Buhari’s 2016 Budget: A Consolidation Of Corruption

 By Remi Oyeyemi

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”  - Joseph Goebbels

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”   - Adolf Hitler 

*Buhari 

President Muhammadu Buhari promised CHANGE in the days and months leading to the last presidential elections. For a country in comatose, stagnated in misery and miasma, CHANGE was the sing song. At a point in the journey to the presidential elections, Buhari, to and for Nigeria, became much more than the promise of CHANGE. He became the CHANGE that the majority of Nigerians were seeking.

Thanks to the hitherto unprecedented propaganda in the history of Nigeria. It was a dexterous devilish manipulation of information that turned Muhammadu Buhari from the Satan that Nigerians have rejected at the polls for the previous 16 years into a Saint all of a sudden. He became the messiah. He became the savior. Hope rose to high heavens. Excitement was enormously generated. The enthusiasm was pervasive. It was all encompassing. Buhari was everybody’s man. Everyone was Buhari’s man. And woman!

The lies about Buhari were very big but were kept very simple in deference to the gospel according to Adolf Hitler. His party and handlers kept saying those lies repeatedly and consistently. Eventually, Nigerians believed the lies hook, line and sinker. In the face of historical facts to the contrary, Buhari became a man of integrity! Buhari became a man of competence! Buhari became incorruptible!

After sixteen years of trial, Buhari became the President of Nigeria. Contesting for an office for sixteen years consecutively would have meant an adequate preparation and deep grasp of the issues involved. The advantage of ruling the same country once before the second coming was also expected to be helpful. He was expected to know exactly what to do. Buhari was supposed to be the man with a plan; the man with the solution; the savior to salvage and save; the messiah to mesmerize, untie the shackles and set Nigeria free on the path to freedom and realization of its potentials.

Some of us believe that Buhari is and has always been incompetent. In addition to his incompetence, he is also corrupt as facts of history have attested to. Not just by his actions, but by his utterances that are well documented for and by History. But on this second coming, the day he began to deny himself and what he promised Nigerians during his campaign, it was crystal clear that he had no plans for Nigeria. It was clear he had no solutions. It was clear that he is more of the same. At that time, there was no new proof. But now he has provided a brand new proof to Nigerians and for the world to behold. And that proof is his Budget for the Year 2016!

Nigerians And Their Anti-Corruption Charade

By Chinweizu

Sundoor999@gmail.com

26jan15

Anybody who thinks that, under Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution, any government, party or president can eradicate corruption is like a man who expects a worm to give birth to a lion, or who wants to go to heaven but doesn’t want to die.

If Nigerians are at all serious in their endless noisemaking against corruption, they must, as a first step, get rid of their 1999 Constitution. Anybody who is claiming he can end corruption but who isn’t campaigning to get rid of the 1999 Constitution is a fraud.

But Nigerians are not serious. First of all, they love what they call corruption, they became addicted to it right from the 1950s. They want to loot and squander, that’s why they don’t really want corruption tackled.  Secondly, they love their noisemaking against it. If “corruption” was eliminated, they would lose their favorite topic for complaining. In this matter of denouncing corruption, Nigerians are like a rich hypochondriac who is addicted to his symptoms and to the attention he gets because of his condition, and doesn’t want it cured. He refuses to go for the diagnostic tests that can determine the cause of his symptoms so it can be treated. Instead he keeps going from one quack doctor to another, each of whom claims to have the magic cure for his condition. Of course all that each wants is to get at his money and take his share and run. So each denounces his predecessor and gets his chance until the next quack doctor displaces him, and he leaves the patient uncured and even worse, and the hypochondriac is happy that his symptoms are still with him.

Which coup maker in the past 50 years hasn’t claimed he has come to get rid of corruption only to get even more corrupt than those he threw out? Which presidential candidate hasn’t claimed the same intention and ability only to fail when he got into office? Why has that been so? There are three main reasons why that has been so since 1999:

OIL SUBSIDY: To Be Or Not To Be?

By Dan Amor, Sebastine Eko & Omini Oden

Over the years, Nigeria's four decrepit refineries which were built to refine crude oil into petroleum products for local consumption and possibly for exports were left to rot just to make room for the importation of petroleum products by the governing elite and their contractors. This makes it pretty difficult for the importers or oil marketers to bring the products to the reach of the final consumers without incurring additional costs. The effect of this excess tax on the consumers in the name of landing and other costs of carriage from the ports to depots across the country is what government tries to cushion so that the products would be affordable for the common man. This extra payment government makes to the oil marketers in order to maintain an affordable price regime for the products is what is generally referred to as oil subsidy.

*Buhari

Subsidy is therefore a government policy that would act as a palliative due to fluctuations in the international market. But what makes this policy so controversial in Nigeria is that everything about the oil & gas sector is shrouded in secrecy. Ever since the military administration of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida introduced the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in 1988, whose major intention was to vend juicy national assets to willing buyers, those companies not sold to government officials or their cronies, were allowed to rot in other to attract the sympathy of Nigerians for their privatization. The refineries, two in Port Harcourt, one in Onne near Warri and one in Kaduna, are part of those assets. Since the Babangida era, Nigerians have been living with this menace. It triggered a lot of civil unrest during which several Nigerians including university students were killed.

The Military junta under the late General Sani Abacha which inherited the crisis set up the Petroleum (Special) Trust Fund (PTF) headed by the current President, Muhamadu Buhari to manage the excess charges from the pump prices of petroleum products. The fund was meant for the provision of infrastructure across the country. In 1999, when Chief Olusegun Obasanjo assumed leadership of the country as a democratically elected president, he disbanded the PTF and insisted on the deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry. But the move was resisted by Nigerians who thought that they had long been shortchanged by government in the oil and gas industry.