OPINION 21
Sanctity of Truth
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Sanusi, The New York Times and intellectual racism Sufuyan Ojeifo
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uspended Central Bank of Nigeria governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, is a man that can put a canary to shame. Even when he has nothing new or meaningful to say, he must seek out a journalist somewhere and sing his heart out. As such, it surprises nobody that he has been rehashing some of the inconsistent songs he has been singing in the last few months to The New York Times. What is noteworthy, however, is how The New York Times allowed itself to become a platform for peddling Sanusi’s views without making any effort to reflect Sanusi’s inconsistency and unreliability. While it is possible that the newspaper suffered a lapse of editorial judgment, the poor journalism exhibited by the newspaper smacks of intellectual racism. To be clear, the issue at stake is not whether The New York Times should have published its recent article (culled by The Nation of Wednesday, March 12, 2014 and a number of other national newspapers) largely reflecting Sanusi’s opinions. Even though the newspaper obtained a quote from presidential spokesman Reuben Abati in an ostensible attempt to balance its article, what stood out was the lack of a requisite background that would have properly contextualised Sanusi’s views.
For The New York Times to have taken as gospel Sanusi’s views on the $20 billion purportedly missing from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) without reflecting the number of times Sanusi’s figures has changed is a disservice not only to the newspaper but the ideals of good journalism. It is important to recall that in September 2013 Sanusi wrote to President Goodluck Jonathan alleging that $49.8 billion from the sale of crude oil was missing. He later said he’d made a mistake and that the actual figure was $12 billion. In February 2014 Sanusi’s figure changed to $20 billion. The question that naturally arises from this is: how would The New York Times have presented the article it did on Sanusi if the Chair of the US Federal Reserve System flip-flopped in the manner that the suspended CBN governor did? It is an incontestable fact that a banker who is flippant with figures simply cannot be credible. Consequently, the failure to reflect that Sanusi is inconsistent with figures, and as such cannot be relied upon— whether in the court of law or the court of public opinion—is the great undoing of The New York Times article. To further diminish its stature, the newspaper related in its report that, according to Sanusi, President Jonathan doesn’t want him to bring out any more information that would get the administration into trouble. This is unfair to say the least. President Jonathan, as everybody
For the avoidance of doubt, the FRCN report listed infractions ranging from tax evasion by all staff of the CBN knows, is the most liberal president Nigeria has ever had. Moreover, everybody in Nigeria is equally aware that nobody can stop Sanusi, being the canary that he is, from singing, even if all he does is to keep flip-flopping when it comes to figures. To put this matter in the most lucid way, The New York Times showed great contempt for Nigeria and Nigerians by failing to hold Sanusi to the same level of responsibility in fiscal precision as it would the Chair of the US Federal Reserve System. The newspaper is, in effect, saying that the Chair of the US Federal Reserve System must be sure of figures before going public with them, but the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria can play with figures all he wants because he is a lesser intellectual being. This is a grievous insult to Sanusi—even if the man in his eagerness to outperform all canaries do not realise this—and all Nigerians. It is also important to note that, for The New York Times to dismiss the many infractions listed by the Financial Reporting
Council of Nigeria (FRCN) against Sanusi by saying he may have “sidestepped civilservice rules” is to raise the possibility that the article was a sponsored foundation-laying report aimed at tarnishing the Nigerian government. For the avoidance of doubt, the FRCN report listed infractions ranging from tax evasion by all staff of the CBN—due to the institution’s failure to implement the provisions of the Personal Income Tax (Amendment) Act 2007 under Sanusi’s watch—through billions of naira spent on spurious subheads such as ‘Lunch for policemen’, to more billions purportedly paid to an airline that had no significant operations for over two years. These are just a few of the very specific and detailed charges against Sanusi’s stewardship at the CBN. Despite the attempt of The New York Times to present Sanusi as a credible source of information, the facts contained in the FRCN report paint a contrary picture. Apart from the shocking portrait of incompetence, financial recklessness, waste and outright fraud that the report revealed, everybody now knows that Sanusi’s CBN could not even observe the corporate governance practices which were the basis that Sanusi himself used in hounding several bankers like Erastus Akingbola and Cecelia Ibru out of their jobs. • Ojeifo, an Abuja-based journalist and magazine publisher, can be reached through ojwonderngr@yahoo.com
Revisiting the Oronsaye Report Adewale Kupoluyi
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t is disheartening that Nigeria, being the sixth largest exporter of crude oil in the world, still has over 70 per cent of its estimated 170 million population tagged as being poor and living below the United Nations poverty threshold of $2 per day. It is in our country that more than 70 per cent of its national resources are channelled into running a government that is unduly large and cumbersome to manage, while leaving behind, less than 30 per cent for the execution of capital projects and debt servicing. It is still my dear country that continues to promote a bogus and corrupt system that can never bring about any development because we keep consuming and consuming and producing little. Our country is a nation that runs a bicameral legislature that is notorious for being the highest remunerated in the world, where the embarrassing high rate of unemployment is at the dismal bottom position and the attainment of all the known human development indexes such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals MDGs by 2015, which is barely a year from now, remains a mirage. As a way out of the quagmire, the Goodluck Jonathan administration came up with the idea of setting up the Presidential Committee on the Rationalisation and Restructuring of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies, under the leadership of the well-respected, retired civil servant and former Head of Service of the Federation, Stephen Oronsaye, which at the end of their painstaking assignment, recommended the scrapping and merging of 220 out the existing 541 government agencies. The Oronsaye committee had proposed the reduction of the size of government to a manageable level and the streamlining of the operations of its various organs for
efficient service delivery and cost reduction. Not only did the Federal Executive Council met to deliberate on the report, a White Paper was allegedly produced while the Adamu Fika-led committee reviewed the report. Unfortunately, the Federal Government appears to have dumped the report, which recommended the drastic reduction in the number of government Ministries, Departments and Agencies, because the Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy presented by the Presidency to the National Assembly point to the fact that all the money-gulping MDAs were still provided for in the controversial 2014 budget to the tune of about N200 billion. This development is nothing short of a clear demonstration of the government’s lack of political will to implement policies that can impact positively on the economy as well as the polity. The two untenable reasons that had been given for the inability of government to implement the findings of the committee are: the money to be saved from the exercise is negligible and so does not worth the stress and secondly, the legal framework is not in place for its implementation. Certainly, the reasons are not convincing to any discernible mind and the mindset of many Nigerian that these MDAs are nothing other than wastages, economic burden and sheer duplication of bureaucracies and an avenue to create ‘food for the boys’ through other means. Then, if this is the case, why do we really need to waste money and precious time setting-up a committee when its outcome will never be implemented just like the Orosanye report is turning out to be? While the detailed work of the committee - that cuts across virtually every aspect of Nigerian public administration - deserves commendation, another look at the education component of the report - which when implemented, could bail out this critical sector from its near collapse.
These include the provision of compulsory and free education from primary to junior secondary schools for all school-age children in the country; the need for critical stakeholders, such as the National Council on Education, to make tangible efforts to revamp the falling standard of education in Nigeria; the imperative for state governors to be engaged, through the National Economic Council of State to drive the process and restore the standard of primary and secondary school education; professionalization of teaching; need for practicing teachers to undergo in-service training to enable them garner renewable teaching license; while teachers in privately-owned primary and secondary schools should be made to pass a qualifying examination before they are re-certified. The report also made case for an appropriation of funds for the management and development of schools, which should be allocated to them directly, rather than being warehoused at the Federal Ministry of Education, Universal Basic Education Commission and State Universal Basic Education Board; need for the restoration of a strong, aggressive, focused and professionalized Inspectorate Division that would facilitate the improvement and maintenance of standards in service delivery; and the institution of decisive and courageous leadership for the sector. With the government’s posturing, the report might have reached the end-of-the-road, meaning that we are still from overcoming our perennial and wasteful spending on bureaucracy, as the current deficit budget proposal before the National Assembly, indicates that the nation is set to spend N4.6 trillion while revenue profile is pegged at N3.7 trillion. One does not need any soothsayer before being told that the fiscal budget provides barely any reason to expect meaningful development in terms of either infrastructure or human capital this year.
• Kupoluyi writes from the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, vide, adewalekupoluyi@yahoo.co.uk, Twitter, @AdewaleKupoluyi