Strictly Personal

How we lost Buhari by Emmanuel Aziken

Published

2 years ago

April 23, 2022

In his first press interaction with the Lagos press in 2015, just after he was inaugurated minister of information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, in an off-the-record conversation with correspondent disclosed that President Muhammadu Buhari was looking for his first appointee to use as a scapegoat for his anti-corruption war.

Mohammed said so against the background of the fact that anti-corruption was one of three major planks on which the Buhari government campaigned for office.

The other planks were economy and security. With the administration’s record in those two sectors fantastically below average at best, the remaining leg left of the tripod to hold on to the Buhari personae had been his vaunted phobia for corruption.

However, in the last week, that personae quickly evaporated after two landmark actions that took place under the president’s nose.

The first was the pardon granted former Governors Joshua Dariye and Jolly Nyame which transformed them from convicted felons to saints. That whitewash followed the conviction of both men by appropriate courts on charges of corruption while in office as governors.

The prosecution of the two men also followed years of diligent investigation that consumed a substantial amount of taxpayers’ resources. That was also followed by resources expended in the course of their trial.

While many are lamenting the time and money wasted in the process, others are also looking at the more emotional cost on the part of the prosecution agencies. The scorn and mockery that the anti-corruption agencies and their officers have been subjected to in the nullification of their efforts must be considerate.

In other lands such diligent investigation and prosecution would ordinarily have earned the anti-corruption officials laurels and commendations, perhaps to run for political office. However, under the stroke of President Buhari’s pardon, they have been turned into objects of mockery.

Even more, the lesson from Buhari’s cohabitation with these former felons is that it would encourage other governors enmeshed in corruption to believe that one can easily wriggle out if convicted. Indeed, rather than deter corruption, President Buhari has by his action encouraged the corrupt to be more wanton in their deeds.

Alas, seven years after Lai Mohammed promised that Buhari was looking for the first official to make a scapegoat, the reverse is the case. Indeed, the once famed Buhari is now in cahoots with the corrupt in setting the agenda of the polity.

One of the former felons now pardoned by Buhari, it was gathered, is set to contest a Senate seat to position himself as a lawmaker. Indeed, a lawbreaker turned lawmaker who would sooner than later be called Distinguished Senator. He may even be appointed to chair the committees supervising the anti-graft agencies.

The second development that melted the Buhari personae was the decision to impose a N100 million levy on the purchase of forms by presidential candidates of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.

The decision by the APC inevitably puts it that only the super rich could afford to purchase the forms. Your correspondent is seeking to know the Nigerian who worked and laboured hard for N100 million that would throw that to purchase a form that may not take him or her anywhere.

Already, critical stakeholders including the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP which is not even much better having placed its own form at N40 million, have lampooned the APC.
Of course many of the pretentious aspirants would come out to purchase the forms through groups as a way of distancing themselves from such ignominious expenditure.

It is, however, contradictory to the principle of egalitarian democracy for any section of the electorate to be fenced out on the basis of money as the APC has so blatantly done.

An examination of the requirements for running for public office in the United States for example, does not prescribe such high level of financial investment on forms. Emphasis is rather put more on the ability of the office seeker to mobilise signatures from a proportion of the constituency to file papers to run.

By imposing such a high levy on the forms, Buhari’s APC has made it possible that only treasury looters who are pardoned or yet to be convicted, armed robbers, kidnappers and terrorist sympathisers are able to purchase the forms.

It is a pity that Buhari sat over the proceedings where the NEC of the party rolled out these criteria to the extent that even the House of Assembly, the lowest entry point has a N2m peg.

With such atrocious policies enunciated under the supervision of Buhari, genuine stakeholders who once looked to the president and believed his words that “if we don’t kill corruption, that corruption will kill Nigeria,” are now looking askance. They are asking what happened to Buhari?
We have lost him.

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Strictly Personal

Zambia’s Fiscal Dilemma, State Compensation Ethics and Treasury Stability, By Misheck Kakonde

Published

2 hours ago

December 10, 2023

Ifeoluwa Dada

The recent judgments overseen by the Attorney General in compensating individuals like Hon. Mwaliteta, Hon. Frank Tayali, Mr. William Banda, and the late Mapenzi a case that should be treated separately raise pertinent concerns. These compensations, while important to acknowledge, have led to substantial payouts from the state treasury, prompting a critical evaluation of their judiciousness.

It is essential to recognize that these compensations do not originate from personal accounts, be it President Hakainde Hichilema’s savings or those of the Attorney General and associated lawyers. They derive from public funds, necessitating prudent management to safeguard the state’s financial health. President Hichilema’s prior observation regarding the nation’s empty coffers adds weight to the significance of responsible fiscal governance.

The present scenario demands intervention from the President to prevent an unchecked depletion of the state treasury. While acknowledging the importance of compensations, there’s a call for the Attorney General to negotiate more reasonable amounts in these consent judgments. The substantial sums being awarded arguably exceeding what’s reasonable ought to be revised downwards, ideally to around K200,000 or lower. Unless in the loss of less of mapenzi, Vespers and many more, their life has no amount to be attached and it is hard even for me to attach a price, may their souls continue resting in peace and those involved are investigated and prosecuted. Such a move would prevent the disproportionate drain of state funds due to payments to a select few individuals.

The Attorney General holds the crucial responsibility of representing Zambian interests and should not succumb to undue pressure from a minority seeking exorbitant compensations. Their role necessitates negotiations for fair consent agreements that safeguard the nation’s fiscal stability.

However, within the confines of consent judgments, wherein both parties cannot appeal, the flexibility for direct alteration is limited. Yet, there exists a possibility for future generations to revisit these decisions through legal means, reassessing their impact on the Zambian treasury. Therefore, the Attorney general and President Hichilema should appreciate this truth.

This situation emphasizes the need for checks and balances to ensure the judicious use of state funds. The Attorney General’s role should extend beyond mere legal representation, incorporating a broader responsibility of safeguarding the nation’s financial interests. President Hichilema’s intervention can steer a course correction, addressing the trend of excessively high compensations that strain the state treasury.

Ultimately, this scenario underscores the delicate balance between honouring just compensations and ensuring responsible fiscal management—a balance that requires prudent negotiation and oversight to protect the interests of all Zambians.

The author is a legal scholar, comparative politics specialist, History and Cultural Studies, expertise in international relations, negotiation, and protocol (ZIDIS).

Strictly Personal

There is more worth in what is public than in what is private, By Jenerali Uliwengu

Published

4 days ago

December 6, 2023

Ifeoluwa Dada

A conversation I have been having with my compatriots can suffer some escalation to the regional level, especially because our different countries have had largely similar experiences in many respects.

In the 1960s, Dar es Salaam had a more or less efficient bus transport service, run by the Dar es Salaam Motor Transport Company (DMT) organised along lines not dissimilar to the London metropolitan bus service. The city service once even boasted double-deck buses, immortalised in the Kilwa Jazz song, Kifo cha Penzi ni Kifo Kibaya.

The buses ran on strict timelines, and when a bus scheduled to pass by a stop at 7.15 came at 7.20 people waiting at the stop would be seen impatiently looking at their watches.

Some of us in the media would take the matter up as soon as we got to our newsrooms to ask of the transport company officials why our bus had delayed a full five minutes on a working day.

By 1983, the company had been nationalised and called Usafiri Dar es Salaam (UDA) and soon acquired the distinctive Ikarus articulated buses manufactured in Hungary, but soon even thy ran out of steam because of the usual, multifaceted problems attaching to public owned institutions.

Around that time, then prime minister Edward Moringe Sokoine decided to bring in minibuses operating in Arusha and Moshi to rescue Dar es Salaam “temporarily, while the government is making plans for a permanent solution” to the problem.

From that period, it is only now that Dar es Salaam is beginning to see what looks like that “permanent solution” with the introduction of the Dar es Salaam Rapid Transport (Dart), which was initiated by a former mayor, the late Kleist Sykes.

Political skulduggery

It was delayed for so many years due to political skulduggery and the inevitable corruption in all our public institutions.

In the meantime, a former transport minister, Harrison Mwakyembe, had the rare presence of mind to remember that the city had had, since colonial times, railway tracks linking different districts but which lay fallow; he took action, and this initiative — which created what has come to be dubbed as “Mwakyembe’s train” — has contributed to the easing of the transit system congestion, but only just, because of issues such as the infrequency of train rides and the lack of security lights, ventilation and so on.

As it is right now, the Dar Rapid Transit is hobbling along, packing the human press the way you would pack cattle if you are not a keen meat seller.

Surely, our people deserve better than that, and the so-called “Mwakyembe train” needs replication in other parts of the city, as I suspect, there are many other fallow railway tracks waiting for some smart alecks to collect them and sell them as scrap metal.

Amidst all this, we have young people with hardly an income to speak of dying to own and drive a personal car, not for anything else but that owning a personal car makes them “somebody.”

What I have been telling them is, you do not have to own a car to be somebody; you are somebody because you are a useful member of society, and, surely, if you are predicating your personality on ownership of material things, you’re not.

What our young people — including not-so-young people, like me — should be doing is to militate for public transport to be expanded, and for it to work well; that is what they do in Europe and the US. The collaborative cries should be for Dar rapid service to improve: This past week, I was in the Coast region and wanted to ride on the service, only to be told by the bored girl at the stop that they had no tickets. Shame!
I understand there is too much red-tape restrictions in the processes attaching to getting more buses run by private operators. If that is so, what are the myriad officials running around like headless chickens doing?

Luxury cars

Why are they paid all the big salaries and allowed to drive such luxury cars if they cannot do a repeat “Mwakyembe train,” increase buses, and ensure tickets are available for rapid-transit bus rides?

These should be the issues our young people have to be fighting for not driving their cars, except if they belong to the Diamond Platmuz or Ali Kiba cohort.

With an efficient public transit system, we all become part-owners of our collective means of transport.

The opposite of that is when you forget what a car is for and you begin to think like the backward tribesman for whom the car is a mystical contraption which confers miraculous powers on the owner and driver, a far cry from the evolved, modern citizen.

Unfortunately, I know I am preaching to the unhearing, but this should not discourage anyone.

In the fullness of time, the message will sink home when the hordes of the lumpen motorcar realise they have more important things to seek for their lives to be better and more meaningful, instead of the trinkets that are being dangled before their noses.

I stand ready, as ever, to engage in a conversation.