from The Guardian
The paradox: Umaru Musa Yar’Adua has come to the leadership of Nigeria almost a billionaire. His predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, came to office almost a pauper but he is well-known now to be a billionaire.
Most Nigerians are not as lucky as either of these gentlemen. Grinding poverty remains their lot, and it is one of the challenges that President Yar’Adua has to answer. He is talking about a great Nigeria, and about making Nigeria one of the world’s top 20 economies by 2020. That sounds nice and poetic; the problem is that 2020 is only 13 years away, but there is little evidence we are walking in that direction.
Can Nigeria be one of the world’s top economies? Certainly, but you do not win a match against as formidable an opponent unless you have a formidable match plan that is studiously and stubbornly followed. So far, we have only rhetoric. Handled wrongly, rhetoric yields nothing to be proud of.
The Obasanjo presidency is the best—or worst—example. There was a flurry of anti-poverty activism when he came to power, swearing poverty would be eliminated by 2010. In 2001, to chase this objective, he established the Poverty Eradication Programme—to be funded by a Poverty Eradication Fund, state and local governments, the private sector, special deductions from the Consolidated Fund, as well as contributions from donors.
The first sign of trouble was that he also established the National Poverty Eradication Council (NEPC) chaired by himself, with an Assessment and Evaluation Committee headed by Vice-President Atiku Abubakar. None of them was heard from in this capacity thereafter. Perhaps it is no surprise little has been heard of PEP since then, but it would be interesting to see a report on what was achieved in the past six years, beginning from whatever happened to the take-off grant of N6 billion which the government said would be used to establish PEP in states, the 744 local councils, and the Federal Capital Territory.
In addition to this conceptual and structural chaos, the NPEC permitted each poverty eradication scheme already being undertaken in the ministries to continue, separate from PEP, funded by those ministries. I am sure you do not understand. Nobody did. The incoherence and duplications mounted.
If Yar’Adua is serious about combating poverty, he must begin by reviewing these problems, otherwise he will fall into the same traps. Thirteen federal ministries were part of the PEP, and a lot of money was poured in our annual budgets into programmes being undertaken by them, ostensibly in the name of poverty.
In addition to those ministries and our annual fiscal plans, there have been heavy outlays of cash nobody is quite certain how they were spent; regrettably, the Nigerian press does not often ask. The first was the windfall from the debt relief deal with the Paris Club, under which Nigeria began to enjoy annual revenues of $1billion to fund education and anti-poverty programmes. Without clearance from the National Assembly, President Obasanjo put the money in his hip pocket, having decided that was the best way to spend it.
Asked last month by the BBC what she had done with the money, Amina Ibrahim, who was alleged to be the “anti-poverty advisor” to President Obasanjo, answered cheerily, “Spend, spend, spend!” Specifically, she said in-service training had been given to 145,000 teachers “for example,” and six teacher training centres upgraded.
This is how billions of United States dollars have been spent? I am not saying Ms Ibrahim and her colleagues are corrupt, but there must be a clearer definition of national or professional responsibility, and deeper accountability than “Spend, spend, spend!”
In addition to the windfall from the Paris Club, Nigeria has also received from the London Club recently, a refund of $747.82million on debt we paid back in December 2006.
Here is where it gets really confusing. Ms. Ibrahim has explained that these debt relief savings are being deployed through a mechanism called the Virtual Poverty Fund (VPF). Apparently, the Obasanjo government decided that in order for Nigeria to meet the United Nations Millennium Declaration Goals, it was essential to devote budgetary attention on MDG-related projects. I have not heard of any other nation adopting this approach, nor can I determine its merit. The press and the National Assembly ought to be asking: Where are the billions of dollars?
In any case, in 2006, according to Ms. Ibrahim, N100 billion was appropriated to MDG projects: N21.3 billion on health, N17.8 billion on education; N19.2 billion on water; N17 billion on power/rural electrification; N9.9 billion on Works; N8.7 billion on agriculture; and N5 billion on “Others.” In the 2007 budget, the VPF received another N110 billion.
Another source of revenue for the Obasanjo government has been the Abacha loot, and Nigeria has got back about $2 billion. Last March, as that government was staring at a fast-approaching expiration date, Finance Minister Nenadi Usman explained that those vast fortunes had been allocated to five ministries: Power, Works, Health, Education, and Water Resources. These are the same ministries into which the government said it had also emptied our debt relief windfall. But where are the gains? Who is less poor?
What the Yar’Adua anti-poverty approach must first look at, therefore, is where all these resources went. Clearly, we cannot blame lack of resources as much as, perhaps, too much of it. If the Yar’Adua does not determine what went wrong, it has no chance of changing anything.
His anti-poverty scheme must then be anchored on empowering every Nigerian to enjoy an abundance of opportunity. The great nations of the world are busy harvesting their human potential in every field, and trying to obtain the best human talent from other nations. Regrettably, 47 years after independence, our best-trained people are largely outside our shores.
There is no shortage of ideas from which to begin to shop for ideas. Sani Abacha’s Vision 2010, for instance, is a good place to begin, as is Olusegun Obasanjo’s National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS)
The worst mistake President Yar’Adua could make, however, is boldly follow the philosophical footprints of his predecessor. Obasanjo might have been a great success, but he doomed by his hypocrisy. He did not want to hear, for example, of the depth of poverty in Nigeria, although PEP had been founded on a poverty rate of 66%, and the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), on 70%. In his second term, he asked for a new definition of poverty in Nigeria that he could be comfortable with. How can you vanquish an enemy you do not admit of?
One of the first things Yar’Adua must determine is how to harmonize the plethora of “anti-poverty” programmes with which Obasanjo made the party faithful and his friends happy. Some of those programmes readily became conduits for the siphoning of national resources to the privileged, as may have been the objective in the first place, and funds were dumped into all kinds of schemes that were never reviewed or accounted for.
NEEDS, for instance, has never been re-assessed. Do we even speak of it in the present tense, or is it dead? The term disappeared from Obasanjo’s speeches within one year of its launching; when next if bubbled up, it was towards the end of his administration, when Finance Minister Nenadi Usman spoke about launching “NEEDS II,” without the original programme ever being evaluated.
President Yar’Adua must establish and emphasise structure and reporting in our programme planning and execution, as programmes are often betrayed or overwhelmed by political pressures and lack of attention at the top. In the end, what is at stake here is not one clear or isolated dream known as poverty-reduction, but a broader reality: social justice.
We cannot seek the elimination of poverty if the objective is not social justice; this is the plot Obasanjo forgot, or conveniently neglected. That is why he grew inexplicably rich as he progressively left his nation much poorer than before he arrived, without ever noticing any contradiction.
Yar’Adua has three and a half years—not the four years until 2010, and certainly not the next 13—to sort determine his place in our history.
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