Jonathan’s Two Quiet Months By Okey Ndibe

Two months have gone quietly by,
and Nigeria’s transformational
president has failed to transform a
single thing.
It’s one of the amazements of
Nigerian life that the tumultuous
events of last January seem now so
terribly dim and faraway. But it was
in January, two short months ago,
that President Goodluck Jonathan
incautiously increased the price of
fuel. That policy in turn precipitated
one of the staunchest, though
ultimately short-lived, acts of mass
resistance in recent Nigerian history.
After months of trying, the best
argument the government was able
to marshal for what was officially
billed as fuel subsidy removal was
that unconscionable fuel marketers
had exploited the system to steal
the nation to the brink of
bankruptcy. In other words, the
Jonathan government essentially
pleaded corruption (by its
bureaucrats and its favored
business players), incompetence
(on the part of law enforcement and
anti-corruption agencies mandated
to apprehend as well as prosecute
criminals), and absence of political
will (to disrupt the profiteering
frenzy of a small group of
businessmen who are often
politically connected).
In the prelude to the shocking New
Year hike in fuel prices, the
administration’s debate team –
often featuring the trio of Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala, the Central Bank’s
Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, and Diezani
Alison-Madueke, had rehashed the
old rationales. Remove oil subsidy
and Nigerians would have better
infrastructure. Remove it, and get a
healthcare system for the first time.
Remove it, and see infant and child
mortality rates take a nosedive for
the first time in years. Do you want
dependable power supply, an
interstate road network, well-funded
universities and polytechnics? The
answer, we were told, lay in
foregoing fuel subsidy.
It was hardly surprising that
Nigerians were less than impressed.
A state that cannot beat back the
criminal conduct of two or three
dozen fuel importers (as well as a
few score bureaucrats who act as
enablers) does not possess the
credentials to deliver on better
roads, improved health care, or
reduced mortality rates.
The general strike and protests that
were provoked by the government’s
fuel policy were called off when the
government not only reduced the
per liter price to N97, but also
pledged to move against those who
had exploited us all. If memory
serves, the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission was ordered to
get cracking, to unmask the
fraudsters whose round-tripping and
other illicit maneuvers inflated
claims and gutted the nation’s
resources.
Two months later, EFCC chairperson
Ibrahim Lamorde has been all
fashion and little action on
corruption. Given the scale of the
abuse in the fuel subsidy scheme,
the EFCC should have had little
trouble finding targets for
investigation and prosecution. Even
if the agency did not have enough
investigators, it could easily have
started by poring over the probe by
the House of Representatives.
A serious-minded, enterprising EFCC
can establish fraud by comparing
documents submitted by fuel
marketers with maritime logs as well
as sales records from foreign
refineries. There’s no evidence that
the agency is looking at the issue,
much less going at it with the
requisite sense of urgency.
It’s safe to bet that, by design, no
investigation is going on. In fact, the
odds are that the original
announcement of an investigation
was, from the outset, a will-o-the-
wisp, an exercise in public
deception. The government had
unwittingly confessed to Nigerians
and to the world that a few
businessmen (easy to identify
because they were licensed to
operate in the oil sector), and a
coterie of public officials, had bilked
the public till to the tune of close to
two trillion naira. As a rule, the
Nigerian state is allergic to exposing
acts of corruption, much less the
rumps of the biggest players in the
vast industry of embezzlement.
When exposure occurs, it is usually
an inadvertent mistake, quickly
corrected.
One’s hunch, then, is that the
ostensible probe was nothing more
than a carefully concealed scheme
of concealment. Perhaps it was a
ploy to enable the government to
hide the ugly fact that it had
confessed that some of those
decorated with high national honors
were crooks – and cheats of the
most mindless class.
So here we are, enduring two quite
months that should have been filled
with dynamism and momentum.
Here, a president who seems to
read a major speech today and,
before tomorrow, forgets (or even
disdains) the important
commitments he made. Above all,
the lack of action is a direct
indictment of a presidency that –
like most past Nigerian leaders –
believes that all it takes to lead a
nation is to enjoy sleeping privileges
at Aso Rock.
Mr. Jonathan should summon the
EFCC’s boss to share what he’s
uncovered – if an investigation is
afoot. If there’s no prying going on –
in other words, if Nigerians were lied
to – then it behooves the labor
leaders to revisit the issue, and
insist that the government revert to
the pre-January price of N65 per liter
of fuel.
As many protesters pointed out in
January, the grounds of contestation
went far beyond the question of
where to peg fuel subsidy. Three far
more potent issues had to do with
the unsustainable cost of running
Nigeria’s “nasty” democracy,
measures to dislodge the
entrenched culture of corruption,
and modes of ensuring that policies
are informed by the voices and
interests of the largest number of
Nigerians.
If Jonathan is to make an impact as
a political figure, it would be, it
seems, by acting with courage in
one or all of the above three areas.
One doesn’t hold out much hope.
For, everything considered, this
president may be quiet precisely
because the confluence of forces
and circumstances that produced
him dictate that he merely see
himself as the sleeper in Aso Rock –
even if the ship of state continues,
dangerously, to flounder.

Please follow me at twitter @
OkeyNdibe.
(okeyndibe@gmail.com)