Probes To Nowhere! (II)

By Sola Adeyeye 

Nigerians watched it all sitting in the public gallery in the House and on live television, thus the report was not surprising in its findings and recommendations. It just confirmed the suspicion of a lot of knowledgeable people that a cabal of political interests had mindlessly exploited the expectations of Nigerians over power to loot us blind.

The names of the indicted include, once again, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the three persons who were Minister of Power and Steel after Bola Ige – Olusegun Agagu, Liyel Imoke and Mohammed Goje – all of whom became PDP Governors in their various states thereafter. They were all indicted for using the vehicle of the National Integrated Power Project, NIPP, to siphon huge sums of money. The Committee recommended that the law enforcement agencies interrogate the trio, Obasanjo, the then Central Bank Governor, Professor Charles Soludo and the then Accountant-General of the Federation, Alhaji Ibrahim Dankwambo. The latter’s name has latterly surfaced in the House of Representatives’ subsidy Report as the fellow who, in a display of accounting abracadabra, signed cheques of N999 million 128 times within a 24-hour period. That’s some accounting record for which he’s been rewarded by the ruling party with the governorship of Gombe State, where he presently nestles as the hoopla over his act rents the air.

Chief Obasanjo was said to have been in cahoots with the then Minister of State for Energy, Alhaji Abdulhamid Ahmed, with whom he mastered the art of approving waivers to contractors in what the Committee described as “economic sabotage”. The Report stated: “The committee identified the brains behind waivers of due process on NIPP disbursements. The justification at that time was to fast-track the completion of the projects. But rather than fast-track or facilitate the completion of the projects as envisaged, waivers of due process became the major plank that facilitated payments to contractors and consultants that have failed to perform, at the expense of the nation and the power industry. These officers need to be thoroughly investigated by the appropriate agencies for economic sabotage to the country.” President Goodluck Jonathan, who came into office seizing the Power portfolio for himself with a promise to clear the mess, has since appointed Ahmed as our Ambassador to Turkey!    However, once the Committee completed its task in May 2008 and handed its report to the House amidst great ovation (considering that the public watched the riveting detail of sleaze right there on live television and the nation was all pumped up), Elumelu and his Committee became the subject of a N100 million bribery allegation by Tell magazine. The allegation was referred to the House Ethics Committee. Ultimately, the Ethics Committee cleared Elumelu and his colleagues, but the poison had seeped in already, the public had begun to have doubts about the whole probe, and the indicted were circling their prey. By May 2009, Elumelu was on the run, sought by the EFCC for an alleged N6 billion Rural Electrification Agency, REA, contract scam. For the next three years, up till today, Mr. Elumelu has become more familiar with police stations and courtrooms than the chambers of the National Assembly. The EFCC charged him at the Abuja Federal High Court, where Justice Garba Umar struck out the charges of corruption levelled against him. But on 12 April 2012, the EFCC filed an appeal at the Abuja Court of Appeal against that judgment.

While Elumelu faced his legal travails, the fight to kill the report in the House of Representatives went on apace. In a typical Nigerian twist, the report that was originally praised to high heavens began to be pilloried from the same quarters that welcomed it within the House. At a plenary session in April 2009, a couple of weeks before Elumelu was arrested, members took turns to attack Elumelu and the report. After an executive session, the leadership of the House emerged with some novel idea. They set up a seven-man committee to be headed by the then Deputy Chief Whip, Aminu Tambuwal (now the Speaker of the House) to review the Elumelu Committee Report. The other members of the review committee, apart from

Tambuwal were Hassan Shekarau, Adisa Adesida, C.I.D Maduabum, Patrick Ikhariale, Mohammed Mungono and Chile Igbawa. They did the review and concluded that the Elumelu Committee had not established any loss of money nor had it established that any money was corruptly siphoned by President Obasanjo and his lieutenants. That was the end of the power probe and the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, who had vowed to get to the bottom of the mess, with an eye on second term, and Obasanjo, a key player in his party, asked no questions. The only relic of the affair now is the occasional news of Elumelu shuttling between the police stations and the courts. The waste of public funds – from those siphoned to those used for the probe – is mind-bending!

To be honest, we can go on forever talking about the disappointing outcomes of several other parliamentary probes. The latest ones on the pension and subsidy are still on-going or fresh, so I wouldn’t want to conjecture on whether or not they would be implemented once passed to the executive. The subsidy probe is very close to my heart not only because of the social consciousness that engineered it via the January fuel protests by Nigerians, but also because I was principal co-sponsor of the motion in the Senate calling for a probe long before the national protests. The motion itself was raised by Senator Bukola Saraki as early as October last year. He had pointed out that only N240 billion was appropriated for fuel subsidy in the 2011 budget for the entire year, yet by August of that same year, N931 billion had already been spent! What responsible legislature would overlook such a thing? Though our own Senate Joint Committee on the investigation into the management of petroleum subsidy, headed by Senator Magnus Abe, is yet to issue its report, I doubt very much it would be radically different from the one of the House of Representatives, considering some of the fundamental facts already established. In the meantime, there are worries that the latest travails of Senator Bukola Saraki with the police over some alleged complicity in a bank loan scandal may not be unconnected with the fact that he is the one who blew the whistle on the subsidy scam. We are watching developments closely on that front, but I can assure Nigerians that the Senate will do a thorough job, because those of us pushing it recognise the historical importance of this mission.

However, having stated all the above, I am at this point looking beyond the probes precisely because of the seeming limit of our powers as parliamentarians. I have chatted with colleagues countless times about this executive rascality of not implementing probe reports and all I get in response is some finger-twiddling and heavy sighs of helplessness. Our role, they keep pointing out, is to present reports, not implement them. But I am sick and tired of public money being siphoned by unscrupulous public officials and tonnes of public money spent by parliament on probe upon probe that end up in the executive waste basket! As a citizen sitting through these and watching on TV, I’m worried stiff that the politicians of my generation are missing the opportunity to make a positive change in my nation. The consequence of such inaction can only be imagined. Of course, some can continue to deceive themselves by claiming Nigerians are inured to the effects of corruption and that it is an acceptable way of life, but I do not believe that. Inasmuch as one can say corruption is endemic in our society, the responsibility for good governance cannot forever be compromised without a deadly effect on us and our children and at the forefront of factors militating against good governance is corruption. I believe it’s time those of us who call ourselves leaders begin to take another look at our actions and the results (or lack of same) with a view to beginning to address some of our core needs as a society.I’m now strongly of the view that we have to begin to think of how to make these probes productive for the ordinary people. I mean, Mohammed Adoke, the Attorney-General ad Minister of Justice, in a pre-emptory strike against implementation of the subsidy report is already declaring it only as a “fact-finding exercise”, but I wonder whether it is wise to spend such colossal sums as we have on these fact-finding exercises without doing anything about their findings. How long would this continue before the bottom drops off the bucket?

I do not have anything against the Senate President rightly stating at the adoption of the BPE Report that all we can do as parliamentarians is submit our report and leave the executive to implement. I can add that on the face of it, there seems nothing directly in the law at present to indicate that we can compel them. But a purposive reading of Section 4 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999) granting us legislative powers to “make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Federation” and Section 88 (2)(b) empowering us to investigate with the aim of exposing “corruption, inefficiency or waste in the execution of administration of laws” within our legislative competence “and in the disbursement of administration of funds appropriated by it” would imply without question that it is not the intention of the Constitution to empower us to probe so that the result can lawfully be thrown in dustbins. The law assumes that the executive will be working in tandem with us to ensure that our recommendations are implemented and where not implemented, to give valid reasons why it is not doing so. But it certainly cannot be the intention of the law to establish a culture of totally ignoring reports of parliamentary probe. For all it is worth, that is where we are and that is what must now change for the health of our nation. We parliamentarians must rise to the challenge now and force the executive to do the right thing through a robust interpretation of the law and strategic repositioning.

In this regard, I see something in the proposal of my colleague in the House of Representatives, Zakari Mohammed, who is the Chairman of the House Committee on Media and Public Affairs. He is of the view that the House can influence the executive to implement the fuel subsidy report if adopted by the whole House by making its implementation a precondition for approval of any requests from the executive. In the light of our democratic practice, that may look a little desperate, but desperate times call for desperate measures! The key thing here is that parliament would be within its right to ask the executive to implement its report before granting it any request, based on the provisions of Section 4 as it concerns its responsibility for good governance. This may lead to some kind of stalemate or even brinkmanship, but this nation cannot just go on this way! It’s about time real grown-ups within the leadership began to show themselves through exemplary patriotic action. We must begin to identify amongst ourselves, irrespective of parties, those who genuinely want to save Nigeria and we must do so without any sentiments whatsover. Gone are the days when you just came into the National Assembly, quietly collected all your entitlements, without saying or doing anything. Our job is to make laws for the good governance of Nigeria. So, not only are we to make the laws, the Constitution empowers us to make sure that these are for the good governance of Nigeria. It follows that any law being manipulated by anyone to create bad governance must be fought by us in every way possible!

Finally, between Ojudu’s criticism of the opposition and my claim of seeming helplessness in the face of a dominant party, I think we can make the legislature more assertive. We can do this through the vehicle of the Public Accounts committees of both the Senate and the House of Representative, first because of their extremely important tasks and secondly, because these are committees whose chairmanships are conventionally given to opposition parliamentarians. I have not spoken here like a politician, but as a citizen, because I know the danger that lurks in our future if we continue blindly as we are going without regard for the Nigerian people. My proposals are aimed to at returning confidence immediately to the probe process. We may have all sorts of excuses, but the public perception of us is not great. The contagion of credibility deficit enveloping those of us who call ourselves leaders in the face of these economic and social injustices should not be ignored. We need to begin to change that by proactively tackling executive lawlessness. We are paid to check the excesses of the executive, not to condone them or give excuses why we can’t check them.

•Adeyeye is a Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.