Cost Of Governance: Playing Ostrich With The Economy

 By Adekunle Adekoya

Earlier in the week, two renowned economists, one a businessman and the other a traditional ruler used the occasion of a book launch by the Oxford Global Think Tank Leadership Conference in Abuja to speak truth to power. They are HRH Muhammad Sanusi II, Emir of Kano and former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, and Mr. Atedo N.A. Peterside, founder of IBTC, which later fused with Stanbic Bank to become Stanbic-IBTC Bank. 

*Tinubu

What came up at the event, which the media focused on, were the reforms of the present administration and the cost of governance.

For Sanusi, the issue was the size and cost of governance. He pointedly asked: “We’ve got to be honest, why do we need 48 ministers? Why do we need dozens of vehicles when we’re moving around in convoys or travelling all over the country?”

Nigeria, A Country With Too Many Sovereigns

 By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Colonial rule in Nigeria was conducted through Indirect Rule. It was a system of “native administration” patented in Northern Nigeria, which became the model exported by the British across their colonies. For all practical purposes, this system of government gave to most Emirs and other rulers in Chiefly communities, “more power than they had in pre-colonial days.” 

*Allen Onyema 

The result was the establishment of “native states” at the top of which sat these local potentates, many of whom enjoyed powers of life and death over their kinsfolk. The end of colonial rule did not much change this as they reached working accommodation with the post-colonial elite for self-preservation. Powered by twin failures of both leadership and nation building, the result in Nigeria, where it all began, is one country with a multiplicity of sovereigns.

The on-going dispute between the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Aminu Ado Bayero, and Air Peace, a private airline in Nigeria, dramatises this. The claim on behalf of the Emir is that he flew Air Peace from Banjul, The Gambia to Nigeria, on February 24, landing in Lagos about 05:45 hours. He was at the head of a ten-person traveling party who had a connecting flight to catch to his home in Kano, north-west Nigeria scheduled for 06:15 hours the same morning, a mere 30 minutes after they landed. Five out of the ten members of the Emir’s traveling party were business class passengers.