture, the Wole Soyinka Centre for
Investigative Journalism, is an organization whose work and vision I both
greatly admire and endorse. Journalism, specifically activist journalism, was
crucial in the struggle for our country’s freedom from colonial rule, just as
we are finding out more and more that in the long and unfolding struggles to
consolidate that independence from continued foreign domination and internal
misrule, anarchy and suffering for the vast majority of our peoples, that
tradition of journalism will prove indispensable.
The
Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism is a leading, perhaps
pioneering organization for the consummation and perpetuation of this vital
tradition of the press at this particular conjunctural moment in our history.
May its work live up to the great expectations that its mission bestows on its
founding in the years and decades ahead!
All
modern democratic nations and societies need a free press at the centre of
which stands the kind of activist, professionally mature investigative
journalism that the WSCIJ seeks to nurture and expand in our country. Beyond
this, the developing nations of Africa and other parts of the global South have
an even much greater need for a free press, for an activist, independent-minded
journalism than the affluent liberal democracies of the global North.
The
theme of my lecture this morning - the Freedom of Information Act of 2011 (FoI)
as it confronts the immense challenge of what I call the dictatorship of
corruption and mediocrity - is a small part of this larger global issue of the centrality
of a free press and an independent-minded activist journalism for all modern
democratic societies. But this should not blind us to the immensity of its
ramifications for the survival of our country and the future prospects of the
majority of our peoples.
Since
the term “dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity” in the title of my talk
goes to the heart of this assertion, let me now dispel any puzzlement
concerning the term by directly addressing the range of issues and
significations I have in mind in my use of it.
Before
going directly to this theme, a word of clarification is perhaps
necessary. As I move into discussion of
the theme, I ask you, my audience, to bear in mind that the question that
drives all my observations, analyses and projections is this: What need do we
have for a Freedom of Information Act when what I am calling the dictatorship
of corruption and mediocrity in our country is so open about all the corrupt
misdeeds, all the inept illegalities and all the official inanities that attach
to “democratic” governance in our country?
Well,
my answer to this question is that we still need that landmark legislation that
is known as the Freedom of Information Act that was passed in the year 2011,
even if corruption and the mediocrity which it creates on a gargantuan scale in
our country are normatively not hidden, not shrouded in secrecy in Nigeria. As
a matter of fact, I shall in the course of my lecture be arguing that there is
a crisis of under-utilization of the FoI by our press, by our media houses in
spite of the fact that they were at the forefront of the struggle for the
passing of the Act.
Indeed,
my central argument in the lecture will be that though the nature and scale of
corruption in Nigeria poses a challenge to the FoI, this is a challenge that is
not insurmountable. However, before I come to this argument, it is perhaps
helpful to highlight three particular cases that are exemplary in their graphic
illustration of the climate of corruption that the FoI must contend with in our
country that is almost without comparison with the moral and political climates
that the FoI in other countries of the world have to deal with.
[Parenthetically, let me note here that the FoI exists in many countries of the
world; it has indeed become an almost indispensable part of human and civil
rights legislation in many parts of the world].
The
first case concerns perhaps the biggest and most brazen act of state or
official corruption ever perpetrated in Nigeria. This sublime brigandage is
known as the oil subsidy scam of 2011. It involved vast sums of monies paid out
of our national coffers to a cabal of oil marketers that hold the lifeline to
the distribution of petroleum products in our country. I am sure that every
woman and man in this hall has heard or read of this case before but all the
same, a critical look at the details is necessary in the context of this
lecture.
For
the avoidance of doubt or confusion, let us remember that in the Nigerian
context oil subsidy implies an annual budgetary allocation to defray the costs
of refined oil imported into the country to augment the shortfall between what
our oil refineries produce and the volume of petroleum products that the nation
consumes annually.
There
is a longstanding controversy concerning the reality and the scale of this
subsidy, but in the present context, we need not concern ourselves with that
controversy. The important thing to note here is that in the year 2011, and
depending on which set of posted and announced figures you use for your
computation, what was actually paid out to marketers as oil subsidy was six to
nine times bigger than what was budgeted, even though there was no rise at all
in the volume of petroleum products sold and consumed in the country. Indeed,
for 2011, the posted, budgeted sum was N245 billion for the whole year.
But
within the first eight months of the year, an alleged sum of N1.3 trillion had
been paid out to the marketers. I say “alleged” here because N1.3 trillion was
only one of the figures thrown around. On this particular crucial issue, let me
quote from the Report of an Ad-Hoc Committee of the House of Representatives on
that oil subsidy scam:
Contrary
to the earlier official figure of subsidy payment of N1.3 trillion, the
Accountant General of the Federation put forward a figure of N1.6 trillion; the
Central Bank N1.7 trillion, while our Committee established subsidy payment of
N2.58 trillion as at December 2011, amounting to more than 900% over the
appropriated sum of N245 billion.
Please
note that the sum of N2.58 trillion actually paid out was 900% greater than the
N245 billion budgeted. Indeed, for the year 2011, the budget approved for the
whole country was N4.97 trillion, which means that what was paid out to the
cabal of oil marketers was more than half of the national budget itself for
that year. And to place this within the framework of some of the convertible
currencies of the world, N2.58 trillion is approximately $16 billion US
dollars; 12.46 billion Euros; and 10.73 billion British pound sterling, all
paid out to marketers most of whom were phantom dealers in petroleum products
who supplied nothing.
One
more quotation from that same House of Rep Ad-Hoc Committee Report and we will
move on to my second example of what I am calling the dictatorship of
corruption and mediocrity. This is the quotation:
Contrary
to statutory requirements and other guidelines under the Petroleum Support Fund
(PSF) scheme mandating agencies in the industry to keep reliable information
data bases, there seemed to be a deliberate understanding among agencies not to
do so. This lack of record keeping contributed in no small measure to the decadence and rot that the Committee found in the administration of the PSF… We
found out that the subsidy regime, as operated in the period under review (2009
and 2011), was fraught with endemic corruption and entrenched inefficiency. Much of the amount claimed to have been
paid as subsidy was actually not for consumed PMS (i.e. petroleum products).
Government officials made nonsense of PSF Guidelines due mainly to sleaze and
in some cases, incompetence. [The
emphases are mine]
“Decadence”;
“rot”; “entrenched inefficiency”; “incompetence”: these are the Committee’s own
terms, not mine. Mine is only to draw conclusions from these terms and from the
combined effect of their concatenation in the Report’s searing indictment of
the sublime kind of corruption that reigns in our country. This is my
conclusion, my extrapolation: Corruption is not only dishonesty, fraud, or
sleaze; it is also aided by, and in turn generates mediocrity, rottenness,
putrefaction. We shall come back to this issue later in the lecture.
For
now, let us turn our attention to the second of the three exemplary cases that
I wish to highlight in these observations and reflections on the challenges
that the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity poses to the FoI Act. This
happened in the year 2006 and entailed a very public feud between no less
august and authoritative political personages than the President and Vice
President of the Republic at the time, Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar.
The
feuding in essence entailed accusations and counter-accusations by Obasanjo and
Atiku of massive looting of the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) of
hundreds of millions of dollars. It was precipitated when the President sent a
report to the National Assembly alleging that Atiku had conspired with some
Americans to divert vast sums from the PTDF to the benefit of himself and his
foreign co-conspirators. Please note that the word “loot” was in the report
that Obasanjo sent to the National Assembly with a demand that impeachment
proceedings be launched against the Vice President.
Of
course, as could be expected, Atiku promptly responded to Obasanjo’s charges.
But what no one expected, what in fact nearly took everyone’s breath away in
Atiku’s response was that he did not deny the charges at all; rather than a
denial, he alleged that Obasanjo and some of his cronies and girlfriends had
benefitted from the funds he had diverted from the PTDF. And to back up this
claim, Atiku made photocopies of the cheques he had written in favour of these
cronies and paramours of Obasanjo. He took out full-page advertorial spreads in
major newspapers in which documents in support of this extraordinary
counter-accusation were published.
Mr.
Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, it is tempting to say that this account, this
story speaks for itself. But that is not exactly true. To the story itself and
for our purposes in this lecture, we must ad that no action based on the FoI
could ever have brought out the surfeit of information on the looting, the
corruption that Obasanjo and Atiku, together with their supporters, voluntarily
revealed about themselves. And let us also note that nothing happened to
Obasanjo, Atiku and their cronies, girlfriends and sycophants that benefitted
from that vast looting of the funds of the PTDF by way of well deserved
punitive action.
Ironically,
the only person who did go to jail was the American congressman, William J.
Jefferson who, at one time, was Atiku’s point man in the United States theatre
of operations in financial wheeling and dealing before he and the Vice
President quarreled and went their separate ways. But Jefferson served prison
time in the United States, not in Nigeria.
For
our third and final case, we must go all the way back to 1984 when Nigeria was
still in the grip of the irruption of military dictatorships into political
governance, an irruption whose end seemed to be nowhere in sight. The case in
point is the Buhari-Idiagbon Decree No 4 of 1984, unquestionably the most
notorious of all military decrees ever promulgated in Nigeria. That Decree has
a special bearing on all that I have said so far concerning the challenge of
the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity to the Freedom of Information
Act.
This
is partly because in military rule, dictatorship manifests itself directly and
autocratically; it has no need to deviously manifest itself through corruption.
Also, you simply cannot talk of a Freedom of information Act in the African
dictatorships of the 1970s through the 1990s when the very first thing that
goes with the inception of any military dictatorship is the Constitution
itself, together with all the rights that derive from it.
Moreover,
African military dictatorships are
notoriously very paranoid, to the extent that many military dictators at the
time actually went so far as to promulgate decrees banning rumors, as if any
human society has ever existed in which there can be no rumour-mongering as an
inevitable part of social existence. At any rate, the Buhari-Idiagbon Decree No
4 of 1984 took this axiomatic and quixotic paranoia of African military
dictatorships to a new level when it explicitly stated that you must not and
cannot publish anything to embarrass military leaders and their support corps
of civil service officials even if what
you publish is true.
It
is important to state here that like the two other cases I have already
mentioned in this lecture, this infamous decree against truth also had its
origins in the phenomenon of endemic corruption in our country. This is because
the decree came on the heels of allegations of the disappearance of N2.8
billion naira from the coffers of a federal ministry that had been under the
headship of Buhari in a previous military administration.
Allegedly, Buhari had
been deeply embarrassed by this report and when he himself carried out a
successful coup, he promulgated Decree No 4 to deal with those sections of the
press that had been most vocal about the alleged missing N.2.8 billion naira.
From
these three separate cases, we can see that there is a common of corruption.
However, unlike the corruption that we saw in both the oil subsidy scam and the
Obasanjo and Atiku feud that paraded itself in broad daylight, the alleged
corruption in the case of Buhari’s military dictatorship was hidden,
subterranean. Everyone knew it was there and abundantly so; but you could not
talk openly about it; you could not even engage in rumours about it.
In
Buhari’s Decree No 4 of 1984, this veil of silence and secrecy on corruption
was made sublime in its impunity and brazenness: the decree stated without the
slightest equivocation that even if true, any allegation of corruption could
not be published because it would embarrass the military government and its
loyal civil servants.
This observation leads us to the next stage of this
lecture, the stage in which we now directly engage the crucial issue of a dictatorship that is not military, not
exercised through the gun but through the complex mediations of corruption and
mediocrity of the highest order.
To
enter into this segment of the lecture, please consider the following ironic
reversal of normal expectations concerning dictatorships and democracy. On the
one hand, we have a military dictatorship that is non-elective, that is indeed
totally contemptuous of popular mandate but is nonetheless very paranoid about
being embarrassed by any revelation that it is corrupt. But on the other hand,
we have an elective, “democratic” government that putatively bases its
legitimacy on popular mandates but is completely unembarrassed by any and all
allegations of corrupt practices and dealings.
I
would like to suggest that the irony in both cases is more apparent than real.
Military dictatorships are characteristically, even extremely paranoid about
being shown to be corrupt only because nearly all military coup-makers come
into power on the claim that they have come to clean up the mess made by
civilian governments, or even by a preceding military autocracy.
Of all the
governments we have ever had in Nigeria, the Buhari-Idiagbon dictatorship was
the most self-righteous, the most fanatical about imposing discipline on
Nigeria and Nigerians; for this reason, it absolutely could not stand being
embarrassed by the taint of corruption, especially
if the allegation happened to be based on truth.
The
irony in an elective, “democratic” government that brazenly washes the dirty
linens of its oceans of corruption in the national and global public sphere is
likewise a factitious irony with no basis in reality. This is because the
presumption of virtually all our ruling class parties since the return to
formal democratic rule in 1999 has been, quite simply, that no party, no
politician ever wins or, conversely, loses an election on the basis of public
exposure of huge sums that the politician or the party has looted from our oil
wealth.
At a more general level, winning
or losing elections has little or nothing to do with your performance in office.
You may be as corrupt and as mediocre as the worst politician on the African
continent or the world, but that is no disqualification for you to become a
member of the National Assembly, the Executive Governor of a State, or the
President of the Republic itself – unless, of course you have been caught,
tried and jailed.
I
readily accept the fact that not all our politicians are corrupt and mediocre.
Indeed, there are a few state governors and public officeholders that are
deserving of respect and admiration. But I think that the great majority of our
politicians are fundamentally predisposed to being corrupt and mediocre. This
is not because they are necessarily or inherently corrupt or mediocre; it just
so happens that this is the prevailing order that they know; it is the universe
of expectations and values in which they operate. Corruption and mediocrity
reign supreme in our country at the present time because that is the game in
town; it is the undeclared dictatorship which has apparently found a perfect
hiding place in the outward forms and protocols of a formally democratic
political order. Permit me to expatiate a little on this observation.
I
think it is safe for me to assume that most of us in this gathering this
morning would agree to a proposition which states that an endlessly corrupt
electoral system in which massive, blatant and violent rigging plays a central
role is the main reason why virtually all our political parties and politicians
do not really depend on their performance in office to win elections.
Another
way of putting this concretely is to say that rather than actually perform well
in office and win the respect and the mandate of the people, virtually all of
our political parties spend most of their time amassing the war chest that will
enable them either to successfully rig elections or, conversely to prevent
successful rigging by opposing political parties and politicians. In other
words, rigging does not stand alone; it is part of a vastly corrupt and
corrupting political party system.
Because
this is a very crucial point in this lecture, I wish to be absolutely clear
about what I am asserting or even claiming here. For this reason, I wish to
give one very concrete illustration of my claim here that rigging does not
stand alone but is part of a vast network of corruption in our political party
system. This illustration, I would argue, is one that most adult and
politically sophisticated Nigerians know only too well.
Thus,
I don’t think anyone would seriously contest the fact that as the ruling party
with a so-far iron-clad control of the centre, the PDP spends most of its time
between election cycles preparing to rig itself back into power with absolutely
no relevance to how it has performed in office. By contrast, the other ruling
class parties not in control at the centre but in the seats of power in some of
the states of the federation spend all their time between electoral cycles
amassing the financial means and the strategies with which to prevent the PDP
from rigging itself back into power.
Nowhere
is this whole apparatus of a deeply corrupt and corrupting political order more
apparent than in our election tribunals in which, as everyone knows, political
parties and politicians who have much more credible claims to having won elections
must still bribe very heavily to secure legal redress for having been robbed of
their victories through rigging at the polls.
It
is well known that the 2011 oil subsidy mega-scam that ran into more than N2.58
trillion naira had everything to do with the re-election project of the
President and the PDP. But even with that dubious help, we shall never get a
full measure of the actual sums that go into both rigging and preventing rigging by our ruling class parties. All we can
safely say is that rigging and its opposite, rigging-prevention, are but the
tip of an iceberg; behind the whole unholy party-electoral edifice in our
country is the widespread, defining
feeling among the Nigerian political class that the money is there to be looted
either to stay in office or to come into power because, for a long time yet,
the oil will keep flowing. I will come back to this point at the end of the
lecture.
In
case the point I am making here is not yet clear enough, let me spell it out:
the rigging of elections, as heinous as it has generally been in our country
since the return to civilian rule in 1999, is but one factor among others that
make our electoral system and our present political order so spectacularly
corrupt and corrupting.
This is why, as much as I loathe and condemn the
rigging of elections in our country, I do not ascribe what I have in this
lecture been calling the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity to the
agency or primacy of rigging; rather, in my view, corruption itself is the
agent, the precondition of a dictatorship that is both kleptocratic and
plutocratic.
I
have observed that in the Obasanjo-Atiku feud of 2006, both camps made
revelations of corruption about each other that should, at the very least, have
led to the impeachment of the President and the Vice President. But nothing
happened to them and not a single one of their cronies, henchmen and
girlfriends that were the beneficiaries of the “loot” from the PTDF was made to
pay back a single kobo.
Also, nobody has paid back a single kobo out of the
N2.58 trillion looted in the oil subsidy mega-scam, a colossal sum that could
make the lives of millions of Nigerians better than the horrible conditions
they currently have to endure, thanks to this dictatorship of corruption and
mediocrity.
As
a matter of fact, with regard to this particular case of the oil subsidy scam,
the whole nation was treated to a comedy of errors and absurdity when the
Chairman of that same House of Rep Ad-Hoc Committee on the oil subsidy scam,
Hon Farouk Lawan, was caught by a hidden videotape camera receiving hush-money
bribe from one of the biggest names among the cabal of real and fake marketers.
Hon Lawan has not faced any significant legislative censure for this
egregiously corrupt act. All that has “happened” to him is that he is being
tried in a court of law in which he is apparently successfully tying up the
legal process in a seemingly endless impasse.
It
is time in this lecture to address the equation between corruption and
mediocrity that is a central aspect of the undeclared ‘dictatorship’ that I am
engaging in the lecture. Corruption and mediocrity in our country at the
present time are symbiotic, they feed off each other. Extremely poor
performance or even no performance at all is no barrier to becoming very
wealthy and holding very high public office in our country – including the
highest office in the land.
According
to the House of Representative Ad-Hoc Committee Report on the oil subsidy
mega-scam we see “a gross lack of record keeping”, “decadence” “rot” and
“entrenched inefficiency” in the work of the public officials that supervised
the payment of those vast sums to the oil marketers.
These
epithets of abysmally low standards of performance and probity were addressed
to the specific case of the oil subsidy scam but they might as well have been
addressed to the generation and distribution of electricity; construction of
physical infrastructures like roads, bridges, hospitals and schools; public
sanitation and waste disposal; social services for children, youths, the
elderly and the disabled. Federal and state governments don’t have to perform
well or perform at all to generate the budgets on which they depend; it comes
to them like manna from heaven even though we know that the source is the rents
from the oilfields of the Niger Delta.
At
the centre of things in the government of the federation and the ruling party,
the standards of performance in virtually all areas of governance are so low
that almost any other party or phalanx of politicians can credibly claim that
they can do better than the current incumbents, even though there is little to
choose between all the ruling class parties in terms of their ideologies and
their value orientations. Almost everywhere that you find corruption in our country,
mediocrity is never too far behind.
At
this point and drawing from my professional academic interest in linguistic,
literary and cultural studies, I would like to offer some thoughts on the
separate and yet connected relations between the cognate terms corrupt, corruptive and corrupted.
My intension in doing this is both to further clarify and broaden the
ramifications of this link that I am urging between corruption and mediocrity
in our country.
Thus,
when we say that a person, an act, or a process is corrupt we are alluding
adjectivally to a quality, a disposition or an effect. The term corruptive adds a dimension that implies
an active transformation that turns that which is not initially corrupt to that
which becomes tainted with corruption. The term “corrupted” lends an even more
dynamic, more perfected or completed
dimension to the term “corruptive”.
At
this level, the term corruption that we so often use to describe our
politicians and their habitual practices takes on the quality of a specter, a
malaise, a generalized social pathology that reeks of rot, decay, putrefaction.
On this basis, I would argue that in our Nigerian context, “corruption” is to
politicians and political parties as “corrupted” is to virtually all our
institutions, both religious and secular, both private and public, both local
and nation-wide.
Pushing
further on this observation, I would argue that we tend to associate corruption
primarily with our electoral process and our politicians and political parties,
but who among us is unaware of the cheap, superstitious and facile religiosity
that underlies the nairamania, the
amassing of great wealth in our mega-churches and among our most prominent,
jetsetter religious leaders? Who is unaware of the scale of examination
malpractices in our primary and secondary schools? Yes, the corruption has its
roots, its foundations in the political order and among our rulers, but almost
every institution in our country has become corrupted.
Since
I am an academic, I am particularly interested in the decay, the unspeakable
fall in standards that has befallen our educational institutions. Here, I will
give only a few particularly shocking examples of this terribly corrupted state
of things in our secondary and tertiary institutions. The failure rates in our
secondary school leaving examinations are some of the worst in the world.
In
the last one decade, I don’t think we have recorded anything higher than 35% of
passes in these exams. In one particular year, in the NECO exams, only 1.8% of
those who sat for the exam passed, leaving a staggering failure rate of 98.2%.
Our universities are poorly ranked in the world; not a single one of them is
among the 2000 most highly rated institutions. Far more alarming is the fact
that our universities are also poorly ranked among African universities.
In
the most recently released rankings, only eight of our universities were listed
among the first 100 universities in Africa and only one Nigerian institution is
among the first 20. Within the country itself in the business sector of the
economy, potential employers of our university graduates are forever
complaining that the instruction our university students receive are so
appallingly poor that a lot of the graduates are simply “unemployable”. The
list goes on and on with a depressing regularity that has a grim foreboding for
the future of our country.
I
do not wish to empty out the contents of the special focus of this lecture -
the Freedom of Information Act of 2011 in relation to the dictatorship of
corruption - into an endless jeremiad about the things that are prematurely but
utterly corrupted in virtually all the institutions of our society.
The Greeks
have a saying that is very pertinent here that I wish to invoke to underscore
this point: When a fish begins to rot, the process starts from the head and it
is from there that the decay pervades the entire body of the fish. From this, I
wish to state with as much emphasis as I can muster that it is our rulers, our
politicians and political parties that we must hold accountable if we wish to
arrest the rot, the decay that acts like a dictatorship in our present
political order.
One
aspect of a comparative, transnational view of corruption that we would do well
to keep in mind in this respect is the fact that corruption is not always or
even necessarily linked with mediocrity as we find it with our rulers. As a
matter of fact, as big as corruption is in Nigeria, it is nothing in size
compared with the corruption that has been documented and much discussed with regard
to some of the biggest transnational business conglomerates of Western and East
Asian countries.
Without
in the least bit offering an apologia for the scope of corruption among our
rulers, I would insist that it ought to be pointed out that Transparency
International is able to regularly rank corruption higher in African and other
developing regions of the world than what obtains in the West only because its
figures pertain to the countries and regions of the world, leaving out the big
business empires of the planet who, between them, account for by far the
greatest share of corruption in the world, together with the effects that
corruption has on the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable peoples of the
planet.
I repeat: corruption is not always and necessarily linked with
mediocrity, with abysmally low or poor standards. The high incidence of
corruption in the ranks of some of the smartest and most innovative
corporations in the world is clear proof of this assertion. The movements and
forces around the world that have taken on the corruption of these corporations
have counted on rationality, legal and ideological, as weapons with which to
wage their struggles.
This
is where, in my opinion, we must locate the potential of the Freedom of
Information Act to make a difference in the struggle against corruption and the
indifference to due process and accountability that reigns supreme in the highest corridors of power in our
country.
Like all other national versions of the Freedom of Information Act, ours
also presupposes legal and moral rationality, especially as enshrined in the
presupposition that the state, the liberal-democratic state, is founded on the
rule of law, on the assumption that a country’s rulers, a country’s public
officeholders and a country’s business enterprises must comply with the laws of
the land, otherwise what you have is not a true democracy but a dictatorship
hiding behind the outer forms and shells of democracy.
Invoking the theoretical jargon of radical political economy here, I
would argue that our Freedom of Information Act of 2011 presupposes that our
country is on the verge of transforming primitive accumulation of the most
vicious kind into a modern, market-driven economy in which, in conjunction with
cutthroat competition, you have the supremacy of the law.
It
is doubtful that our press, our media houses have thought much of these
ramifications of the Freedom of Information Act. This is because as much as
they fought long and hard for the passing of this Act, they have been
remarkably reticent in using it to compel our rulers, our public institutions
and private business companies to comply with the provisions of the Act. Let me
move to the conclusion of this talk by briefly engaging one of the few
instances when the provisions of the Act was invoked – and met stiff,
unyielding resistance from the powers that be in our country.
This
much is known about the scale of remuneration of the members of our National
Assembly: Both in relative and absolute terms, they are the highest paid
legislators in the world. Each member of our National Assembly collects far
more in salaries, allowances and bonuses than the President of the United
States, the most powerful man in the world.
In
the face of the universal outcry in the country against the whopping scale of
our legislators’ remuneration package, they have been extremely secretive about
the precise figures. Indeed the lengths to which they are apparently willingly
to go to keep the exact figures hidden from public awareness and scrutiny seems
to have no bounds.
Thus, when a former member of the House, Honourable Dino
Melaye, began to go public with these figures, he was swiftly and severely
dealt with by the leadership of the House. Indeed, the manner in which he was
silenced was so effective that no other member of the National Assembly has
since then ever dared to follow his example.
Far
more cynical and indifferent to its claims to democratic norms is how the
National Assembly responded when a civil society organization, The Legal
Assistance and Aid Project, LEPAD, invoked the Freedom of Information Act of
2011 to compel our legislators to reveal to the Nigerian people exactly how
much they are paid. They refused absolutely.
Consequent
on this refusal, LEPAD dragged the National Assembly to the courts. In a suit
argued by the frontline activist lawyer, Femi Falana, SAN, a high court ordered
the National Assembly to act in accordance with a law that it had itself passed
by promptly releasing full details of the salaries and emoluments paid to
members of the Assembly. They still refused and then took the matter to a
federal appeal court. The case is still pending in the courts.
I
should mention that without being a lone figure crying in the wilderness, Femi
Falana has done much to put the usefulness, the value of the Freedom of
Information Act to test again and again since 2011 when the Act was enacted. He
has invoked the Act in relation to a range of issues of public good that
pertain to governmental functionaries, parastatals and private commercial
interests including but not limited to Minister of Justice and the Attorney
General of the Federation; the Universal Basic Education (UBE) Commission; the
National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA); and the GSM/Internet Providers.
I
do not think that Falana harbors any illusions at all that by itself, the
Freedom of Information Act will radically and positively transform the present
endlessly corrupt and mediocre Nigerian political order. But he is taking this
prevailing deeply unjust, wasteful and corrupted order to the very limits of
its claim to being a democracy founded on the rule of law, not a failing state
perpetually on the brink of becoming a failed state.
Let
Falana’s example be a wakeup call to our media houses and our journalists that
they must rediscover the reasons why they fought long and hard for this Act to
be passed. The dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity that I have discussed
at length in this lecture is the root cause of some of the worst problems and
crises that our country faces at the present time: vast disparities of incomes
and opportunities between the wealthy few and the teeming majority;
insecurities of life, property and personal possessions; unemployment and bleak
prospects for the future for our youths; and rising tides of state-sponsored
and non-statist violence. The very survival of the country is at stake and has
been so almost since 1999, the year in which the present Fourth Republic came
into existence.
Many
pundits now openly talk of the possibility, if not the necessity or the
inevitability, of the end our present experiment in democratic governance in a
violent bloodbath. Quite possibly, the Freedom of Information Act is the only
remaining legal and moral instrument that we have for making the revolution
that is coming a peaceful one. It remains to be seen whether the most
patriotic, progressive and selfless individuals and groups in the country will
wake up to this vital aspect of the FoI. But this line of reasoning requires
another lecture, another set of reflections.
Thank
you!
Prof. Jeyifo is Emeritus
Professor of English, Cornell University and Professor of Comparative
Literature and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. He
delivered this speech at The Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism
at the 5th Annual Lecture, Saturday, July 13, 2013, at the Nigerian
Institute of International Affairs, Lagos.
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