By Okey Ndibe
 |
| Nigeria’s Aviation Minister, Stella Oduah |
For
all of two weeks, Nigerians have been riveted by the disheartening revelation
that Aviation Minister Stella Oduah approved the purchase of two bullet-proof
BMW cars at the cost of $1.6 million.
Once
SaharaReporters broke the story, we were treated to a predictable game of fibs
and obfuscations. First breath: an aviation official denied the report. Second
breath: the minister’s spokesman admitted the purchase. He then defended it on
the ground that the minister needed the cars to protect her from faceless
threats to her life. Third breath: Yet another official said the cars were
actually bought for the use of foreign aviation dignitaries on official visits
to Nigeria. Fourth breath: Ms. Oduah, appearing last week before a committee of
the House of Representatives, disavowed her spokesman’s account of events.
If
the varied accounts had any characteristic in common, it was this: each narrator
seemed to speak before thinking. If there was a common impression, it was of a
desperate bunch trying hard – but failing mightily – to defend a transaction
that’s simply impossible to justify.
If
Ms. Oduah were an official in a country where ill-thought actions have
chastening consequences, she would long have handed in her letter of
resignation. Instead, she’s extremely lucky to be a Nigerian, a space where
anything-goes is the going style.
Nigerians
can’t stand the small crook, won’t forgive the petty thief. If a wretched,
starving fellow is spied picking somebody’s pocket for a hundred naira for a
meal, you can count on any Nigerian mob to deliver a sentence of death. And
that sentence is instantly executed, no appeals for mercy from the hapless thief
entertained.
But let a Nigerian public official – a governor, say –steal
billions of naira of public funds, and the same mob becomes amazingly dovish.
Some will rise to the thieving governor’s defense because he’s a “son/daughter
of the soil,” a fellow “tribesman/woman.” Some will put much store by the fact
that s/he worships in the same church or mosque. Some will declare that the
Bible warns, let s/he who is without sin throw the first stone. Some will ask
whether you expected a person who had sugar sprinkled on her/his tongue to spit
it.
Nigeria
is a paradox. It metes out instant capital punishment on pickpockets. Yet, it
is the perfect kingdom for the big, bold, audacious embezzler or squanderer.
It’s a country where ethics is frequently asked to surrender to ethnicity,
principle must cower before sectarian claims, and where institutions are made
to shudder in the presence of personalities, the merest achievement of public
officials is inflated beyond belief. It is, above all, a country where nothing
is ever any body’s fault. In Nigeria, the buck never stops at anybody’s desk;
like the Energizer bunny, the buck must keep on going.
Ms.
Oduah has benefited from the strange confection of Ethics Nigeriana. Many (I’d
even hazard, most) Igbo saw that what the Aviation Minister did was plain wrong
– no ifs or buts. But some Igbo groups and individuals rushed to her side,
proclaiming her a target of ethnic bigots. Their line of argument, whether
deployed by the Efik, the Hausa, the Yoruba, or the Igbo, is exasperating. How
does being Igbo lessen the awfulness and scandal of a minister’s decision to
buy two BMW cars at a price tag of $1.6 million?
Every
inch of Nigeria is bereft of basic facilities. For the vast majority of
Nigerians, life is hardly livable. Only recently was the country’s minimum wage
raised to N18,000 (about $112) per month. That’s $112 per month to spend on
rent, clothing, kerosene/firewood, food, transportation, school fees,
healthcare, (tanker-borne) water, (non-existent) electricity, and so on. The
federal and state governments were dragged, kicking and screeching, to assent
to that minimum.
Today, many Nigerian workers are still paid much less than
that miserable minimum. Forgive me, but I don’t see how the millions of hapless
Igbo are helped by Ms. Oduah’s approval of vulgar sums for bullet-proof cars.
This
is not to deny the existence, persistence and power of the ethnic factor.
There’s no question that some of the minister’s harshest critics would shed
their indignation and sing a different tune were she a member of their ethnic
bracket. But that fact, I think, does not validate the use of ethnicity to
defend impunity.
Instead, it offers a challenge as well as an opportunity for
the emergence of a cross-ethnic coalition of enlightened citizens. Such
citizens ought to be courageous enough to reject the invocation of ethnicity in
defense of nonsense.
In
2007, many commentators went after Patricia Etteh, then Speaker of Nigeria’s
House of Representatives, for spending N600 million of public funds on
renovating her official residence and her deputy’s. In one piece titled, “A
female speaker’s manly vices,” I argued that Ms. Etteh deserved to be banished
from her office. I wrote: “She has displayed a quality of arrogance and
insensitivity to the national mood that is difficult to stomach from an
occupant of her exalted position. In a season of national misery and disquiet,
she has proved herself an insouciant fan of revelry, self-aggrandizement and
squandermania.”
The
title of my piece was provoked, in part, by some misguided apologists who
sought to defend the speaker on grounds of gender. Others still raised the
ethnic defense. But both the gender and ethnic apologia were hollow in her
case. They have no traction in Ms. Oduah’s case, either.
President
Goodluck Jonathan’s response to the Oduah scandal was to – in effect – refuse
to address it. He achieved his evasion by setting up a panel to look into the
matter and report back in two weeks. Is there any information of consequence
that the president doesn’t already have? Nobody, least of all Ms. Oduah, has
denied that an aviation agency doled out $1.6 million for two cars. That’s a
grave enough misjudgment for the minister to merit being fired.
The US,
Britain, Germany, Norway, France, China, and Canada have lots more money than
Nigeria. Yet, it’s a safe bet that no aviation authority in any of those
countries would survive the scandal of doling out $1.6 million on two cars! I’d
like to know whether Ms. Oduah and Nigeria’s aviation “dignitaries” are driven
around in $800,000 bullet-proof BMWs when they visit other (wealthier) nations.
If
President Jonathan needs a panel and two weeks to figure out how to respond to
the Aviation scandal, then how much time – and how many panels – would he
require in order to tackle his country’s ever-worsening climate of insecurity,
its education crises, scary healthcare system, horrible roads, and the tattered
state of its infrastructure?
It’s
a mistake to assume that the president wanted a panel that would exhume the
facts to guide his action. No, Mr. Jonathan was merely playing according to the
rule book of our mess of a country. One of the rules is to shield, protect and
immunize loyal “steakholders” like the Aviation Minister from the consequences
of their actions and inactions.
The presidential panel’s real, if unstated,
mandate is to lull outraged Nigerians to sleep. If it can, the panel must
induce us to forget that our “Honorable Minister” blew $1.6 million of our
scarce funds on two cars. Once we forget, the president will be able to do what
he really wants to do – nothing!
Some
of Ms. Oduah’s defenders have pointed to the extensive renovation she initiated
at various Nigerian airports. The facts are there, undeniable. But Nigeria is a
nation of at least 120 million people – perhaps as many as 170 million. Surely,
the president can find another minister from that population capable of
continuing – and even expanding – the airport renovation projects. To argue
that Ms. Oduah and she alone can oversee that job is to fall back on the
Nigerian cult of the individual.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo used that
canard when he made a thinly disguised bid to alter Nigeria’s constitution in
order to perpetuate himself in office. His shameless acolytes argued, “If Obasanjo
is not president, who can do the job?” It was an insulting, brainless question
to pose in a country that brims with talent, even if the best of them are
carefully, deliberately excluded from the pool. And there was the irony that
the question was being posed by the surrogates of a man as ethically wretched,
mischievous and bereft of a modern outlook as Mr. Obasanjo.
There’s
a good chance that Ms. Oduah will keep her cabinet post, but that outcome would
be for all the wrong reasons. It won’t be because she’s a superb performer, or
that it made sense to fork over $1.6 million for two cars, or that the purchase
met the smell test. It will be because she happens to operate in a country
where ethnicity trumps ethics, loyalty to the oga at the top supersedes loyalty
to the collectivity, and expediency has far more muscle than adherence to sound
principles.
Please
follow me on twitter @ okeyndibe
No comments:
Post a Comment