“By doubting we come to question, and by questioning, we perceive the truth.” (Peter Abelard, 1079-1142)
2 Questions on … Nigeria and the Global Financial Meltdown
Because one isn’t engaged in the kind of business that will allow the payment of interest rates of 25% or more, it’s a long time since Perceptor dared to even dream about borrowing money from any bank, so the words ‘credit crunch’ whether at home or abroad don’t impinge on the mind much. Now, Perceptor isn’t going to pretend to be any kind of financial guru or whizz kid, but when one sees people who’ve been struggling to save their money here and there, buying stocks and shares and currently being told that the N500,000 that they started out with is now worth N130,000, or who, to their astonishment and delight, were actually given loans by their banks to buy N500,000 worth of shares which are now worth N130,000 but they still have to repay the N500,000 WITH INTEREST, it begins to dawn on even Perceptor that however healthy for one’s mental health it may be to simply REFUSE to keep on checking the value of one’s savings every day, the collapse of prices on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, on top of the collapse in the price of oil ought to attract some executive attention, you know, some leading from the ‘servant leader’. Our President however, set up a committee (!) on the global economic crisis and then … went on a vacation (which he then didn’t really take). In such circumstances, it goes without saying that at least one or two questions arise …
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1. Who is actually in charge?
President Umaru Yar’Adua’s usual response to any issue or crisis is to throw a committee at it, and with regard to the worldwide financial meltdown, he did not disappoint. In mid-January, before he went ‘on vacation’, the President established a Presidential Steering Committee that will “fashion out a strategic response to the impact of the current global financial meltdown on the country”. Well, better late than never, but the thing is, that although we were told that the committee would be chaired by the President, and there was some attempt to explain the President’s failure to proceed on the much-trumpeted ‘vacation’ by claims that he hadn’t gone because of the meeting of the Presidential Steering Committee, it later turned out that it was Finance Minister Dr. Mansur Mukhtar who had chaired the meeting of the Committee at Aso Rock. Even though Yar’Adua was also in Aso Rock! It was AFTER the meeting that Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole led a team to ‘brief’ the President on their decisions. Even though this led to headlines along the lines of “Global financial crunch: Yar’Adua directs agencies to roll out palliatives” which tried to present a picture of a president acting masterfully to tame worldwide economic forces, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that basically, what happened was that the chaps who KNOW decided what needed to be done and then told the President and he said “Yes, let it be done.”
2. When Charles Chukwumah Soludo famously did NOT say that Nigeria was immune from the global economic crisis, what exactly DID he say??
Perceptor didn’t expect him to start ringing a bell and crying ‘Doomed! Doomed I say! We’re all DOOMED!’, But did he say anything to suggest that ‘Nigeria is in grave danger’, or ‘The Global Credit Crunch won’t affect Nigeria directly, but because banks which my institution is supposed to be overseeing have not only been artificially pumping up their share prices but have also been lending money to customers so that they can buy at these inflated share prices, once foreign investors (who suddenly realise that they need their money in cash RIGHT NOW) have taken their money off, the bubble is going to burst and share prices will collapse.’?
Not exactly. The CBN’s "Mea Non Culpa" exercise resulted in the following statement:
“We have posted on the CBN Website, full transcripts of Prof. Soludo’s two presentations to the Senate on October 21, and December 16, 2008; interactive session with the media on the financial crisis held in Lagos on October 31, 2008; and powerpoint presentation to the House of Representatives on January 21, 2009.”
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although Perceptor is inclined to discount a presentation to the House of Representatives on the 21st of January THIS year, or even December 16th last year, as smacking rather too much of advising that someone – anyone? – really ought to shut the stable door well after the horse has bolted. But even if we take those other presentations as the ones in which he “clearly showed” how the global crisis affected the Nigerian economy:
“through the impacts on the capital market, and by extension, the banks, through their exposure to the capital market; collapsing oil price and implications for external reserves, fiscal revenue and exchange rate; and the decline in capital inflows among others”
Perceptor wonders how the mea non culpa team at the CBN managed to miss the statements made by Mr. Soludo when he, along with other members of the President’s economic team (at that time – Finance Minister, Dr. Shamsudeen Usman; Minister of National Planning and Chairman of the National Planning Commission (NPC), Senator Sanusi Daggash and the Chief Economic Adviser to the President, Dr. Yakubu Tanimu as well as Mr. Soludo himself) offered reassurance to the nation’s elected representatives at the Senate on the 21st of October, when he spent so much time patting himself on the back over the bank consolidation of 2006 as being THE buffer against the global credit crunch, and insisting that “no bank will fail”. Anyway, it’s in the interests of Perceptor’s mental health to believe him, and to feel confident that the news that the CBN is going to scrutinise the profits declared by banks more closely is not in any way suggestive of suspicions that they might have been … economical with the truth about their financial condition …
Polishing a President
There will always be those who take what government and those in authority serve up at face value. Perceptor used to be one of those people – but no longer. Perceptor now tends to doubt, and to question. And especially when it comes to polishing a presidential image, things are not often as they seem.
A reminder of this came in the form of the N500 million (well, N500 million plus N100 million actually) claim for services provided to the Obasanjo administration in the form of – not to put too fine a point on it – ‘rent-a-mob’ – or as the Obasanjo/Atiku Alliance Crusade put it in their claim before the Federal High Court, hiring crowds for ‘pro-Obasanjo solidarity rallies’ in August 2002. Perceptor is astonished that the former President’s supporters didn’t turn out in ‘solidarity’ free of charge in 2002!
But it is against this background that Perceptor feels obliged to doubt a couple of recent efforts on behalf of the ‘servant leader’.
First out of the gate are the ‘Patriots for Democracy and Good Governance’ (PDGOG). Week before last it published an advertorial in which it listed 50 reasons (in fact 50 STRONG reasons) why we should support President Umaru Yar’Adua. According to them, although he came to power when:
“Nigerians’ belief in their country and its future was at the lowest ebb. Law and order were almost non-existent and citizens’ trust in government was highly eroded”, an atmosphere of “uncertainty and near hopelessness”
in the nearly two years since he introduced the concept of the ‘servant leader’, PDGOG has discovered 50 reasons why he deserves our ‘unflinching support’. What is remarkable about the 50 reasons was that none was a specific achievement. Instead, it was all about his PERSONALITY, for example, that he is a “patriot of all ages” (No.10), “not a desperate politician” (No. 9), has “remained a focused and courageous leader” (No. 37), “is a man of proven integrity” (No. 43), “believes in women development” (No. 30) and “is human” (No. 49) – which is no doubt a big relief to those who were afraid that there might have been something behind SaharaReporters’ captioning of the President as a ‘serpent’ leader instead of a ‘servant’ leader. And those who thought that it was ‘Musa’ will be interested to learn that “the President’s second name is humility” (No. 33).
While Perceptor was worrying whether this list of personality traits and affirmation of membership of the genus homo sapiens was really the best that PDGOG could come up with, we turn to the next out of the gate, ThisDay on Sunday.
“YAR’ADUA RETURNS TO WORK AFTER A TWO WEEK VACATION” the paper breathlessly reported as its front page headline, using a font normally reserved for the outbreak of war or at least, some kind of election victory. Other papers carried the same report (yes! they too can do maths and work out when fourteen days from the 26th of January comes to an end) but at least they carried the official explanation for the President’s inability, or rather, his failure to leave Aso Rock for Obudu, Dodan Barracks or Katsina. Actually, let’s make that ‘his executive decision’ to stick to Aso Rock. But ThisDay on Sunday didn’t bother with that, pretending that it was “not clear whether the president actually spent the vacation in the designated places announced by his spokesman”. Perhaps ThisDay’s reporters ought to have read The Guardian on Sunday! They were quite clear that not only had Yar’Adua not gone anywhere, he’d presided over a couple of Federal Executive Council meetings during his ‘staycation’.
While ThisDay rather cheekily reproduced the official statement announcing the vacation that was issued by the Secretary to the Federal Government which also contained the assertion that the Vice President would be “taking over” as a result of which it had to pretend that Jonathan Goodluck had acted for Yar’Adua by going off to Ethiopia to attend the AU Summit, The Guardian hit the nail on the head when it baldly asserted that Goodluck was deprived of the opportunity to be Acting President because Yar’Adua refused to inform the National Assembly that he was going away on leave.
ThisDay on Sunday has an even more graphic example of presidential polishing. Media houses sometimes use file copies of pictures of people in the news to illustrate their stories, and of course, President Yar’Adua is one person whose file pictures are often used. Indeed, one can hardly blame newspapers in the case of the President because there seem to be so few opportunities to catch him live, as it were. ThisDay on Sunday however, is using a particularly striking – Perceptor thinks that the word ‘portrait’ is more appropriate than mere ‘picture’ or ‘photograph’ – a particularly striking portrait of the President in which his skin is even and glowing, his cheeks are plump and unwrinkled, and even the presidential eyes, which – while undoubtedly intense and penetrating, are not the sort of thing that you would normally want to expose your three-year-old to after dark – even the presidential eyes in the ThisDay on Sunday portrait seem merely wise, calm and far-seeing. If only SaharaReporters would stop putting up those unflattering pictures of Mr. President!
Let Them Eat Cake?
There are those who think that there is something wrong with the leading (albeit behind-the-scenes) role being played by the First Lady, Turai Yar’Adua in the current administration, but Perceptor is not wholly on their side. After all, if the brains and energy of a partnership reside in the partner who, for cultural or social reasons, cannot take centre-stage, as long as the brains and energy manifest themselves SOMEWHERE, surely that’s better than nothing? Indeed, Perceptor shudders to think what would be the condition of the country if the First Lady weren’t at least making SOME decisions. (NO, not about the marriages of her daughters and the amount to be spent on wedding parties!)
But recently, the First Lady disappointed Perceptor. Deeply. Launching the UNICEF Report on The State of the World’s Children, Mrs. Yar’Adua quarrelled with the figures in the report which showed that one Nigerian woman dies every 10 minutes due to complications arising from pregnancy and childbirth, while over 500 newborns die daily. Nigeria is the second largest contributor to under-five and maternal death in the world, with half a million women dying from pregnancy and childbirth-related causes, and nearly four million newborns dying within twenty-eight days of birth, while another million who survive, suffer from disability, disease, infection and injury associated with childbirth.
On what did the First Lady base her challenge? Her own visits to some hospitals and maternity homes … in ABUJA!
Perceptor would like to think that as soon as the fatal words “Let them eat cake” had left the lips of Marie Antoinette when told that the people were rioting because they had no bread in 18th century France (you know, just before the French Revolution in which she lost the use of her lips due to the cutting off of her head) she wished she could have recalled them. Well, Perceptor would like to think she did, because Perceptor is sometimes sentimental. But how does Perceptor explain this similar example of head-in-the-cloud lack of thinking before speaking on the part of the First Lady? It was bad enough when her husband brought his narrow vision from mono-ethnic, mono-religious Katsina to play his part on the multi-ethnic, multi-religious national stage and promptly fell asleep on the job. But when the First Lady’s vision substitutes some hospitals in Abuja for the medical situation across the whole of Nigeria, then Perceptor begins to be afraid. Brains and energy there may well be. But if they’re facing the wrong direction, it just means you get there faster!
Or could the First Lady have just not wanted to believe the rate at which Nigerian women are dying off because she realised that there was no need to have hurried her daughters into third or fourth wife-dom? After all, if women are dying in childbirth in such numbers, it’s probably true, as the census figures suggest, that there really ARE more men than women in Nigeria …
Much Ado About … Ibrahim Babangida
Ibrahim Babangida appeared recently on ‘Moments with Mo’ to give another reason why he annulled the June 12th 1993 presidential election. Now although no doubt popular, ‘Moments with Mo’ is a programme broadcast over the Digital Satellite Television (DSTV) system, and is thus not necessarily a programme for a mass audience in Nigeria. So one does wonder whether Babangida calculated that not many people would get to know about his latest explanation, or whether he anticipated that the newspapers might pick the story up and relay his rather pathetic and even less believable excuse for the annulment to a wider Naija audience – thereby exposing it to somewhat more penetrating scrutiny and robust response than Mo and her polite studio guests might have offered.
Prior to his moment with Mo, Nigerians (who had initially thought that power was sweet and he just didn’t want to go) had come to understand that Babangida had annulled the election because he was afraid not to after being threatened. (Perceptor REFUSES to comment on the bravery quotient of a General in the Naija army!). Whatever, according to Babangida during his now famous moment with Mo, he annulled the June 12th election – not because of cowardice, but because of … foresight! Yes, Babangida foresaw that there would be coups to oust the incoming civilian government within six months. THAT was why he refused to hand over to M.K.O. Abiola, the winner of the election! What is more, he planned to hold a fresh election in November 1993 …
Now, there will be those who will quibble that if Babangida knew that there would be a coup, why didn’t he – between the election and the inauguration – take steps to neutralise the coup plotters, even if only by retiring them from the armed forces? They may wonder what difference he was going to make by a fresh November election that he couldn’t have made by an August inauguration. Others may consider that Babangida was getting rather ahead of himself, and that if he really believed (in June 1993, as opposed to January 2009) that the MKO administration was in danger of a coup that only a pre-emptive coup (by Babangida) would avert it, his experience when the Nigerian people chased him out of office barely two months later, would have caused him to reconsider his ill-considered boast that it was only the military that were ‘master practitioners in the art of violence’.
But Perceptor wonders why Babangida bothered to open his mouth at all. He himself no longer knows why he did what he did. All he knows is that he wants to posture and position himself so that people get talking about whether he’s going to make a run for the presidency. Again. But that train has left the station Babangida! If he’d handed over in 1993, he would probably have been a shoe-in for 2001. But he didn’t. End of story. Leave the stage for heaven’s sake. The audience is getting embarrassed for you.
Grovelwatch
There are times when Perceptor wants to say ‘Get Up OFF Your Knees!’. Such a time was listening to a radio programme where the main guest was the Chairman of a Senate Committee. Now, Perceptor can appreciate that in introducing the guest, the presenter might need to start off with ‘Our guest today is the distinguished Senator … blah blah’. But was it necessary to preface every occasion that the word ‘Senator’ was pronounced with the word ‘distinguished’? So instead of saying ‘Senator, what do you think about …’, or (to a caller) ‘Put your question to the Senator’, we had the wretched presenter saying to the man himself ‘Distinguished Senator, what do you think about …’, and to the caller ‘Put your question to the distinguished Senator’ … taking up about a fifth of the time meant for the programme with his grovelling repetitions.
In the Spirit of ‘Aunty’ Dora
Perceptor is happy to report that a trip from Third Mainland Bridge to the Abeokuta Expressway, which normally involves hold-up at Maryland, Airport Road and Ikeja, now involved just reaching the famously cleared Oshodi, descending to the Agege Motor Road, doing a ‘U’ turn to face Abeokuta instead of Lagos, and hey presto! This was Perceptor’s FIRST TIME EVER on that part of the road – kept away by the impenetrable crowds and traffic – a visible result of Governor Fashola’s steps to change the face of Lagos State. Of course, that isn’t quite under Aunty Dora’s mandate – while she’s looking for a new slogan with which to re-brand the same old Naija, Fashola is just getting on with things and letting the people’s response be his best advertisement. But although it was always said that there were more than living people at Oshodi, Perceptor does wonder what he has done with the vanished people. Hope they’re not the ones now turning the Lagos-Ibadan expressway into a robbers’ theme park …
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