TWO weeks ago we raised issues with the kite the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party of President Muhammadu Buhari was flying on the need for Nigerians, through the National Assembly (NASS), to award them extra powers to, ostensibly, arrest the collapsing economy of Nigeria. The word out is that the proposed instrument is christened Emergency Economic Stabilisation Bill 2016 and would be perfected and forwarded to the national lawmakers on resumption this September from yet another of their frequent and frivolous fully paid holidays.
Our position in the first part of this submission was that the Bill was not necessary and that the emergency power being sought would turn the once touted messiah-president into a monster-president. He would be worse than a bull in a China shop. We had also posited that the award of absolute power, under whatever guise, to this administration will not change the glaring fact that the APC government and its operatives are bereft of ideas on how to steer the economy and suffering Nigerians away from the disaster we are into now.
If a political party and its leadership which made a song and dance of how they would turn our country into Eldorado when they were canvassing for our votes about two years ago have, in the sixteen months since their assumption of office and power, been blaming everybody and everything else but themselves for the deteriorating condition of the Nigerian, that party and the president it offered Nigerians cannot, and should not be entrusted with any more powers beyond those in our extant laws and the Nigerian Constitution. Indeed if it is possible the powers they already have which have thus far been used for parochial ends including lopsided appointments should be curbed. The APC and President Buhari have serially blamed the former ruling Peoples Democratic Party [PDP] for sixteen years of waste and maladministration. They have blamed that government of massive corruption. They blamed the ancien regime of not saving during that era when a barrel of crude oil, at some point, sold for well above $USD100. They claimed the rot they met was mind boggling. APC and Buhari alleged that they were bequeathed with a vandalized treasury. They claimed that the PDP that governed the country since the return of democracy in 1999 did virtually nothing and that it was peopled by petty thieves and armed robbers and bandits.
Indeed the PDP might as well be all the APC accused it of. The irony is that the same people the APC branded as bandits were the same people recruited by the APC to help it win power and to govern. Look around you. Who are the leaders and key personages in the NASS? Who are the chairpersons of the powerful and ‘juicy’ committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives? Who are the notable ministers in the cabinet of Buhari. Who are the special advisers to our top government functionaries? Trace their political history and see where it takes you. Are they likely to be the same persons that the APC has been insisting were the troublers, I mean the destroyers, of Nigeria?
Now on the question of the imminent emergency powers. For this administration which from all intents and purposes is clueless and confused and confounded everything is a virtue. In the beginning it took President Buhari about six months to constitute the federal executive council. There was hue and cry by knowledgeable Nigerians on the dangers of the delay. They were dismissed. Rabid supporters of the president said Buhari should be allowed to find angels and saints to work with him. Finally, when he came out with the list of cabinet members we saw angels without wings and saints that could easily pass as Satan. When Buhari was branded Baba go slow his supporters, among them the elite of our society who should ordinarily know better, claimed the snail pace of the president in tackling basic, ordinary tasks was good for our collective wellbeing. When the ministerial list was unveiled, the names were so ordinary that the word ordinary should not in good conscience be applied to it. All the while our president lived permanently on a jet plane, travelling round the world to ‘repair’ Nigeria’s sullied image and to attract investors. He was holding meetings at head of state level and his aides gloated about low hanging fruits. Nobody cared even after they were warned that the absence of follow up at lower, especially ministerial levels, to our president’s photo ops meetings with other heads of state and governments would lead to non-maximization of the desired benefits. Because of the lack of follow up engagements at the ministerial level, the low hanging fruits got rotten before our eyes. The more the president travelled the more Nigeria was being quickly deleted from economic billboards showcasing the attractions of emerging markets.
Then we were confronted with the contrived comedy of the 2016 national budget. What happened to, or with, the budget was a tragedy. But it provided a comic relief unless you have heard before our own experience the story of a budget that was presented to lawmakers, declared missing soon after, forged, padded, found, then passed into law and signed by the president. And months after, the chairman of the House committee that superintended that budget process is still insisting that that document is a patchwork of forgeries. I have since stopped counting the number of agencies he has petitioned, not to correct the forgeries, but to ensure the sacking of the House Speaker and other principal officers, having himself been ousted as appropriation committee chair. The government had promised that our lives would change once the budget came on stream. The budget has run one full quarter. A short period no doubt. Our lives have indeed changed…for the worst. The price of every food item has gone wild. Buhari’s ministers who were branded ‘noise-makers’ by their principal even before they were appointed have completely lost their voices; presidential spokesmen have beaten a retreat while APC leaders are AWOL (away without official leave). I once asked on this column Where in town is the new sheriff? And now I ask where is the legendary body language.
After serial self-inflicted injuries on constituting his cabinet and the bungled budget, the president again mismanaged the exchange rate and the deregulation of the downstream sector of the oil industry. Out of unbelief, I believe, our president created and still creates a cesspool of corruption in the FX market. Those who are adept at rent-seeking and who have influence and connection have made a kill, and are still making a kill in that market. We had long bemoaned the round tripping in the market long before Emir Sanusi who was Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) told us about how he could make billions sitting in the gardens of his palace, working the phones and maximizing his reach and influence. It is the same poor approach to the petroleum products handling. Now there appears to be no end to price fixing. Recently an amorphous body of former and serving group managing directors of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation rose from a meeting to claim that the N145/litre of petrol tax imposed by the government in May was no longer tenable. The price has to go up to anywhere above N150/litre. Buhari applied for this job in 2003, 2007 and 2011 but failed. When he was given the job in 2015, he assumed office without any plan. Now he wants us to accept that emergency power is a substitute for a roadmap. We are in for more diet of dust.
Still on emergency power for a diet of dust
