The el-Rufai/Dogara and Osborne dollars jokes

Anyone who has ever been to the verandah of any Government House in Nigeria needn’t stay too long to know that Nigeria is one big circus and governments (federal, state and local) are the comedians who supply the ribaldry. Sometimes, like the joke that this nation is, try as they attempt to put the lid on the pot of joke of Nigeria, the recalcitrant joke slides out like a rat, to reveal its embarrassing configuration. And like the circus that the whole nation is, we all come together to enjoy this joke of our nationhood and when satisfied, we go about our normal circus business, only to wait for another.

Two latest rats have slid out of the national circus of recent. One is Yakubu Dogara and Nasir el-Rufai. The other is the circus of Osborne, Lagos $15 billion mint money find that is proving to be the proverbial offspring of the cobra that results in its death. On the latter, the joke of this government’s anti-corruption fight seems to be getting to its denouement and Nigerians are laughing their hearts out.

When Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dogara, spun the ribald about the ubiquitous Security Vote as another name for unaccounted-for slush funds that have oiled the Nigerian engine of massive governmental corruption since the time of the military and which is sustained since the current democratic experiment, he apparently didn’t know that that was another rat from our national jokevsille that he was letting out of the pouch. The joke has since taken a life of its own.

First was the Kaduna State governor, el-Rufai, who published what he called his security budget, ostensibly as a way of making Dogara look stupid in his claim. Those who know el-Rufai since his governmental odyssey in the days of the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) know that he is an iconoclast whose footprints are laced with against-method acts. Smart and calculative, unlike your run-of-the-mill politician, it is evident that if a smart folk like el-Rufai decides to tread the path of the typical Nigerian politician, he will so walk smartly that you can hardly decipher his prints on the rock.

el-Rufai proved the sense in this assumption. Immediately, he caused his pay-slip as governor and what he called the security budget of his Kaduna State to be published. This was followed by a rigid punch on the mythical budgetary allocations of the National Assembly which everyone had always known was as secretive and inaccessible as the rules of a coven or the logistics of secret societies. At a conservative estimate, about N1 trillion of Nigerian money has been incinerated in the last few years as blood libation to this god of National Assembly whose rapacious thirst for the blood of the nation is legendary.

Like a cowboy craving for stardom, Dogara also ordered the House Committee Chairman on Media to release what looked like a truant school boy’s lesson note to the world which he claimed was his monthly take-home. It was as scanty and bereft of information as a lie sheet could be. But aware that Nigeria is a circus and nobody takes the other person seriously, Dogara was sure that this terse note will explain the profligacy, opaque budgetary life of the Nigerian legislature and like an audience of a comedy show, we would all clap and laugh ourselves to stupor. And he was right.

If you look at the el-Rufai and Dogara circus carefully, you would realise that they both meant this comedy to enthrall us as the audience of this comedy theatre called Nigeria. el-Rufai, for instance, would know that no sane human being would believe that that thing he called “security budget” explains the sleaze among Nigerian 36 state governors which has become a recurrent decimal in the last couple of decades? Nor does he expect any Nigerian, even the most idiotic of us all, to take that peremptory sheet of paper as an explanation that he runs an open and accountable government in Kaduna State?

If the diminutive governor is not averse to the truth, let him draw his swivel chair close and listen to this: There is a big wall that separates security budget from security votes. While the former is mainly a capital vote for the maintenance of security, the latter is a recurrent spending on security which the governors collect every month. What el-Rufai made available to us, audience of Circus Nigeriana, is a yearly security capital vote. The security vote is collected by hand, and in cash, monthly from the states’ Ministries of Finance. From facts collected by this writer, it ranges between N200 million to N500 million every month. Even though it is budgeted for by the state assemblies, it comes directly to governors monthly in cash and they are allowed to spend it freely on security. Ostensibly as an extension of the nebulous belief of national security as the security of the person in government, the conception of the framers of the constitution which allows for security vote is that such money would be spent on issues of security which needed not to be discussed in the open. Rogues and greedy louts that those we elect into office are, they capitalise on this lacuna and go on saturnalia with security votes monthly.

Giving credence to this, former Minister of State for Finance, Mrs Nenadi Usman, in 2004, shouted out loud that a sizeable number of governors convert the entire monthly allocation of their states to dollars and heist same abroad.“Four to seven days after the Federation Account Allocation Committee meeting, the exchange rate goes up. That means that they (governors) are using the money to buy up dollars. Make telephone calls to any of the states. Ask for the governor and you would be told he has gone abroad. Not only the governors, even the commissioners of finance,” she said. The situation hasn’t changed today. Many of the governors feast on their local government allocations, pauperizing them so much that councils seldom have enough funds to grade a local road in a year.

To be fair to the governors, if they reveal those who benefit from the slush funds of security votes monthly, this nation will collapse under a heavy load of scandals. Pastors, Imams, Bishops, traditional rulers, rights activists, former governors, former this and that, journalists etc, make the sacred list of those on monthly “retainer-ship” at Governors Offices. Apart from kick-backs from road constructions that are wired through foreign contractors to their foreign accounts, this is the governors’ cesspit. It is the list Dogara wants el-Rufai to provide, not how much is spent buying Armoured Personnel Carriers (APC) for police or vehicles. The story is told of one of el-Rufai’s colleagues who scampered out of his hole when told he had the hole drenched with millions of dollars. If President Muhammadu Buhari now claims he is fighting corruption and corruption is lionized monthly in Governors Offices as this , you cannot but conclude that he is part of our entertainment crew.

The latest circus is this Osborne, Lagos find. Methinks Nigerians will, at the end of this circus, realise that they had always had their governments and particularly this Buhari’s as a joke and they refused to see it.