Follow Us on Google
When in November, last year, the Federal Government announced its plans to withdraw fuel subsidy by June this year and provide eligible Nigerians with N5,000 monthly transport palliatives, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) dismissed the proposal, describing it as laughable. Consequently, the government quickly recoiled and approved an 18-month suspension of the proposal.
It does seem, however, that the Nigerian government is not yet done with amusing its citizens, knowing that its foibles are the actual palliatives for a beleaguered people,whose leaders are somnambulant when critical issues concerning the citizens are concerned. So, they opted to suffer and smile at the same time, apologies to the late maverick, Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
So, watching the helmsman of Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, Mele Kyari, informing bemused Nigerians that the country would stop importation of fuel from mid-next year was a huge joke. He built his hopes on Dangote Refinery in which the government has 20 per cent equity holding.
His excitement was appalling. People wondered where the government had been all of these seven plus years, and is now just waking up when one of their legs is already out of the exit door of power.
Apart from that, although the country’s three refineries have remained in coma despite the billions of naira allegedly pumped into revamping them, Kyari expressed unusual optimism that the Dangote Refinery, billed to refine up to 50 million litres of petrol per day, would supplement the output from the state-owned refineries to meet the demand of Nigeria for petroleum products. He made no mention of the Federal Government, which, presumably, has ceased to exist.
It is an irony that in spite of the over seven years of waste, this government now wants Nigerians to believe that importation of fuel would end immediately it turns its back on governance.
Nigerians would miss nothing but the jokes in this government though but that it hinges its enthusiasm on the private initiative of one man to solve the country’s decades-old woes is overreaching and a joke taken too far. It is a blatant admission of failure and more tolerable if they willingly handed over the reins of governance to Dangote instead of wasting the country’s time since 2015.
Of more concern, however, is the booby trap being smartly laid for the incoming government in 2023. The government has again proposed that the obnoxious fuel subsidy would be terminated in June, next year, immediately it takes its leave from Aso Rock on May 29.
Indeed, Nigerians find it difficult to differentiate between fuel subsidy and conduit for milking the country dry by the privileged few, who are also fingered for the perennial vandalism and bunkering in the oil sector. They make a mystery of petroleum refining by crippling the refineries while shamelessly taking our crude elsewhere for filthy lucre.
Nevertheless, the Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, had told the House of Representatives ad hoc committee that President Muhammadu Buhari has set June 2023 as the date for the removal of fuel subsidy, which the labour movement rejected last year. In other words, Buhari has set up his successor to start off on a stormy note, as the incoming President would be the one to contend with the eventual backlash that will trail the unpopular decision.
According to her, the funds expended on subsidy could have been deployed to other critical sectors.
Interestingly, this government had kicked against subsidy payments during the election campaign in 2015 but still continued with it once it got into office. Now, it wants to swindle gullible Nigerians with its comical schemes on the eve of its exit from power.
This is a government that rode to power on the back of promises to rid the country of insecurity. Instead of that, virtually all parts of the country have been conflagrated by the disastrous fire of insecurity and ethno-religious cleansing suspiciously aggravated from within the bastion of power, such that the country now occupies the objectionable second spot, as the world’s most terrorised country.
It promised to halt corruption but Nigeria has dropped further the line on the world corruption index. The hunters of corruption have themselves become hunted, having their hands illicitly stuck deep inside the national till.
Undeniably, Nigeria is besieged by many vermin, a confraternity of evil that covenanted to keep the country interminably destitute through many complicated twists. Those entrusted with the task of cleaning the Augean stable end up being sucked in by the endemic pull of corruption.
For instance, the presidential panel that probed former acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Ibrahim Magu, has not only indicted the agency for abandoning 14 fraud cases, involving N118 billion and $309 million under Magu’s watch, it also accused Magu of failing to remit another N48 billion loot recovered in foreign and local currencies in what could be described as re-looting the loot. However, his is not an isolated case.
The Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON) was set up to recover loans from defaulting debtors but the story oozing out of the agency is saddening, putrid and nauseating.
AMCON is allegedly targeting prime properties of supposed debtors and appropriating them through questionable sales to their proxies while letting real debtors off the hook.
One of such its victims, Suru Group of Companies, top range real estate developers and owners of a chain of hotels in Lagos, has been crying for justice that seems long in coming.
AMCON had dragged the Suru group to court thrice over its alleged indebtedness to the defunct Oceanic Bank. However, despite losing all the three cases it initiated, AMCON has continued to hold onto the company’s property and allegedly sold some, even as its very appeal in the Supreme Court is still pending.
The question begging for an answer whose interest is AMCON protecting that it cannot respect the rule of law and judicial decisions; who is beating the weird orchestra for the government agency?
The coming of Prof Ishaq Oloyede as Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, triggered off a probe that exposed the monumental rip-off going on at the agency. The officials only remitted miserly sums to the coffers of the government but busy lining their own pockets. The examination reportedly body only remitted N50, 752,544 between 2010 and 2016, as against the N5 billion it remitted to the treasury in 2017 alone.
Shocked, the Federal Government ordered a probe of previous heads of JAMB, which opened a can of worms and subsequent trial of the former registrar, Dibu Ojerinde over an 18-count charge, bordering on alleged misappropriation of N5.2 billion.
Nigerians are occasionally treated with weird transactions that portray the country as a land of absurdities where anything and everything is possible, especially if it leans towards corruption. Several years after the passing of the country’s ex-maximum ruler, Sani Abacha, humongous looted funds are still being discovered and repatriated to the country.
Strangely, animals and reptiles are now being made accomplices to the ginormous looting of the treasury.
What could one make out of the bizzare story, emanating from the accounts office of the JAMB, in Makurdi, Benue State, where a sales clerk told a shocked audit team that she could not account for N36 million. She had claimed that her housemaid connived with another JAMB staff member to spiritually steal the money from the vault in the accounts office, using a mysterious snake that sneaked into the office to swallow the money from the vault.
Similarly, the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, NSITF, shocked the Senate Committee on Public Accounts with an amazing tale of how termites ate most of the vouchers containing details of how N17.158 billion yet to be accounted for was spent.
Also, the anti-graft agency, EFCC, on May 16 arrested a former Accountant General of the Federation, AGF, Mr. Ahmed Idris, for allegedly cornering N80 billion through specious consultancies and other dishonest activities.
He is now facing trial but like Ojerinde, has offered a plea bargain. Methinks that the plea bargain offer is a ploy by the guilty to eat their cake and still have it. Nonsense! Government must recover every kobo, and with interest, because nothing could be more encouraging to sleaze than plea bargain.
However, ours is a country where anything and everything is possible and doses of official hilarity doled out to take the pain off our famished land.
