By
Ikechukwu Amaechi
President Muhammadu Buhari is worried. That,
ordinarily, should not be news. A president under whose watch the economy is
performing so woefully should be worried. That is the least expected of him.
The National Bureau of
Statistics (NBS) says the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which measures inflation
has hit 16.5 per cent, the highest in 11 years. Before Buhari took over the
reins of power, inflation was at a comfortable single digit.
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| *Dambazau and Buhari |
But he is not worried
because the economy is in recession; he is not worried because of the runaway
inflation.
And he is not worried
that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that Nigeria
Our dear president is
not worried that N375 now exchanges for $1 with the prospect of hitting a
scandalous N500 to $1 before the end of the year, contrary to what he promised
on the campaign stump.
Buhari is not worried
that his All Progressives Congress (APC) has not delivered on its promise to
create millions of jobs annually. Instead, thousands are thrown into the labour
market and those still keeping their jobs are grossly underemployed with
salaries being irregular or not paid at all.
He is not worried that
Foreign Direct investment (FDI) has dried up, literally, despite the much-hyped
trip to Beijing
Buhari is not worried
that Nigerians are feeding, literally, from the dustbin.
No!
He is rather worried
that Nigerians are bootlegging his "good behaviour," his penchant for
labelling every citizen a “thief” with or without evidence, particularly anyone
who has served in any government before his.
Buhari is worried that
senior government officials are being tarred with the brush of corruption
without any concrete evidence.
Presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina, said his principal has appealed to “discerning” Nigerians to ignore orchestrated attempts to sully the integrity of ministers and other senior government officials and called for decent and civilised comments, particularly on the integrity of those serving the country.
Presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina, said his principal has appealed to “discerning” Nigerians to ignore orchestrated attempts to sully the integrity of ministers and other senior government officials and called for decent and civilised comments, particularly on the integrity of those serving the country.
Oh, Really!
Adesina issued a
statement which said Buhari was reacting to reports, particularly by online
media, that former Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Ibe Kachikwu, who is also Minister of State for
Petroleum, is being investigated over crude oil swap deals and gas lifting
during his tenure as GMD.
“Terrible
and unfounded comments about other people’s integrity are not good. We are not
going to spare anybody who soils his hands, but people should please wait till
such individuals are indicted,” Buhari was quoted as saying.
I pity Kachikwu. I
will be surprised if, despite all the public show of indifference, he will not
be asking himself in his very sober moments why he, an alumnus of University of
Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) and Harvard Law School, left his very lucrative job as
the executive vice chairman of ExxonMobil Africa for the roforofo fight that is public service in Nigeria.
Something tells me
that if he has his way, he will quit, having done his best in the short period
he was in charge of the NNPC. But he won’t quit on his own. He has to be
sacked, because to resign and take a walk from public office in this part of
the world is deemed a slap on the face of the government, a mortal sin, as the
Catholics would say, that is beyond pardon. My take is that Kachikwu will hang
in there.
But Buhari knows that
those savaging the brightest star in his cabinet and impugning on his character
are from within the system, not from the outside. They want to punish him for
daring to reform the NNPC for greater efficiency, for daring to change its
business paradigm that serves only the interest of a greedy few.
With his removal and
constitution of a new NNPC board, the vested interests will claw back what they
lost in the last one year that Kachikwu ran the show. But as forces that don’t
take prisoners, they are not contented that he has been rendered redundant,
they want to destroy his reputation as well.
But I digress. Kachikwu’s
travails in the hands of those who believe they own Nigeria
How can a president
who has elevated to an art the unhealthy habit of labelling every other person
a thief even before indictment, both in his first coming as military head of
state and now, lament that his fellow citizens have learnt the “good manners?”
In a discussion I had
with Sylvester Ugoh – former governor of the defunct Central Bank of Biafra,
former minister of science and technology and later education – he said his
only grouse against Buhari, who overthrew Shehu Shagari’s government where he
served as a minister, was that he tarred everyone who served under Shagari with
the brush of corruption even where evidence proved otherwise.
“Had
Buhari freed those who did not soil their hands in any way, and there was
enough evidence to prove that some of us were not corrupt after the
investigations, he would have sent out the right message that integrity in
government pays.
“People
would have known that there is a reward, after all, for good behaviour in
government.
“But the
fact that he tarred everybody with the same brush of corruption was a
disservice to the country which sent out the very wrong signal that honesty
does not pay,” Ugoh said.
What the Harvard-trained
economist complained about happened 32 years ago, and Buhari is making the same
mistake in 2016. Today, anybody that had anything to do with the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP) government in the 16 years it was in power is deemed
corrupt because the APC government has used propaganda and barefaced lies to
wheedle the unwary. There is mass hysteria in the land.
Let me be clear, there
are corrupt politicians in the PDP whether in government or not. However, it is
absurd to claim that everybody who served in the PDP government was corrupt.
But that is the impression Buhari is creating. The same picture he painted of
politicians when he overthrew Shagari on December 31, 1983.
Yet, the same APC
government demonising the opposition is doing all it call to give its officials
a clean bill of health even where a prima
facie case is established on evidence.
Take for instance the
case of Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazzau, and the third interim
report released by the Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement in
the Nigerian Armed Forces.
While the report
indicted two former Chiefs of Army Staff, Azubuike Ihejirika and Kenneth
Minimah, it left out Dambazzau who occupied that position between 2008 and 2010
and was reportedly indicted in the report leaked to the media before it was
officially released.
There are strong
suggestions that Buhari’s government may have deliberately doctored the latest
report of the presidential arms audit panel by removing Dambazzau’s name to
shield him from prosecution.
But the government
claims nothing like that happened. While this may well be true, what is
patently false is the reason given for the omission of Dambazzau’s name in the
report. To ward off allegation of bias, the Minister of Information and
Culture, Lai Mohammed, said Dambazau’s name was not included among those
indicted because the third interim report only looked into procurement and
contracts awarded for and by the military between 2011 and 2015.
“When
the documents regarding procurement from 2007 to 2010 are available and
scrutinised, the committee will then issue its report on that,” Mohammed said in a
statement signed by his Media Adviser, Segun Adeyemi. “The audit is being done in phases, and the report that was released on
Thursday [July 21] is the third of such.”
But a look at the
report puts a lie to Mohammed’s claim because it read: “Press Release on the Third Interim Report of the Presidential
Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement From 2007 to 2015.”
The first paragraph of
the seven-page report also confirmed that the committee used 2007-2015 as
reference.
“In
continuation of its assignment, the Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment
Procurement (CADEP) in the Nigerian Armed Forces analysed procurement contracts
awarded by or for the Nigerian Army between 2007 and 2015,” it said.
So, why will a
government run by Saint Buhari lie so blatantly if there is nothing to hide?
Buhari’s government is
playing the ostrich, burying its head in the sand and believing nobody sees its
body. Nigerians are wiser.
You cannot effectively
fight corruption when you shield members of your kitchen cabinet. 1983 is not
2016. The scale is falling off the eyes of many who thought that with Buhari, a
Daniel had finally come to judgment in Nigeria
But as the inimitable
Chinua Achebe would say, it is morning yet on creation day.
*Ikechukwu Amaechi is the Managing
Director/Editor-in-Chief of the The
Niche, a national newspaper published in
Lagos
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