Beyond the power sector revelations
By CHIJIOKE ODOM
Monday, March 24, 2008

After nearly half a decade of self-governance, Nigeria, with her astounding oil wealth is supposed to be waking, walking and witnessing in the comity of nations. But is she? The blood-curdling and heart-wrenching revelations emanating from the on-going House of Representatives’ public hearing on the comatose power sector establishes why she is still mired in infantile paralysis.

In full public glare, Nigerians and the global community via live satellite television coverage, are seeing and hearing how managers entrusted with public funds for public good chose to purloin US $16 billion and submerge the nation in the thickest darkness for the past eight years. Marooned in the cesspool of profuse corruption with no will-power for salvation, those opportuned to engage her in trust for the citizenry have only seen themselves as heroic undertakers and pall-bearers.

With one hand, they clean up her treasury, and with the other they simultaneously thrust their daggers in her vulnerable underbelly. Lootocracy, the unannounced state policy facilitated by this gang of political serial rapists, have left her asphyxiating and hemorrhaging at the same time. And yet, that is not all there is to it.

Far beyond the stunning revelations; of otiose and incompetent public servants and their local and international collaborator wheeler-dealers; of companies with less than N2000 share capital being awarded N1.8 billion contract; of ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo perfidiously awarding contracts of stupendous sum to a German firm blacklisted by the World Bank; of foreign and local contractors who pocketed the full final settlements but neither visited the project sites nor did any work in the past eight years, etc, lies a far more terrifying evil. It is not just the attendant social and economic losses. Rather, it is the sinister lattice on which the destiny of the nation is being daily forged, albeit negatively.

The much unacknowledged incubator of the “conquer-and-plunder” tragedy which Nigeria suffers, specifically, is her grossly tinctured political framework in which the Nigerian state has become the de facto centralized political apparatus from which huge contract sums must be made. The personalization and privatization of public office at all levels is its veritable index. Its range is broad, the identities of the facilitators shadowy, their methods subtle and deadly, and their sole purpose, the creation of political and economic terror which they can endlessly manipulate for their insatiable pecuniary and political ambitions.

Within that framework, corruption at the highest levels of government not only bloom, but assume the status of a primary objective and directive principle of state policy. Consequently, the country gets caught up in a vicious cycle of continuing economic crisis compounded by these wholesale looting of the public treasury.

Public finances are the immediate and primary casualties of this convergence of vaulting political ambition with economic greed. They are quickly plunged into disarray. And, being the determinant of the nation’s social sector’s health and development, the sector takes a tail-spin and, in turn, cascades into distress with a knock-on effect on other sectors.

The implementation of the economic reform policies of the government, no matter how beautiful, becomes compromised, wholesale. As resources are brazenly diverted to serve private and partisan sectional ends, the national infrastructure, ranging from the educational and health institutions through the road and rail network to the entire power and energy sector lacerate at the edges with far reaching consequences for both the economy and the society.

The reality on the ground is self-evident. The country has been clearly set back by many decades as life for the majority now consists mainly of striving for basic subsistence amid collapsing facilities and institutionalized predation. Any form of opposition to this state of affairs, whether under the military or civilian governments, is usually met with incremental levels of repression. This is epitomized by the monstrosity of the ambivalent-dribbler Ibrahim Babangida’s junta (1985-1993); the dark-goggled Sanni Abacha’s junta (1993-1998) and the imperial presidency of the Ota chicken farmer, Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-2007).

For the majority of citizens, therefore, it has become an eternal impossibility to fathom what the bargain was in being a citizen. They daily see themselves suffer the consequences of the conceptualization of state power as the private preserve of those who wield it. Before their very eyes, the Nigerian state is unable to advance the welfare of its citizens. Even when it spends stupendous amounts of money on infrastructure and services, there is very little to show for it.

Instead, as has been aptly revealed in the on-going hearings, much of the allocated money is stolen through the award of fictitious contracts, contracts not executed but whose entire sum has been paid to the contractors, abandoned contracts and poorly executed contracts. Little wonder therefore, that personalities like Olusegun Agagu, in an unparalleled demonstration of arrogance, insensitivity and bombast bluntly told the probe panel that there was absolutely nothing wrong regarding the finding that the ministry of power and steel which he headed from 2000-2003 awarded $ 6.2 billion contracts to 34 fictitious companies

. “That is how contracts are awarded in ministries and parastatals,” he said, and it was not the minister’s responsibility to verify whether such firms are real or fake! Even $16 billion is a tiny investment to bring about any change in the nation’s power profile, Agagu would have us believe! Liyel Imoke, who succeeded him in office, earlier in his testimony hinted on the need for Nigerians to festoon him with garlands, rose flowers, eagle and ostrich feathers for whatever tiny watts of electricity they are still able to find in their bulbs today!

Both Agagu and Imoke are today the number one public officers as governors of their respective states of Ondo and Cross Rivers. And like their days as ministers, the buck does not stop on their tables in their respective states’ mansions.
Further, the prevalence of corruption and officially-sanctioned embezzlement through myriads of schemes including privatization and other neo-liberal economic alchemy have combined to create a criminalized social system in the nation.

This in turn reinforces the contaminated political system as the highly monetized politics determines who gets to power at any unit. Persons who find themselves in positions of authority leverage State resources in order to entrench themselves and their cronies in power perpetually. It is in this sense that the Nigerian State has become one huge contract. The methods of perverse enrichment are not unknown to the majority of citizens.

The 1987 Political Bureau finely delineated these myriad avenues to include “ the inflation of government contracts in return for kickbacks; fraud and falsification of accounts in the public service; examination malpractices in our educational institutions including universities; the taking of bribes and perversion of justice among the police, judiciary and other organs for administering justice; and various heinous crimes against the State in the business and industrial sectors of our economy, in collusion with multinational companies such as over-invoicing of goods, foreign exchange swindling, hoarding and smuggling” among others.

Thus, with the exception of the noble-minded few, both princes and plebeians are caught up in a dead heat for the slightest opportunity to enlist in the hollow ritual and get a piece of the pie. The uncorrupted that get there are quickly corrupted by the corruption because it is the unwritten ethos of the social system which reserves the highest honour for the thief.

Sadly enough, the most significant challenge to the enthronement of public finance probity within the overall tinctured political system in the current dispensation, is the nature of the executive branch. Its dominance over the other two arms of government in Nigeria is simply incongruous. This derives from the advantage the executive enjoyed during the long history of military rule.

This culture of executive dominance has been carried over to civil rule, and appeared to have been consummated by the emergence of the Obasanjo Imperial Presidency. At all levels of government, the relative weakness of the legislature vis-à-vis the executive is shown in the excesses of the executive and in attempts to control the legislature, especially executive influence in the selection of legislative leadership. Executive dominance has been greatly aided by legislature’s acquiescence of its time-honored oversight functions on the executive which could have saved the nation the current power sector show of shame in the last eight years.

Woodrow Wilson, in his classical doctoral treatise, Congressional Government, in 1885, laid bare the irrepressible heart-beat of a legislative body, properly so called, in relation to the entire government which it is part of, and more specifically, the executive. According to him, “It is the proper duty of a legislative body to look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees.

It is meant to be the eyes and the voice, and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents. Unless Congress have and use every means of acquainting itself with the acts and the disposition of the administrative agents of the government, the country must be helpless to learn how it is being served; and unless Congress both scrutinize these things and sift them by every form of discussion, the country must remain in embarrassing, crippling ignorance of the very affairs which it is most important that it should understand and direct. The informing function of Congress should be preferred to its legislative function.”
The price of liberty, it has been said, is eternal vigilance. The present probe, indeed, is an apt illlusytration for all.