International scholar and ex-national chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Professor Chidi Odinkalu speaks to DEPUTY EDITOR, DARE ADEKANMBI, on his resignation from the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA), the fiscal reforms of President Bola Tinubu, among other issues.
Some people might say your decision to quit the NBA Electoral Committee was hasty and that you should have explored internal means of resolving the matter before you came to that ‘plain conclusion’ as you called it. Why didn’t you engage the leadership of the NBA on the matter?
Did you read my letter?
Yes, I did.
The answer is in the letter.
There are people who might say you were impatient and that there could be more to the issue than has been made public. Some are even saying “Is NBA broke that it won’t be able to pay its debt?”
If you go to my letter, you will see that it speaks for itself. It states the matter very clearly. “Following the failure of any breakthrough in efforts to address this matter with you, my colleague(s) of the ECNBA brought this matter to your attention in the last (virtual) NEC meeting on or about 26 June. But rather than address it in the spirit in which it was raised, you shut it down, complaining that you regretted giving my colleague(s) the floor. That was hardly a vote of confidence in the Committee.” So, what failure to explore internal procedures are you talking about? What other internal procedures can you explore?
What would you think is the reason for the failure of the NBA to defray the cost?
Have you seen the response of the NBA president? His response just came in to me in the last hour [about half past noon on Friday]. I don’t want to start making claims that are not factually founded and I don’t want to make wild allegations against anybody. But when you see the letter of the NBA president, then you will see that the two-paragraph letter speaks for itself. “Please note that the NBA which I am privileged to lead at this time and of which you are a member remains a responsible organisation and will always honour its financial and contractual obligations. I will however not allow any person or group of persons to stampede us or in any way blackmail us into compromising our internal mechanisms put in place for verifying claims or requests before payments are made. Our commonwealth, which I hold in trust, will to the best of our ability be administered in the best interest of the Association.”
So, interpret that however you may. I will say no more. But what gratifies me, as I would like to say, is that he does not deny anything that I said in my letter of resignation.
You have had an election and one year after the election, you are refusing to pay the service providers and that one year after the election is one year before the next election. You are still refusing to be stampeded. So, one year after the election, asking you to pay your debt which you have not objected to and which you have more than enough money to pay because the NBA is a multibillion naira organisation amounts to stampeding you to do so? That is for people to make up their minds about. It is not something I want to comment on further.
NBA is one respected organisation that many look up to for decency and all things noble. But in the last decade or so, the issue of NBA election has been dogged by skirmishes and fracas. How do you think the NBA can redeem its positive image from being further battered?
It is up to the NBA leaders to address it. I have resigned from ECNBA and I am moving on with other things. That is all I can say. I have done my service to the organisation and it is up to the leaders of the NBA, if they are interested, to do what leaders exist to do.
Did this development have anything to do with your oft-critical stance against the NBA leadership?
I remember during the controversy generated by Senator Adamu Bulkachuwa’s comments, you spoke at an event in the UK, I think, where you described the NBA’s response to the saga as disappointing or something like that…
I did not say I was disappointed. I said the response of the NBA president was disgraceful and that is exactly my view. I was not disappointed.
Could your critical stance account for the current issue between you and the NBA over the unpaid debt?
My view on Bulkachuwa was issued on the 15th of June 2023 and the last NBA election in respect of which this debt remains outstanding was conducted on the 16th of July, 2022. So, my views are 11 months later than the conclusion of the event in respect of which the debt is contracted. So, there is no relationship.
You might have come across to the NBA president as a very critical and even a cantankerous member…
If you are saying that, you would have to require me to say that the current NBA president is a petty, small person. I refuse to say that because the current NBA president is over six feet four inches tall. So, I will not be party to trying to make the kind of imputations that this requires me to make.
What is your take on some of the decisions made so far by the Tinubu administration? Let’s start with the appointment of service chiefs which has drawn wide applause from far and near. Do you think he deserves plaudit on this?
Every person occupying the office of the president has the prerogative to appoint their service chiefs. How they choose to do that is their problem not mine. It is like I have got to applaud someone for paying their wife’s hospital bill after the woman delivered their first baby. Whether they borrowed the money to pay for the bill or paid from their pocket or did esusu or whatever is not my problem.
Many people have actually commended the spread of the services chiefs among the ethnic groups against the background of what happened under Muhammadu Buhari for eight years…
I refuse to be baited into a certain dimension at this time. I will leave it at that. I just decline the invitation to be baited on this.
What about the Executive Orders on taxes and the fiscal reforms being carried out?
I will wait for the fiscal reforms to crystalise before I offer any views. At the very best, the suspension of certain parts of the Finance Act is saying that we are thinking. So, why do I have to jump the gun before the outcome of the thinking is issued?
The approved N500bn palliative which is intended for distribution to 12 million households of the poorest of the poor at N8, 000 a month to each household for six months via conditional cash transfer has rippled the polity with many saying it is an ignoble path travelled before. How do you think the government can best address the hardship that has attended petrol subsidy removal?
There is a lot I could say about this, but I am not sure we have the time or the space. The word palliative is used for the most part in therapies to address when there are no further therapies left and what you are doing is nursing a person to death. So, when you have a cancer patient for instance and all forms of treatment for the cancer have been exhausted, you go into what is called palliative care, which is managing the patient to death. Somehow, people celebrate the idea that a government, of course it did not start today, is prescribing palliatives for its citizens and somehow that is okay. I don’t find it okay.
On subsidy, if you notice, there is a coincidence between the fate of the naira and the so-called subsidy. What is the problem? The problem is this: we are regulating pricing in the downstream sector of the hydrocarbons industry in a country in which the value of the currency is going down and not up, in respect of a product that you are not producing notwithstanding the fact that we have got four refineries which have been consuming money in trillions over the past 30 or thereabout years. So, you have to import this product. But the price in the global market is a variable, not a constant. The value of the currency is falling. By the time to buy and land the fuel, your currency has changed and since the price is regulated, there is a gap between what you pay and what you realise when you sell. As a result, somebody has got to make up that difference if you are going to buy again in order to re-stock and that thing is called subsidy. As long as the naira is going the way it is and you are not producing refined petroleum domestically, you cannot say you have removed subsidy. That is just a fallacy.
Secondly, Buhari got approval for 16 advisers. Tinubu has got approval for 20 advisers. Tinubu’s convoy is like one and a half times or even two times that of Buhari. Tinubu is appointing domestic staff at a speed that outstrips the number of domestic staff that Buhari had. If you were just to take the convoy alone, Tinubu’s convoy will be consuming petrol at more than one and a half times the price of Buhari’s convoy. You know what that means? The price will rise. If the price of petrol were to be a constant, the money spent on petrol by Tinubu would still have been higher than what was spent by Buhari on petrol. The price of petrol has risen nearly two times since Buhari and yet the convoy of Tinubu is bigger. That will increase the cost of government. All the vehicles in the convoy will be buying petrol at the new price. It also means that all public works contracts will go up because logistics and transport make up a major part of public works contracts. The increases will be more than 100 per cent for all public works contracts. And because workers no longer have money to feed, they are going to pad the contract increases, which will go up higher. Workers are going to get more corrupt, because the only place they can make money from is where they are working.
What am I saying in effect? There are no savings from subsidy. Anybody who is talking about savings from subsidy has not examined the issues. The cost of government and the cost of delivering government commitments will more than eat up everything. The only place, therefore, where you could think of making savings is not from subsidy, but from efficiency gains which is by closing gaps in public administration wastes and fiscal consolidation through eliminating agencies and parastatals that are no longer required or fit for purpose, effectively implementing the Orosanye report. From those, you then free up money. If Tinubu had said because of the way things are, he will reduce his convoy by 50 per cent, that means we are making actual savings. Or he reduces the presidential fleet from say nine to four or five aircraft. But they will not do that.
Let’s take Ebonyi State as an example. The governor there has increased the number of commissioners to 35 from 20 something that it was. That means costs are going to increase. Ebonyi State now has a Ministry for Aviation even when aviation is on the Exclusive Legislative List. That means only the Federal Government can do aviation, but Ebonyi has created a ministry for it with a commissioner and the ministry will have bureaucracy. The only governor who appears to take the situation so seriously enough to have shrunk his cabinet, I believe, is the new Zamfara State governor who has reduced his cabinet from 28 to 16.
If the people in government at the federal and state levels are not trying to make efficiency savings, what it basically means is that they are socialising the pains from subsidy [removal] to the poor and they are privatising the gains from subsidy for themselves. N8, 000 for so-called families, poorest of the poor, is abusive in this circumstance, given the context that I have described. It is an abuse of the impoverished people in Nigeria. It is sticking the middle finger to them.
There is only one way in which the N8, 000 could make sense. Obviously, Tinubu has legitimacy issues and no matter how much they may project confidence, they may not be totally sure of what the outcome of the judicial process will be. Therefore, if you want to prepare for the possibility that there may be election, giving people N8, 000 a month for a period of six months during which he may, if the judicial outcome were to say so, do a rerun of the presidential election, is a very fantastic election campaign. That way, it makes sense to me. But as an economic policy that should otherwise be thoughtful, I think it is actually ridiculous. However, as a campaign measure for an eventuality that may or may not eventuate, it is not a bad idea, cynical as it may sound.
The biggest item in public life in government in Nigeria is the cost of government. Do you know the amount of money spent on transport, estacode and travel? If they were to reduce all of that, they will make enough savings to impact people’s lives and mitigate a lot of things therefrom and channel the money to where it will make a difference to people’s lives as a policy intervention.
Talking about conditional cash transfer, how many of your poor people are documented? Before you know it, they will begin to do it in terms of party leaders bringing names. By the time it is done, they will create more problems because there are no reliable databases. By the time they are done, effectively they will be alienating more people. That is the schema for doing things in the country.
What is your take on the unification of the exchange rate to reduce arbitrage and corruption? Just within three weeks of the policy, naira continues its downward slide.
There is a lot to be said about this, but I will try and make it a lot briefer. We should never have had multiple exchange rates. It was not just arbitrage; it was the abuse by the former CBN governor. That is one of the reasons why it is difficult to see how the Dangote refinery can be finished. If you were giving foreign exchange to someone at let’s say N450 and other people were accessing it at N750, the rate of profit from round tripping and arbitrage is such that you cannot make up from the refinery at full production. I listened to the CBN governor [Godwin Emefiele] former or immediate, claiming that Dangote had paid over 70 per cent of his debt on the refinery. If that is not criminal, I don’t know what is. Assuming he was being factually accurate, how do you even repay a debt on a project that has not yet been finished? If you noticed, the commissioning of the refinery was done under a canopy and there was no drive around and he did not get any specimen of juice and by juice I mean refined products from the refinery to say this is his first product to show the West African presidents that attended the event. The refinery has not come close to starting production. It does not make sense and it was not even designed to make sense.
The whole situation with the arbitrage and its administration was in my view manifestly criminal. When you move from the sheer criminality of it all to where we are, you can only talk about trying to reverse the trend in the slide of the naira if you are producing things that you can sell to generate forex which goes into what you call your foreign reserves. But if you are depleting your reserves to the point where we are now, where we are struggling to have reserves to guarantee one month of imports. Of course the naira is going to be sliding; that is a fact. There is nothing anybody can do about that. That is the nature of monetary economics. It is up to the country to reverse the trend. The multiple exchange rates guaranteed that the naira would slide this way because, basically, it meant we were depleting the reserves in favour of particular individuals and their families. When all of the smoke and mirror was to be cleared up, what we ended up with was a situation in which everyone found out that we did not actually have the reserves to defend the naira which is what it is right now. There is no magic out of this. Unifying exchange rate is one thing, being able to get into a framework of productivity, production and export trade and earnings that can help us finance sensible reserves is a totally different thing. Until we do that, we are going to remain in this situation.
YOU SHOULD NOT MISS THESE HEADLINES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE
Shukroh Adeyemi is a first-class graduate of the Department of English, Lagos State University (LASU), for the…
Full list: Names of ex-governors receiving pensions in 10th Senate
No fewer than 13 former governors still receive pension allowances as serving senators in the…
Mmesoma’s father apologises, begs JAMB, Nigerians, to pardon daughter
Mr Romanus Ejikeme, the father of Mmesoma Ejikeme, the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) candidate who…
Asisat Oshoala shortlisted for 2023 Ballon d’Or award
Nigerian football star and Super Falcons forward, Asisat Oshoala, has been named as a nominee for the…
3 lessons from the ethnicization of JAMB controversy
OVER the last few days, Irecoiled in horror and disgust as the fairly straightforward case of JAMB exam result fraud by…
Rahinatu Ibrahim, popularly called Ganga, recalled with nostalgia when she first embarked on her journey to the…
and then